This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter).
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On Saturday we got results from the Northern Mariana Islands. A whopping 6 delegates were at stake, so this almost wasn’t worth its own post, but here goes. Then we’ll follow it up with a quick comparison with 2008 and 2012.
Clinton won 4 delegates. Sanders won 2.
Since the post on the Michigan results between Michigan finalizing results and superdelegate preferences we have an additional net change of Clinton +2, Sanders -1.
So since the Michigan post, a total of Clinton +6, Sanders +1. So 85.71% of delegates to Clinton, way more than the 38.96% she needed to be on the glide path to the nomination.
Clinton now needs 38.90% of the remaining delegates to win. Or more if a large number of superdelegates start to defect. But that hasn’t happened yet.
Yawn.
OK, since not much happening there, just a quick comparison of where Clinton and Sanders’ “% of remaining needed to win” is compared to Obama’s at similar points in 2008 and 2012. (For clarity, I’ve eliminated some oddness in the chart at the very end of the 2008 line when delegates were restored to states that had been stripped of them for rules violations and such.)
The blue line is Obama in 2008. At this point he was still behind! He needed about 52% of the remaining delegates to win. He managed that of course, and ended up winning. Because of the competition from Clinton, Obama did not clinch the nomination until about 96% of the delegates had been determined.
The orange line was Obama in 2012 when he was unopposed. Aside from a few random protest delegates here and there he essentially collected 100% of delegates as soon as they became available, and clinched at the 50% mark.
Clinton 2016 so far is neatly splitting the difference. She is far far ahead of where Obama was in 2008, but of course not doing as well as she would if she was unopposed.
And then Sanders 2016. Notice that while Obama was behind at this stage, he was basically holding steady. He was not getting further and further behind with each new primary or caucus. Then right around when he hit the 50% mark, he started winning decisively, and caught up and won. Sanders is not holding the line. He is not keeping up. He keeps falling further and further behind the pace he would need to catch up and win. This is not what a come from behind victory looks like. This is what a stay behind loss looks like.
Of course if Sanders started winning every contest from here on out by large margins, then Clinton superdelegates might start abandoning her in droves and this graph COULD still change rapidly. If and when that happens, we’ll see it. But it hasn’t happened yet, and the longer this goes on, the less likely that becomes. It would require a DRAMATIC change in the the race. As I’ve said before, we’re talking something on the order of a new Clinton scandal that even Clinton die-hards think is disqualifying, or a major Clinton health issue, not just Sanders doing well and winning a few states.
[Update 2016-03-15 05:07 UTC – Revision to Kansas delegate results, plus superdelegate changes. Net: Clinton +4, Sanders +1]
[Update 2016-03-16 00:31 UTC – Superdelegate changes. Net: Clinton -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.
On the Republican side March 9th brought results from Hawaii, Idaho, Michigan and Mississippi. The results were:
Trump +73, Cruz +59, Kasich +17, Rubio +1
The projections I made a few days ago based on polling were:
Projected total for March 8th: Trump +91, Cruz +28, Rubio +18, Kasich +12, Carson +1
Despite his wins, Trump considerably underperformed what his polling indicated just a couple days beforehand, while Cruz beat his estimates by quite a bit. Rubio, well, Rubio just flamed out.
Now, this is still a Trump win, but the fact that it was less than the polls would have predicted may mean that there is weakness in Trump that is not being captured by the latest polls.
Also, it was not enough to put him on track to get back out of the “contested zone” where we are on track for a contested convention, and back to a place where he actually has a majority of the delegates.
Lets look at the “% of remaining delegates needed to win” graph:
Before today, Trump needed 53.85% of the delegates to be on track for an outright win. For the night he got 48.67% of the delegates. Not quite there. So his % needed for the next contests increases to 54.39%.
This is getting high given that his history to date is only getting 44.14% of the delegates. He needs to improve his rate of delegate acquisition by about 23% to head toward an outright win.
If the remaining states were all straight proportional, it might already be time to start saying the likelyhood of the contested convention was getting to the point that anything else would be a surprise.
But the Republican contests are almost all biased at least a little bit to the winner, and starting March 15th, we have a number of high delegate winner take all states, most notably Florida and Ohio.
As I’ve been doing, lets look at the next few contests. This time lets go all the way through the big March 15th day. As usual, using RCP poll averages and delegate distribution rules from Green Papers.
Florida – 99 delegates – March 15th:
- Poll averages: Trump 40.2%, Rubio 24.4%, Cruz 17.4%, Kasich 8.4%
- Delegate estimate: Trump 99
North Carolina – 72 delegates – March 15th:
- Poll averages: Trump 32.7%, Cruz 21.7%, Rubio 15.3%, Kasich 9.7%
- Delegate estimate: Trump 30, Cruz 20, Rubio 14, Kasich 8
Illinois – 69 delegates – March 15th:
- Poll averages: Trump 32.7%, Rubio 18.7%, Cruz 17.7%, Kasich 13.3%
- Delegate estimate: Trump 37, Rubio 12, Cruz 11, Kasich 9
Ohio – 66 delegates – March 15th:
- Poll averages: Trump 39.0%, Kasich 34.0%, Cruz 15.3%, Rubio 7.0%
- Delegate estimate: Trump 66
Missouri – 52 delegates – March 15th:
- No recent polls, using national avg: Trump 36.0%, Cruz 21.8%, Rubio 18.0%, Kasich 12.0%
- Delegate estimate: Trump 52
Wyoming – 29 delegates – March 12th:
- No recent polls, using national avg: Trump 36.0%, Cruz 21.8%, Rubio 18.0%, Kasich 12.0%
- Delegate estimate: Trump 12, Cruz 7, Rubio 6, Kasich 4
District of Columbia – 19 delegates – March 12th:
- No recent polls, using national avg: Trump 36.0%, Cruz 21.8%, Rubio 18.0%, Kasich 12.0%
- Delegate estimate: Trump 9, Cruz 5, Rubio 5
Virgin Islands – 9 delegates – March 10th:
- No recent polls, using national avg: Trump 36.0%, Cruz 21.8%, Rubio 18.0%, Kasich 12.0%
- Delegate estimate: Trump 4, Cruz 2, Rubio 2, Kasich 1
Guam – 9 delegates – March 12th:
- No recent polls, using national avg: Trump 36.0%, Cruz 21.8%, Rubio 18.0%, Kasich 12.0%
- Delegate estimate: Trump 4, Cruz 2, Rubio 2, Kasich 1
Northern Marianas – 9 delegates – March 15th:
- No recent polls, using national avg: Trump 36.0%, Cruz 21.8%, Rubio 18.0%, Kasich 12.0%
- Delegate estimate: Trump 9
Now, lots of assumptions there. Also, Wyoming and some of the territories are actually directly electing delegates and we may not know their preferences on election night, so they may be listed as unbound or TBD for awhile. But lets do the addition anyway. From the above we end up with:
March 10th to March 15th estimate: Trump 322, Cruz 47, Rubio 41, Kasich 23
That would give Trump a whopping 74.36% of the delegates, well above the 54.39% he needs.
Now, because that includes some big winner take all, and some more that are winner-take-most, that is highly volatile. If he loses Florida… or Ohio, where the race is a lot closer… then things start to look worse for Trump very quickly. In terms of winning outright… not necessarily in terms of keeping the delegate lead.
But given the results above, does Trump get back to a delegate majority?
The new totals would be:
Trump 785, Cruz 409, Rubio 196, Kasich 77, Others 15
Trump would have 52.97% of the delegates. He would be back on track for an outright win.
Not only that, but 1482 of the 2472 delegates would already have been allocated. That is just a hair under 60%. Only 990 delegates would be left. And Trump would already have 785 of the 1237 delegates he would need to win outright. So he would only need 452 more delegates… or 45.66% of the remaining delegates. Which would probably be an easy ask given where the campaign would be at that point and the number of winner take all and/or winner take most states coming up. If he wins both states, the chances of a contested convention drop dramatically. We’re almost certainly looking at a clean Trump win.
Take away Ohio and Trump would no longer have a majority at this stage, and would still need 52.32% of the remaining delegates to win outright. This would still be very doable, just a little bit harder. In this scenario, we might be hanging on the edge between the contested convention and the Trump win for awhile.
Take away Ohio AND Florida and not only would Trump not have a majority, but he would need a full 62.32% of the remaining vote to win outright. This number would be more difficult to achieve, and the chances of a contested convention would then be very very high.
Now, this of course assumes the results are somewhat similar to the projections above in the other states too… but the general outlines of this are likely to remain true.
Where we are after March 15th will depend in huge part on Florida and Ohio. Right now Trump is way ahead in Florida, and has a slim lead in Ohio. But Trump has been underperforming his polls lately. If that trend continues, things may be closer than they look right now.
There are five and a fraction days left, including one more debate. So there is room for considerable movement as well.
But Trump has a significant advantage at this point. We are currently in the “contested convention” zone… but Trump is in a very good position to knock us out of there and into the “Trump wins” zone.
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.
You may have heard all the breathless coverage last night of Sanders’ surprise win in Michigan. And it was indeed a surprise. He outperformed all the recent polls by a substantial margin. This was a big huge win, right?
Well, no. It wasn’t. The media hype is all around the fact that it is more interesting to cover an actual race than a slow march to an almost inevitable win. Time to look at the numbers.
First of all, the straight up delegates out of Michigan: Sanders 69, Clinton 61
That means Sanders got 53.1% of the Michigan delegates. To be on a pace to catch up and win, he needed 60.2% of the delegates. He may have “won”, but he didn’t win by anywhere near enough to actually catch up with Clinton.
But Michigan wasn’t the only state handing out delegates. Mississippi did too. And Mississippi went for Clinton 32 to 4. So the total for the day was actually Clinton 93 to Sanders 73.
There were also some superdelegate updates since my last post. Net change: Clinton +4, Sanders +3.
So total since the Maine results on Sunday: Clinton 97, Sanders 76.
So Sanders only got 43.9% of the delegates since Sunday. This is not close to 60.2%.
Yes, Sanders pulled out a surprise win in Michigan. But he could duplicate that win in EVERY STATE from here until the end of the primary season and he STILL would not catch up. He would not win. He can’t catch up by “just winning”. He needs to win by huge margins to catch up. That did happen (barely) in Maine. But Michigan didn’t do it, and Sanders has only very rarely managed the margins he would need to catch up.
So, looking at the graph of “% of remaining needed to win”:
Clinton now needs 38.96% of the remaining delegates to win. Sanders needs 61.14% of the remaining delegates to catch up.
Oh, unless the superdelegates start changing their minds in massive numbers. That would make things harder for Clinton and easier for Sanders. And to be fair, if all 460 of Clinton’s superdelegates flipped to Sanders tomorrow, Sanders would indeed be ahead by 1035 delegates to 771.
I wouldn’t hold my breath on that one though.
Right now the totals are Clinton 1231, Sanders 575.
Next up are the Northern Marianas on Saturday, then Florida, Illinois, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio next Tuesday.
[Edit 16:22 UTC to add the following exchange]
Minutes after I posted this update, I got a comment via Facebook that prompted me to do some additional analysis. It seemed directly relevant and interesting, so adding it here (lightly edited):
Jenn: Since superdelegates have never actually gone against the popular vote and could change their minds, what’s the math if we simply exclude them? I’m not saying it’ll happen. I’m just curious and too lazy to do it myself.
Sam: On superdelegates, my position is that if they ever start to change their minds because of the results of the pledged delegate race, we will see that because they will say so. So speculating about them changing their minds is pointless, you can actually watch and see if they do. If they start changing their minds, then it is a real thing and it will be measured and tracked as it happens. So long as they don’t, it is just a fantasy. But OK, I’ll quickly do the calculation of what things would look like if you only look at pledged delegates and assume superdelegates will follow the pledged delegate result.
[Edit 2016-03-10 16:07 UTC to strike through the calculation below due to really bad stupid math error that completely invalidates the result. Sanders needed percentage will be closer to 55%. Redoing calculations shortly.]
Sam: OK. Here goes. The current totals are Clinton 1231, Sanders 575, O’Malley 1. If you take out supers, that becomes Clinton 771, Sanders 552. Now, there are 2472 delegates total, so you need 1237 delegates to win. But that includes superdelegates. If the assumption is that supers will go for the pledged delegate winner, then you shouldn’t count them in the total number of delegates either because they now don’t matter. Without supers there are 1755 delegates, and you need 878 to win. Sanders therefore needs 326 more delegates to catch up and win. Between Clinton and Sanders they have collected 1323 delegates already. So there are only 432 pledged delegates remaining. 326/432 = 75.5%. So if you look only at pledged delegates it is actually WORSE for Sanders. He needs nearly 76% of the remaining delegates to catch up and win rather than “only” 61%.
[Edit 2016-03-10 17:30 to add additional conversation correcting the erroneous calculation. I am leaving the first version struck out above for the record. The below is lightly edited from the original Facebook conversation.]
Sam: Urg!!!! I made a huge error on those calculations! I blame it on…. Uh…. Being stupid. I used the total number of Republican delegates in one part of the calculation rather than the Democratic totals, which of course invalidates the whole thing. I suspect Sanders actually needs closer to 55% if you don’t count supers. I will redo the calculation.
Sam: OK, here goes again. I suck. Numbers that have changed bolded. The current totals are Clinton 1231, Sanders 575, O’Malley 1. If you take out supers, that becomes Clinton 771, Sanders 552. Now, there are 4765 delegates total, so you need 2383 delegates to win. But that includes superdelegates. If the assumption is that supers will go for the pledged delegate winner, then you shouldn’t count them in the total number of delegates either. Without supers there are 4048 delegates, and you need 2025 to win. Sanders therefore needs 1450 more delegates to catch up and win. Between Clinton and Sanders they have collected 1323 delegates already. So there are only 2725 pledged delegates remaining. 1450/2725 = 53.2%. This is significantly better than the 41.7% of pledged delegates Sanders has gotten so far, but it is not yet in the impossible zone by a long shot, and it is still better than where he is when you include superdelegates. Apologies for the stupid error.
Sam: I had actually checked and rechecked the calculation several times before posting it originally, but I made the same mistake every time. Sigh! Oh well!
Sam: See also this article by Andrew Prokop for more on what would be involved in a Sanders comeback. It was while reading this that I realized my error.
[Update 2016-03-10 06:45 UTC – Update in Michigan shifts 2 additional delegates from Sanders to Clinton. This does not substantially change the analysis above. In addition, the number of total “unpledged PLEOs” was adjusted in several states, giving a net addition of 1 total convention delegate.]
[Update 2016-03-11 05:29 UTC – Superdelegate update: Clinton loses one as a second superdelegate says they will just vote for the pledged delegate winner, putting them back in the uncommitted category for now.]
[Update 2016-03-12 23:50 UTC – Superdelegate update to prepare for March 12th results: Clinton +1, Sanders +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 15:59 to fix one place I said Sanders instead of Clinton. Fixed. Thanks Jenn for pointing it out.]
[Edit 2016-03-10 21:12 UTC to fix author of Vox article I linked to.]
The March 5th states have voted. Trump won Kentucky and Louisiana, Cruz won Kansas and Maine. But states don’t matter. Lets look at delegates:
From March 5th: Cruz +68, Trump +53, Rubio +13, Kasich +10 and 11 still TBD.
In addition since my Republican Super Tuesday post was originally published we had Cruz +8, Trump +4, Carson -1, Rubio -5 as vote counting finished and results were finalized.
So since the last post, Cruz +76, Trump +57, Kasich +10, Rubio +8, Carson -1.
Lets look at the all important “% of remaining delegates needed to win” graph:
Cruz did the best here, but in order to actually improve his position in terms of winning the nomination outright, he needed to get 57.7% of the delegates since my March 2nd update. Actual result above? 50.67% of the delegates since then. He didn’t get there.
Meanwhile, Trump only needed 51.6% of the delegates, but he only got 38.00%. He didn’t even come close to getting what he needed.
Bottom line, NOBODY is getting the delegate numbers they need for a win. This may change as things progress, but for the moment, we’re still on the narrow road to a contested convention.
All of those lines are above 50%, and all of those lines are headed up. For someone to win outright, one of those lines needs to start heading down and start driving toward zero. Right now it hasn’t happened yet.
Right now Trump needs 52.88% of the remaining delegates to win outright. So the non-Trump’s collectively need to be getting 47.12% of the delegates to force a contested convention.
I stated in the Super Tuesday post that in order to keep on this path, the non-Trump’s not only need to keep Trump above that 50% line until the big winner take all states like Florida and Ohio vote on March 15th, but they need to damage Trump to the extent that he is losing states left and right once we are in the winner take all zone. Very specifically, he probably needs to lose Florida and Ohio.
Trump underperformed his polling in the March 5th states, and Cruz exceeded his. The polling was pretty sparse, but this may indicate that the onslaught of attacks against Trump by Rubio, Cruz, and others in the last two weeks may be starting to take a toll on Trump. Perhaps his own debate performances have hurt as well by signaling a general election pivot a bit too soon… or perhaps he just finally passed some sort of line on the outrageous behavior front. Polling is frustratingly sparse in the upcoming states, so it is hard to tell what the situation is, let alone if it changed due to attacks, debates, or pivots.
The big question is: “Has Trump been damaged enough that the non-Trumps can force this to the convention?”.
Right now, we are on track for that!
Don’t get too excited about that possibility quite yet though… Current polling has Trump still ahead in a number of upcoming states, including the critical races in Florida and Ohio. If he maintains those leads, this may get pushed back into territory where Trump can win outright after March 15th. All it takes is a couple of Trump wins in big winner take all states, and dreams of a contested convention will go up in smoke.
But… but… if the damage to Trump is real and sustained, we may start seeing Trump weakness elsewhere soon, including in Florida and Ohio. If so, the chances of a contested convention will go up very quickly. (The odds of one of the non-Trumps winning outright are still very small.)
Next up, in just a few hours: Puerto Rico. As far as I can tell, there has been no polling in Puerto Rico at all. We’ll see how it goes…
[Update 17:31 UTC – Unrelated to March 5th, but looks like one Georgia delegate flipped from Cruz to Rubio as results there were finalized. This doesn’t substantively change the analysis above.]
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.
Absent something really surprising happening… which you never know… could happen… the posts on the Democratic side at this point are essentially just going to be documenting Clinton’s slow but sure march to the Democratic nomination.
On March 5th if you go by states, you would see Sanders winning Kansas and Nebraska, while Clinton only won Louisiana.
Of course, states don’t matter. Delegates do. For the night, Clinton got 59 delegates and Sanders got 50.
In addition, since the post about Super Tuesday there were adjustments for finalized Super Tuesday results and new superdelegate counts. The net result was that Clinton gained an additional 22 delegates while Sanders added 13.
So total since then… Clinton +81, Sanders +63.
At the time of that last post, Clinton needed 40.52% of the remaining delegates to be on track to win. Sanders needed 59.54%.
Actual percentages since then? Clinton 56.25%, Sanders 43.75%. Clearly Clinton easily exceeded her targets, while Sanders… did not.
Actual delegate counts right now: Clinton 1127, Sanders 482, O’Malley 1.
You need 2382 delegates to win. 1610 have already been counted. There are 3153 left to be determined.
Where does that put things now?
Clinton now needs only 39.80% of the remaining delegates to win.
To catch up and win, Sanders would need 60.26% of the remaining delegates.
Next up is Maine. I haven’t found any polling on Maine. It seems like it might be a good state for Sanders. But is it 60.26% good? In delegate terms that would be 16 of the 25 pledged delegates. Guess we’ll find out.
[Update 15:56 UTC: Overnight updates gave Sanders 1 additional delegate in Louisiana and Clinton 1 less. So if I’d waited until morning to post this the title would have said Clinton won 58 to 51 rather than 59 to 50. But the substance of the post remains the same.]
[Update 2016-03-07 03:07 UTC: Another update gives Sanders yet another delegate in Louisiana and Clinton yet another less. So Louisiana now Clinton 37 to Sanders 14, and March 5th contests overall Clinton 57 to Sanders 52.]
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.
Update 08:40 to add actual delegate counts, how many are left, etc.
The Republican Super Tuesday is over with the exception of a handful of delegates that were still undetermined when it was time for me to start writing up the results.
Last Tuesday I used polling to project what Super Tuesday would look like for the Republicans. The projection looked like this:
Estimate: 294 Trump, 246 Cruz, 67 Rubio, 11 Kasich, 6 Carson
We’ll dispense with the state by state totals, and jump right to the final results:
Actual: 252 Trump, 211 Cruz, 101 Rubio, 16 Kasich, 4 Carson, 6 TBD
The 6 that are still to be determined as of this update are from Tennessee (3 delegates) and Texas (3 delegates), but they won’t make much of a difference here.
The poll based estimates were not quite as close as they were for the Democrats. This may simply be because I did the estimates a full week out based on relatively sparse polling. There were a lot of polls in that last week, and it may well be that the results would have been closer if I had redone the analysis on Monday.
The general outlines of the estimate and the analysis based on them were basically correct though. The one notable difference is that Rubio did considerably better than the estimates, at the expense of both Trump and Cruz’s delegate totals. It appears that Rubio’s week of anti-Trump crusading may have worked.
The main consequence is that Trump was pushed a bit further away from the levels he needed to actually improve his position relative to last week. He was expected to lose ground anyway, but he lost more than it looked like he was going to. It was enough to push Trump back down below 50% of the delegates allocated so far:
On this metric, Cruz looks like he did the best coming out of Super Tuesday. But this is the wrong number to be looking at. The all important thing to be looking at is the “% of remaining delegates needed to win”:
Everybody’s position got worse! (Remember down is good on this chart… getting down to 0% means you win, going up to 100% means you are eliminated.)
Trump needed to get 49.4% of the Super Tuesday delegates to improve his position in terms of getting to a clean first ballot win. Instead, he got 43.1% of the delegates so far. So his “% of remaining delegates to win” increased to 51.6%.
We are back in the zone where if everybody performs the same as they have so far, we end up with Trump having more delegates than anybody else, but a bit short of the majority he would need to win. The “contested convention” scenario.
At this point the closest competitor is Cruz, who would need 57.7% of the remaining delegates in order to catch up and win outright. Next closest is Rubio, who would need 64.0% of the remaining delegates. Given their past performances, it seems unlikely that either will reach anything close to those numbers, especially since they both seem determined to stay in the race. It would take one of them dropping out AND a complete Trump collapse to enable that. This seems like an unlikely scenario at this point.
But both the Cruz and Rubio campaigns are now starting to openly talk about a contested convention. To do that, neither Cruz or Rubio need to get super-majorities of the remaining delegates. They don’t even need to get majorities. They don’t even need to have a majority of the delegates between them. They just need to keep Trump to less than 51.6% of the remaining delegates.
So Cruz + Rubio + Kasich (now that Carson has dropped out) just need to manage to get 48.4% of the remaining delegates between them. And if they successfully do that, they will need even less the next time around.
At this point, the best strategy to “stop Trump” is not for more people to drop out. It is for all three of the remaining non-Trumps to stay in to try to get as many delegates as they can, even if they know they can’t get to an outright win either. Strategies have been suggested such as the candidates working together and encouraging their supporters to vote for whichever non-Trump was strongest in each state in order to maximize the delegate totals. Then they would work it out at the convention.
That kind of coordination between rival campaigns is unlikely. But it could happen to some degree spontaneously between now and March 15th, just by the nature of having four candidates still in the race. Even though Trump is leading in a lot of the states in the next couple of weeks, it is possible the non-Trumps could keep him below that 51.6% target, and thus be on the road to a contested convention.
But… starting March 15th there are winner take all states. Not just states where the delegate totals are heavily weighted to the winner, but pure unadulterated winner take all. If Trump is below 50% of delegates at that point, but not by all that much, and he is still leading the polls, then starting on March 15th, he’ll just start cleaning up and get back over 50% very rapidly, and then close out the contest.
In order to actually force a contested convention, the non-Trumps not only have to keep him below 51.6% of the delegates that are being doled out in the next couple weeks, they either have to keep him MUCH lower than that number in the next two weeks, or they have to damage him so much that by March 15th he is losing states left and right and the others can continue to pick up large numbers of delegates in the winner take all zone. Of course, the two might have to come together.
The odds of a non-Trump winning the nomination outright are now negligible absent a major event that destroys Trump’s prospects.
The ability to deny Trump a majority is still alive though. But the time for even that is running out quickly. The non-Trumps basically have two weeks.
Of course, Trump might still come out of a contested convention as the nominee, especially if he came in with a plurality of the delegates that wasn’t very far from the 50% mark. But all kinds of things can happen at a contested convention, including the emergence of a nominee who wasn’t even running. You never know.
One final thing before closing up. I have heard a lot of commentary saying that if any other candidate besides Trump was in the position he is in, he would already be being called the presumptive nominee. Maybe. But we really aren’t quite there yet.
Trump is definitely leading. He has better chances than anybody else of ending up the nominee. But at the same time…
Trump is clearly behind where either Romney or McCain were at this stage in the process. Digging up data from my 2008 and 2012 delegate tracking…
We are currently at the point where about 29% of the delegates have been allocated. Super Tuesday was bigger in 2008, so we don’t have a data point between about 10% and 42%, but you can see that in that Super Tuesday event, McCain took a clear lead, leaving all of the competitors behind. Although things were still a muddle before Super Tuesday, from that point forward there was no stopping McCain. His dominance was unmistakeable.
In 2012, Romney was over 50% of delegates earned almost from the very beginning. He continued to hover just below 50% of remaining delegates needed to win though, leading for continued talk of a possible brokered convention for awhile longer. It took until we got past 45% of delegates for Romney to really pull away and eliminate that possibility, making it a clean win.
2012 is probably the closest parallel to where we are today, but Romney never dropped below 50% of delegates after that first few percent at the beginning of the race. Trump is weaker than that at the moment… and his opponents are stronger. But the gap isn’t large. He trails Romney, but not by much.
We’re going to go from just under 30% of delegates determined today, to just under 60% after March 15th. Things will move very quickly, and if there really is going to be a good chance of a contested convention, the groundwork will be laid in these two weeks. If the non-Trumps want to stop Trump, that almost certainly needs to be the game plan at this point. And it has to start bearing fruit NOW.
[Update 2016-03-03 02:34 UTC – The 6 TBD delegates in Tennessee and Texas have been resolved, and there were other adjustments as results continues to be tabulated. Net changes happened in four states: Arkansas (Trump -1, Cruz +1), Massachusetts (Trump +1, Carson -1), Tennessee (Trump +2, Cruz +2, Rubio -1) and Texas (Cruz +4, Trump +2, Rubio -3). Total change for this update: Cruz +7, Trump +4, Carson -1, Rubio -4. New overall delegate totals are: Trump 338, Cruz 235, Rubio 113, Kasich 27, Carson 8, Bush 4, Fiorina 1, Huckabee 1, Paul 1. These changes do not substantively change the analysis above.]
[Update 2016-03-04 02:53 UTC – Update for Georgia: +1 Cruz, -1 Rubio.]
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.
Well, Super Tuesday is over except for a few straggling delegates that were not yet determined when it was time to start writing this post. So how did things end up? A lot of places will concentrate on “states won” and say that Clinton won 7 states and Sanders won 4. That’s well and good, but we’re going to look at what actually matters… the delegate totals.
First as a reminder, on Sunday I used current polling to predict where we would end up on delegates. Subtracting out “Delegates Abroad” which as it turns out won’t report results for a few more days, the polling suggested we would get results something like:
Estimate: 526 Clinton, 339 Sanders
And where are we actually? I’ll refrain from going through this state by state and just jump to the totals.
Actual: 504 Clinton, 335 Sanders, 26 TBD
The 26 TBD delegates are from Texas (19 delegates) and Tennessee (7 delegates). They could still split in such a way that the estimate ends up exactly correct. But even if it doesn’t, it will have been pretty close.
Bottom line is that the results are very closely in line with what would have been expected given the polling. No surprises here.
Where does that put our all important “% of remaining delegates needed to win” chart?
Clinton now only needs 40.52% of the remaining delegates to win the nomination. Sanders needs 59.54% of the remaining delegates to win.
Or of course large numbers of Clinton superdelegates have to start defecting to Sanders, which would raise Clinton’s number, and lower Sanders’ number. But there continues to be no sign of any such movement. And with Sanders continuing to lose the race for non-super delegates as well, it seems unlikely that a a big rush of “back the winner” movement will be heading Sanders’ way any time soon.
In the title of this post, I ask “what next?”. But even if Sanders had some “momentum” coming out of Super Tuesday (he really doesn’t) getting to 60% of the delegates in the coming contests would be a very tall order. His performance so far has been nowhere near that level. The Sanders folks may not be quite ready to admit it yet, but absent a Clinton implosion of historic proportions, the Sanders race for the nomination is over. If Sanders continues to fight on through the remaining contests, it isn’t to win, it is back to “making a point”, and “giving exposure to his issues”, and “moving the party towards him”, which was probably his original goal before he started doing a lot better than people originally expected. Those are legitimate reasons to continue a campaign. But it is not about winning the nomination.
What next? Clinton slowly but surely pushes her lead until she has 2,382 delegates and wins the nomination.
Before closing up, just a quick comparison:
Although I didn’t produce the chart in exactly the same form when I did the analysis in 2008, a few minutes in Excel with the old data produced the equivalent chart for 2008. It is interesting to compare where we are.
First of all, at just over 30% of the delegates allocated, Clinton was still ahead in 2008! But it was much closer than things are today. She needed about 49% of the remaining delegates to win, compared to only needing about 41% today. Obama needed about 52% of the remaining delegates to catch up and win. Which he obviously did. At that point he already had about 47% of the delegates that were already allocated though… while Sanders only has about 29% of the delegates. (Both 2008 and 2016 numbers of course include superdelegates.) So while Obama was able to mount a come from behind win from this point in the delegate race, Sanders is far far behind where Obama was.
Sanders is now approximately where Clinton was when about 80% of the delegates had been determined. In 2008, that was in late April. The media was still talking about the Clinton/Obama race at that point, and hyping up increasingly outlandish scenarios where Clinton could still win, because a race is more interesting than having a clear winner, but anybody watching the numbers knew it was over at that point absent a catastrophic event.
In any case, back here in 2016, I will of course continue to watch the races and post updates after each contest. If a major event happens that changes everything and puts Sanders back on track to win you will see it here. Absent that though, we’re just going to be watching Clinton’s slow march toward mathematically clinching the nomination.
[Update 2016-03-03 02:17 UTC – Update on super Tuesday delegates. The 7 TBD delegates in Tennessee broke 6 for Clinton, 1 for Sanders. The 19 TBD delegates in Texas broke 12 for Sanders, 7 for Clinton. In addition in Minnesota the estimates were adjusted to give one less delegate to Sanders, and one more to Clinton. Net for this round of updates: Clinton +14, Sanders +12, bringing totals to Clinton 1060, Sanders 431, O’Malley 1. This does not substantively change the analysis above.]
[Update 2016-03-04 02:51 UTC – Superdelegate update: Net Clinton +2]
[Update 2016-03-05 16:41 UTC – Superdelegate update: Net Clinton +6]
[Update 2016-03-06 07:30 UTC – Final superdelegate update prior to results from March 6th states: Net Sanders +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 16:44 UTC to actually answer the “What’s next?” from the title.]
Once again the headline out of a state is Trump winning. In Nevada the delegate count was:
14 Trump, 7 Rubio, 6 Cruz, 2 Carson, 1 Kasich
To be on the glide path for a 1st ballot victory though, Trump needed 15 of the 30 delegates. So he fell slightly short.
Now, don’t misunderstand. This is still an impressive victory, and looking at the upcoming states he has a clearer path to victory than anybody else. His margins were higher in Nevada than many people expected. But if today’s performance was replicated in all of the other states, Trump would come to the convention with more delegates than anybody else, but not the majority needed to win outright. Of course as we continue more people will drop out, and the amount with which states give bonuses to the winners increases, so that still seems like an unlikely final outcome.
Right now Trump continues to do everything he needs to do to win. Lets look at some of the graphs, then we’ll do a quick look at the March 1st “Super Tuesday” states.
The overall delegate count is now:
81 Trump, 17 Cruz, 17 Rubio, 6 Kasich, 5 Carson, and 7 for people who have dropped out
Trump continues to dominate. Lets look at this as percentages:
The “winners” here were actually Cruz, Rubio and Carson. Each of them improved their proportion of delegates with Nevada’s results. Trump actually went down. He doesn’t have to worry too much about that though. He still has a majority of the delegates allocated so far, and he is far far ahead of any of his opponents.
Finally, lets look at the “% of remaining delegates needed to win”, which I argue is the single most important thing to look at to understand where the race really is:
Because Trump got 14 delegates instead of 15 delegates, his line goes up a little bit. (Remember, on this chart down is good, up is bad.) The red line goes from needing 49.39% of the remaining delegates to needing 49.42%. This is a relatively trivial difference though. It is basically flat. Trump’s situation is very close to unchanged.
Meanwhile, the other lines keep going up at a decent pace. Kasich and Carson add about 0.6% to their numbers. Cruz and Rubio add about 0.4%.
This should be obvious, but the more they lose, the harder it is to catch up.
Many people are still talking about how as consolidation happens, the remaining non-Trumps will do better and the picture will change. Maybe, but nobody new announced they were dropping out after the Nevada results (yet anyway). So it looks like we may still go into March 1st with a five person race.
Lets run a hypothetical using current polling on the Super Tuesday states and see where we end up using RCP poll averages for the five remaining candidates. We’ll make delegate estimates based on the specific delegate allocation rules in each state.
Texas (155 delegates)
- Current poll averages: 37.3% Cruz, 28.0% Trump, 11.7% Rubio, 4.7% Carson, 3.0% Kasich
- Delegate estimates: 99 Cruz, 56 Trump
Georgia (76 delegates)
- Current poll averages: 35.0% Trump, 22.7% Cruz, 19.3% Rubio, 7.3% Carson, 6.3% Kasich
- Delegate estimates: 50 Trump, 26 Cruz
Tennessee (58 delegates)
- Last poll from November so using national average: 33.6% Trump, 20.4% Cruz, 16.4% Rubio, 9.8% Kasich, 7.4% Carson
- Delegate estimates: 37 Trump, 21 Cruz
Alabama (50 delegates)
- Last poll from December so using national average: 33.6% Trump, 20.4% Cruz, 16.4% Rubio, 9.8% Kasich, 7.4% Carson
- Delegate estimates: 32 Trump, 18 Cruz
Virginia (49 delegates)
- Using only February poll: 28% Trump, 22% Rubio, 19% Cruz, 7% Kasich, 7% Carson
- Delegate estimates: 17 Trump, 13 Rubio, 11 Cruz, 4 Kasich, 4 Carson
Oklahoma (43 delegates)
- Using only February poll: 32.5% Trump, 25.0% Cruz, 15.5% Rubio, 7.0% Carson, 0.0% Kasich
- Delegate estimates: 17 Trump, 15 Cruz, 11 Rubio
Massachusetts (42 delegates)
- Current poll averages: 41.0% Trump, 17.0% Rubio, 10.0% Cruz, 7.5% Kasich, 3.5% Carson
- Delegate estimates: 23 Trump, 9 Rubio, 6 Cruz, 4 Kasich
Arkansas (40 delegates)
- Using only February poll: 27% Cruz, 23% Trump, 23% Rubio, 11% Carson, 4% Kasich
- Delegate estimates: 18 Cruz, 13 Rubio, 9 Trump (giving Rubio the 2nd place finish breaking 23% tie by alphabetical order)
Minnesota (38 delegates)
- Last poll from January so using national average: 33.6% Trump, 20.4% Cruz, 16.4% Rubio, 9.8% Kasich, 7.4% Carson
- Delegate estimates: 18 Trump, 11 Cruz, 9 Rubio
Wyoming (29 delegates)
- No polls at all, using national average: 33.6% Trump, 20.4% Cruz, 16.4% Rubio, 9.8% Kasich, 7.4% Carson
- Delegate estimates: 12 Trump, 7 Cruz, 5 Rubio, 3 Kasich, 2 Carson
Alaska (28 delegates)
- Last poll from January so using national average: 33.6% Trump, 20.4% Cruz, 16.4% Rubio, 9.8% Kasich, 7.4% Carson
- Delegate estimates: 13 Trump, 8 Cruz, 7 Rubio
Vermont (16 delegates)
- No polls at all, using national average: 33.6% Trump, 20.4% Cruz, 16.4% Rubio, 9.8% Kasich, 7.4% Carson
- Delegate estimates: 10 Trump, 6 Cruz
OK, that’s it. Adding all that up…
Estimated Super Tuesday delegate totals: 294 Trump, 246 Cruz, 67 Rubio, 11 Kasich, 6 Carson
That gives Trump 47.1% of the super Tuesday delegates, Cruz 39.4%, and everyone else much less.
Trump needs 49.4% of the delegates to be on the path to an outright win though! So 47.1% would be in the realm where heading to a contested convention might be possible! Still unlikely, as the additional states in March will add up fast, and more candidates are likely to drop out. Still though, possible!
Adding in the existing delegates, we’d have a post-Super Tuesday race that looks like this:
375 Trump, 263 Cruz, 84 Rubio, 17 Kasich, 11 Carson, 7 for candidates who have already dropped out
Now, these are estimates based on current polling, and very few of these states were well polled as of this post, so much of the above is based on one or two polls, or using the national averages rather than state polls. And I had to make the assumption that all congressional districts would mirror state results (which is unlikely to be true). And Wyoming actually elects individual delegates rather than doing things based on candidate preference, so it may be an oddball in the end. And of course things are likely to change further before people actually vote next Tuesday. But… the general outlines of this aren’t likely to be too far off.
If this is even remotely close to where we are on March 2nd, we end up with Trump very close to the 50% of delegate mark. (The above has him EXACTLY at that mark.) He would need just a LITTLE bit more to actually push him over the edge to a clean win.
The flip side of that though is the combination of all the anti-Trumps would need just a LITTLE bit more in order to have this be on the path to a contested convention. I mentioned earlier that this is still an unlikely outcome. It is. After March 1st, the disproportionality of delegates given to the winner increases, and after March 15th we have pure winner take all states as well. If Trump remains in the overall lead, even with a plurality, then that is all it takes to push him over the edge.
If the anti-Trumps want to have any hope here at all, they need to be in a position by mid-March that they can win not just a few, but many states of the winner-take-most and winner-take-all variety. And frankly, the most likely scenario even then is just forcing a contested convention where Trump still has the most delegates, not someone else winning outright.
The anti-Trumps would have a hard road to get to an outright win. Cruz would need 56.8% of the remaining delegates to catch up and win after March 1st if things played out like my estimates above.
If you had to make a guess based on what we know now, a Trump nomination is far more likely than any other… and with an outright delegate majority on the first ballot, not after a contested convention.
6 days until Super Tuesday. We’ll see how close my estimates above turn out to be.
Update 2016-02-26 07:17 UTC – On February 22nd New Hampshire certified the results of their primary. In the final tally Trump had one more delegate than previous estimates, and Rubio one less. This did not seem worthy of a separate post, but a note here seemed appropriate. The totals on ElectionGraphs.com have been updates appropriately. This does not substantively change any of the analysis above.
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 16:28 UTC to correct math on % of remaining Cruz would need after Super Tuesday, I’d originally shown a higher number around 61%.]
[Edit 2016-02-27 17:06 UTC to fix place where Kasich had been autocorrected to Quash.]
[Edit 2016-02-28 22:03 UTC to add dropped out candidates to the after Super Tuesday estimate.]
To be on a pace to win, Trump needed 26 of the 50 delegates in South Carolina. Instead, he got all 50 of them. Just as this site pointed out was very likely on the 10th and again on the 11th. I’ve seen some surprise at this result in some of the commentary, but absent the polls being way off, this was predictable weeks ago.
Delegate rules matter. The popular vote is only relevant in terms of how it determines the delegates.
So Trump jumps way up in the delegate race:
So… 67 Trump, 11 Cruz, 10 Rubio, 5 Kasich, 3 Carson, and 7 for people who have dropped out.
Lets look at this in percentage terms:
Trump now has more than 50% of the delegates allocated so far. About 65% of them. That is just under 2/3 of the delegates.
Now, we’re only 4.2% of the way through the delegates, but at this point Trump is dominating.
How about “% of remaining delegates needed to win”?
Now that he has a majority, Trump’s line dives down. (Down is good on this graph.) He now only needs 49.39% of the remaining delegates to win.
More importantly though, because of how the delegates split between his opponents, they are all just racing upward. Cruz is second right now, and he now needs 51.75% of the remaining delegates in order to win. Now, this still isn’t a crazy number, although obviously Cruz hasn’t come close to it in any contest yet. But… time is running out.
We are down to five candidates after South Carolina. It is possible we will lose more after Nevada in a couple days. But most polling and modeling I have seen says Trump wins in a five way race, in a four way race, and even in a three way race. It takes bringing it down to a two person race before the non-Trump starts winning. The question is if that happens fast enough to “Stop Trump”.
With the number of delegates determined between March 1st and March 15th, if such a move is going to happen, it has to happen very quickly. Still having 3+ candidates when the March 1st votes happen puts Trump in a very strong position. If we’re not down to 3 before March 15th, Trump may just be wrapping things up.
Or something dramatic could happen that changes everything. You never know.
For now though, polls in Nevada and the March 1st states look good for Trump, and we still have five people in the race.
Trump is on a path to victory.
Nevada is up next on Tuesday.
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.
Sanders needed to win 20 of the 35 delegates available in Nevada’s caucuses to be on a pace to catch up with Clinton and win the Democratic nomination. He did not get 20. He got 15. Clinton got 20. There was some talk from the Sanders camp about how much closer Nevada was than it looked like it would be a few weeks ago. That is true. But in the end, the result is Clinton getting 57% of the delegates while Sanders gets 42%.
So Sanders falls further behind. Lets look at the charts.
First the straight up delegate counts. We are now at Clinton 487, Sanders 67, O’Malley 2.
In addition to the delegates from the Nevada caucuses, since my last update on the 14th when 42 superdelegates were added for Clinton there have been other updates contributing to those numbers. That includes a number of new delegates identified as being for a candidate, a couple delegates who had been identified as being for a candidate saying explicitly that they considered themselves to be neutral, a few double counting errors corrected, and even one superdelegate dying. The net result was 6 more delegates for Clinton and 2 more for Sanders. And I gave O’Malley back 2 superdelegates who despite his dropping out have not yet stated another preference. In general these changes are backdated to the date there is evidence for them, rather than being dated as of the time I find the change.
Add those all up, and since New Hampshire, Clinton’s total has increased by 68 delegates while Sanders gained 17. If you don’t count the delegates that changed before New Hampshire that I found out about after New Hampshire, it is still 30 Clinton delegates to 17 for Sanders.
Either way, Clinton continues to accumulate delegates faster than Sanders does. That is not a recipe for Sanders catching up. To catch up, Sanders needs to either be getting supermajorities of the delegates from primaries, caucuses and currently unpledged superdelegates, or he needs to be getting quite a few current Clinton superdelegates to defect. So far neither of those things have been happening.
(Note: AP and CNN have Clinton’s delegate totals even higher, presumably due to some non-public superdelegate commitments they know about but haven’t published. The above counts are mostly using superdelegate counts from Wikipedia except for a handful of cases where I have deviated for specific reasons where I believe I have a better count.)
So, how is the “% of remaining delegates needed to win” looking?
Since Sanders has not been making his percentages, and Clinton has, Clinton’s line is slowly dropping, and Sanders’ is slowly rising. Slowly is the watchword here though. Sanders is now up to 55.03%. Right before Iowa, this was at 54.22%. (Counting the postdated delegates, 54.72%.) Sanders hasn’t done well enough that he is actually catching up with Clinton, but he has done well enough to keep the movement on this number low. He is ALMOST keeping Clinton from making progress. Almost but not quite.
As more delegates get racked up, assuming Sanders continues to collect less than 55% of the delegates, it will not only get harder and harder to catch up to Clinton, it will also get harder and harder to prevent that red line from zooming downward to zero, the point where Clinton wraps up the nomination.
For now though, while he isn’t stopping her, Sanders is clearly slowing Clinton down more than she would like.
Next up, South Carolina.
Update 2016-02-26 15:55 UTC – Completed a scan for superdelegate changes. Net result is +6 Clinton superdelegates… plus one new O’Malley superdelegate. This is not actually a NEW O’Malley superdelegate, but one that declared their support back in November but just hadn’t been logged yet, and there is not yet evidence of them stating they are now uncommitted or backing another candidate. These changes have no substantive effect on the analysis above.
Update 2016-02-28 03:24 UTC – Another scan for superdelegates in preparation for adding in South Carolina results. Net result Clinton +4, Sanders +1. This again has not substantive effect on the analysis above, but putting a note here since it is not worth a blog post of its own.
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 17:17 UTC to add note about AP and CNN delegate counts.
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