How The States Voted On Semi-Super Saturday

Although the margin of Cruz’s win in Kansas is a big deal — with all results reported, he beat Trump 48 percent to 23 percent — his performance in Maine might be even more surprising. Decision Desk HQ has now called Maine for Cruz — in fact, it looks like Cruz could win by some margin — although the networks haven’t yet. When I wrote about Maine a few days ago, I said it was unpredictable (that part looks smart) but mentioned Kasich, not Cruz, as the candidate to keep an eye on (that part doesn’t look so smart). Cruz couldn’t have won Maine just by winning evangelicals, since it has relatively few of them (although more than other parts of New England). Cruz also seems to have made inroads with a relatively broad spectrum of conservatives: libertarian-ish voters who nearly gave Ron Paul a win their four years ago; working-class voters Down East. If this all sounds a bit vague, it’s because there are neither exit polls in Maine nor detailed county-by-county results yet. But it doesn’t make Cruz’s performance any less impressive.

Although Kentucky is officially holding caucuses, they are functioning much more like a primary than caucuses normally do. The polls were open for six hours, and there were no speeches allowed. That might be part of the reason Trump may do better in Kentucky than in Kansas or Maine.

Trump won overwhelmingly in “coal country” in far western Virginia and far northeast Tennessee, so it’s not surprising that he did really well in the Kentucky county most representative of coal country to have reported so far: Clay County, which gave 58 percent of its vote to Trump and 23 percent to Cruz. Coal country might be enough to tip Kentucky to Trump, even if he and Cruz run fairly evenly throughout the rest of the state.