Nate Silver's Blog, page 134

Republicans In Competitive Races Have Shunned Trump

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence endorsed Ted Cruz on Friday, which may not be enough to help Cruz win Indiana, where he currently trails Donald Trump in polls, let alone the Republican nomination. Nevertheless, the endorsement is part of a pattern: With the exception of a single congressman from Western New York, no Republican who faces a competitive gubernatorial, Senate or House election this November has endorsed Trump.

Pence, a plausible presidential contender in 2020, is one of those Republicans with a lot on the line. He considered a presidential bid this year but decided to run for a second term as governor instead. However, his re-election this November is not assured. (Indiana is one of a dozen states to hold gubernatorial races in presidential years.) He’s in a tight race with Democrat John Gregg, the former speaker of the Indiana House of Representatives, whom he beat by only 3 percentage points in 2012. If this turns out to be a catastrophic November for Republicans, Pence’s governorship and his presidential hopes could be toppled.

The only other Republican governor in a competitive re-election race this year, according to Cook Political Report’s ratings, is Pat McCrory of North Carolina, who hasn’t made a presidential endorsement. However, there are 11 Republican senators and 34 Republican members of the House who face competitive races, according to Cook. The only one to have endorsed Trump is Tom Reed, the incumbent from New York’s 23rd Congressional District, a Republican-leaning swing district that covers much of the rural, western part of the state.

RACEINCUMBENTSTATE OR DISTRICTENDORSEDGovernorMcCroryNorth Carolina—GovernorPenceIndianaCruzSenateAyotteNew Hampshire—SenateBluntMissouri—SenateBurrNorth Carolina—SenateGrassleyIowa—SenateIsaksonGeorgia—SenateJohnsonWisconsin—SenateKirkIllinois—SenateMcCainArizonaGrahamSenateMurkowskiAlaska—SenatePortmanOhioKasichSenateToomeyPennsylvaniaRubioHouseYoungAlaska at-largeKasichHouseMcSallyAriz. 2—HouseDenhamCalif. 10BushHouseValadaoCalif. 21BushHouseKnightCalif. 25—HouseTiptonColo. 3—HouseCoffmanColo. 6RubioHouseCurbeloFla. 26RubioHouseMicaFla. 7BushHouseDoldIll. 10—HouseBostIll. 12—HouseDavisIll. 13RubioHouseBlumIowa 1—HouseYoungIowa 3—HousePoliquinMaine 2—HouseWalbergMich. 7—HouseBishopMich. 8KasichHouseTrottMich. 11BushHousePaulsenMinn. 3RubioHouseZinkeMont. at-large—HouseHardyNev. 4RubioHouseGuintaN.H. 1—HouseMacArthurN.J. 3ChristieHouseGarrettN.J. 5—HouseZeldinN.Y. 1—HouseStefanikN.Y. 21—HouseReedN.Y. 23TrumpHouseKatkoN.Y. 24—HouseCostelloPa. 6—HouseMeehanPa. 7ChristieHouseHurdTexas 23—HouseLoveUtah 4CruzHouseComstockVa. 10RubioHouseMooneyW.V. 2CruzRepublicans in competitive races are sitting on the sidelines

Competitive races are determined by Cook Political Report ratings as of April 29

Cruz hasn’t received much support from Republicans in competitive races either. Prior to Pence’s endorsement, the only Republicans in competitive races to back him had been Mia Love, the representative from Utah’s 4th Congressional District, and Alex Mooney, from West Virginia’s 2nd District. John Kasich, meanwhile, has been endorsed by Sen. Rob Portman, his fellow Ohioan, along with two House members in competitive races.

Marco Rubio had been somewhat more successful at procuring endorsements while still in the race, but most Republicans in competitive races have sat on the sidelines. Overall, of the 109 endorsement points available from Republicans facing competitive races — endorsement points are our system that assigns 10 points to an endorsement by a governor, five for a senator and one for a member of the House — 12 have gone to Cruz, seven to Kasich and just one to Trump. Another 22 belong to Rubio or other Republicans who have since exited the race. But the majority of Republicans in competitive races haven’t endorsed a presidential contender at any point of the election cycle.

SHARE OF ENDORSEMENTS POINTS FROM CANDIDATES IN …PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATECOMPETITIVE RACESNONCOMPETITIVE RACESCruz11%14%Kasich66Trump16Other*2040None6134Who are Republicans up for re-election endorsing?

*Other indicates a Republican who has since dropped out of the race

Although the pace of Republican endorsements has been extraordinarily sluggish overall, Republicans who are not up for re-election this year — or who are not in competitive races — have been at least a little more active. Trump has 6 percent of the endorsement points from Republicans who don’t face competitive races, as compared to just 1 percent (Reed’s endorsement) from those who do. Cruz has 14 percent of the endorsement points from Republicans who don’t face competitive races. He has 11 percent from those who do (and that was just 2 percent before Pence’s endorsement).

It’s hard to know whether Pence thinks he can still stop Trump, whether he wants to distance himself from Trump for November — Pence did say he’d back Trump against Hillary Clinton — or if he thinks supporting Cruz could help his positioning in 2020. (The answer may be all of the above — or none of the above — of course.) But when you hear stories about Republicans backing Trump, cross-reference those names against lists of competitive races such as the ones produced by Cook. There are lots of plausible reasons for Republican elected officials to back Trump, ranging from liking his politics to wanting to get in on the ground floor in the event of a Trump administration. The Republicans with the most to lose have mostly been staying away, however.

CORRECTION (April 29, 4 p.m.): An earlier version of a table in this article misidentified two congressmen, Scott Tipton and Tom MacArthur. Tipton represents Colorado, not California, and MacArthur represents New Jersey, not New York.

Can Carly Fiorina Save Ted Cruz’s Candidacy?

In a special politics chat, we unpack the news that Ted Cruz has decided to name a vice presidential pick. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): Emergency Slack chat time! Ted Cruz announced today that Carly Fiorina would be his pick for vice president should he win the Republican nomination. Let’s get a quick round of first takes: What was your initial reaction to this move?

clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): My initial reaction — how big was Fiorina’s base of support to begin with? Is she actually that exciting? She had a moment in September 2015, after the first couple of debates, but didn’t garner much support otherwise:

That said, she might get GOP women/people who are frustrated with the Trump shenaniganism excited to turn out.

julia.azari (Julia Azari, associate political science professor at Marquette University and FiveThirtyEight contributor): I mean, if this were a normal year, Fiorina would make some sense as a Cruz running mate. She fits the outsider bill, she’s had some nice moments in the debates, and she’s socially conservative.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): I dunno. I don’t think Fiorina is a Richard Schweiker — Ronald Reagan’s VP pick in advance of the 1976 convention — by which I mean, there’s not any obvious way in which she widens Cruz’s coalition or any obvious constituency she appeals to. Schweiker, by contrast, gave Reagan some credibility with moderates and suggested that he was trying to unify the party.

clare.malone: Fiorina was among the first people to take Trump on in debates, given that he basically called her ugly. She’s sort of the personification of the #NeverTrump movement. Fiorina was #NeverTrump before there was #NeverTrump. So Cruz is basically counting on that being a thing right now for certain segments of the Republican electorate.

natesilver: That’s true. She’s effective on the attack and good at debates, two things that would be important if she became an actual VP pick instead of some weird game-y change-y one.

julia.azari: So other than the gender angle, I don’t think this is totally about Trump. This is about attention in the news cycle — although that’s a good point about the debates. One more theory: Is this Cruz’s announcement that he’s running in the general election one way or another?

micah: Interesting!

clare.malone: It’s certainly a way for him to continue with the “I’m more prepared for this challenge than anyone else in the field” tack; he had better ground game, delegate game, mobile data game. Now he has better VP game. Or at least existing VP game.

natesilver: I mean … if Cruz won the nomination and Fiorina was on his short list, nobody would say it was ridiculous. She has the strengths mentioned above, plus she has more or less conventionally conservative positions, meaning that she wouldn’t offend anyone. She’s at least semi-vetted. On the other hand, she has no experience in elected office, and her tenure at Hewlett-Packard was “mixed,” by which I mean not good.

But as a media conversation-changer — which, as Julia says, is probably what this is about in the near term — I don’t know if she’s that effective. Though let me protest here that the media has a big double standard for covering the candidates. If Trump did the same thing after losing Wisconsin, it would be huge news, blowing every story out of the water, and the consensus wouldn’t be so sarcastic about it or call it “desperate.”

micah: But let’s talk about Fiorina specifically for a moment: Is she popular among Republicans? Does she help Cruz in Indiana or California?

clare.malone: Well, she’s sort of … not that splashy by the numbers. This is from a Morning Consult survey right after Iowa:

I suppose California = home field advantage for her, but also that failed Senate bid might leave people in her home state with lingering feelings that aren’t all that fuzzy.

natesilver: I guess the California thing is a plus. But it’s not like she’s built up all that much loyalty there. She’s never held elected office, and her reputation as an H-P exec is … what’s that word again? … mixed.

micah: But she’ll be very effective going after Trump, right? And she brings “real world business experience” to the Cruz table.

clare.malone: She’s certainly a pugilist when it comes to Trump!

natesilver: I don’t know if that Morning Consult data is representative. Gallup and most other places had her with reasonably good favorability ratings among Republicans:

But separately, it’s amazing how few people have gone after Trump and articulated the case against him. Fiorina has the virtue of standing up for herself and not being as cowardly as most of the other Republicans who ran this year.

micah: OK, let’s go back to how this fits in with Cruz’s overall prospects. First, Julia, this is unusual right? Has a trailing candidate with a small chance of winning the nomination ever named a VP pick before?

julia.azari: Not that I know of.

clare.malone: What’s the general bump that candidates get after they name a VP?

julia.azari: It’s hard to distinguish from the convention bump, because that’s usually when the VP is picked, though not in the last couple of cycles.

natesilver: This would have been better as part of a broader, moral case against Trump as the nominee, one Cruz and the GOP should have done a better job of building for months. The Cruz campaign excels at tactics but is middling on strategy. This will “change the conversation,” I guess, but it’s less clear how it helps them win the nomination.

micah: So it seems like everyone is pretty skeptical this will have much of an effect?

Harry is on a plane right now, but if he were here, he might say, “Cruz had to do something! He’s losing.”

clare.malone: I mean, yeah, he totally had to do something — you can’t fault him for doing this. It just might not be enough. I think at this point, it’s people voting against Trump, not for a candidate; Fiorina’s a reliable choice in a pinch.

natesilver: When you weigh the pluses and minuses of a desperation move, do you account for the minus of it appearing to be a desperation move?

micah: I think so, yes. To me, the biggest minus here might be that this makes a Cruz-Kasich unity ticket — which I think really could have an effect — less likely.

clare.malone: Less likely = not gonna happen.

micah: Yeah.

natesilver: But look, where I think it actually pays off for Cruz is if he wins Indiana. That would make Fiorina look like a winner in the media’s eyes — maybe wrongly — and she might start to get some coverage for her attacks on Trump. Plus, she could be helpful at the margin in California. I don’t particularly think it will help him win Indiana, though.

julia.azari: So VP selections have taken on this symbolic significance, and John McCain did experience a bump after picking Sarah Palin in 2008. But there’s not a ton of evidence that they make a huge difference. However, they’re usually done, you know, after the primary is over. So this is a bit of a wild card.

micah: Yeah, this is so unusual that isn’t it possible that naming a VP during the primaries is secretly a genius move? Maybe Republicans will simply feel like they’re getting more bang for their vote. Normally, it’s nominee/veep vs. nominee/veep, but this is two vs. one.

clare.malone: This year is so weird that it almost doesn’t strike me as that odd. It basically fits the oddity pattern of 2016.

natesilver: I don’t think Fiorina is a big enough name to weigh heavily into voters’ calculation. To me, there’s not anything inherently wrong with naming a VP before the convention, however. It gives voters more information while (some of them) still have a vote — what’s wrong with that?

julia.azari: To argue the other side, it’s behavior more typical of a nominee. Do political norms mean nothing to us anymore? I suppose not. We could also view it in the context of the failed Cruz-Kasich pact. Minor candidates attempt to coordinate, way too late!

clare.malone: I think one of the reasons why it’s not all that exciting is because she was just in the race, but as a bit player, not a full-blown entity. Mitt Romney naming Paul Ryan as his VP was energizing because the guy was a young star, etc., etc. This just sort of feels … slap-dash practical, if that can be a thing; Cruz proves that he can exhibit organization and leadership in the midst of a melee.

natesilver: It also reduces Cruz’s flexibility at the convention, although I suppose he could cast Fiorina aside as the VP pick if he needed to broker a deal with Kasich or something. It’s technically the delegates who decide the VP at the convention anyway, not the nominee — and all of them are unbound on the first ballot in making that pick.

clare.malone: omg more delegate drama.

natesilver: There’s a weird universe where you could end up with a Trump-Fiorina ticket!

clare.malone: Convention fan fiction.

micah: Clare, let’s start a weekly column looking at the delegates’ considerations on the VP selection.

clare.malone: ummmmmm. Please, God, make it stop.

julia.azari: I was hoping that you’d ask me to write a weekly column on convention fan fiction. I have a pretty sweet idea where Reince Priebus is a werewolf and Paul Ryan is a vampire.

natesilver:

Dear supporters
Everyone
Should
Please
Enjoy meeting my
Running mate
And remember
To vote in
Indiana
On Tuesday.
NeverTrump!

— Christopher Hayes (@chrislhayes) April 27, 2016

clare.malone: Not enough poetry in our lives. Thanks, Chris.

julia.azari: One more thought: In addition to trying to grab delegates from Trump, to the extent there is a mainstream Republican Party story in 2016, it is one of trying to recapture some kind of narrative about the meaning of the party’s ideas, election results, the candidate choices, etc. This strikes me as an attempt to do that, although it’s subject to many interpretations — political outsider/business, woman on the ticket, Cruz acts decisively, etc.

micah: Yeah, that’s interesting. Maybe this marks the beginning of more of that “moral” case against Trump we talked about being made. Even if it is too late.

julia.azari: Yeah, like one of the things that has been interesting is the two strains of argument against Trump: His remarks are beyond the pale, and also he’s not a principled conservative.

natesilver: My contract requires me to complain one more time about how Trump-centric the media coverage has become. It’s actually become more Trump- centric as the campaign has gone along. While Trump could command a 13-person roundtable on CNN by inadvertently farting during a press conference, Cruz has to do something actually newsworthy — and risky and “desperate” — to get the same treatment.

clare.malone: To Nate’s point, it was just amazing to watch MSNBC last night, anchored by Brian Williams, cut away from most of the candidate speeches but just hang onto Trump’s forever and ever. It hits you over and over again. In a lot of ways, you can’t blame Cruz for wanting to wrest our attention away for a media moment or two.

micah: This encapsulates everything:

Donald Trump Bestows Next Town Hall On Fox News Channel’s Greta Van Susteren https://t.co/ui54d6DajG via @deadline

— Greta Van Susteren (@greta) April 27, 2016

clare.malone: “Bestows”

micah: 2016!!! Yay!

OK, final thoughts?

clare.malone: Only the next few days will tell if this gambit works; watch cable, people — if Carly’s getting airtime, then it’s working, I suppose. Great metric.

julia.azari: This is shocking, but not surprising. It violates norms but sort of makes sense from a strategic perspective.

natesilver: I’m agnostic on this move, but Fiorina’s ability to rattle Trump is not to be underrated and one of the bigger potential benefits.

Arguably, last night proved that Trump’s erratic behavior had hurt him with GOP voters and prevented him from consolidating the field as front-runners normally do. If he retweets one sexist meme about Fiorina, it could start the cycle all over again. Works best if Fiorina just continually rips the shit out of Trump for the next seven days instead of being placed into a deep freezer somewhere and thawed out once every few weeks like Chris Christie.

micah: OK, I think Harry just got wifi on his plane, so let’s give him the final word.

harry (Harry Enten, senior political writer): I have no clue what the heck has been said in this chat, but this move stinks of desperation. I can smell it from up here at 30,000 feet. Cruz is doing it only because he is losing in California and Indiana. Then again, if you’re failing, I guess throwing a Hail Mary is called for.

It’s Trump’s Nomination To Lose*

Tuesday night went about as well as possible for Donald Trump.

Two weeks ago, after a rough stretch of states for Trump, we issued a series of delegate projections that included something called a “path-to-1,237” projection, a set of targets that would allow Trump to clinch a delegate majority without having to rely on uncommitted delegates. With Trump’s terrific results in New York last week and even better ones in the five states that voted on Tuesday, Trump is actually running a little ahead of the path-to-1,237.

Based on provisional results,1 it looks as though Trump will sweep every pledged delegate in Maryland (as a result of winning every congressional district), Connecticut (as a result of winning every congressional district and getting more than 50 percent of the vote statewide), Pennsylvania (where statewide delegates are awarded winner-take-all) and Delaware (ditto), along with 11 of 19 delegates in Rhode Island (which is highly proportional). Combined with the New York results,2 that gives Trump 200 delegates since we issued the path-to-1,237 projections, five delegates ahead of his original targets.

STATEPATH-TO-1,237 PROJECTIONACTUAL TRUMP DELEGATESWyoming10New York9190Maryland3238Connecticut2828Pennsylvania1717Delaware1616Rhode Island1011Total195200Trump’s back on a potential path to victory

Sources: The Green Papers, Elections.MARYLAND.GOV

None of this was assured, or necessarily all that likely, when we surveyed the race a few weeks ago. Trump was coming off one of his worst results of the campaign in the Wisconsin primary, along with a disastrous series of results in state and local Republican delegate-selection conventions (those will still hurt him if the Republican convention goes to multiple ballots). While the Northeast had long appeared to be a reasonably strong region for Trump, the polls two weeks ago suggested it was a tossup whether he’d get to 50 percent of the vote in Connecticut; instead he won it easily with 58 percent of the vote. It looked as though he’d probably lose a couple of congressional districts in the Washington suburbs in Maryland even if he won the state; instead, he swept all eight districts.

In other words, something changed for the better for Trump in the past couple of weeks. At the time we issued those delegate projections, Trump had yet to get 50 percent of the vote in any state and both his national polls and statewide results seemed stagnant. Now he’s gotten over 50 percent in six states in a row. Whereas Trump had once been a safe bet to underperform or, at best, match his polling averages, he’s beaten them in the last six states.

Having moved to a demographically favorable bloc of states is part of the equation, but not all of it. Compare Trump’s excellent result in Maryland (55 percent of the statewide vote) to his mediocre one in demographically similar Virginia on Super Tuesday (35 percent). Pennsylvania, where Trump got 57 percent of the vote on Tuesday, isn’t all that different from Illinois, where he got 39 percent on March 15. (The Pennsylvania result is especially important given that Trump also got favorable-seeming results among the 54 officially uncommitted delegates elected in the state on Tuesday night, which will give him a cushion if he falls a bit short of 1,237 pledged delegates.)

The question is what’s changed for Trump, whether the change is permanent or temporary, and what implications it has for the next set of states to vote. More particularly: What it means for Indiana, which votes next week and awards its delegates winner-take-all (some statewide and some by congressional district), and which the path-to-1,237 projections had Trump winning. As much good work as Trump has done over the past two weeks, a loss in Indiana would mostly undo it.

One theory, which I proposed last weekend, is that Trump is benefiting from Republicans who buy his argument that the delegate system is “rigged” against him — or if you prefer the milder version, that the candidate with the plurality of delegates and votes should become the nominee. It’s hard to prove definitively that this is what’s behind Trump’s gains, but there’s some good circumstantial evidence for it. Polls suggest that Republican voters mostly take Trump’s side on the question of the nominee’s legitimacy, and the timing of Trump’s gains in the polls lines up well with when he started pressing the argument.

My original idea was that this sentiment might be moving undecided voters toward Trump — Republicans who just wanted to get the race over with and who didn’t want to go through the ordeal of a contested convention. After seeing the exit polls on Tuesday, however, I’d propose a slightly different version. According to the exit polls, Trump did not perform especially well among late-deciding voters — no better than John Kasich did. But recent turnout has been low as compared with earlier states. Whereas 25.6 percent of the voting-eligible population cast a Republican ballot in Wisconsin, according to Michael McDonald’s estimates, an average of only 9.9 percent of eligible voters have in the six northeastern states to vote over the past eight days.

STATETURNOUT AS SHARE OF VOTING-ELIGIBLE POPULATIONNew Hampshire27.8%Wisconsin25.6Alabama23.9Ohio22.3Missouri20.7South Carolina20.3Idaho19.7Arkansas19.2Mississippi19.1Georgia18.8Michigan17.8Tennessee17.6Virginia17.0Oklahoma16.5Texas16.4Florida16.3North Carolina15.8Pennsylvania15.8Illinois15.3Massachusetts12.8Vermont12.5Arizona11.4Maryland10.6Delaware10.0Louisiana8.9Connecticut8.7Rhode Island7.8New York6.4GOP turnout has been low in recent primaries

Turnout estimates for states with incomplete reporting are extrapolated based on results as of midnight on April 27.

Sources: Electproject.org, New York Times

So it may not be that undecided voters are gravitating to Trump so much as anti-Trump Republicans are discouraged. Trump faces unusually high levels of intraparty opposition for a front-runner — or at least, he had seemed to until the past two weeks. But Kasich and Ted Cruz are also deeply flawed, and somewhat factional, candidates. It’s asking a lot of voters to cast a tactical vote against Trump when that tactic requires (i) going to a contested convention in order to (ii) deny the candidate with the plurality of votes and delegates the nomination in order to (iii) give the nomination to a candidate they don’t particularly like anyway. The #NeverTrump voters might not be voting for Trump, but they might be staying at home.

I mostly buy this argument — I’m as optimistic about Trump’s chances as at any point in the election cycle. (Granted, that isn’t saying that much given that I spent much of last year being highly skeptical of Trump’s chances.)

But I still have a couple of points of caution.

One is that it isn’t uncommon for candidates to run up the score in primaries that appear to be noncompetitive. In fact, this happens all the time. Polls usually call the winners right in primaries, but they often lowball their margins of victory. It isn’t very motivating to turn out for a guy who’s going to lose a state by 30 percentage points, even if doing so might win him an extra delegate under some obscure provision of the delegate rules. In Indiana, a genuinely competitive, winner-take-all race where Cruz is (theoretically) the clear alternative to Trump, that won’t be such a problem.

The other caveat is that the Republican race has not only defied “momentum” but often contradicted it. Whenever Trump seemed to be on a glide path to the nomination (such as after Super Tuesday, or after March 15), he’s had a setback. When he’s seemed to be vulnerable (such as after losing Iowa, or Wisconsin), he’s rebounded.

This maybe — or probably — is just our reading too much into noisy data. But it’s possible there’s some sort of thermostatic effect at work. When Trump seems to be on the verge of becoming the presumptive nominee, there’s more focus on his awful general election numbers; meanwhile, the media’s incentives for covering him change, with the possibility of Trump imploding at a contested convention becoming a more attractive story than the man-bites-dog narrative of Trump winning the nomination in the first place. When Trump seems to be in trouble, conversely, Republicans are forced to contemplate the problems of a contested convention and the inadequacies of Cruz and Kasich, and the media becomes more eager to tell a Trump comeback or pivot story.

Indiana is important not only because of its delegates, but also because it will give us an indication as to whether the apparent change in Republican attitudes is temporary or permanent. If Trump wins Indiana despite its middling-to-fair (from his standpoint) demographics, he won’t quite be the presumptive nominee because he’ll still need to follow through with a decent performance in California. But he’ll at least be in the liminal zone that Hillary Clinton spent a lot of time in, with the race not quite wrapped up mathematically but close enough that something (a gaffe, a scandal) would have to intervene to deny him the nomination. Incidentally, Trump’s potential support from the uncommitted delegates in Pennsylvania will give him more margin of error in that situation.

If Trump loses Indiana, however, that will suggest the race is still fairly volatile week-to-week, that he’s very likely to lose states such as Nebraska that vote later in May, and that the geographic and demographic divergences in the GOP haven’t reversed themselves so much as become more exaggerated. It will improve the morale of anti-Trump voters and change the tone of press coverage. And mathematically, it will make it hard (although not quite impossible) for Trump to win 1,237 delegates outright; he’d be back to fighting tooth-and-nail for every uncommitted delegate.

I don’t know what’s going to happen in Indiana. But Trump’s strong results over the past two weeks have changed the Hoosier State from potentially being “must-win” for Trump to probably being “must-win” for his opponents.

Today Is Clinton’s Chance To End The ‘Groundhog Day’ Campaign

The Democratic campaign has taken on the feel of “Groundhog Day,” repeating the same storyline over and over with only minor variation. Hillary Clinton, in our view, has spent most of the year in the liminal space between “clear favorite” and “presumptive nominee.” After barely beating Bernie Sanders in Iowa and badly losing to him in New Hampshire, Clinton reasserted herself in late February with a narrow win in Nevada and an overwhelming one in South Carolina, indications that (as we and a lot of other folks had originally expected) she would hold an advantage once the Democratic calendar turned to more diverse states.

Then, after a series of victories on Super Tuesday on March 1, Clinton emerged with a clear edge over Sanders, leading him by 187 pledged delegates.3 (Note that none of the numbers in this article account for superdelegates, who also favor Clinton.) Despite a shocking loss in Michigan on March 8, Clinton swept Ohio, Florida and three other states on March 15, expanding her lead over Sanders to 310 pledged delegates.

Sanders then ran off a string of victories, including his big win in the Wisconsin primary on April 5, to cut his disadvantage to 204 delegates. Still, because Sanders’s wins were coming on terrain demographically favorable to him — and because he had to gain delegates at a rapid pace to close his deficit with Clinton — he wasn’t necessarily doing all that much to improve his chances of winning the nomination. Then came an unambiguously bad result for Sanders last week in New York, when he lost by 16 percentage points.

Clinton’s current lead — 235 pledged delegates — is still below her post-Ohio peak. But because there are relatively few states left to vote, she now needs only 41.6 percent of the remaining pledged delegates to clinch a pledged delegate majority, her lowest figure of the campaign to date. Sanders, conversely, will need 58.4 percent of the remaining pledged delegates to win a majority.

That’s already a tall order for Sanders, but if polls and demographic projections are roughly correct in the five states set to vote today, Sanders’s math will become even more challenging, requiring him to win about 65 percent of pledged delegates in the remaining states to surpass Clinton.

Clinton has clear leads in our polling-based forecasts of Pennsylvania and Maryland, which together have 284 pledged delegates (more than New York’s 247). She also narrowly leads Sanders in our forecast of Connecticut, while trailing him by a percentage point or two in Rhode Island. We’re not running a forecast in Delaware since there’s been only one poll there, but Clinton led Sanders in that survey.

Polls are sometimes inaccurate in primaries. Michigan has been the only state in the Democratic campaign so far where the substantial majority of polls misidentified the winner, but it was such a huge miss that it needs to be kept in mind. Still, in this case, the polls don’t diverge much from what you might expect from the states based on their demographics. Furthermore, all of the states voting today except Rhode Island are holding closed primaries, another factor helping Clinton.

Below, you’ll find a polling-based4 and demographic-based forecast5 for each state, along with an allocation of pledged delegates on the assumption that they’ll be distributed in proportion to the statewide vote.6

POLLING MODELDEMOGRAPHIC MODELSTATEPOP. VOTECLINTON DEL.SANDERS DEL.POP. VOTECLINTON DEL.SANDERS DEL.PennsylvaniaClinton +1711178Clinton +1310782MarylandClinton +165639Clinton +316233ConnecticutClinton +42926Clinton +113124Rhode IslandSanders +11212Sanders +41113DelawareClinton +71110Clinton +22138Total219165224160Delegate gains are likely for Clinton on Tuesday

Clinton holds a 17 percentage point lead in our polling-based forecast of Pennsylvania. That would closely match her margins in neighboring Ohio and New York, although it seems a bit high according to the demographic model, which has Clinton winning Pennsylvania by a margin in the low teens instead.

However, Clinton’s 16-point lead in the Maryland polling forecast might be on the low side, partly as a result of a possibly dubious American Research Group poll showing a close race there. Other recent polls of Maryland showed Clinton with a 20+ percentage point edge, while our demographic model has her winning there by 31 points.

The demographic model also has Clinton winning Connecticut and Delaware by slightly more than the polls do, while it has Sanders as a bigger favorite in Rhode Island than the polls suggest. But these states have relatively few delegates and so deviations from the forecasts won’t matter all that much in either direction. Overall, the polling-based forecast shows 219 delegates to Clinton to 165 for Sanders, while the demographic forecast has a similar 224-160 split.

Suppose that the polling-based forecast is right and that Sanders adds 165 pledged delegates on Tuesday. He’d then need 653 of the 1016 pledged delegates in the remaining states, or 64.3 percent, to eventually reach a majority of 2,026 pledged delegates. Here’s an estimate of what that would require in each remaining state (these numbers are adapted from estimates that we originally built for Sanders last month).

DATESTATE OR TERRITORYNO. ELECTED DELEGATESSANDERS’S PATH-TO-2,026 PROJECTIONPOPULAR VOTE MARGIN NEEDED TO REACH TARGETMay 3Indiana8353Sanders+28May 7Guam74Sanders+14May 10West Virginia2921Sanders+45May 17Oregon6149Sanders+61Kentucky5536Sanders+31June 4Virgin Islands74Sanders+14June 5Puerto Rico6036Sanders+20June 7California475299Sanders+26New Jersey12673Sanders+16New Mexico3420Sanders+18Montana2118Sanders+71South Dakota2015Sanders+50North Dakota1815Sanders+67June 14D.C.2010TieWhat Sanders’s path to 2,026 will look like if Tuesday polls are right

Based on these estimates, Sanders would need to beat Clinton by 26 percentage points in California, 28 points in Indiana and 16 points in New Jersey, all states where he trails Clinton in polling averages. He’d also need to win Western states like Oregon and Montana by 50 or more percentage points. No matter how much creative, mind-bending math they might be tempted to apply, Sanders and his campaign might have to “re-evaluate” his position in the race.

True, even an unexpectedly good day today wouldn’t help Sanders in the delegate count all that much. Suppose he splits pledged delegates with Clinton 192-192, perhaps as the result of upset wins in Pennsylvania and Connecticut. He’d still have to win 61.6 percent of the remaining pledged delegates to claim the majority.

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But candidates rarely end their campaigns after beating consensus expectations, even if their results aren’t all that impressive in an absolute sense (see also: John Kasich declaring victory after winning 16 percent of the vote in New Hampshire). And if Sanders doesn’t reconsider his campaign after Tuesday, there’s not a logical off-ramp for him before California on June 7; instead, the states set to vote in May look reasonably good for him. Clinton is extremely likely to be the Democratic nominee either way, but tonight could determine whether she continues to see Sanders’s shadow for another six weeks.

Check out our live coverage of the April 26 primary elections.

Elections Podcast: Kasich And Cruz Are Scheming

John Kasich and Ted Cruz are openly coordinating their campaign strategies to stop Donald Trump from reaching the 1,237 delegates he needs to clinch the GOP nomination before the convention. In this episode of FiveThirtyEight’s elections podcast, the crew discusses whether the two underdogs’ new strategy will work and force a contested convention. Then, Clare Malone tells the story of Pennsylvania’s delegate loophole primary from the ground. Plus, Nate Silver talks about his own primary vote.

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You can stream or download the full episode above. You can also find us by searching “fivethirtyeight” in your favorite podcast app, or subscribe using the RSS feed. Check out all our other shows.

If you’re a fan of the elections podcast, leave us a rating and review on iTunes, which helps other people discover the show. Have a comment, want to suggest something for “good polling vs. bad polling” or want to ask a question? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

Will The Kasich-Cruz Alliance Work?

In this week’s politics chat, we weigh the impact of the newly minted alliance between Ted Cruz and John Kasich against Donald Trump. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): Hey, everyone! We’ve convened our weekly Slack chat early to tackle an interesting development in the Republican race; here’s how Clare puts it in our weekly Conventional Wisdom newsletter:

Like conquering European powers after a war — i.e., pretty much most of modern history, those bastards — the campaigns have decided to divide territory to maximize their spoils; Cruz will get Indiana, and Kasich has dibs on Oregon and New Mexico, presumably because he enjoys going to art fairs more than Cruz.

The situation is illustrated perfectly by this photo from CNN’s Republican debate in Miami on March 10:

Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and John Kasich after the CNN Republican presidential debate on March 10 in Miami.

Rhona Wise / AFP / Getty Images

So how big of a deal is this?

clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): I think it’s pretty darn big — signals what I’m thinking of as a Machiavellian turn in the race. Cruz and Kasich are realizing just how little time they have left and how steep the odds are; minus California, the states with lots of delegates up for grabs are dwindling away.

micah: Yeah, I wonder if they’re too late. (Also, just to note: Kasich has sent some conflicting signals on Indiana.)

harry (Harry Enten, senior political writer): Well, Cruz needed to do something. Indiana is a must-win state for him. It’s a state he was favored to win for a while, but the polls that came out late last week had him trailing Trump by single-digits. Those surveys all had Trump around 40 percent and Cruz+Kasich at 49 percent or more. There are 57 delegates at stake in Indiana, and if Cruz won the Cruz+Kasich share in the polls, he would get pretty much all those delegates (in Indiana, delegates are awarded winner-take-all on both the congressional district and statewide levels).

Moreover, the states that Cruz ceded to Kasich (New Mexico and Oregon) have only 52 delegates between them, and those are awarded proportionally. The proportional rules mean that even if the Cruz+Kasich share of the vote is lower in those states because of this deal, it won’t cost them that many delegates. This is about Indiana and about stopping Trump.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): My question is whether you guys are looking at this too much in a vacuum. Yes, if you combined Cruz’s and Kasich’s support, Trump would probably lose Indiana. But as I wrote this weekend, the most important development of the past couple of weeks might be that Trump is successfully persuading Republicans that “the system is rigged,” or at least that he’s clearly going to win the plurality so they might as well get this over with.

clare.malone: Are you wondering if the sheeple are going to follow this directive, Nate?

natesilver: I think some of Kasich’s voters will follow it, yes. But I also think it could give Trump a good talking point and persuade some undecided Republicans to go with Trump.

clare.malone: Aren’t voters just chess pieces on a cosmic board for campaigns to move around at will? Have I misunderstood all this?? The Trump statement last night on this Kasich-Cruz deal was pretty strong; here’s an excerpt from the rather lengthy Trump release the campaign e-mailed out that speaks to the unfairness argument that Nate brought up (which I think can ring pretty true with voters):

Because of me, everyone now sees that the Republican primary system is totally rigged. When two candidates who have no path to victory get together to stop a candidate who is expanding the party by millions of voters, (all of whom will drop out if I am not in the race) it is yet another example of everything that is wrong in Washington and our political system. This horrible act of desperation, from two campaigns who have totally failed, makes me even more determined, for the good of the Republican Party and our country, to prevail!

natesilver: Trump’s polling has gotten quite a bit better over the past two weeks. If the reason it’s gotten better is because voters have the sense that the rest of the party is colluding against him, this won’t necessarily help.

harry: So what do you think Cruz and/or Kasich should do? Nothing? Trump is going to say the system is rigged anyway. Nothing has ever stopped Trump saying what he wants to say.

natesilver: Well, there are a couple of alternatives. First, they could coordinate without making a big show about it. Kasich quietly pulls out of Indiana and has some pretense for why he’s spending time in Oregon or California instead. Maybe on the eve of the primary, he issues an ambiguous statement saying that he’d rather his voters go for Cruz than for Trump if they must. The other alternative is a unity ticket where Kasich runs as Cruz’s VP.

micah: Now we’re talking!

clare.malone: Kasich is everyone’s safety school VP pick, huh? I actually think that quiet coordination wouldn’t have worked in this case — the atmosphere of this race is pretty pitched, and I think they wanted to send their voters a clear signal.

harry: Did you consider this quiet — when Marco Rubio told his backers to vote for Kasich in Ohio?

natesilver: The Rubio thing doesn’t seem like collusion as much, Harry. They played pretty coy until the end. Still, it worked! Rubio got only 2 percent of the vote in Ohio.

harry: The Rubio folks stayed coy until about four days before Ohio. The Cruz-Kasich news broke nine days before Indiana. I’m not sure how big a difference that is. As for behind the scenes, I’m very hesitant to believe that voters are paying that much attention. I’m also not sure how much of a difference advertisements have made.

natesilver: Let me say something else about Rubio, by the way. He was running as a candidate who could unite the whole Republican Party. Now that’s a difficult task, and he failed at it. But in some ways it made him a more credible #NeverTrump spokesperson. Cruz and Kasich themselves have run as factional candidates, meanwhile. Cruz has been moving to his right — hitting Trump on the North Carolina transgender bathroom law, for instance — instead of trying to persuade moderate conservatives in the Indianapolis suburbs to vote for him.

micah: Clare, how receptive do you think Cruz and Kasich voters will be to this message? Do you think they’ll happily behave tactically? Will voters resent their favored candidate asking them to back someone else?

clare.malone: I think at this point, my sense is that if you’re supporting Kasich or Cruz, there’s a good chance that you’re not necessarily in the thrall of them, you’re just against Trump. So I can see tactical voting working. Obviously Kasich had an inherent advantage in Ohio, but the many public statements telling voters to vote strategically had to have bolstered him a bit.

micah: Has this type of collusion happened before? Wasn’t there an effort to block Jimmy Carter in 1976?

harry: I don’t even think we need to go back to 1976. I think we can go back to 2008 and how John McCain and Mike Huckabee colluded in West Virginia to stop Mitt Romney from getting delegates. That’s not to the same scale as this Cruz-Kasich team-up, but this type of thing does happen in multicandidate primaries.

clare.malone: This kind of stuff is happening this year at state conventions — Kentucky’s this weekend was basically just Mitch McConnell stuffing the slate of delegates to the national convention this summer with establishment types, and the names weren’t released until right before the vote. There’s TONS of collusion that’s not getting big coverage. But voters don’t see it … or they’re only starting to see it in drips and drabs.

natesilver: It’s different to cooperate/collude behind the scenes and to do so explicitly. The latter is not something voters will have a lot of experience with. But I’m not even sure I disagree with you, Harry, particularly given that high-risk strategies are probably necessary at this point. I just think the rollout seems a bit clumsy. We haven’t seen Cruz or Kasich take very much time to make the moral case against Trump or explain why Trump should rightfully be denied the nomination if he wins only a plurality. They haven’t set the stage for this all that well.

clare.malone: Hm. I think I disagree that they haven’t made a moral case against Trump. Also, there’s something implicit in their banding together that says “moral case,” right? It’s an unholy alliance to beat an unholy terror of a candidate.

natesilver: If they’re making the case, Clare, I don’t think voters are hearing a lot about it, in part because the media rarely pays attention to Cruz or Kasich unless they do something this drastic. To take some fairly basic points, GOP voters are still convinced that Trump is the most electable candidate even though that’s, uhhhh, really really wrong if you look at the polls. And as I pointed out in my piece this weekend, the media has often failed to distinguish between Trump having a plurality of support and Trump having a majority, even though that’s super important to the moral case too.

clare.malone: In this case, the well-educated Kasich voter will presumably swallow the fish oil pill and hope it prevents the heart attack to democracy that they think is Donald Trump.

micah: So give me your bottom line, everyone: Will this work?

harry: I have no idea. I think it will, but let’s be real: None of us know.

micah: I don’t think it will.

harry: So, essentially, you are saying that Trump is the Republican nominee?

natesilver: I think you’re asking slightly the wrong question. Did Trump’s probability of being the nominee increase or decrease as a result of this?

micah: Push. Helps his message, helps his opponents — my prior is that those two things cancel out. But as Harry says, I really have no idea.

natesilver: Betting markets had Trump’s percentage of winning the nomination dropping by a couple of percentage points, for what it’s worth.

harry: It decreases the chance in my opinion.

clare.malone: I agree that it decreases the chances of his nomination.

micah: What if they had done this a month ago, before March 15? (Ignore Rubio for the sake of argument.)

harry: Well, they should have done something a month ago. And reporting from The New York Times indicates that John Weaver (Kasich’s chief strategist) wanted to do something a while ago. It was apparently Jeff Roe (Cruz’s campaign manager) who resisted. I find that ironic because #NeverTrump has been very anti-Kasich. In fact, Kasich was more anti-Trump than given credit for.

natesilver: Yeah, that is interesting, although arguably Kasich should have pursued this strategy without any concessions from Cruz!

clare.malone: I dunno — a lot of people might have thought it too mafioso at that point? Splitting up three states is quite a thing. But perhaps I’m wrong and voters who would be so inclined as to go strategic might recognize and respond to the desperation of the historical moment for the GOP, no matter what the calendar date.

natesilver: If Kasich’s goal is to maximize the chance of a contested convention, which means minimizing the number of Trump delegates, he should have pulled out of Indiana or Wisconsin of his own volition. Then again, he proved to be a pretty cheap date. Oregon and New Mexico are extremely proportional, and this deal won’t swing very many delegates there.

harry: Perhaps so, though I think we underplay the effect giving up on states may have in terms of a candidate looking viable overall. That’s why Cruz didn’t want to drop out of the Northeast contests.

natesilver: Having been on the skeptical side about the way the deal was rolled out — and, yes, for the record, I do think it was better for #NeverTrump than nothing — let me say one thing in its favor: It does set Indiana up as something of a #NeverTrump referendum. And Indiana is probably a slightly below-average state for Trump, so it’s not such a bad place to have such a referendum. If Trump loses Indiana, the narrative might start to grok that Trump doesn’t really have a majority of support and is only winning because of the divided field.

micah: If #NeverTrump loses Indiana, is it over?

clare.malone: California, baby.

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natesilver: IMO, it would be over in the sense that the Democratic primary has been “over” for a few weeks. Not technically over, because there are way too many delegates available in California, but over in the sense that you’d need something to change and cause Trump’s polling to fall quite a bit.

micah: Which hasn’t happened to date.

harry: I think #NeverTrump must win in Indiana. If they can’t win in a state favorable to them, then no way will they pull it off in California.

micah: So this is the desperate #NeverTrump gambit? Has anything like this (on this scale) worked before?

natesilver: Well, unless Kasich were to drop out. And that’s one negative to this deal for #NeverTrump. It gives Kasich an excuse to stick around, when arguably #NeverTrump would be better off with him dropping out entirely.

clare.malone: John Kasich: The underdog story no one wanted.

harry: Kasich wasn’t and isn’t dropping out. On the question of whether we’ve had a situation like this before — I don’t think so — a multicandidate field this late in the season in which the leader had only a plurality of the vote and a plurality of delegates, with his opponents having a clear shot to stop him if there was an ability to coordinate efforts.

natesilver: We’re definitely in uncharted territory. I suppose the best defense of this is something like the one McCain used in picking Sarah Palin: You may as well shake things up because on various levels the status quo isn’t working. As a bonus, maybe it’ll rattle Trump, who had been unusually calm over the past couple of weeks. On the flip side, two weeks ago it looked like Cruz could probably win Indiana on his own and that California was a tossup. So the fact that this deal was made is a sign of how much Trump’s position has improved.

clare.malone: Feels a bit like trying to put the brakes on the “Snowpiercer” train hurtling at like 1,000 mph, though — might just be too late.

Trump’s ‘System Is Rigged’ Argument Is Working

Donald Trump has had a good run of numbers lately. While his victory in New York this week was expected, he got 60 percent of the vote, more than the roughly 55 percent projected by the polls. He appears headed for victories in Maryland and Pennsylvania, which vote on Tuesday. He’s gained ground in California and is narrowly ahead of Ted Cruz in the first public polls of Indiana. He’s added about 2 percentage points over the past two weeks in our national polling average.

You could push back against some of these details. Some of the California polls come from pollsters1 that have had a Trump-leaning house effect or that used an unorthodox methodology. The Indiana polls have Trump leading, but with only about 39 percent of the vote, which might not be enough if the rest of the vote consolidates behind Cruz. The national poll gains are small and may just be statistical noise.

But with Trump’s path to 1,237 delegates on such a knife’s edge, every percentage point matters. And it’s possible that Trump has moved a few voters into his column with a series of process arguments that he’s been pressing recently. The more restrained version, as you can see in a recent op-ed published under Trump’s name in The Wall Street Journal, is that the candidate who gets the most votes should be the Republican nominee — that delegates shouldn’t upend the people’s verdict. In public speeches, Trump has taken the argument a step further, describing the GOP’s nomination process as “rigged” and “crooked.”

Polling suggests that a majority of Republicans agree with at least the milder version of Trump’s argument, although the framing of the question matters. Last week’s NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that 62 percent of Republicans thought the “candidate with the most votes in the primaries” should become the nominee in the event that no candidate wins a majority of delegates, compared with 33 percent who said Republicans should choose the “candidate who the delegates think would be the best nominee.” Only 40 percent of Republicans had Trump as their first choice in the same poll, which implies that there’s a group of Republicans who personally don’t prefer Trump but wouldn’t want to deny him the nomination if he finished with the plurality of delegates and votes, as he is almost certain to do. We might call this group the #TolerateTrump faction of the GOP, as opposed to pro-Trump and #NeverTrump blocs.

Polls like those could sway delegate sentiment at the convention. But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves; there are still 15 states where voters have yet to weigh in. With John Kasich mathematically eliminated from winning on the first ballot at the convention and Cruz practically eliminated from doing so,2 a vote for either of Trump’s opponents is a vote for a contested convention at this point. It’s possible that some #TolerateTrump Republicans in states such as California might hold their nose and vote for Trump to try to pre-empt a contested convention, even though they might have voted for Cruz or Kasich earlier in the process.

However, there’s other polling to suggest that #TolerateTrump Republicans could be persuaded by counterarguments to Trump’s plurality-rules doctrine, if only they were hearing them. Consider, for instance, a recent YouGov poll of Pennsylvania, which had Trump with 46 percent of the vote there. That poll also asked about a contested convention but used different language than the NBC/WSJ poll did:

As you may know, the Republican party requires a nominee to get 1,237 delegates in the primaries for the nomination. If Donald Trump does not get 1,237 but Trump still has more delegates than Ted Cruz, and more delegates than John Kasich, what do you feel Republicans should do at the convention this summer?

In the YouGov survey, only 47 percent of voters said the convention should select Trump if he fails to reach 1,237 delegates, while 45 percent said the candidates should “fight for delegate support at the convention to decide the winner.” Not coincidentally, these percentages closely matched the candidates’ overall level of support in the poll.3 Explicitly pointing out that Republican rules require a candidate to get a majority and portraying the convention as a fight for delegates among the candidates rather than one in which the delegates are deciding things on their own seem to sway #TolerateTrump voters back into aligning with the #NeverTrump’s.

But if the framing of the question matters, Trump has a big advantage: The media is mostly echoing and validating his side of the argument. That’s partly because Trump continues to dominate news coverage of the Republican race and therefore has a lot more opportunities to get his message out.4

It also helps that Trump’s system-is-rigged message is relatively simple and plays into the media’s master narrative of the Republican race as a conflict between the Republican base and the GOP “establishment.” The Republicans’ delegate selection rules, by contrast, require an attention to detail that narrative-driven stories about the Republican race can misconstrue. Take this recent article from Jonathan Martin of The New York Times as an example; here’s how it begins:

With his thoroughly dominating performance on Tuesday in New York, Donald J. Trump proved that he remains the preferred candidate of most Republican primary voters. The question now is whether winning the most votes will be enough to make him the Republican nominee.

The volatile nominating contest has effectively spun off into two simultaneous races: one for votes and one for delegates. And they are starkly different.

Winning New York in a landslide — he captured all of the state’s 62 counties except his borough, Manhattan — Mr. Trump demonstrated the breadth of his support and his resilience in the aftermath of a loss in Wisconsin two weeks ago. With just 15 states remaining on the primary calendar, he has left little doubt about his popular appeal.

But the sturdy opposition to his candidacy within the party and his own organizational deficiencies have hampered him at the state and local level, where a byzantine process is underway to elect delegates to the Republican convention in Cleveland this summer. Senator Ted Cruz has dominated that esoteric inside game until now. And if Mr. Trump falls short of clinching the nomination after all 50 states, the District of Columbia and five territories have held their contests, those delegates could make their own decisions after the first ballot in Cleveland.

There’s quite a bit to critique in this passage. To start, note how Martin asserts that “Trump proved that he remains the preferred candidate of most Republican primary voters.” In fact, Trump has won only 38 percent of the vote so far and has won a majority of the vote only in his home state of New York.5 Trump is unusually unpopular for a party front-runner — only about half of Republicans would be happy with him as their nominee — but he’s taken advantage of the divided opposition.6

A more fundamental problem with Martin’s narrative is that it fails to clearly explain that the overwhelming majority of Republican delegates are bound based on primary or caucus results on the first ballot. In fact, because some states use winner-take-all or winner-take-most rules, the Republican delegate math tends to advantage the front-runner — in this case Trump, who has 47 percent of the delegates awarded so far with only 38 percent of the vote. By contrast, under the Democrats’ highly proportional delegate allocation rules, a contested convention would already be all but guaranteed.

It’s true that most delegates become free agents on the second ballot — and more still on the third and fourth ballots — and that Trump hasn’t done a good job in delegate-selection conventions held by state and local Republican parties.7 But that won’t matter if Trump has enough support on the first ballot, which he can still get if he finishes strongly in states such as California and Indiana. The process is still in Republican voters’ hands, and Trump may have found an argument that can get him over the finish line.

What We’re Watching In Today’s New York Primaries

For this week’s politics Slack chat, we set the stage for — and discuss the stakes of — today’s New York primary. (Polls are open until 9 p.m.!) The transcript below has been lightly edited.

Check out our live coverage of the New York primary elections.

micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): Happy New York Primary day! How many of you voted?

clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): None of your business.

harry (Harry Enten, senior political writer): I didn’t vote. Sue me.

micah: Clare, even simply whether you voted or not?

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): I voted in my capacity as a private citizen. I’ve gone back and forth on this question over the years, but ultimately I think it’s dumb to have a problem with journalists voting.

clare.malone: The vote is private and sacred, that’s what we were taught in the Malone household. A veil of secrecy is in order.

micah: Alright, let’s start with the Democrats … what’s going to happen? Rumor has it that America is feeling the Bern.

harry: That’s nationally; if the polls of New York are to be believed, then Hillary Clinton is going to have a very strong night. She’ll win and probably by double digits. In doing so, she’ll probably up her elected delegate lead by 25+ delegates.

clare.malone: And if the polls are wrong, all hell breaks loose. Sí?

micah: Yeah, let’s posit a couple cases …

clare.malone: Bernie Sanders loses, but by only a couple of percentage points. That’s the most likely “bad” scenario for Clinton.

micah: That’s the likely outcome according to the “the-most-annoying-and-ambiguous-outcome-possible-will-happen” theory of the 2016 primaries. And that theory has worked pretty well so far.

natesilver: Yeah, that would be an annoying outcome, in the sense that it would represent a setback for Sanders relative to the delegate targets he needs to hit to overtake Clinton, but he might get pretty favorable press coverage in that scenario.

clare.malone: Not quite Murphy’s law … Sullivan’s Law maybe? Many things will go kinda, sorta wrong, but not all of them.

micah: Malone’s Law.

clare.malone: Coin it.

natesilver: Are you guys just randomly naming faux-Irish bars in Kips Bay? O’Hurleys?

micah: OK, let’s say Bernie wins by 4 points. Shitstorm, yes?

clare.malone: Yes!

natesilver: A shit tornado. A shit hurricane.

harry: If Bernie wins by 4 percentage points, my @ mentions on Twitter are going to be something else.

clare.malone: I hope he wins just for that. #schadenfreude

micah: It would signal something might be fatally wrong with the Clinton campaign?

harry: In that scenario, I’d say there is something wrong. If you’re Clinton, how can you not win New York? It has a closed primary — only registered Democrats can vote — with a diverse electorate, and you were the state’s U.S. senator for nearly 10 years.

natesilver: Yeah, it would suggest that Sanders was starting to eat into her base. The closed primary thing is a big deal — especially given how strict New York is about changing parties. A Sanders win would imply he was winning over the sorts of voters that he wasn’t winning in other states.

clare.malone: Right. If that’s the scenario, and voters really are turning more and more towards Sanders, Clinton’s got a big ol’ problem, and I’m not quite sure what she would do at that point. “Campaign shake-up,” I believe, would be the phrase on everyone’s lips.

natesilver: But it’s also pretty darn unlikely. In some ways, a Sanders win in New York would be more shocking than Michigan was. Whereas Michigan’s demographics and open-primary status seemed more favorable to Sanders than the polls did, I’m not sure you can say that about New York in a closed primary.

micah: Last scenario: Clinton wins by 15 percentage points.

clare.malone: She drinks a couple boilermakers and goes to bed a happy lady. Because that would do a lot for putting to bed the narrative that Sanders is closing in on her. And while we care a lot about numbers here, perception also matters in the race to a certain extent, especially if voters on the fence for him in states that have yet to vote start to think he has a better and better chance of beating her.

harry: Yeah, I think Clinton will love that. Based on the polling, it looks possible.

natesilver: If Clinton wins by 15 percentage points, she’d gain 35-40 pledged delegates on Sanders.

micah: Would he drop out?

clare.malone: No, I don’t think so. I think he’s going to stay in until June. He’s got the money, so why not? He’s got a message to spread. That’s why he got into the race in the first place.

natesilver: I doubt he’d drop out but it would eliminate some of the pretense of it being a competitive race. Especially because if Clinton does well here in New York, she’s probably also going to win states like Pennsylvania that vote on April 26.

micah: Would he stop going negative maybe?

clare.malone: That’s an interesting question … hard to tell, I think. That would be the thing that a more middle-of-the-road Democrat would certainly do in this situation, but to me, what he might do feels like a bit of a wildcard, since he’s not exactly a dutiful foot soldier of the Democratic Party.

harry: I’d be interested in seeing how the White House would react, if Sanders keeps going negative after a Clinton blowout. The Obama administration has already made some pro-Clinton noise.

natesilver: I dunno, but the race might begin to get less media coverage. Recently, there’s been a resurgence of interest in the Democratic race, and if you’re watching CNN or something, you’d (falsely) get the impression that Sanders and Clinton are very close in elected delegates. That would end — I think — with a big Clinton win in New York. It really does become almost impossible for Sanders to catch up if he loses a net 35 delegates in New York.

micah: And if she wins by a bunch, and Sanders keeps attacking her harshly, I think you would see more explicit pro-Clinton signals from the party, including from people who have so far remained neutral.

clare.malone: This, by the way, from back in March, was about Obama being frustrated with Sanders remaining in the race: Obama Privately Tells Donors That Time Is Coming to Unite Behind Hillary Clinton.

harry: I think you would see a real rally to Clinton, if Sanders keeps attacking. You’ve already seen a bit of a rally, but I think you’ll see it more openly.

micah: The REPUBLICANS! What’s up with them?

natesilver: Donald Trump probably gets a majority of the vote for the first time in any state tonight.

clare.malone: And, in notable news, Trump hasn’t said anything inflammatory in days. Campaign rebrand! (sorta)

harry: Yes, there is an increasing number of news stories about how Trump is going in a new direction.

micah: And the media will play right along.

natesilver: Well, for just this once, let’s not be quite so cynical. He seems to have put Corey Lewandowski in the doghouse, which is a good move.

harry: He seems to have hired some legitimate staffers.

micah: See, I think it’s cynical to play along with the rebrand.

natesilver: But Trump keeps a very small team, and switching up a couple of advisors is a big deal. Obviously, he’s still getting killed in delegate selection in states like Virginia and Georgia, to the point where it’s sort of past the point of no return. I’m not saying he’s had an amazing couple of weeks. But at least he’s steering in the right direction in terms of managing his personnel.

harry: Winning on the first ballot at the GOP convention may be a lost hope for Trump. I would argue, however, that these types of personnel moves help his chances, even if minimally, of winning on a first ballot.

micah: I guess my point is that some stains shouldn’t come clean, i.e. Trump’s racist and sexist comments, and a rebranding shouldn’t be able to wipe those away.

harry: The way I’d put it, Micah: The carpet still has the mark, but at least it doesn’t smell nearly as bad.

clare.malone: This has gotten gross.

micah: Haha. So give me a best case/average case/bad case for Trump’s delegate haul from New York.

harry: Let’s talk about delegate leakage!

clare.malone: Favorite topic. Democratic-heavy districts in New York City are coming after Trump (leakage-wise)!

clare.malone: But a good night for Trump would be that he gets well over 50 percent statewide, right?

harry: I think that is Bar No. 1 for Trump. The 50 percent bar. If he gets below that, he’ll still win, but I’d call it disappointing. If Trump can get like 55+ percent, then I’d consider that to be a strong night for him.

natesilver: I think we should be more precise when we talk about a good night or a bad night, etc. When we set our delegate targets a month or so ago, we had Trump winning 71 delegates in New York. He’ll almost certainly beat that unless he finishes way off his polls (and below 50 percent). If you asked me right now, though, I’d have Trump getting oh let’s say 83-85 delegates, which would probably require him to get 54-55 percent of the vote. To me, it’s almost certainly going to be a good night for Trump, but the question is just how good.

The stakes aren’t actually that high, because the difference between an extremely disappointing night and a pitch-perfect night might amount to only 20 delegates or so.

By contrast, one can easily imagine a 50-delegate swing in Indiana from Trump’s best- to worst-case outcomes there.

harry: Nate just loves Indiana.

natesilver: Casinos, fireworks, cheap booze and a Steak & Shake. We went there all the time in college.

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micah: And is the story in New York basically exclusively a Trump story? Does it matter where Ted Cruz and John Kasich end up relative to each other?

natesilver: In terms of Trump’s delegate haul, the Kasich/Cruz order doesn’t matter much, because Trump is unlikely to lose more than a district or two and it’s all about whether he stays under 50 percent. A vote for either candidate — or even Ben Carson, who’s also on the N.Y. ballot — is a vote against Trump getting 50 percent. Maybe it has some implications for the states to vote next week, however.

harry: How can you forget Jim Gilmore?

clare.malone: I think it matters for Kasich and Cruz in the “sub-primary” sense of things — Kasich, in particular, desperately needs to log some delegates to appear at least a bit viable, right?

harry: The question you have to ask yourself is whether Kasich would ever get out of the race. If the answer is no, I’m not sure how much it matters.

micah: But if Kasich finishes ahead of Cruz statewide, that hurts Cruz’s case as the chief/only Trump alternative, right?

clare.malone: Mitt Romney dropped another public hint to Kasich.

natesilver: If Kasich winds up with 190 delegates vs. 170 at the end of all this I’m not sure how that matters. (I should clarify that I think Kasich’s path to the nomination is far-fetched no matter what.) The questions are (i) how many delegates Kasich and Cruz combined deny Trump and (ii) whether Kasich might consider dropping out at some point.

Does it really hurt Cruz, Micah? Cruz insulted New York, his main opponent is from here, and this is about as bad a fit as you’ll find for him demographically. In other words, what happens in New York doesn’t necessarily translate to other contests.

micah: Unless New York says something about the Northeast generally — let’s say Kasich outperforms Cruz in New York, and then again a week later in PA, MD, CT, etc… won’t that have some effect heading into Indiana, where Cruz really, really needs to beat Trump?

clare.malone: That’s the Kasich team plan right there ^^^

micah: Oh god. OK, I’m wrong.

natesilver: So, let’s say Kasich finishes second in a bunch of places on April 26 but wins almost nowhere. Let’s say he wins six proportional delegates in Rhode Island and two congressional districts in Maryland, for 12 delegates total. Does he really emerge out of that with momentum? If anything, it seems like Cruz can say “you had your chance, bud, and you blew it.” Sort of like how Rubio had a couple of putatively good results on Super Tuesday but was way short of where he needed to be to make himself more of a factor.

harry: https: //www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5RtlpXsl8k

clare.malone: I mean, fair enough point. I think Kasich has ulterior motives about being a power player during the convention. However that might manifest itself.

micah: VEEP!

clare.malone: Right. If his personality allows it.

micah: OK, final question: Doesn’t Trump tend to underperform his polls? Why are we so sure he’ll clear 50 percent tonight?

harry: More times than not he has underperformed his polls, but the average result is pretty much finishing right at his polling percentage. So, I think that’s why we’re still interested.

natesilver: We’re not sure. Our models put his chances at about 95 percent, and we’ve seen enough cases in this election of 5-percent chances coming through that we should be careful about that. And if you account for Trump’s tendency to underperform his polls, maybe the real chances are more like 10 percent. But still, some of the factors that have led him to underperform his polls in other states don’t really apply in New York. For one thing, Trump has the highest favorability ratings of the three candidates in almost every poll of New York. Usually, the opposite is true. For another, he actually has a fair amount of support from state and local party leaders here — again, way different than usual. Trump is a local-boy-made-good story in New York.

clare.malone: That favorability thing … really says a lot about New York.

natesilver: It says a lot about New York Republicans, who are a weird, Trumpian lot.

More Democrats Are Feeling The Bern, Probably

We’re not big fans of national polls here at FiveThirtyEight. In the general election, they provide less information than state polls do, especially given that the presidency is determined by the Electoral College. But at least in the general election, everybody votes on the same day.1 Not so in the primaries, where the states vote sequentially. Furthermore, the rules vary substantially from state to state; in particular, some hold primaries and others have caucuses, which generally have much lower turnout. That makes it difficult to determine what a “likely voter” is in the context of a national poll.

So we’re not quite sure how much to read into national polls that show the Democratic race having tightened substantially. Our own national polling average has Hillary Clinton ahead of Bernie Sanders by 7.6 percentage points, essentially2 her narrowest margin of the campaign. That lead is down from 18.5 percentage points on Jan. 31, the day before Iowa voted.

Other polling averages show an even tighter race, with Clinton up by just a couple of percentage points. We could spend some time debating the “right” way to calculate a national polling average — given that there’s no national primary, our method is designed to be deliberate rather than rush to place a lot of weight on new polls. But no matter whose numbers you’re looking at, Sanders has gained on Clinton.

If Sanders has gained on Clinton, however, shouldn’t we also see evidence of that from the states that have voted so far? Other things held equal, we’d expect him to perform better in states voting in April than those voting in March, and better in March than in February.

Other things held equal is the tricky part. The Clinton-Sanders margin has varied massively from state to state, depending, among other things, on how many black voters a state has and whether it holds a primary or caucus. Sanders reeled off a string of wins in late March, for instance, but they were mostly in extremely white caucus states where we expected him to do well all along. (This is not just hindsight bias: “It’s possible that Bernie Sanders will win every state caucus from here on out,” I wrote on Feb. 20, after Sanders had just lost Nevada.)

We can attempt to account for this by means of regression analysis. I ran a regression to “retrodict” the results of each primary or caucus so far, where the inputs were the share of black voters, the share of Hispanic voters, how liberal or conservative the Democratic electorate was, and whether the state held a primary or caucus.3 This is essentially the same process I used to construct demographic benchmarks for each state back in February, although this time I’m using results rather than polls. I excluded Vermont and Arkansas from the analysis because the results could potentially have been affected by Sanders’s and Clinton’s ties to those states.

The thing to watch for is whether there’s any time trend in where Sanders tends to fall above or below his retrodiction. If he tends to beat his projections in the second half of the calendar (while Clinton beats hers in the first half), that would be a sign Sanders is gaining ground. If there’s no time trend after controlling for the other factors, that means we may just be fooled by the order in which the states happen to vote. Here’s what we get:

DATESTATERETRODICTION BASED ON DEMOGRAPHICS AND TYPE OF ELECTIONRESULTDIFFERENCE ACTUAL VS. RETRODICTION2/1IowaSanders +30Clinton +0Clinton +302/9New HampshireSanders +27Sanders +22Clinton +52/20NevadaSanders +6Clinton +5Clinton +122/27South CarolinaClinton +44Clinton +47Clinton +43/1AlabamaClinton +56Clinton +59Clinton +3Arkansas—Clinton +36—ColoradoSanders +20Sanders +19Clinton +2GeorgiaClinton +50Clinton +43Sanders +7MassachusettsSanders +11Clinton +1Clinton +12MinnesotaSanders +39Sanders +23Clinton +15OklahomaClinton +7Sanders +10Sanders +17TennesseeClinton +8Clinton +34Clinton +26TexasClinton +38Clinton +32Sanders +6Vermont—Sanders +72—VirginiaClinton +27Clinton +29Clinton +33/5KansasSanders +29Sanders +36Sanders +6LouisianaClinton +51Clinton +48Sanders +3NebraskaSanders +29Sanders +14Clinton +143/6MaineSanders +40Sanders +29Clinton +113/8MichiganClinton +5Sanders +1Sanders +6MississippiClinton +61Clinton +66Clinton +53/15FloridaClinton +22Clinton +31Clinton +9IllinoisClinton +21Clinton +2Sanders +19MissouriClinton +11Clinton +0Sanders +10North CarolinaClinton +25Clinton +14Sanders +12OhioClinton +8Clinton +14Clinton +53/22ArizonaClinton +6Clinton +15Clinton +9IdahoSanders +33Sanders +57Sanders +24UtahSanders +33Sanders +59Sanders +263/26AlaskaSanders +31Sanders +59Sanders +28HawaiiSanders +31Sanders +40Sanders +9WashingtonSanders +37Sanders +46Sanders +94/5WisconsinSanders +6Sanders +13Sanders +74/9WyomingSanders +29Sanders +11Clinton +17Sanders has been beating demographic projections more often

Arkansas and Vermont are not included in this analysis because of potential home-state effects

There does seem to be a time trend in Sanders’s favor. In retrospect, given how poorly she’s fared in caucus states elsewhere, Clinton’s narrow wins in the Nevada and (especially) the Iowa caucuses look impressive. However, those wins came early in the calendar, and there’s room to question whether she’d have gotten the same results if those elections were held today. Clinton also beats her retrodiction in most Super Tuesday states, although Oklahoma is a major exception.

Since his upset win in Michigan (and his loss in Mississippi) on March 8, however, Sanders has beaten his retrodiction in nine of 13 states. His gigantic margins in states such as Washington and Idaho are impressive by the model’s standards, even accounting for the fact that we’d have expected those states to be strong for him to begin with. The model is also impressed by his narrow losses in Illinois and Missouri, which were closer than the retrodiction would have expected based on their demographics. He also won Wisconsin by a slightly larger-than-expected margin.

Not all the news has been good for Sanders, however. He doesn’t have a great excuse for Clinton’s large margins of victory in Ohio, Florida and Arizona. And in the most recent Democratic contest, the Wyoming caucuses on April 9, Sanders only narrowly beat Clinton when the model expected a blowout.

Overall, the time trend is statistically significant,4 although some caution is in order. The states haven’t voted in random order, but instead in clusters — for instance, there was a cluster of demographically similar Southern states to vote on March 1, and a cluster of Western caucus states to vote March 22 and March 26. Under conditions like these, statistical significance tests can exaggerate the certainty of an effect because we don’t have as many independent observations as we think; as Alabama goes, so goes Georgia, probably, especially if they both vote on the same day. (See Slate Star Codex for more about this.)

The combination of this regression analysis with the national polls, however, provides a reasonably persuasive case that Sanders had gained ground on Clinton. The magnitude of the effect is about the same in both cases. According to the regression, Sanders underperformed his retrodiction by an average of 6 percentage points in states through March 1, but has beaten them by an average of 5 percentage points since. That would represent an 11-point net swing to Sanders, closely matching his gain in our national polling average.

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That Sanders has made gains so far doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll continue to do so, however. This deserves a longer discussion, but to a first approximation a well-calibrated polling average is a random walk. That means Sanders is about equally likely to give back ground to Clinton in national polls as to continue gaining on her.

That matters, because unless Sanders continues gaining ground, it will wind up being too little, too late for him. The model — without accounting for a time trend — expects that Sanders would lose a demographically average primary state by 12 percentage points to Clinton. Caucuses are another matter: The model would have Sanders winning the same state by 7 percentage points if it held a caucus instead of a primary, but there are almost no caucuses left.

To be more specific, the model has Sanders losing New York by 7 percentage points — actually a bit better than his polling average there, although New York’s closed primary and strict voter registration requirements could hurt him.5 There are five states voting next week, and it has Sanders winning Rhode Island by 6 percentage points but losing Connecticut and Pennsylvania by 4 percentage points each, Delaware by 13 percentage points, and Maryland by 22 percentage points. And it has him losing California, which votes June 7, by 11 percentage points. Even if he beats those projections by several points, it might not be enough because Sanders needs to be winning almost every state from here on out to catch Clinton in pledged delegates.

Check out our live coverage of the New York primary elections.

Elections Podcast: Start Spreading The News

The primary comes to FiveThirtyEight’s backyard, New York. In this episode of the elections podcast, the team prepares for a post-New York spate of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump comeback stories, as both are likely to notch wins in the Empire State. Then, an explainer on who the Democratic superdelegates are and why they exist. Plus, what the scene is like at a Republican district convention in Virginia.

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