Republicans: Trump Clinches the Republican Nomination

The Election Graphs delegate estimate now has Trump at 1238, one more than he needed to clinch the nomination.

AP announced that Trump had exceeded 1237 by their count on Thursday. They had canvassed the remaining uncommitted delegates who had not expressed a public preference, and found enough of them to put Trump over the top. When AP does this sort of thing, they don’t generally release their full list of delegates though, so it was hard to confirm this independently. But Election Graphs was able to spend a few hours Friday night digging through various sources to look for more specific information on specific uncommitted delegates, and we were also able to get Trump over the top.*

He will of course get even more delegates on June 7th, but he doesn’t need them. Absent a catastrophic unexpected event, Trump will be the Republican nominee for President in 2016.

The final “% of remaining delegates needed to win” chart looks like this:

Trump hovered just over 50% for most of the race, but essentially as soon as Cruz was mathematically eliminated, Trump dropped below 50% needed, and rapidly raced to the conclusion. This was of course aided by Cruz and Kasich dropping out, but even if they hadn’t, the writing was on the wall. It would have taken a huge effort with a groundswell of popular support for his opponents to prevent Trump from getting to 1237 at that point, and it was obvious that neither the political will, or the voters for Cruz or Kasich were there. And so it ended.

At this point the delegate count is Trump 1238, Cruz 570, Rubio 166, Kasich 163, Carson 7, Bush 4, Fiorina 1, Huckabee 1, Paul 1.

Trump will of course collect more before things are done. There is a chance others may pick up a handful too, but if they do it will be insignificant, and it is quite possible Trump will sweep the remaining delegates.

At this point Trump has 57.55% of the delegates. Cruz was next at 26.50%. Trump’s percentage will increase before we are done with all the delegate allocation.

Election Graphs will continue to monitor the delegate totals from the last few races for completeness, but for all intents and purposes the Republican race is now done. This has been the craziest oddball primary race in many decades. It has been fascinating to watch it play out.

Trump led from New Hampshire onward. From that point forward nobody ever came close. Until we got to the Northeast states though, the others were getting a high enough percentage to keep the possibility of blocking him alive, with the odds of Trump not getting to 1237 as high as 36% as late as April 18th according to the best simulations. (My gut feel had it higher, at 60%, but the numeric simulations were a better guide.) Now, that still meant Trump was probably going to get to 1237, but there was a decent shot at stopping it.

But then the anti-Trump forces essentially collapsed and gave up. It is just too hard to make the case that people should vote for you in order to help stop someone else, even after it is very clear you can’t win yourself. In my Curmudgeon’s Corner 2016 predictions show I essentially predicted exactly that. But in the heated days of March and April, I allowed myself to get a little too excited about the news nerd’s dream of a contested convention, as did a lot of people looking at the race. In the end though, it is really hard to stop someone who has led from beginning to end.

And so we have Trump.

It has been a lot of fun watching this primary process play out. The Democratic side should be winding up very shortly as well.

And then it is full speed ahead to the general election. If you have enjoyed my coverage of the Republican delegate race, I hope you’ll stay around for the Electoral College analysis.

164.7 days until polls start to close on the general election. The next few months will be quite a ride. Stay tuned!

* For those who want the specifics, in the last few days there were updates to the preferences from uncommitted delegates in North Dakota, Oklahoma, Colorado, Pennsylvania, the Virgin Islands, and Louisiana. Added up, the net change was Trump +23, Kasich +1, Cruz -3.

Update 2016-05-30 16:44 UTC – Change from Colorado: Trump +1, Cruz -1.

Update 2016-06-03 14:40 UTC – Change from Oregon: Trump -1, Kasich +1.

Note: This post is an update based on the data on ElectionGraphs.com. Election Graphs tracks both a poll based estimate of the Electoral College and a numbers based look at the Delegate Races. All of the charts and graphs seen in this post are from that site. Additional graphs, charts and raw data can be found there. All charts above are clickable to go to the current version of the detail page the chart is from, which may contain more up to date information than the snapshots on this page, which were current as of the time of this post. Follow @ElectionGraphs on Twitter or like Election Graphs on Facebook to see announcements of updates or to join the conversation. For those interested in individual general election poll updates, follow @ElecCollPolls on Twitter for all the polls as they are added.

Edit 14:00 UTC to add the * with the delegate changes from the last few days.

Edit 2016-06-04 04:04 UTC to fix the title from Electoral College to Republicans. Sigh.