How The States Voted On Semi-Super Saturday

That’s a wrap for us, folks. We’ll have more analysis of tonight’s results in the days ahead, but here’s how I’d score the evening relative to expectations on the GOP side. I mean that in a more precise way than when the term “expectations” is usually invoked. Specifically, I mean that if you’d drawn up a list of plausible outcomes this morning and ranked them from best (10) to worst (0) for each candidate, how would candidates fare by that measure? Ted Cruz — 9 out of 10. Huge win in Kansas, unexpected win in Maine, and unexpectedly close to Trump in Louisiana, with results suggesting he might even have won if not for early votes. Cruz’s loss in Kentucky was also narrow — he came much closer to Trump, for example, than he did in Tennessee on Super Tuesday. Not quite a “best case scenario” but not more than one step removed from it. Donald Trump — 2 out of 10. You could equivocate by saying Trump performs poorly in caucuses, and there aren’t all that many of them left, but the huge split in the election day versus early vote in Louisiana suggests that he’s encountering serious problems, perhaps the most serious since voting started on Feb. 1. It also appears as though Cruz will pick up more delegates than Trump did from the night. Marco Rubio — 1 out of 10. Just 17 percent of the vote in Kansas, 17 percent in Kentucky, 11 percent in Louisiana (with a huge drop-off from the early vote to election day votes) and 9 percent in Maine. Not. Good. He’ll presumably hang on until Florida on March 15 and a win there would still be a big deal, but he needs to gain votes to do that and right now he’s losing them instead. John Kasich — 4 out of 10. We thought he’d do a little better in Maine. His results in Kentucky in counties that border Ohio were solid but not stellar. He’s basically running as a one-state spoiler candidate at this point, although the fallout from some of the other developments (like Rubio’s bad evening) could create opportunities for him in the long run. Still, all of those opportunities would seem to involve a contested convention and it’s not clear why he’d emerge as the choice from such an event.

We’re about to shutter this live blog, so let’s take a look at how Semi-Super Saturday played out on the Democratic side. Sanders won Kansas and Nebraska. That’s the good news for him. The bad news is he’s even further from the nomination than he was before the day started: He lost Louisiana, and, in doing so, fell even further behind in the delegate hunt. Let’s take a look at the math. Sanders won 23 delegates in Kansas to Clinton’s 10. He won — preliminarily — 14 delegates in Nebraska to Clinton’s 11. That’s a margin of 16 delegates. In losing Louisiana, however, Sanders only claimed 12 delegates to Clinton’s 39. Combine the three states, and Clinton gained 11 delegates on Sanders. Now you might be saying, but didn’t we expect Sanders to do poorly in Louisiana? Yes, that’s true. But according to our delegate targets, which takes that into account, Sanders is now 3 delegates further behind the pace he needs to win a majority of pledged delegate than he was at the beginning of the day. Considering he was already running 82 delegates behind his delegate goals, he needs to be exceeding his delegate targets. Overall, it was actually a bad day for Sanders by the math, even with his two wins.