What Went Down In The New York Primaries

The Upshot’s cool model has Sanders eventually winning about 110 delegates in New York, which is well short of the 128 he’d need to keep up with his (increasingly difficult) path to a pledged delegate majority. Here’s what now we calculate as Sanders’s least-implausible path to 2,026 pledged delegates, assuming he earns 110 from New York tonight.

Sanders’s path to 2,026 is very challenging after his New York loss

STATE OR TERRITORY	NO. ELECTED DELEGATES	SANDERS’S PATH-TO-2026 PROJECTION	POPULAR VOTE MARGIN NEEDED TO REACH TARGET
California	475	280	Sanders	+18
Pennsylvania	189	103	Sanders	+9
New Jersey	126	69	Sanders	+10
Maryland	95	44	Clinton	+7
Indiana	83	49	Sanders	+18
Oregon	61	46	Sanders	+51
Puerto Rico	60	34	Sanders	+13
Connecticut	55	32	Sanders	+16
Kentucky	55	34	Sanders	+24
New Mexico	34	19	Sanders	+12
West Virginia	29	20	Sanders	+38
Rhode Island	24	16	Sanders	+33
Delaware	21	10	Clinton	+5
Montana	21	16	Sanders	+52
South Dakota	20	14	Sanders	+40
D.C.	20	9	Clinton	+10
North Dakota	18	14	Sanders	+56
Guam	7	4	Sanders	+14
Virgin Islands	7	4	Sanders	+14

After tonight, Sanders would have to win California by almost 20 points, and Pennsylvania and New Jersey by around 10 points, to eventually claim the majority of pledged delegates. Even though Sanders has made up ground with Clinton over the course of the campaign, results like those would be quite a shock.

Why was this primary-night speech different from all other primary-night speeches for Trump? Well, for one thing it was pretty short on invective. This is not to say that Trump wasn’t Trump — he walked to the podium to strains of Sinatra’s “New York New York,” and proceeded to dismantle his opponents, but not in the rambling manner we’ve seen before. Tonight, his words were, as they say in the business that Trump claims to disdain (politics), “on message.” “Senator Cruz is just about mathematically eliminated,” he said. “We’ve won close to 300 more delegates than Senator Cruz.” “It’s really nice to win the delegates with the votes. It’s really nice.” “It’s a crooked system, the system is rigged.” Trump’s team has been on a hiring spree of late, adding seasoned political operatives. It seems abundantly clear that since the campaign has been losing what you might think of as the “sub primary” — the hunt for second-ballot delegate allies if no candidate clinches the nomination with 1,237 votes on the first ballot in Cleveland — they are focusing on pointing out how unfair the Republican nominating process is. While he continues to win big with voters, Trump’s loss of delegates is a big problem — he’s losing second-ballot delegates to Cruz left and right, which could kill his candidacy in the increasing likelihood of a brokered convention. Trump rather surprisingly expressed sympathy for Bernie Sanders in his speech. “I am no fan of Bernie, but you watch him win, win, win,” Trump said, seeming to indicate that both men are victims of their respective party nominating systems.

Throughout the night, my colleagues have been writing about Trump’s numbers, and whether he’s over the threshold needed to secure all three delegates from a given district. Kasich and Cruz have been hoping to pick off a delegate here or there from districts where Trump doesn’t clear that bar. I commend my colleagues for their astute analysis, and I commend all but one of them for not using an expression to describe this that Clare has recently introduced to the elections podcast: “delegate leakage.” Everyone has showed admirable restraint in not using this phrase. Except Harry, who actually invented it. Harry used it at 9:37 p.m. C’mon, Harry.