This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter).
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Wyoming allocated delegates in a two stage process. 12 were determined back on March 12th. At that point the count was Cruz 9, Rubio 1, Trump 1. One uncommitted delegate was elected as well. He appears to still be uncommitted.
On April 16th Wyoming completed their process, allocating their remaining 14 “normal” delegates at their state convention. All 14 delegates went to Cruz. There are three more delegate slots for party leaders. They have not yet expressed their preferences.
This once again appears to be a case of the Trump team not even bothering to “play” in Wyoming and just letting Cruz clean up essentially unopposed. This in a race where Trump needs every delegate.
In addition, since my last post there was an update in North Carolina that resulted in moving one delegate from the Trump column to the Carson column of all places. So the net change in the last week is Cruz +14, Carson +1, Trump -1.
This obviously represents less than the 57.07% of delegates Trump needed to be on pace for a win.
Time to look at some charts:
Looking at the raw delegate count, Cruz looks like he is catching up quickly. And he has been doing extremely well recently. But there is a problem. It is very late in the process.
Cruz’s win streak has succeeded in lowering his % of remaining delegates needed to win, but not by a lot. It has dropped from 83.68% to 82.80%. This is still a number that Cruz can not realistically reach.
So Trump. His 57.07% increased to 58.17%.
New York is next. Trump is expected to do very well in New York. But the specific line to watch is the 58.17% line. Translated into delegates, this means to be on track to get to a delegate majority, he needs at least 56 of the 95 delegates. The expectation seems to be that he will exceed this bar, probably by a significant margin.
Even if Trump got all 95 delegates though, it still wouldn’t completely undo the damage of Cruz’s winning streak. In that case Trump would need 52.69% of the remaining delegates. Trump had been down to 52.22% before his string of losses. So shutting everybody out in New York wouldn’t quite get him back there. Close though.
After New York, there are quite a few more states where Trump is expected to do very well and some of them are winner take all. We’re still right on the edge between an outright Trump win and a contested convention. Anybody who says either of those two outcomes is certain at this point is premature.
We’ll see what happens in New York shortly, and the “narrative” of the race will almost certainly turn again. In the meantime, let me update the comparisons to 2008 and 2012 that I did back on March 13th.
First of all just the % of delegates won:
Then the more important “% of remaining delegates needed to win”:
It is still possible for Trump to win outright. Barely. But it is very very clear that his path is dramatically different than the McCain or Romney patterns. In both of those cases, by this point the frontrunners were clearly the presumptive nominees, even though they hadn’t quite wrapped it up mathematically yet.
This year Trump still has a minority of the delegates, and he hadn’t even been trending in the right direction. We’re not in the “wrapping things up” stage, instead, we clearly still have a fight going on.
Which of course makes this all much more fun to watch than 2008 or 2012 were. :-)
[Update 2016-04-20 01:27 UTC: New delegate estimate from Georgia nets Cruz +1, Trump -1. This does not 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.
This week on Curmudgeon’s Corner Sam and Ivan talk about Election 2016 of course. But first some bits about Mike the headless chicken, the comments on Sam’s Election Graphs site, stamp prices, Hey Siri, and a movie Sam watched. When they do get to the election they cover Trump’s shutout in Colorado, Trump’s general malpractice in delegate wrangling, the odds of a contested convention, the accusations of cheating in both parties, and much more!
Click below to listen or subscribe… then let us know your own thoughts!
Recorded 2016-04-14
Length this week – 1:20:15
 1-Click Subscribe in iTunes
 View Podcast in iTunes
 View Raw Podcast Feed
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Show Details:
- (0:00:41-0:22:29) But First
- Ivan in his Car
- Mike the Headless Chicken
- Election Graphs Comments
- Stamp Prices
- Facebook Bots
- Hey Siri
- Movie: Mississippi Burning (1988)
- (0:23:08-1:00:14) Election 2016
- Trump shutout in Colorado
- Delegate wrangling malpractice
- Contested Convention Scenarios
- Ryan saying no… Again
- Odds of Trump getting majority
- Trump Trends
- Cruz wooing delegates
- (1:00:53-1:19:55) Election 2016 Continued
- Cheating? Stealing? Unfair? Rigged?
- Sanders “contesting” the convention
- Sanders attempts to woo superdelegates
- Edit wars on Wikipedia Superdelegate list
- Denial from Trump and Sanders people
- What Sanders and Trump didn’t do
- When is New York again?
- Thoughtful Trump people wanted
Colorado is odd in that it dribbled out delegates over a couple of weeks. The 6 from the 1st and 6th congressional districts were already included when the Michigan results came out. Those 6 were all Cruz. Since then I added notes about the rest of Colorado’s congressional districts to the Michigan post. Cruz won all 15 of those delegates. Then yesterday Cruz won all 13 at large delegates.
There are 3 more delegates from Colorado who are state party leaders and have not yet expressed a preference.
But Cruz has won all 34 of Colorado’s delegates that were available via the caucus process.
Since March 23rd, Trump has gotten bad news in Alaska, American Samoa, Louisiana, North Dakota, Wisconsin and Colorado. Some of those were “new” results in states, others were just updates as more information came in. Either way, none of those updates went Trump’s way.
Lets look at the chart:
After Arizona and Utah Trump needed 52.22% of the remaining delegates to be on a winning pace.
Since then the delegate deltas have been Cruz +78, Trump +6, Rubio +4, Kasich +1. And that Kasich delegate is being generous interpreting one uncommitted delegate’s comments. That might actually be a Cruz delegate in the end.
So Cruz got 78/89 = 87.6% of the delegates.
Trump got 6/89 = 6.7% of the delegates.
Needless to say this is far below the 52.22% Trump needed to improve his position.
Instead, he goes from needing 52.22% of the remaining delegates to needing 57.07%. This is huge change.
Winning 57.07% of the delegates would represent a 23% improvement over the 46.46% of delegates pace he has so far. That is a pretty substantial improvement.
Trump is in the worst position he has been so far. This is not where he wants to be. Everything is going in the wrong direction.
But is it time to assume a contested convention yet? The drum beat about that has certainly begun.
I could do my usual of calculating an estimate for New York from current polling, and then look where that puts us, but other folks have done more in depth projections. I’ll specifically point out two:
Both of these two outline scenarios where Trump can still get to 1237. These are not highly unlikely scenarios like those required to get to a Sanders win on the Democratic side, but rather perfectly reasonable possibilities given current polling data. Trusting current polls completely, Wang actually gets a 92% chance of Trump getting the delegate majority. When he adjusts for the fact Cruz has been over performing his polls, that drops to 70%. This is by no means certain, but it is still more likely than not.
In addition you can run your own simulations at The Upshot or FiveThirtyEight. With either of these it is not that hard to get Trump to 1237. Try it yourself. It is fun.
My own take is that some of Wang’s assumptions about how uncommitted delegates will break is a bit generous to Trump given his performance so far with uncommitted and unbound delegates. So 70% chance of an outright majority seems a bit high.
In the last Curmudgeon’s Corner podcast I said my gut feel was that we have a 60% chance of a multiple-ballot convention at this point. Which would mean a 40% chance that Trump wins outright. (I allowed for some additional chance of convention shenanigans like trying to change the rules to unbind delegates on the first ballot, or that the results of there 1st ballot would be unclear until the actual vote due to uncommitted delegates.)
Trump was EXPECTED to do badly in Colorado and Michigan… perhaps not quite this badly, but still it means that it is easy to get distracted by notions of “momentum” that may or may not be real. The fact that Trump did well in Arizona, but then badly in Colorado does not represent a change in the state of the race. It is just a function of the makeup of those states and the calendar. To see if things have really changed from being “right on the edge between a Trump win and a contested convention” we need to see deviations against how the remaining states are expected to play out.
We haven’t seen that quite yet.
But all the anti-Trump forces are pushing against him hard and Trump has no margin for error in the remaining states. He has to do well in all the places he is expected to do well. He might actually need to exceed expectations by a bit. If he starts dipping, even a little bit, then we are at a contested convention. And given what appears to be Cruz’s skill at collecting “ghost delegates” who are bound to Trump on the first ballot but who really support Cruz, a Trump loss on the first ballot almost certainly means Cruz (or maybe someone else, but probably Cruz) wins on a later ballot.
Keep watching New York and if Trump stays over 50% in the popular vote, which will get him all or almost all of the delegates. That is the next big test. If Trump underperforms expectations in New York, we almost certainly will have a multi-ballot convention. If he matches or exceeds expectations, then the path to an outright Trump win remains open.
[Update 2016-04-13 15:19 UTC: Update from North Carolina. Net Change: Carson +1, Trump -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 Curmudgeon’s Corner this week Sam and Ivan talk about the iPhone SE, the Panama Papers, and Tesla Model 3 before diving into Election 2016. On the election they of course cover the Wisconsin results, the outlook for the next states, the bleak view for Sanders, and of course the possibilities of a contested convention on the Republican side. With a few other random things thrown in for good measure.
Click below to listen or subscribe… then let us know your own thoughts!
Recorded 2016-04-06
Length this week – 1:33:50
1-Click Subscribe in iTunes
View Podcast in iTunes
View Raw Podcast Feed
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Show Details:
- (0:00:44-0:03:30) But First
- (0:04:09-0:07:36) But Second
- (0:08:16-0:24:00) Panama Papers
- What and Who
- Why not US people?
- Putin’s Circle
- Shocking?
- Legal Implications
- (0:25:05-0:43:25) Tesla Model 3
- Lines / Preorders
- Pros and Cons of the Car
- Implications for Industry
- VIP Email Notifications
- (0:44:46 -1:33:38) Election 2016
- Ivan’s Song
- Wisconsin Results
- Demographic Models vs Polls
- Next States
- Trump’s Delegate Game
- Brokered Convention Scenarios
- Rules changes for 2020?
- Trump weakening in General
- This week’s Trump craziness
- Clinton vs Sanders
- Trump Statement
Cruz won Wisconsin decisively with 36 delegates to Trump’s 6. That’s 85.71% of the delegates.
Adding in other updates and delegate adjustments in Alaska, Colorado, American Samoa, Louisiana, and North Dakota that happened since my last post and you end up with a net change of Cruz +50, Trump +6, Rubio+4, Kasich +1. That’s 81.97% of the delegates for Cruz, which is pretty overwhelming.
But Cruz needed 83% and change to actually be on pace to win the nomination outright. He did that in Wisconsin, but when you factor in all of the other things since Arizona and Utah he falls a little bit short. The net result is he holds steady. Cruz now needs 83.64% of the remaining delegates to actually win outright.
Nobody expects Cruz to win delegates at that pace. The scenario where Cruz actually gets to 1,237 delegates before the convention is outrageously unlikely.
So lets look at the more relevant question. Does this stop Trump from getting to 1,237?
Well, it certainly makes it harder:
Between all of the things happening recently mentioned above, Trump goes from needing 52.22% of the remaining delegates to win outright, to needing 55.22%. Given that so far he has only managed 47.27%, this will clearly be a bit of a lift. If we had all proportional contests from here on out, it would probably be time to say it just wasn’t going to happen and buckle up for the contested convention.
Because of the craziness of winner take all and winner take most states though, we’re probably not quite there yet. But we’re a lot closer than we were before Wisconsin. But even that is complicated.
Taking Wisconsin into account, if you use 528’s “Can you get Trump to 1,237” calculator and follow the expert consensus projections, Trump falls about 55 delegates short. Now, they are giving Trump none of the uncommitted delegates. I agree that Trump won’t do well in this group, but zero seems a bit light.
The general picture though remains, which is that if all the remaining states go “as expected” Trump will fall slightly short of a majority of the delegates, and we’ll have a multi-ballot Republican convention for the first time since 1948. (The last time for the Democrats was 1952.)
To avoid this, Trump has to not just meet expectations in all of the coming states, but exceed them by just a little bit. With the drumbeat of perceived problems and missteps Trump has had in the last few weeks, this may seem unlikely. It may seem that Trump coming in below the current expectations is more likely. There has even been some talk that Trump has peaked and the long anticipated Trump collapse has now started.
A few weeks ago FiveThirtyEight projected Trump to get 25 of the 42 delegates in Wisconsin. The six Trump actually got is a long way from 25. That certainly seems to indicate we might be seeing a Trump collapse.
But wait… in the New York Times Nate Cohn gave Trump’s “expected” popular vote result in Wisconsin based on demographics and previous history as 35%. What was the actual result? 35.1%. That means that compared to where he was before, Trump’s performance didn’t actually constitute any sort of collapse. Trump is not in freefall. Instead, Trump came in pretty much where he was expected to in the popular vote.
So why the shellacking in delegates? It seems like this is due more to Cruz doing better than expected than to Trump doing worse than expected. The way this lined up in Wisconsin, it gave Cruz the overwhelming delegate win.
But this may or may not translate into other states. New York is not Wisconsin.
We will have some more information from Colorado this weekend and Wyoming next weekend. Trump is not expected to do very well in either, but we can look for clues in terms of if he meets or exceeds the projections there. But the next big bunch of delegates is April 19th in New York where Trump is expected to do very well. Then a lot of East coast states where Trump is also favored. But the question is not just “does Trump win” it is “does Trump win by enough”.
Right now, we are still in the zone where an outright Trump win is possible. But it requires Trump to improve on his performance so far, at a time where it seems like he is holding steady, but not really gaining ground. And despite not really taking aim at him until way later than many people thought they should have, the anti-Trump forces are now in full force, throwing everything they have at Trump. Improving his performance to the 55.22% of delegates average he needs to win outright may be a very tall order.
It may be slightly too soon to say that we are definitely going to have a multi-ballot contested convention… but the odds seem to be getting better by the day. And the chances that we will have some sort of craziness… the result of the first ballot determined by uncommitted delegates… or convention floor fights on rules changes or delegate credentialing that might impact the voting… seems to be very likely indeed.
So if you are a political junkie, go ahead and book July 18th to July 21st as days off from work, because there will almost certainly be fireworks of some sort, and you’ll want to be at home keeping up with the craziness minute by minute.
Right?
Or is that just me? :-)
[Update 2016-04-08 18:09 UTC – Results from Colorado’s 7th Congressional district in. Cruz +3. This doesn’t substantially change the analysis above.]
[Update 2016-04-09 16:24 UTC – Results from Colorado’s 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th Congressional districts: Cruz +12. Cruz has completely shut out Trump in Colorado’s 7 congressional districts. The statewide delegates will be determined later today. With the changes so far in Colorado, Trump now needs 56.20% of the remaining delegates to win.]
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.
There have been polls in Michigan, Wisconsin and California since the last post.
There is no change for the front runners. The Clinton vs Trump summary remains the same, with anything from Clinton by 156 to Trump by 30 in the realm of the possible, with Clinton by 138 the “expected” result and the tipping point remaining at Clinton by 3.9%.
But the Wisconsin polls made a difference for Clinton vs Cruz:
Four of the five polls used in the average now show a very tight Clinton vs Cruz race in Wisconsin. The average now has Clinton ahead by only 2.7%, and clearly it is only that high due to the oldest poll included in the average. So Wisconsin is added to the list of states that Cruz might win in his “best case” where he wins all the states he is ahead in, plus all the ones where he trails by less than 5%.
With Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes, Cruz’s best case increases from a 10 electoral vote win to a 30 electoral vote win, now matching Trump’s best case against Clinton. In fact, Cruz’s best and worst cases now match Trump exactly. Cruz does a bit better in the expected case because he leads in Iowa and North Carolina, while Trump does not.
Cruz has also been on a strengthening trend while Trump has been getting weaker. We will see if that continues.
222.4 days until polls start to close on Election 2016.
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 this week’s Curmudgeon’s Corner Sam and Ivan hit all the things you would expect about Election 2016, the attacks in Brussels and the announcements at the latest Apple event. They also talk a bit about fitness, #ManInTree, Waze, Obama in Cuba and more! Even a bit about events in the Nixon administration!
Click below to listen or subscribe… then let us know your own thoughts!
Recorded 2016-03-24
Length this week – 1:51:13
1-Click Subscribe in iTunes
View Podcast in iTunes
View Raw Podcast Feed
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Show Details:
- (0:00:00-0:02:52) Alex Prelude
- (0:03:05-0:14:21) But First
- Health
- Fitness
- Man In Tree
- (0:15:01-0:56:58) Election 2016
- Delegate Math
- Types of Contested Conventions
- Upcoming States
- California
- Virgin Islands
- Delegate Selection Processes
- Trump’s Lost Illinois Delegates
- Clinton vs Trump
- (0:58:02-1:06:19) Brussels
- Belgian Citizens
- Radicalization
- History of Terrorism
- Responses
- (1:07:36-1:19:56) Brussels Part II
- Overreactions
- Suicide Bombings
- IS Strategy
- Cruz and Trump on Brussels
- When it happens in the US
- (1:20:35-1:33:43) Apple Stuff
- No surprises
- Android codenames
- OS X codenames
- FBI vs Apple update
- (1:34:22-1:50:53) Lightning Round
- TV Series: Minority Report (2015)
- Obama in Cuba
- Obama in Argentina
- Nixon Administration on Drug War
- Rob Ford
When I did my last update there hadn’t been any recent polls in either Arizona or Utah, but the results there ended up matching pretty well with the results of the few polls that came out since then. Namely, Trump won Arizona which was straight up winner take all, and Cruz got over 50% in Utah, so he got all of the delegates there.
So the net for the night was Trump +58, Cruz +40.
Adding in other delegate adjustments since the March 15th results we have a net change of:
Trump +62, Cruz +43, Rubio -3
So effectively, Trump got 60.78% of the delegates since the last update. He only needed 53.07% to improve his position.
So what does this look like?
The raw delegate count is now Trump 755, Cruz 466, Rubio 169, Kasich 144, Carson 8, Bush 4, Fiorina 1, Huckabee 1, Paul 1
Trump’s pace of delegate accumulation actually looks like it has accelerated, while everybody else has slowed down.
But the raw delegate counts are not the right thing to look at.
In percentages of the delegates so far, both Trump and Cruz improved. But of course Cruz is nowhere near the 50% line. Trump meanwhile is now at 48.74%. He doesn’t have a majority. Close. Very close. But not quite.
But % of delegates so far isn’t the right thing to look at either.
This is the real graph to watch. The percentage of the remaining delegates that Trump needs to win in order to get to the convention with a majority of delegates. This has been dropping in the last couple of contests.
Trump now needs 52.22% of the remaining delegates to win the nomination outright.
Now, some of those “remaining delegates” are 18 delegates who have already been selected as officially “uncommitted” delegates, and there will be more uncommitted delegates coming out of some of the states that have yet to vote. Probably a few dozen to as many as 100. These delegates are essentially like the Democratic superdelegates in that they can vote however they feel like and are not bound to the results of any primaries or caucuses.
If you wanted to calculate the percentage Trump would need without uncommitted delegates, it would be higher. But just like superdelegates are part of the process on the Democratic side, uncommitted delegates are part of the process on the Republican side, and to get a fair picture you need to include them.
You just have to realize that winning not only includes earning pledged delegates, but also convincing uncommitted delegates to vote for you.
It is a real possibility that we could get to the end of the primaries and caucuses in June without knowing if Trump has an outright win, or if he’ll come up short on the first ballot at the convention. It might end up depending on what those uncommitted delegates decide to do.
We are still right on the edge between a Trump win and a convention where nobody wins on the First ballot. And which way that goes may end up depending on the uncommitted delegates. What percentage of the uncommitted delegates Trump would need… if he even needs them at all… will depend on how he continues to do in getting pledged delegates between now and June.
But meanwhile, the pace of primaries and caucuses now slows down quite a bit. So there will be a lot of waiting before we know.
[Update 2016-04-01 17:15 UTC – Alaska gave back Rubio’s delegates after he asked, and Oklahoma finalized their results. Net change: Rubio +4, Cruz -2, Trump -3. This does not substantially change the analysis above.]
[Update 2016-04-04 05:43 UTC – Most of Colorado’s delegates will be determined next weekend, but the 6 representing the 1st and 6th congressional districts were determined this weekend, and all 6 went to Cruz. With this and the change above, Trump’s percentage of remaining needed to win is up to 52.83%. Adding this note here rather than doing a full post on those six delegates.]
[Update 2016-04-04 14:15 UTC – As of April 4th there were 28 “unbound” Republican delegates, with more to come soon. These are free agents like the Democratic superdelegates. I have started to track them individually when there is evidence of a known preference. So far, adding them in nets: Cruz +3, Trump+2.]
[Update 2016-04-06 02:01 UTC – Added in tentative evaluations of the uncommitted delegates from North Dakota. Net: Cruz +7, 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.
In my last post on the Republicans I used current polls to try to guess the March 15th results. This was my guess:
Trump +226, Kasich +86, Cruz +36, Rubio +19
Results are not yet final in Missouri, and because it is winner take all in each congressional district as well as statewide, and it is close in most congressional districts, things could still swing there quite a bit. But for the moment, with the best estimates I had from Green Papers, the actual results from the 15th were:
Trump +229, Kasich +81, Cruz +51, Rubio +6
Cruz got a bit more than my predictions, Rubio a bit less. But basically using the polls a couple days out got things pretty spot on. So minus any big changes from Missouri or minor adjustments elsewhere, this was the expected scenario.
So time to look at some graphs, including some I don’t usually bother with…
In raw delegate counts we now have:
Trump 693, Cruz 423, Rubio 172, Kasich 144, Carson 8, Bush 4, Fiorina 1, Huckabee 1, Paul 1
Trump, Cruz and Kasich both look like they made significant improvements, but…
This is the percentage of delegates allocated so far to each candidate. Trump is just BARELY under the 50% mark. Only Trump and Kasich improved on this metric with the March 15th results.
But… looking at the much more useful “% of remaining delegates needed to win” graph…
Everybody except Trump got further away from the nomination after March 15th. In fact, all of them got a LOT farther from the nomination. In fact, almost all the candidates have now been mathematically eliminated from a first round convention win. We knew for a long time that Paul, Huckabee, Fiorina, Bush and Carson were headed there. But it is now official. But Rubio was also eliminated. And despite his “big win” in Ohio, so was Kasich. All of these candidates could get every delegate still outstanding… and still not end up with enough delegates to win.
Only Trump and Cruz still have the possibility of collecting a majority of the delegates before the convention. And Cruz just went from needing 62.14% of the remaining delegates, to needing 79.41%. This is a completely unrealistic number, even if it was a two person race between him and Trump. (For the moment, despite it being impossible for him to get enough delegates, Kasich is staying in, so we still have a three way split, which favors Trump.)
Trump needs 53.07% of the remaining delegates to win outright. Less than that will get us to a contested convention and all kind of chaos. But how likely is Trump to get those sorts of margins? So far of course he has only gotten 47.89% of the delegates. So he does have to improve on his previous performance by about 11%.
This sounds like a lot, but it is probably quite reachable. First, Trump will undoubtedly pick up some of Rubio’s supporters, they won’t all go to Cruz and Kasich. Second, there are a number of winner take all states coming up. Third, a lot of the states that are not winner take all are still winner take most.
Basically, the structure of the primary calendar is DESIGNED to help the front running candidate wrap things up. It is not unreasonable to think Trump will be able to do that. To stop it, Cruz and Kasich between them need to be getting more than a majority of the delegates despite the fact that neither of them has a realistic shot at an outright win. The only plan for those two is to force the contested convention, then win there.
Some places have tried to game out all of the remaining primaries and caucuses, and they conclude that we may in fact not know if we have an outright Trump win or a contested convention until the very last contests on on June 7th. That would be California, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico and South Dakota. And there is a possibility we won’t even know until after that, because although their numbers are small, some states and territories have actually elected uncommitted delegates, who like superdelegates on the Democratic side are free agents able to vote however they see fit. There is a posisbility (a small one, but non-zero) that these uncommitted delegates may be in a position to determine if there will indeed be a contested convention.
I won’t try to game out the rest of the season, but I will look at next Tuesday… Arizona, Utah, and American Samoa. As usual, looking at RCP for polls, and Green Papers for delegate rules. But guess what? As of today, there has been NO recent polling on any of these three. So we’ll use national polling, but eliminating candidates who have dropped out. So Trump 36.0%, Cruz 21.8%, Kasich 12.0%. Normalized to 100%, that is Trump 51.6%, Cruz 31.2%, Kasich 17.2%..
- Arizona is winner take all. Unless Cruz or Kasich are doing much better there than nationally, Trump gets all 58 delegates.
- Utah is winner take most. If anybody gets over 50%, they get all the delegates. If the estimates above based on national polling are right, Trump gets all 40 delegates. If he doesn’t hit 50%, but still gets a plurality, he is likely to still get almost all the delegates. We’ll estimate 40 to Trump.
- American Samoa might end up electing someone with a commitment, but the expectation given their rules is that all delegates will be uncommitted, so they will just stay TBD in my counts.
Now, either Arizona or Utah COULD go in a completely different direction. As I said, there has been no recent polling. So who really knows? But if Trump ends up winning both, he will likely get something close to 98 delegates out of the two states.
If that happened, that would put the total delegate count at:
Trump 791, Cruz 423, Rubio 172, Kasich 144, Carson 8, Bush 4, Fiorina 1, Huckabee 1, Paul 1
That would give Trump 51.20% of the delegates. He would once again have a majority of the delegates. Trump would then need 446 delegates to win outright. There would be 927 delegates left undetermined at that point. So Trump would only need 48.11% of the remaining delegates to win. Which given his history at that point seems quite reachable.
But continuing to block him might still be within reach. Cruz + Kasich would only need to manage about 52% of the delegates. Which might be possible if they could build on anti-Trump sentiment even in the face of Trump winning. If they can do that is a big open question though. The “I can’t win, and you might not even like me, but vote for me to block the other guy and cause a contested convention where the outcome is completely unknown” case may not be the easiest one to make.
But if Cruz and Kasich can make that case, then it is not over yet.
So then we start looking at North Dakota, Wisconsin, Colorado… and beyond.
Of course, if Trump loses Arizona or Utah, that all changes.
So we will have to wait and see… but if I had to put odds on it, I’m still thinking about an 80% chance that Trump just wins this outright. The structure of the contests themselves are designed to help the front runner, and that is Trump.
[Update 2016-03-18 06:21 UTC – As per Alaska’s rules, after Rubio dropped out they reassigned his delegates to the remaining candidates. Result: Trump +3, Cruz +2, Rubio -5.]
[Update 2016-03-23 01:43 UTC – The Virgin Islands updated their delegate results because the original slate of delegates (all uncommitted) did not end up qualifying under the rules (see here). The original delegates were replaced by alternates. The result for the counts was Rubio +2, Cruz +1, Trump +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 02:27 UTC to add final bit about odds.]
Since the last Electoral College Update there have been general election polls in Florida, Ohio and Illinois. There was no notable change to the front-running Clinton vs Trump pair, but there was significant movement in Clinton vs Cruz.
After more than a year on an upward trend, Cruz finally closes to within 5% of Clinton in Florida. Clinton now leads by only 3.8%. This makes Florida a “Weak Clinton” state and makes it a possible pickup for Cruz. Add this to Ohio from a few days ago and you have a breakthrough moment for Cruz:
For the first time, Cruz’s best case is actually to win. If Cruz won every state he leads, plus Nevada, Ohio, and Florida where he is close… then he wins by 10 electoral votes.
Without those three close states, he still loses by 96 electoral votes. But those three states ARE close, and for the very first time the possibility of Cruz pulling ahead and winning seems plausible.
The Florida move, plus yet another bump in Cruz’s direction in Ohio, also moved the tipping point:
Before the latest batch of updates, the tipping point had been New Hampshire, where Clinton is ahead by 6.4%. Now it is Florida, where Clinton is ahead by only 3.8%.
Florida and Ohio make a big difference, and Cruz is now making them both close.
Cruz had been the one Republican candidate that looked sure to lose in the general. But things change during a campaign, and he now has a shot. If he were to win the Republican nomination of course. Looking at the delegate race that still looks unlikely. But if we end up at a contested convention, anything could happen…
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.
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