How The States Voted On Semi-Super Saturday

There are reports that Cruz has carried York County in Maine by a small margin. If that turns out to be true, it seems likely that Cruz will pull out the win. York was a fairly good county for Romney in 2012 and is not as rural, where Cruz tends to do best, as the rest of Maine.

Appropriately, the first results from Kentucky came in from Bourbon County, which gave Cruz and Trump 32 percent each, Kasich 18 percent and Rubio 16 percent. It’s been some time since we had a competitive Republican caucus or primary in Kentucky, so the results are hard to put into context. In the past few presidential general elections, however, Bourbon County — which consists of working-class exurbs in the Lexington metro area — has been a reasonably good bellwether, voting about the same as Kentucky does overall.

It’s been a real bad night for Rubio, who has just 15 percent of the vote in Kansas and 9 percent in Maine based on results reported to date. Cruz, in my view and that of prediction markets, is now the second-most likely candidate to win the GOP nomination after Trump. The only silver lining for Rubio is that Trump is having a really bad night also. At the very least, Trump’s results aren’t consistent with those of an “inevitable” nominee. It’s also possible that Trump’s numbers are in decline, but we’ll know more about that after Kentucky and Louisiana results are in and after Michigan and Mississippi vote on Tuesday. If so, that opens up some possibilities for other candidates down the road, including an outcome where Cruz and Trump each wind up with something like 40 percent of delegates, with the other 20 percent belonging to Rubio, Kasich or going into the convention unbound. One almost wonders whether Rubio and Kasich, either of whom probably require a contested convention to win the nomination, might find ways to start working together.