Wisconsin Primary Elections: Live Coverage And Results

A small little slice of the demographic in exit polls that might indicate just how strategic voters are getting as the race moves along: Cruz won voters with a postgraduate degree in Wisconsin, a group that Kasich has traditionally done very well with. Cruz got 54 percent of these voters in Wisconsin, while Kasich got only 18 percent. By contrast, in Michigan, another upper Midwestern state, Kasich won voters with postgraduate degrees, getting 37 percent of the vote, while Cruz only got 19 percent support.

Coincidentally, after tonight both Trump and Sanders need 58 percent of remaining delegates to reach a majority (in Sanders’s case, this refers to pledged delegates only). But only Trump has a realistic path to a delegate majority, because the remaining Republican calendar is heavily winner-take-all. No such luck for Sanders on the Democratic side, where proportionality rules all.

Of course it’s dumb not to do your own polling, especially when you’re as rich as Trump claims to be, but I can’t really fault him for spending a lot of time in Wisconsin. Even if he loses the state, he could have potentially salvaged a few delegates from congressional districts by spending more time there; keeping the margins closer might also matter a bit for how the media frames the result. Still, Trump relies so much on the perception of being a “winner” that I wonder if his ego would allow him to concede a state. If he wins the Republican nomination, is he spending a bunch of time campaigning in New York and New Jersey, for instance?