Tag: superdelegate

Bernie’s Bad Night

There are still many Oregon votes left to count, with those voters literally mailing it in, but it looks like Bernie Sanders will win just 55% of the vote there. Hillary Clinton looks to have just edged Sanders in Kentucky on the strength of her showing in Louisville. Lexington barely went her way, and it could still come out that Sanders wins the delegate tie there.

So a tie and 55% of the vote is a bad night? Well, kind of. Our model had Kentucky about where it is (though we had guessed it might look more like West Virginia, where Sanders won handily), but predicted Oregon coming out closer to where Washington voted where Sanders won 73% of the vote and nearly 50 delegates more than Clinton. Our model had him winning 70-80% in Oregon.

It looks like he’ll get something closer to 55% of the vote there, instead.

On the whole, it looks like Sanders will pull in 20 delegates fewer than we predicted. None of that changes the outcome too much; we still have him heading into Philadelphia with a nearly 400 delegate deficit. It does, however, possibly suggest that Democratic voters are beginning to coalesce around Clinton as the nominee and it weakens Sanders’ narrative heading into the big June 7 contests – especially California.

Right now, we have Clinton winning California 54.3% to 45.7%, but polling is several weeks old at this point. We fully expect that to be the last real day of the nominating process. Clinton should both clinch a 350+ delegate lead and should be just 150 delegates short of the 2,383 she needs for the nomination. To pull to a tie, Sanders would need to convince upwards of 300 superdelegates who have already declared for Clinton to switch their vote, which is not going to happen.

Sanders Will Likely Win Through June

The story in the newspapers is that Sanders’ West Virginia victory means that the Democratic race will extend until July. This was always going to be true, as the Sanders camp has said since New York, regardless of the outcome in West Virginia.

The demographics in May 17 races suggest big wins for Sanders in Kentucky (similar to WV) and Oregon (similar to Washington, where he won in a landslide). Those wins should net him nearly 45 delegates, and he may come close to the 70+ percent of the delegates that he needs to stay on pace to tie.

Wins will help the public narrative on Sanders’ viability, as well as his chances on June 7 primaries in California, Montana, North Dakota, New Jersey, New Mexico, and South Dakota. Unfortunately for Sanders, polling in California and New Jersey shows Clinton with sizable leads there, and we project her heading into the convention with a 350-delegate lead and needing around 180 superdelegates to clinch the nomination.

Sanders will likely win through May, but polling in California and New Jersey portends the end for Sanders.

None of this, of course, speaks to core Sanders supporters. Running a projection in which Sanders wins 100 percent of all votes in states where there are no state-level polls (i.e. all but New Jersey and California), we still show her heading into the convention with a 180-delegate lead.

If Sanders wins 100 percent of all votes in states where there are no polls, he still comes up short.

Sanders will not be mathematically eliminated until June 8, and so does retain a chance of taking more delegates than Clinton into the convention. To do so, he needs to perform better than he did in Indiana and West Virginia, and will need Oregon-sized wins throughout. That would represent a nearly 50-point swing in California from current polling, and a 60-point swing in New Jersey. Winning 60% of the vote in those states and 70% in the remaining still leaves him 70-delegates short.

Bottom line: It’s not overly dismissive to say that Clinton will be the Democratic nominee, but the news this week and next will suggest a closer race.

Trump on pace, Sanders needs a miracle

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are now almost certainly the major-party candidates for president.

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton both exceeded expectations in the April 26 Acela primaries. Trump couldn’t have had a better night, beating his polls in almost every state and picking up an extra 12 delegates by triggering winner-take-all rules. He also did extremely well, as Huffington Post points out, in getting his voters to pick his slate of delegates. Assuming that slate is loyal, we now think Donald Trump will reach 1,237 delegates on the first ballot.

After April 26, we project Donald Trump to have 1,206 bound delegates at the convention. With the 29-31 delegates from his slate in Pennsylvania, it now looks like Donald Trump will win on the first ballot.

Indiana is the the #NeverTrump crowd’s last hope. If Trump wins that state, even by a few points, Cruz and Kasich would need miracle numbers in California to block Trump from reaching 1,237 delegates. Polls show him ahead, but our model suggests he might still be vulnerable there. However, our model failed to account for Trump beating his polling numbers – sometimes significantly – in the last six contests…something he had not done thus far.

On the Democratic side (and, insert GIF of us tooting our own horn here), our projections were pretty right on (nailing Pennsylvania) with the exception of Maryland, where Clinton had her most unexpected showing. The polls missed her margin by nearly 18 points in the spread, netting her 20 “extra” delegates.

We now think Sanders needs 64.5% of the delegates, on average, in the remaining states. That number will likely increase to nearly 70% by June 6. He is likely to get that in Oregon, and maybe even Washington, D.C., but our model has him losing the June 7 primary in California 245-230. The math is grim for Sanders, but with a big war chest, there’s no reason for him to withdraw.

Where he and his supporters can hold on to hope, though, is that Clinton is extremely unlikely to hit the 2,383 convention majority with bound delegates alone. We project she’ll enter the convention with 2,176 elected delegates to Sanders’ 1,875, meaning he won’t ever be mathematically eliminated until the 712 superdelegates vote on the first ballot. That said, Clinton’s 470-25 lead in that unofficial count is unlikely to dwindle, absent a major political shock.

New York: Big Trump, Clinton wins don’t change Delegate Math

Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump had big nights in New York, both getting around 60% of the vote. They both needed the big wins, and they got them. Clinton won 139 of 247 delegates, and Trump will get around 90 of the 95 on the GOP side.

They didn’t, however, deviate too much from our projections (although, and we admit it, we went on the conservative side on both, the mid-point part of our model would have had us closer, at Clinton 105 and Trump 85. Oops.)

Republican Race

With Trump’s big win, we now estimate he will get 1,160 of the 1,237 delegates he needs to lock up the nomination on the first ballot.

New York handed Trump his biggest step up since March 15, but he still looks to finish short.

There are a lot of caveats to this analysis. Most importantly, there’s vanishing little polling in the upcoming states. While he should get 40% or so of the votes in Maryland, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Rhode Island on April 26, the big outstanding tests are Indiana and California. Our model currently has Trump losing New Jersey. This is almost certainly wrong, and would hand him 51 delegates (or 1,211 of the 1,237 he needs), but is based on now 2-month-old polling.

Another caveat: one important outcome for the evening is that Ted Cruz held steady with 546 pledged delegates, by our count. With just 618 left on the board, he joins Kasich in becoming mathematically eliminated. However, Kasich’s reasonably strong performance in New York shows that’s not necessarily a killer, but our model has Cruz cleaning up in states like Montana (and winning Indiana), which could be more difficult if he’s having to wage a Kasich-like battle for relevancy.

Democratic Race

With California at the end (well, DC) of the calendar and 714 super delegates able to change allegiances through the convention, Sanders will never face mathematical elimination. New York, as expected, made his case much more difficult.

Clinton's win in New York all but assures her of the nomination, but the race stays tight through the convention, where she'll need superdelegates. — Clinton’s win in New York all but assures her of the nomination, but the race stays tight through the convention, where she’ll need superdelegates.

Like Trump, Clinton now enters a slate of states that should be favorable. Our model has her picking up between 20-30 delegates over Sanders in next week’s primaries, which look a lot like New York in terms of polling (10-20 in Maryland and 10 in Pennsylvania). It’s not enough to clinch the nomination with pledged delegates alone.

The Democratic race should stay close, but Sanders should remain around 300 delegates behind Clinton.

For Sanders, we show him getting around 48% of the remaining delegates. He needs 59% of the 1,400 remaining delegates to work this to a tie.

His campaign is sending mixed messages on his way forward. Sanders’ campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, told MSNBC that Sanders would “absolutely” try to flip superdelegates if he remained behind in the popular vote and delegate count. They would need to win 500+ of the 714 superdelegates to do so.

At the same time, campaign strategist Tad Devine left open an exit, telling the AP that the campaign planned to “sit back and assess” the campaign’s chances after next week’s contests.

Clinton Likely To Net 25 in New York

Ten polls in the past two weeks show Hillary Clinton maintaining a double-digit lead over Bernie Sanders in New York. With our model set to Sanders winning 80% of the undecided vote, we predict Clinton will win the New York primary with around 55 percent of the vote.

It will likely take weeks to get the final delegate count, in part because New York is proportional by Congressional district, and the district maps in the city cross all kinds of political boundaries. In CDs that have six delegates available (18 of 27), a candidate needs to exceed 58% of the vote to avoid splitting the delegates 3-3. This likely helps Sanders by around 10 delegates statewide.

Since we don’t have CD-level polling, and our model doesn’t account for demographics in any meaningful way, it’s not possible to drill down into how each of the 27 CDs may split. Nevertheless, our estimate shows Clinton netting roughly 25 delegates in the night, which would extend her pledged-delegate lead over Sanders to around 240. The win is what will set the narrative for the remaining races, but a 20+ Clinton delegate victory will come close to sealing the deal.

Our model shows Clinton netting an addition 42 delegates in the April 26 contests, mostly on the strength of an 18-point win in Maryland and a 6-point win in Pennsylvania, based on recent polls. Even were she just to net 30, she would have a 270-delegate lead. While not mathematically impossible to overcome until June 7, Sanders would need to post 50-point victories in each of the remaining contests to work the race to a tie. He will likely do so in Oregon, but in California, our model predicts a 4-point Clinton win, meaning Sanders has a lot of ground to make up in the next two months.

The “good” news for Sanders, though, is that the polls also show him keeping Clinton around 200 delegates short of what she needs to win the nomination on pledged delegates alone. It’s very likely that she has the super delegates needed to carry her over on the first ballot, but without Clinton hitting the 2,383 magic number in the primaries, Sanders can legitimately fight through the convention.

Wisconsin primary results: Trump, Clinton less likely to clinch

Sanders exceeded our pre-primary delegate estimate, picking up 48 instead of the 47 we projected to net a total of 10 delegates. Cruz also exceeded expectations, hauling in 36 delegates instead of the 30 we projected. The error there was all Kasich underperforming; our estimate showed him performing stronger in the 2nd and 3rd Congressional districts, where it look like he will have actually come in third.

The results don’t alter our convention projections much, which point to a likely contested convention for the Republicans. On the Democratic side, it remains unlikely that Sanders will catch Clinton in pledged delegates, but it does look like superdelegates will have to get the winning candidate over the nomination threshold:

Sanders win cuts Clinton's lead to around 250. She has a chance on April 19th and 26th to extend the lead in such a way that make it nearly impossible for Sanders to catch her. — Sanders win cuts Clinton’s lead to around 250. She has a chance on April 19th and 26th to extend the lead in such a way that make it nearly impossible for Sanders to catch her.

GOP race post Wisconsin — Trump’s growth is stunted, but a winner-take-all for New York’s 95 delegates could have him on his way.

Sanders will likely do well in the small, western caucus state of Wyoming this weekend, but with only 14 delegates in play (and notable differences between the electorate in Wyoming and New York), it’s hard to see that contest changing the race considerably.

Instead, all eyes turn to New York. On the Democratic side, our model projects a 10-point Clinton victory to net 23 delegates (winning 135 to Sanders’ 112). State-level polls from Maryland and Pennsylvania also show her leading in those big April 26 states where we project her to pick up another 28 delegates. Those two weeks would erase Sanders’ impressive rally over the past few weeks. With Sanders’ big Wisconsin win and the age of the data in the upcoming states, it’s easy to see those numbers changing – and with them the completion of the race. New York is, in essence, Sanders’ last shot to change the race.

On the Republican side, our baseline projection has Trump, who’s polling at 51.4%, picking up all 95 delegates. New York awards 81 of its delegates at the Congressional district level, and the remaining for the statewide winner. In 2014, 14 of the 27 Congressional districts elected a Democrat to the House of Representatives by more than a 10-point margin. It’s difficult to see those districts giving over half of their vote to Trump to trigger the winner-take-all rules there, so it’s likely that Cruz (or Kasich, about whom we’ll have to write a more-speculative column) chip into the 95-delegate haul. Our most-generous projection predicts Trump getting 1,192 of the 1,237 delegates he needs before the convention, with 122 delegates unbound on the first ballot. A 44-delegate margin may put him in striking distance, but losing delegates on some blue districts in New York (and, in June, in California) could put him just out of reach.

Sanders needs a 30-point swing in New York

A lot has been written over the past week about Bernie Sanders’ chances of getting a majority of unplugged delegates. Nate Sanders has a good writeup, but doesn’t show a lot of his work. Demrace.com would be a better tool if it defaulted to current polling. Here’s our contribution to this theme:

Bernie Sanders' unlikely path to pledged delegate majority. — Bernie Sanders’ unlikely path to pledged delegate majority.

A few assumptions at the top:

Our model has Sanders winning Wisconsin 54.6-45.4, giving him +8 delegates. We’re keeping that assumption.
Few states have state-level polling (though the states that do account for 70% of outstanding delegates). Our model uses national polls there, which would give Clinton a 53.2-46.8 edge. We’ll ignore that in every state, with most states going 60-40 for Sanders, which means he needs to over perform his polls by 15 points.
For a few states (Wyoming, Oregon, Montana, New Mexico, DC), we’ve assigned Sanders Alaska-level blowouts.
We’re putting Clinton’s delegate lead at 229 through April 1.

Our rough estimate is that Sanders would need to take 15 points off of Clinton in New York to have a chance of breaking even, even with the generous spot our assumptions give him. The latest polling average has Clinton up there 57-37. For this exercise, we have Sanders winning 58-42. Here’s how this scenario plays out, and look closely at what a polling shift would need to happen to get there:

An incredible change of fortune for Sanders gets him an edge over Clinton, but both would need super delegates to decide.

We left Maryland and Pennsylvania within the reasonable bounds of change, and assigned Sanders a 10-point victory in California (our model shows Clinton actually just squeaking by there by one point).

Here’s a more-likely scenario:

A more-realistic Bernie surge leaves him about 90 delegates short.

For this chart, we leave in place most of the favorable projections from the last run, but instead leave Clinton winning New York 52-48 and giving her the 1-point victory in California, a conservative estimate on the latest polls. This still represents Sanders taking away 5 points of Clinton’s support in New York, which a 10-point win in Wisconsin might reasonably do (despite Clinton’s heavy campaigning in the Empire State). The final tally in this scenario would be Clinton 2,061 delegates, Sanders 1,979.

The key here is that each percent of the vote in New York is worth about 2.5 delegates. If Clinton nets more than about 10 delegates there, it’s very difficult to see how Sanders can break even.

Big Sanders Wins Coming, But Trouble Looms In New York

Bernie Sanders is likely to rack up a string of wins over the next two weeks: it’s a favorable calendar combining both caucuses and voting demographics that have favored him throughout the cycle. It’s entirely plausible that he wins the next five contests — most of them in blowouts.

In so doing, he may chip in to Hillary Clinton’s lead by 70-80 delegates, leaving her around 250 delegates ahead, and helping forestall for a bit the growing narrative that he doesn’t have a chance. We should note here that there isn’t much data in the upcoming contests, but our upgraded projection model allows us to posit what a Sanders blowout might look like.

A favorable calendar helps Sanders chip away, but a strong Clinton lead in New York erases his progress.

You can see above that there’s no polling data for Alaska, Hawaii, or Washington state, so we’ve plugged in big wins for Sanders (with Wyoming following suit). That would track with similar performance in small caucus states with similar demographics.

The potential trouble for Sanders, though, is that the latest polls in New York show him trailing badly. The 67-24 split would be among her bigger margins. Even if she were to drop to a more-realistic 55-45 win, the two Democrats would break even on delegates over the six contests, and Sanders will be left to fill a 310-delegate gap with significantly fewer chances.

The silver lining for Sanders is that our projection shows Clinton falling short of the pledged delegates she’s need to win the nomination outright, meaning she would need around 15% of the superdelegates to lean her way (she has nearly two-thirds in her camp now). Barring a big turnaround in New York, though, Sanders is unlikely to make a dent in Clinton’s lead.

Does Bernie have a chance? Probably not.

We were surprised to see a lot (a lot) of social media stories yesterday suggesting that Bernie Sanders remains strongly positioned to win the nomination. Our favorite was a post saying Sanders “won nearly half of the delegates” on Tuesday night, and, that with him only needing 1570-odd delegates to hit the 2,383 magic number and there being 2,404 on the board, the momentum was there. There were also a bunch of comparisons to Barack Obama’s path in 2008.

Poppycock.

As always, Nate Silver has a strong and succinct analysis of where things stand. It’s not impossible for Sanders to pull out a win, but for him to do so there would have to be a major shock to the system. A much more likely outcome would be that he could prevent Hillary Clinton from hitting 2,383 before the convention (i.e. without superdelegates), possibly undermining her legitimacy as the nominee – but that still has her beating Sanders by around 600 delegates.

Now let’s poke holes in this narrative. Here’s what our projection is based on:

The projection has Clinton adding another 300 delegates to her already more than 300 delegate lead. It includes some (sometimes very old) state polling in Utah, Wisconsin, New York, Pennsylvania, and California. This is the “Bernie takes majority of undecideds, but not all” model that has played out over the past few weeks. This still probably overplays Hillary’s strength a tad (there’s a string of caucus states over the next four weeks, for example), which could help Sanders pick up maybe 10% better than he stands.

Another weakness in the model is that there is precious little polling, and the demographics of many of these states is at variance to those that have already voted – but it’s not totally silly to see Hillary coming out around 50% in most states.

Here’s what it looks like if Sanders picks up all undecideds:

Hillary's ceiling is her poll average, Bernie picks up the rest. — Hillary’s ceiling is her poll average, Bernie picks up the rest.

That green line at the tippy-top is 2,383. She misses, but still leads.

In order for Sanders to catch Clinton, he would need to invert the poll numbers in the chart above. That means on average, he’d need to win all remaining states 55-45. In that scenario, both would fall short of the nomination without superdelegates. It’s not mathematically impossible, but it doesn’t track with where things are historically.

Early returns: Trump’s ceiling and Sanders’ undecideds

It’s early still, but the returns look to show that Trump will come out pretty close to our projections, though may lose a few delegates in Illinois and a few more in Missouri. It’s limited data, but the returns suggest Trump’s ceiling correlates closely to his poll numbers. With that and Rubio’s drop out, our model shows Trump missing a win by around 150 delegates – particularly if Rubio (and perhaps Bush) throw some weight behind Kasich. Big asterisks: Kasich still might not end up on Pennsylvania ballot.

On the Democratic side, Clinton appears to be exceeding our projections slightly, particularly in Ohio and Illinois (and, of course, Missouri, where we had her losing by nearly 10). This suggests her polls need to add somewhere near a one-third take of the undecideds (vice the worst-case 0% we projected). This still has Clinton short exactly 100 delegates from an outright, no-superdelegate win, but she finds herself in a much stronger position.