Wisconsin Primary Elections: Live Coverage And Results

That does it for us tonight, folks — I’m going to sleep on tonight’s Republican results in Wisconsin before having anything too grandiose to say about them. It’s a weird case where there might be a danger either of underreacting (“it’s just one state!”) or of overreacting (“this changes everything!”). Neither of those reactions quite feels appropriate until we see how the candidates, polls, delegates and media behave in the coming days. Clearly tonight’s results were problematic for Trump in terms of his delegate math. A few weeks ago, we’d projected Trump to win 25 delegates in Wisconsin. It looks like he’ll only get 3 to 6 instead. After also accounting for Trump’s failure to get any delegates in Utah last month, our estimate would now project him to get 1,179 to 1,182 delegates total, or somewhere between 55 and 58 short of the 1,237 he’d need to clinch the nomination. Trump could potentially make up the difference by persuading uncommitted delegates to vote for him, although given how poorly Trump’s doing in the delegate-wrangling business, that might not be easy. But the more immediate question — the one I’m not quite ready to answer — is what tonight tells us about how Trump might perform in subsequent states. Are we overestimating him in Indiana? (Probably.) Underestimating him in New York? (Possibly.) And what about California? In some ways, though, this misses the big story in Wisconsin. What was really different about tonight is not how poorly Trump did, but how well Cruz did. Trump will win around 34 percent of the vote tonight. Compare that to his previous results in the four states that border Wisconsin. His results were a bit worse for Trump than in neighboring Illinois and Michigan — not a good sign for him since Rubio dropped out after those states voted. Trump got a higher share of the vote in Wisconsin than he did in the early caucuses in Iowa and Minnesota, however. Overall: 34 percent of the vote was mediocre-to-poor for Trump, but not terrible for him.

A breakthrough for Cruz in Wisconsin

STATE	TRUMP	CRUZ	KASICH
Iowa	24.3%	27.6%	1.9%
Minnesota	24.3	29.0	5.8
Michigan	36.5	24.9	24.3
Illinois	38.8	30.3	19.7
Wisconsin*	34.0	49.3	14.3

But it’s Cruz who had the breakthrough, getting 49 percent of the vote as compared to between 25 and 30 percent in the four Wisconsin border states. Cruz also won all sorts of demographic groups that he doesn’t usually win. Maybe that means Cruz has finally emerged as the singular alternative to Trump and that Kasich — who’s won only his home state of Ohio — will fade further into the background. Or maybe it means that Republican voters are behaving tactically in order to stop Trump, and could vote for Kasich in states and congressional districts where he runs stronger later on. Neither is great news for Trump, whose Achilles Heel has always been that he gains fewer votes than other candidates as the field winnows. Still, the permutations of how everything plays out from here are complicated even by FiveThirtyEight’s detail-loving standards.

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.