What Went Down In The New York Primaries

There’s a huge GOP divide between elites and everyone else: Trump’s weakness in the votes counted so far seems pretty much confined to Manhattan, and he’s crushing it everywhere else (save for a few fairly elite precincts in Brooklyn). He may be on track to win at least 85 of New York’s 95 delegates.

ABC News and NBC News have projected Clinton the winner of the Democratic primary.

If Clinton significantly outperforms exit polls showing a close race tonight and wins by a fairly comfortable margin instead, will it be part of a broader pattern? Not really. We’ve been keeping track of how Clinton’s and Sanders’s actual results have compared to initial exit polls, and the differences have been pretty random over the course of the campaign. With that said, sometimes a candidate whose supporters are more enthusiastic can be overrated by exit polls because of response bias — this was sometimes an issue for Obama during the 2008 campaign, and it’s plausible we could see something parallel happening with Sanders. Furthermore, pre-election polls showed a wider lead for Clinton than the exit polls did, and it’s usually worth taking a blend of exit polls and pre-election polls even when you have exit polls in hand.