What Went Down In The New York Primaries

That’s it for our live blog tonight, folks. At various times throughout the course of the campaign, we’ve wound up with annoyingly ambiguous results. Not so tonight. Clinton had a great night, as Harry pointed out below, and so did Trump. It’s pretty much that simple. It looks as though Trump will win every New York county except for Manhattan. More importantly, it looks as though he’ll eventually get something like 90 delegates of the 95 available in New York, winning all but one congressional district (he’s down by 70 votes to Kasich in the 12th congressional district on the East Side of Manhattan with all precincts reporting) and finishing above 50 percent in all but a handful of them. That’s right in line with the deliberately optimistic path-to-1,237 projections that we outlined for Trump last week, which had him finishing with 91 delegates in New York. It’s also well ahead of the 71 delegates that our expert panel initially expected Trump to get in New York when we looked at the race a month ago. If Trump finishes with 90 delegates from New York and matches the panel’s projections in the remaining states, he’d eventually finish with 1,191 delegates — close enough to 1,237 that he might be able to get there with uncommitted delegates, especially uncommitted delegates from Pennsylvania. Speaking of Pennsylvania, it’s one of five states that will vote next Tuesday, along with Maryland, Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island. Although it’s hard to say exactly how much of Trump’s results tonight reflect the fact that New York is his home state, it’s certainly not a bad sign for how he’ll perform in nearby states — and keep in mind that Trump also performed well in earlier northeastern states such as Massachusetts. In fact, he has a chance to nearly sweep the delegates next week — except in Rhode Island, where delegates are allocated highly proportionately. It will be worth watching whether Trump can get more than 50 percent of the vote statewide in Connecticut, which could potentially enable him to win every delegate there, and how he performs in Maryland districts in the Washington suburbs, where he could potentially lose a couple of districts to Kasich. I’m not sure we’ve learned as much about how Trump will perform outside the Northeast. It’s been a highly regional campaign so far, and Trump will probably still need to win both Indiana and California to clinch 1,237 without uncommitted delegates. If he loses both states, we’re probably headed for a multi-ballot convention, which would be trouble for Trump. If he splits Indiana and California, Trump will be right on a knife’s edge — that’s the case where the extra two or three dozen delegates he’ll pick up in the Northeast tonight and next week could be the most helpful to him.

Clinton won the Democratic primary in New York on Tuesday by what looks to be about a 15 percentage point margin. While that generally matches pre-election polls, it is a devastating result for the Sanders campaign. The outcome almost certainly ensures that Clinton will beat Sanders in the elected delegate count after the final Democratic votes are counted in June. Clinton entered the night with an elected delegate lead of about 205. That means, of course, that Sanders needs to catch-up. In order to do so, he has to win states with big delegate totals because of the proportional allocation rules that Democrats use in their primaries. Late last month, Nate calculated that Sanders needed to win New York by about 9 pledged delegates to remain on track for the nomination. Instead, Sanders lost the state by about 30 delegates or more. That’s a swing of about 40 delegates or more. To give you an idea of how big of a swing that is, that’s about double the total available delegates in Montana, which is expected to be a strong state for Sanders. Sanders’s loss in New York means that he needs to do even better in upcoming contests than we originally thought to have any shot at winning more elected delegates than Clinton. More specifically, he’ll need somewhere in the area of 59 percent of the remaining elected delegates to eliminate his deficit to Clinton — he needed 57 percent before the night began. That means that he needs to win a state like Pennsylvania by closer to 10 percentage points instead of the 7 percentage points Nate originally calculated. (Sanders is behind in the Pennsylvania polling average by 14 percentage points.) Indeed, the math just doesn’t look like it’s on Sanders’s side in upcoming contests. Besides Pennsylvania, he’s behind in all three of the other states with the biggest delegate prizes left on the calendar. He’s down 23 percentage points in Maryland — we originally estimated a 9-point Sanders loss would signal he was “on track.” Sanders trails Clinton by 9 points in New Jersey, which he originally needed to win by 6 points. Most importantly, he’s trailing by 13 percentage points in California, where he needed to win by 15 points. Put simply, Sanders can’t win the Democratic nomination without a minor miracle. That doesn’t mean Sanders won’t continue to campaign, and minor miracles do sometimes happen. But the media shouldn’t sugarcoat this. There’s a reason the Sanders campaign is talking up superdelegates: Clinton can see the nomination in sight. Tonight reaffirmed that she is almost certainly going to be the Democratic nominee for president.