How The March 22 Primary Elections Went Down

Here’s an interesting tweet from Cruz campaign manager Jeff Roe: https://twitter.com/jeffroe/status/712488624999141377 However, in Maricopa County, the earliest election day returns show Trump leading Cruz 5,011 to 2,847, a tiny bit tighter than the early votes but not vastly different as was the case in Louisiana a few weeks back. My guess is that Trump’s margin over Cruz will continue to shrink tonight, but that he’ll still end up with a solid double digit win.

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.