How The March 22 Primary Elections Went Down

There are 131 pledged delegates at stake tonight for Democrats. It’s going to be hard for Sanders to win a majority of those given that Arizona has most of the delegates and Clinton is winning big there, but it’s not impossible if he crushes it in Utah and Idaho. So let’s say he almost does it. Clinton gets 66 delegates on the night and Sanders gets 65. That would get Sanders up to 920 pledged delegates, while Clinton would have 1,242, with 1,889 pledged delegates still outstanding. Skipping a little bit of math, but Sanders would need 59 percent of the remaining total to tie Clinton in pledged delegates. That’s really difficult to do; it would be equivalent to beating Clinton by 18 percentage points the rest of the way out. Merely breaking even in delegates isn’t nowhere near enough for Sanders at this point.

Tonight’s likely result of a split verdict — Trump winning Arizona and Cruz stomping him in Utah — would seem to suggest a close fight between the two from here on out. But the problem for Cruz is the same one we’ve been talking about for over a month: There just aren’t a ton of great states for him later in the calendar. Almost every state with a high share of evangelical Protestants have already voted, and the two states with the highest shares of Mormons — Trump’s worst group by a mile — will have already voted after tonight (Idaho and Utah). In fact, between now and June, the only states left where more than 3-in-10 residents are either evangelical Protestants or Mormons are Indiana (32 percent), Montana (32 percent), Oregon (33 percent) and West Virginia (41 percent). Together, these states account for just 146 of the 905 delegates at stake in remaining contests. And, West Virginia is probably Trump’s prototypical state, not Cruz’s. To me, these are the most damning statistics when it comes to Cruz’s bid to prevent Trump from winning 1,237 delegates.

There’s been an ongoing question during the Democratic campaign about which candidate is winning the Latino vote. In Nevada, the exit polls suggested Sanders carried the Latino vote, while an examination of precinct-level results argued Clinton did. In Florida and Texas, it was clear Clinton won Latinos. We don’t have any exit polls tonight, but it would seem that Clinton is again winning the Latino vote. In the votes counted so far from Santa Cruz County (83 percent Latino), Clinton is winning 70 percent of the vote. In Yuma County (62 percent Latino), she’s taking 67 percent of the vote.