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.
| 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 |
A breakthrough for Cruz in Wisconsin
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.
