This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter).
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Sanders won Indiana’s pledged delegates 44 to 39.
So he got 53.01% of the delegates. He needed 80.92% to be on a pace to catch up with Clinton.
But it is actually worse. That 80.92% was as of the results from the Northeast last week. Since then between superdelegate announcements and a revision to the Ohio results, there was a net change of Clinton +11, Sanders -1. If you add that in, you get Clinton +50, Sanders +43 since last week. So actually Sanders only got 46.24% of the recent delegates.
Which means, of course, that Clinton just continued her march to the nomination and improved her position despite Sanders’ win.
Here come the graphs:
The totals are now Clinton 2202, Sanders 1455, O’Malley 1. Clinton only needs 181 of the 1107 remaining delegates to wrap this up.
Which brings us to…
Clinton now only needs 16.35% of the remaining delegates to win. Sanders needs 83.83%.
Massive superdelegate defections could alter this, but there have never been any signs of such movement, and there are none now.
For a long time now the result has been clear absent a catastrophic change. As we have fewer and fewer delegates left, the curves above will move more quickly toward the final result, and it will be more and more difficult to get a result that would even slow it down.
ElectionGraphs.com will continue to document this process, but there is little to no drama left, it is just a matter of watching Clinton gather up the remaining delegates needed.
Update 2016-05-08 01:57 – Superdelegate update, net change Clinton +3. Update from Mississippi, net change 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.
It has only been a few days since the last Electoral College update but there have already been polls added for Ohio, Indiana, California, Florida and Minnesota. A couple of these made differences to the ElectionGraphs.com models, so lets take a look…
Clinton vs Trump
Minnesota has been lightly polled. The average still is padded with the 2012 election results. But with this addition, Clinton’s lead is now 5.5%, which puts the state out of the “Weak Clinton” category and into “Strong Clinton”. For the ElectionGraphs.com model that means for now we now assume that even in a very favorable case, Trump will not win Minnesota.
In the last update Trump’s best case was already an electoral college tie. So, with Minnesota out of the picture…
So yes. Trump’s best case… winning all the states where he leads in the polls, plus all the states where Clinton leads by less than 5%, is now to lose to Clinton by 20 electoral votes.
Now, it is important to mention that even though I call this Trump’s “best case”, it is the best case as of right now, with the polls we have today. It is May. We have months to go before the general election. A lot can change. So this doesn’t mean Trump can’t win. It just means that if today’s polling averages held, he couldn’t win.
The tipping point (the percentage you would have to move all the state polls to flip the winner) also moved toward Clinton:
All this together means that Trump is now very far behind Clinton. She has the clear advantage. A big advantage. Trump has a lot of work to do if he wants to catch up and be in a winning position by November. It is not impossible, but it will require changing a lot of minds.
Clinton vs Cruz
Oh yeah, Cruz is still in it too Cruz was still in it when this last batch of polls was taken, and he did badly as well. The latest poll in Florida didn’t change the categorization of Florida, but since Florida was the tipping point state it moved the tipping point:
Given the state of the nomination races though any combination other than Clinton vs Trump appears to be completely academic now, absent some catastrophic unexpected event.
188.8 days until polls close on election day 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.
Since the last post here on the Electoral College back on April 19th there have been new polls in Maryland, Wisconsin, North Carolina (x3), Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Indiana, and Arizona. Today the latest in Arizona and North Carolina make a difference to the ElectionGraphs.com estimates. There are two state category changes for Clinton vs Trump and one for Clinton vs Cruz. All three of these changes favor Clinton.
Clinton vs Trump
Maybe everything is going Trump’s way in the primary campaign right now, but things are heading in the opposite direction for the general election.
For quite a few months, the Clinton vs Trump poll average in North Carolina just bounced back and forth between Clinton and Trump. But as of now, the best Trump has done in the five most recent polls is a tie. The average has been trending downward since mid-March. The average is now a 5.2% Clinton lead. With that, North Carolina moves from “Weak Clinton” to “Strong Clinton”. This makes North Carolina blue enough that it isn’t considered a possible Trump pick up in the model any more.
Arizona has been very lightly polled. There have only been three polls of Clinton vs Trump so far. So the average still includes the 2008 and 2012 election results. Each of the polls so far has been worse than the last for Trump though. The average now is only a 2.5% lead for Trump. With that, it is a “Weak Trump” state that is within reach for Clinton.
With these two changes, the overall trend in the expected range of possibilities looks like this:
With North Carolina’s movement, the tipping point moved in Clinton’s direction as well:
The downward trend that started around the New Year for Trump is continuing. The current summary now looks like this:
Yes, Clinton’s best case is better than it was with Arizona as a possible pickup.
But look at Trump’s current best case.
It is a 269 to 269 electoral college tie.
Can you even imagine a Clinton vs Trump race thrown into the House of Representatives? Wow.
Of course that won’t happen. But just like a contested convention, an electoral college tie is the kind of thing that gets political junkies excited. :-)
The bottom line on Clinton vs Trump is that after peaking around the New Year, Trump has been declining ever since. He is now at the point where if you give him not only all the states he is ahead in, but also the ones where Clinton is ahead by less than 5%, he only gets to a tie.
Things will undoubtedly change as both parties transition from primary mode to general election mode. The primary season has been very bad for Trump in terms of general election polling. The types of things he has been saying and doing that are winning him the Republican nomination are at the same time souring the general election voter against him.
The question is if he can turn that around once he is the official nominee. (Assuming nothing surprising happens to stop that of course.)
Clinton vs Cruz
Oh yeah, Cruz is still in this too.
Cruz had been doing better and better in North Carolina. Until mid-March. Since then things have been moving against him. With this update, the lead in the state flips back to Clinton. This moves Cruz’s “expected case”:
The new summary looks like this:
Notice that in all four of the key metrics, the expected case, the two best cases, and the tipping point, Cruz is doing better than Trump against Clinton.
Of course, Trump is on track to be the nominee and Cruz is not, absent some sort of coup at the convention via a rules change, a last minute Trump implosion, or something like that. Republican voters do not seem to be prioritizing “electability” this time around.
191.8 days until polls start closing on election day though. A lot will change between now and then. So we shall see…
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 04:10 UTC to add the “Maybe everything is going Trump’s way…” sentence.]
[Update 04:52 UTC to add in some inexplicably missing words where a sentence stopped before it was complete.]
This week on the Curmudgeon’s Corner podcast Sam and Ivan spend most of the show on Election 2016. On the Republican side they discuss how recent results and the polls of upcoming states seem to be closing the door on the possibility of a contested convention and pointing to a straight up Trump nomination, as well as discussing Cruz/Fiorina, and what might make Trump worse than Cruz. On the Democratic side the discussion is on how Sanders seems to be finally admitting defeat, and on the veepstakes! Finally, they wrap it up with a lightning round covering all sorts of other issues they haven’t gotten around to lately.
Click below to listen or subscribe… then let us know your own thoughts!
Recorded 2016-04-28
Length this week – 1:40:24
 1-Click Subscribe in iTunes
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Show Details:
- (0:00:10-0:05:41) But First
- Agenda
- Noisy Ivan
- The Beep is Back
- (0:06:25-0:59:59) Election 2016: Republicans
- PA/MD/CT/RI/DE Results
- PA Uncommitted Delegates
- Where Trump is in the Delegate Race now
- Indiana Polls
- California Polls
- Projections for the rest of the race
- Bye Bye Contested Convention Scenarios
- Cruz/Kasich Deal
- Cruz/Fiorina 2016!
- Presidential Trump
- Trump Foreign Policy?
- Trump vs Cruz, who is worse?
- (1:01:07-1:10:29) Election 2016: Democrats
- Bernie admitting he is done?
- Veepstakes
- Median Voter vs Base
- (1:11:08-1:40:04) Lightning Round
- Bathroom Laws
- Germany/Turkey free speech issue
- Matthew Keys Case
- The Chalkening
- Tubman $20
- Movie: The Gentle Leader Way
- Brexit
- Prince
- Brazil
- Apple Earnings
- Saudi No Oil Plan
- Car vs Helicopter
Trump did very well yesterday in PA/MD/CT/RI/DE.
In pledged delegates the results were Trump 110, Kasich 5, Cruz 3.
That is a crushing win, but that is not why I say everything is falling into place. Trump did a little better than expected in pledged delegates, but a massive Trump win had been expected for awhile. This was not a surprise, and was already baked into people’s projections for the rest of the race.
Even with this built into the expectations, as of my post last week we were looking at odds between about 40% on the low side and 64% on the high side for Trump actually getting to 1237 delegates and having an outright majority before the convention. A week later, several things change that and make an outright Trump win look far more likely, and a multi-ballot convention much less likely. If it isn’t the pledged delegate results from last night, then what is it?
The first thing is the officially uncommitted delegates from Pennsylvania. In past contests Trump has done a horrible job getting his loyalists into the slots that are nominally uncommitted, or for that matter even into the slots that are bound to him on the first ballot. It was plausible to expect that Trump would do similarly poorly with Pennsylvania’s uncommitted delegates which are elected by name on the ballot… without any indication on the ballot of who they support.
But Trump appears to have gotten his act together, making sure delegate slates were available to Trump supporters and such. Between delegates that explicitly said they support Trump, and those who said they would vote the way their district went (and all of them went for Trump), Trump ends up with 45 of the 54 uncommitted delegates by my estimates. There is some ambiguity in the statements made by some of these uncommitted delegates and some other folks have estimated the number of Trump votes slightly lower. But all the estimates have Trump winning most of these delegates.
This was unexpected, and also gives more confidence of Trump’s delegate wrangling abilities going forward. (Although Pennsylvania was the biggest pot of uncommitted delegates.)
Add in the uncommitted delegates that have expressed a preference (45 Trump, 3 Cruz, 3 Kasich, 3 TBD) and 2 additional uncommitted Cruz delegates from North Dakota that I logged in the last week, and the net change since New York ends up as:
Trump +155, Cruz +8, Kasich +8.
The new raw totals look like this:
The finish line is in sight. Trump only needs 233 delegates to win this thing directly. No multi-ballot convention, just a straight up win on the first ballot.
For the first time since Super Tuesday at the beginning of March, Trump also actually has a majority of the delegates so far… 52.32% of the delegates.
But what does it take to keep that? Time for the “% of remaining delegates needed” graph:
First note that with yesterday’s results Cruz has been mathematically eliminated from the possibility of a first ballot victory. Trump is now the ONLY candidate that can win on a first ballot. Everybody else is done unless there is a brokered convention… or I suppose unless Trump drops out or something crazy like that.
Looking directly at Trump’s line… Trump needed 53.52% of the delegates to improve his position. Since New York he actually got 90.64% of the delegates. This obviously means his position improved a lot. He now only needs 42.06% of the remaining delegates to win.
That means he could do 20% worse at delegate gathering in all the remaining contests than he has so far and still win.
If the Republicans allocated delegates proportionately everywhere like the Democrats do, this would clearly be over. It would be Trump’s nomination, and we’d be done.
Because of how so many Republican states tilt the delegate results to the winner though, if the anti-Trump’s were strong, there would still be a path to block Trump.
The anti-Trump scenarios that gave us odds of a multi-ballot convention relied on three things.
The first we mentioned above… Trump’s failure to win delegates when they were selected individually instead of being bound to primary results. Trump dispensed with that in Pennsylvania.
The second was Indiana. Until the last week, Indiana had not been polled. The anti-Trump contested convention scenarios all relied on Trump losing Indiana. Well, last week Indiana was finally polled. Three times. The results? The RCP average has Trump +6.3%. Given Indiana’s delegate rules, a win like that would get Trump most of Indiana’s 57 delegates… possibly all of them. Oops. And Trump now only needs to be getting 42% of the delegates to be on pace to win.
The third was California. Trump has been ahead in the polls in California forever. But the anti-Trump folks were hoping to keep him from winning by too much and to hold down his delegate total. But in the last week of polling, Cruz has been falling and Trump has been rising, so Trump’s margins have just been growing. RCP now has a 17.4% Trump lead in their California average. Assuming Trump wins Indiana and some of the other remaining states, Trump will very likely only need 30% or less of the delegates in California in order to wrap things up. If he is winning by almost 20%, that is going to be very easy to achieve.
The simulator at The Upshot using default assumptions now shows an almost certain Trump win.
The FiveThirtyEight simulator “follow the experts” model shows Trump 27 votes short of the magic number… but they don’t include ANY of the officially uncommitted delegates that have said they support Trump. Add those in… there are just under 50 of them now depending how you count… and you are easily over 1237.
Finally, Sam Wang’s numerical simulations of the rest of the race have moved from a 64% chance of a Trump win a little over a week ago to a 94% chance today.
I see no reason to disagree with this estimate.
We are no longer on a knife’s edge between a contested convention and an outright Trump win.
#NeverTrump is now hanging on by a thread. They maybe aren’t quite as far gone as Sanders is on the Democratic side, but it is getting close. Their last hope is to try to start turning things around with a surprise win in Indiana. Even with that though, Trump’s odds look very good.
Between yesterday’s results, polls in Indiana, and polls in California, this now looks like an almost certain outright Trump win.
This is now Trump’s to lose. Given everything he has done so far that pundits thought would sink him but in fact only strengthened him, it is hard to see how exactly that would happen.
So… time to start paying more attention to Clinton vs Trump. Right now that looks like Clinton 338 to Trump 200, a 138 electoral vote win for Clinton. But things are still early, and that will change…
Update 2016-05-02 17:52 UTC: Uncommitted delegate update plus adjustment in Rhode Island. Net change: Trump +1, Cruz -2.
Update 2016-05-03 03:53 UTC: Uncommitted delegate update checking multiple sources. Net change: Cruz +2, Kasich -2, Trump -4. (See my wiki for my current best estimates of uncommitted delegate preferences.)
Update 2016-05-04 08:11 UTC: Updates (including uncommitted) in Nevada, Wyoming and North Dakota. Net change: Cruz +6, Carson -2.
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.
Even the Sanders folks are starting… just starting… to admit it might be over.
Clinton won 218 delegates yesterday. Sanders won 166.
In addition, since New York there were new superdelegate endorsements and updates in Illinois and Ohio which have netted Clinton +9, Sanders +1.
So including everything since New York, we have Clinton +227, Sanders +167.
That means Clinton got 57.61% of the delegates. She only needed 28.73%.
Meanwhile Sanders got 42.39% of the delegates. He needed 71.39%.
In practical terms this has been for over a long time. Absent a huge unexpected event of course.
But we still watch it play out.
Here are the relevant graphs:
Clinton now only needs 231 of the remaining 1200 delegates to win. That’s 19.25% of the remaining delegates.
Sanders on the other hand needs 971 of the 1200. That is 80.92%.
Guess which is most likely?
Or, of course, still, tons of Clinton superdelegates could defect and change this a bit. I wouldn’t hold my breath for that though.
Update 2016-05-01 17:08 UTC: Superdelegate updates plus change to Ohio pledged delegates. Net change: Clinton +11, 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.
Trump won New York 90 to 5. Those 5 delegates went to Kasich.
If there was any surprise here, it was that Trump got a few more delegates than expected. I didn’t track it in detail, but my impression was that most people expected a result in the 80’s.
In addition, since Wyoming there was an update to the delegate count in Georgia that moved one delegate from Trump to Cruz. So the net change since Wyoming was Trump +89, Kasich+5, Cruz +1.
So Trump got 93.68% of the delegates since Wyoming. He only needed 58.17% of the delegates. He easily cruised past this bar. So where does this put things?
In raw delegates we now have Trump 849, Cruz 559, Rubio 173, Kasich 150, Carson 9, Bush 4, Fiorina 1, Huckabee 1, Paul 1. We have 725 delegates still outstanding or uncommitted. 1237 delegates are needed to win.
In percentage terms Trump now has 48.60% of the delegates determined so far. He is very very close to the magical 50% mark, but not quite there.
So time to look at the all important “% of remaining delegates needed” graph. As mentioned in the post here about Wyoming: If Trump did as well as was expected, he would undo most, but not all, of the damage done by Cruz’s recent series of wins, and that is exactly what played out.
Trump was down to 52.22% before his series of losses. After those losses he was up to 58.17%. Now he is back down to 53.52%.
Trump needs to get at least 53.52% of the remaining delegates… including officially uncommitted delegates… to get to 1237 and win this thing outright. Even one delegate short of that, and we’re in the multi-ballot convention zone.
The next few states are all very favorable for Trump. Next Tuesday we have Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Delaware. Trump is expected to win all of them, by significant delegate margins. It is very possible that he will be over 50% of the delegates allocated so far at that point.
But then he has to keep it. Trump will still be right on the edge. He does a little worse, we have a multi-ballot convention, he does a little better, he wins on the first ballot.
So what are Trump’s odds of getting to 1237? This is unclear. But what is clear is that we are not yet at the point where we can say that either the path to an outright Trump win, or the path to a multi-ballot convention is undeniably the likeliest outcome.
Trump can still get an outright majority of delegates. This is very plausible. It is a reasonable possibility, not just a fantasy.
Some people (including me) have characterized this as a narrow path that Trump has to get nearly perfectly. That would seem to imply relatively low odds of this outcome. Maybe 10% or 20%. (Although I gave 40% as my odds in my podcast.)
On the other extreme, you have Sam Wang putting Trump’s odds of getting to 1237 at 64%. (That was before New York, but New York played out as good or better than Wang expected, so if anything that is now low.)
Looking at the simulators at The Upshot and FiveThirtyEight you see that it is still very easy to get Trump to the magic number. You usually have to use uncommitted delegates though. Trump will need to convince some more of them to come his way.
So maybe Trump is at 30% to win outright, or maybe he is at 64%. Either way, these are odds where either outcome would not be surprising. We’re basically still in the tossup zone. We are STILL right on the edge between Trump and a multi-ballot convention. And we might stay right on that edge straight through the end of the primaries and caucuses in June… or even all the way to the convention if the uncommitted delegates don’t start letting us know what their true preferences are.
Unlike the Democratic side, where Clinton has just been slowly but surely grinding out a win, here on the Republican side we have real drama. None of the others running can realistically win outright, but they CAN still stop Trump from winning outright and force a contested convention.
And so it continues…
[Update 2016-04-27 17:28 UTC: Updated uncommitted numbers from North Dakota. Net Cruz +2.]
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.
Clinton won New York 139 to 108.
This is only a surprise to Sanders supporters who were in deep denial. This is exactly as has been expected for many many weeks. The series of Sanders wins prior to this were also mostly predicted. The one exception (Michigan, where Sanders did outperform expectations) wasn’t enough of a win to actually help Sanders. The Clinton vs Sanders wins and losses have for the most part played out very close to expectations. The variations from that have only been a few delegates here or there.
The breathless talk of momentum and talk of a Sanders path to victory has mostly been due to the Sanders camp desperately trying to spin whatever narrative they have, the general public not understanding how the process works (yes, superdelegates count), the public not understanding the math (even massive Sanders wins at this point aren’t enough to catch up and win), and the media hopelessly biased toward a race being more fun to cover than just monitoring progress toward an almost inevitable result.
It has been clear since around March 6th… at the LATEST… probably earlier to be honest… that absent a major Clinton implosion, Clinton would be the nominee and Sanders wasn’t going to catch her.
And yes, yes, even today… for that matter even up until the actual votes are cast at the convention… there is still that chance of a Clinton implosion. There could be some new scandal, some new health event, or something else, that causes even Clinton supporters to abandon her. That would potentially change everything, even if Clinton already has things wrapped up mathematically.
Absent that though, this result has been clear for a long time, and we are just watching the steps to get there.
In addition to New York, since the last democratic contest in Wyoming there have been a variety of superdelegate changes, plus revised results from Colorado. The net result of all of those was Sanders +5, Clinton -2. Those are good numbers for Sanders, but small.
Add in New York and the results since Wyoming are Clinton +137, Sanders +113.
That means Clinton got 54.80% of the delegates. She only needed 32.23%.
Sanders got 45.20% of the delegates. He needed 67.84%.
So the already nearly impossible Sanders path gets even more remote.
I don’t usually post the raw delegate count graph, but we are now in sight of the finish line.
We now have Clinton 1925, Sanders 1245, O’Malley 1. With 1594 delegates still to be determined, and 2383 needed to win the nomination.
You can see that since primaries and caucuses began (around the 9% mark), with only a few exceptions here and there, the pace at which both candidates have collected delegates has been pretty steady. (If you look at this with a date axis it looks much more jagged, but this is all just distortion caused by the way the states happened to be scheduled, looking at % allocated removes this distortion and allows you to look more cleanly at the actual trends.)
Clinton has been consistently ahead, and except for a few short exceptions has been gradually increasing her lead.
It is clear even from this chart that to catch up before we get to 100% there would need to be a dramatic change, not just a small improvement on the Sanders side.
But lets look at the more telling “% of remaining delegates needed” graph:
Sanders now needs 71.39% of the remaining delegates (including the remaining superdelegates) to catch up and win the nomination.
Meanwhile, Clinton only needs 28.73% of the remaining delegates.
Or, as always, this changes if a massive wave of Clinton superdelegates start changing their minds and going over to Sanders. That hasn’t happened so far, and absent the Clinton implosion discussed earlier, is very unlikely to happen now.
We will probably still keep hearing about it not being over until the vote at the convention because the superdelegates might change their minds though. Because they CAN change their minds. But they tend not to. It is over. It has been for a long time.
Absent the Clinton implosion of course.
[Edit 16:42 UTC to add the raw delegate totals.]
[Update 2016-04-24 00:13 UTC – Superdelegate scan: Clinton +2]
[Update 2016-04-26 16:18 UTC – Superdelegate scan and updates in Illinois and Ohio. Net change: Clinton +3, Sanders +1.]
[Update 2016-04-27 16:55 UTC – Superdelegate scan: Clinton +4]
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.
Since the last update on the Electoral College picture there have been polls in Wisconsin, California (x2), Mississippi, Virginia, Pennsylvania (x2), Maryland (x2), New York (x5), Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Utah, and Georgia. The only one of these that resulted in a change in the overall 2016 electoral college summary was the poll in Georgia.
That poll was bad news for both Trump and Cruz. It showed both of them losing to Clinton. We don’t pay attention to individual polls of course, we look at the averages. But in both cases adding in this new poll drops the Republican lead in Georgia to less than 5%, which means that Georgia may be in play for Clinton this year. Georgia hasn’t been blue since 24 years ago when it voted for another Clinton in 1992.
Lets look specifically at the two match-ups here:
Clinton vs Trump
Georgia has been sparsely polled. It was not particularly expected to be a swing state. For Clinton vs Trump we only have three polls and so are still using the 2012 and 2008 election results to fill in the poll average. This new poll represents a really large move from the others as well, so there is a potential that future polls will show it to be an outlier.
But with those caveats, we now only have a 3.6% lead for Trump, which is close enough that we include picking up Georgia in Clinton’s “best case”.
Clinton’s best case, where she wins not only the states she is ahead in, but also picks up the states where she is currently less than 5% behind… that would currently be Colorado (1.9% Trump lead), Georgia (3.6% Trump lead), and Missouri (4.7% Trump lead)… is now a 208 electoral vote win. The last time the margin was that large was when Bill Clinton beat Bob Dole with a 220 electoral vote margin in 1996.
Keep in mind however that this is Clinton’s best case. The “expected” result is a narrower 138 electoral vote win. That is in between Obama’s win in 2012 (126 electoral votes) and his win in 2008 (192 electoral votes).
Trump’s best case, where he picks up all six of the weak Clinton states (North Carolina, Iowa, Florida, Ohio, Nevada, and Minnesota) is still to pull out a 30 electoral vote win.
The downward trend in Trump’s general election polling that started in January continues. The questions are “How far does he fall before he bottoms?” and “Can Trump rebound after that?”.
Assuming he is the nominee of course.
Time to look at the other contender:
Clinton vs Cruz
Like Clinton vs Trump, there have only been three polls of Clinton vs Cruz, but in this case one of the three is much older. We’re still filling the average with the 2012 and 2008 election results as well.
With the new poll, Cruz’s lead in Georgia is down to only 1.4%. Unlike the Clinton vs Cruz case we actually have two polls showing a similar result, so the case that this is just an outlier is a little weaker.
In any case, the average now shows Georgia as a close state.
Clinton’s best case here improves to winning by 188 electoral votes.
Comparing Cruz and Trump, Cruz is doing better in the tipping point metric, in his worst case, and his expected case. He and Trump tie in their best case, with the narrow 30 electoral vote win.
Cruz’s trend has also generally been an improving trend. Today’s change is actually notable for being only the third decline for Cruz in my summary in the last year.
This decline then brings up the opposite question than the one we asked about Trump. Rather than asking when we will reach a bottom, with Cruz the question is when he will peak.
203.4 days until the general election polls start to close.
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.
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.
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