Wisconsin Primary Elections: Live Coverage And Results

Sanders had a very good night. He’ll likely end up winning by around 13 percentage points over Clinton in Wisconsin, which is a bigger margin than all the polls had it. He won in almost every county in the state (except Milwaukee). This is the type of night that Sanders needs to replicate going forward if he is going to have a shot at the Democratic nomination. My colleague Nate Silver estimated last week that Sanders needed to win Wisconsin by 16 percentage points to be “on track” to tie Clinton in the pledged delegate count. He didn’t quite reach that level, but he came close enough that he stays in the hunt. Of course, if Sanders cannot replicate this type of overperformance in the bigger primary states of Maryland, New York and Pennsylvania coming up later this month than this win was for naught. That’s why it’s key that Sanders picks up some momentum from these wins. He’s still well behind in the polls in the big delegate prize states coming up. In particular, Sanders needs to do better with black voters, a group he lost by nearly 40 percentage points tonight, which is about on par for his performance so far in northern primaries. That didn’t hurt Sanders in Wisconsin given that just 10 percent of Democratic voters were black in the state, but black voters will probably make up at least 15 percent of Democratic primary voters in Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania and — although it has fewer delegates — Delaware. In the delegate race, Sanders will likely remain somewhere in the neighborhood of 210 pledged delegates behind Clinton. That’s a very high hill to climb with delegates awarded proportionally, but tonight made that hill just a little less steep.

Sanders is the projected winner in Wisconsin and he might have a double-digit margin. Even if he’s still behind Clinton in the delegate count, this victory will look significant. Can Sanders eventually claim some sort of election mandate – even if he doesn’t win the nomination? Recent scholarship on mandates (some of which was written by me) suggests that mandate claims are most powerful when the election result comes as a surprise. This is, of course, generally supposed to be a time when there’s a surprising victory. But a surprisingly strong challenge to a powerful figure is likely to pack a strong punch – to bolster a story that the election meant something. The other factor that seems to drive politicians to claim mandates in the first place is the existence of distinct policy positions. Although Clinton and Sanders may share substantial common ground, the differences between them on foreign policy, economic issues, and campaign finance have been reasonably clear. In the wake of this extended string of victories, Sanders is likely to claim a wave of support for his vision. It’s hard to really know what elections mean. Voters have a whole range of reasons why they make decisions. But the signs suggest that conditions are ripe for Sanders to get some mileage out of his 2016 victories, whatever happens between now and the convention.

The final GOP delegate breakdown in Wisconsin looks almost certain to wind up at 36-6 or 39-3 for Cruz over Trump. But it all depends on what happens in the remaining precincts of the 3rd Congressional district, which takes in La Crosse and Eau Claire. Trump leads in most of the 3rd District’s counties, but Cruz leads in Eau Claire by 47 percent to 38 percent with only 18 of 84 precincts reporting. Fun side note: The first time I ever met Nate, he visited my Cook Report office in DC while he was conducting research for “The Signal and the Noise” in 2010. We spent the afternoon chatting about analyzing congressional districts, and I invited him to sit in on a candidate meeting with a Republican running for Wisconsin’s 3rd District to get a sense of how we size up congressional hopefuls. I introduced Nate to the candidate and his consultants as “our intern Nate” and hilariously, none of them had a clue who he really was. The candidate happened to own a minor league baseball team, the La Crosse Loggers. Towards the end of the discussion, Nate asked a few questions about the team’s up-and-coming player prospects. They still didn’t bat an eye – ha!! And, oh, the candidate, Dan Kapanke, lost.