That’s A Wrap
We’re calling it a night after one of the chalkier days of the campaign so far. All the favorites won, although in some cases the margins were a bit larger than we might have expected.
Trump had a very impressive victory in Arizona. Because it’s a winner-take-all state, the margin doesn’t matter from the standpoint of the delegate math. But it’s a good sign for how future states might go for Trump — especially California, which is among the most important states in Trump’s chase for 1,237 delegates.
However, Ted Cruz will win the Utah caucuses, and will very probably do so with more than 50 percent of the vote, meaning he’ll get all 40 delegates there. Meanwhile, it appears as though all of American Samoa’s delegates will go to the convention in Cleveland uncommitted. Thus, we expect the delegate count on the evening to be Trump 58, Cruz 40, uncommitted 9. That’s pretty good for Trump, although slightly fewer delegates than our “expert” panel expected earlier this week. Somewhat in contrast to last week’s primaries, therefore, when the headlines about close races didn’t quite express how well Trump had done in collecting delegates, this night is more of a morale/momentum boost for Trump than something that will dramatically increase his chances of getting to 1,237.
On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton won Arizona easily, while Bernie Sanders won Utah and (although it hasn’t been called officially yet) very probably will win Idaho — in both cases perhaps by overwhelming margins. Thus, it’s probable — likely if I had to guess — that Sanders will win more pledged delegates on the evening.
Not all the news is good for Sanders, however. He was expected to win more delegates on the evening based on our demographic targets — and more importantly, he’s far enough behind Clinton that he needs to not just meet but blow out his delegate targets the rest of the way to have a shot at eventually catching Clinton. Alaska, Hawaii and Washington will vote on Saturday, states where we expect Sanders to perform well.