What Went Down In The New York Primaries

Earlier I cited Morning Consult polling data suggesting that voters in states that voted before today had roughly the same presidential preferences within their parties, as a group, as voters in the rest of the states. SurveyMonkey, another online pollster, sent along its data just now, and it shows a slightly different picture. In its latest poll, Clinton and Sanders were tied among voters in states that had not yet voted before today, but Clinton led by 12 percentage points in states that had voted. The data suggests Sanders’s gains in national polls have mostly come from gains in states yet to vote — where he trailed by more than 10 points in every weekly SurveyMonkey poll from the start of the year through late February. What looks like a big loss to Clinton in New York today isn’t particularly encouraging for that storyline, but SurveyMonkey includes voters who lean Democratic, while only registered Democrats may vote in New York’s Democratic primary. Still, Sanders can’t just be close to Clinton to win the nomination; he has to beat her in most remaining states, most by big margins — especially after tonight. On the Republican side, Trump leads Cruz by 22 points and Kasich by 26 points in states that haven’t voted — not far from his leads of 17 points and 28 points, respectively, in states that have voted. But Trump’s lead has declined in states that haven’t voted since the field narrowed to three candidates a month ago.

Thanks to returns in Schenectady and Albany counties, it now looks almost certain that Trump will be just under 50 percent in New York’s 20th District, so dial up a second upstate delegate for Kasich on top of the one in New York’s 24th District.

It’s true: the exit poll results are re-calibrated as the night goes along to match the actual vote count. In fairness, however, the people who conduct exit polls — and the networks and newspapers who pay for them — are quite insistent that exit polls are not intended to project election results and instead are mostly meant for demographic analysis after the fact. And for the record, while the exit polls were off on the Democratic side tonight, they’ve had a pretty good campaign cycle overall — they were quite good on the GOP side tonight, for instance, providing an early indication that Trump would probably win.