This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter).
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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.]
Sanders won Maine 16 delegates to 9 for Clinton.
In addition, further updates to Louisiana since yesterday gave Sanders 2 more delegates and Clinton 2 less.
So effectively, as 25 new delegates were added, Sanders increased his total by 18. So 72%. Way more than the 60.26% I said he needed to be on track to catch up and win. So how does that look on the big chart?
Yeah, see that little tiny change in direction at the ends of the green and red lines? That’s it.
Sanders did indeed improve his position in the race by winning Maine by a nice large margin. Yesterday he needed 60.26% of the remaining delegates to win. Today he needs… 60.17% of the remaining delegates.
Clinton of course also had a little setback. Instead of needing 39.80% of the remaining delegates, she now needs 39.90%.
Yeah, not much of a change, is it.
After the slight speed bump in Maine, Clinton’s march to the nomination continues…
Update 2016-03-09 03:19 UTC – Full superdelegate scan in preparation for adding new delegate results. Net Clinton +4, Sanders +3. Also 1 additional delegate added to the total number of delegates. This of course does not change the analysis above significantly.
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.
Rubio walked away with 71% of the vote in Puerto Rico. Anything more than 50% meant that he got 100% of Puerto Rico’s 23 delegates.
In addition, some of the TBD delegates in Louisiana were determined since the post about the March 5th results. Rubio picked up 5 delegates while Cruz picked up 1. There are still 5 more delegates TBD from Louisiana. It looks like Louisiana’s rules state these should be officially uncommitted delegates, but the national rules don’t allow that this year, so… we’ll see what happens.
Anyway, that means since the last update, Rubio got 28 of 29 delegates… 96.55%! He had needed only 69.50% to be on track to catch up and win outright!
Uh, of course, nobody expects Rubio to continue at this pace in the next few states.
So lets look at where this puts the “% of remaining delegates needed to win” for the whole field:
You see that dip downward for Rubio? He does actually improve this time around. Now he only needs 68.94% of the remaining delegates to catch up and win! That still seems unlikely given he only has 17.09% of the delegates so far, but at least he went in the right direction for once.
In the mean time, everybody else’s position got worse.
Specifically, Trump moved from needing 52.88% of the remaining delegates to needing 53.85%. For each contest where he fails to reach his needed percentage, the bar for the remaining contests gets higher.
The current delegate totals are: Trump 391, Cruz 304, Rubio 154, Kasich 37… and 15 for people who have dropped out.
Next up on Tuesday for the Republicans are Hawaii, Idaho, Michigan and Mississippi. Lets take a quick look at how they look if we assume today’s RCP poll averages…
Michigan (59 delegates):
- RCP Poll average: 37.3% Trump, 19.8% Cruz, 16.8% Kasich, 15.2% Rubio
- Estimated delegates: 25 Trump, 13 Cruz, 11 Kasich, 10 Rubio
Mississippi (40 delegates):
- Only recent poll: 41% Trump, 17% Cruz, 16% Rubio, 8% Kasich, 5% Carson
- Estimated delegates: 24 Trump, 10 Cruz, 6 Rubio
Idaho (32 delegates):
- No polls, using national average: 35.6% Trump, 19.8% Cruz, 17.4% Rubio, 9.0% Carson, 8.8% Kasich
- Estimated delegates: 32 Trump
Hawaii (19 delegates):
- No polls, using national average: 35.6% Trump, 19.8% Cruz, 17.4% Rubio, 9.0% Carson, 8.8% Kasich
- Estimated delegates: 10 Trump, 5 Cruz, 2 Rubio, 1 Carson, 1 Kasich
Now, Michigan has a bunch of recent polls. Mississippi’s only recent poll is from the last week of February, which isn’t that long ago, but a lot has happened in that week. And I don’t trust using national numbers for Idaho and Hawaii at all really, but that is the best I can do with no polling at all. So where does this get us:
Projected total for March 8th: Trump +91, Cruz +28, Rubio +18, Kasich +12, Carson +1
With these projections, Trump would get 60.67% of the delegates on March 8th. That would be more than the 53.85% of the delegates he would need to improve his position.
The new totals would be: Trump 482, Cruz 332, Rubio 172, Kasich 49… and 16 for people who have dropped out.
Doing the rest of the math, that is a total of 1051 delegates. 1421 delegates would still be available. Trump would need 755 more delegates to win outright, which would be 53.13% of the remaining delegates.
So Trump would have improved his position, but not by very much.
The above assumes that the current polls hold of course. The results this weekend may indicate that Trump has been weakened by the events of the last week. If so, he may significantly underperform these estimates, putting him in a worse position. So these may be estimates that are optimistic for Trump.
And that still keeps us in the contested convention zone. For now.
Trump’s big chance to break out of that won’t come until March 15th with Florida and Ohio’s 165 winner take all delegates.
Until then, watch to see if Trump is able to match his 53.85% target line on Tuesday.
Update 2016-03-09 03:32 UTC – Update to get ready for tonight’s results. New Oklahoma estimates add one delegate for Cruz, subtract one from Trump. This does not significantly 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.
While we still have a live possibility of a contested convention, Donald Trump is still the Republican frontrunner and with the latest polls in Michigan, Trump weakens further against Clinton:
Those polls look like the long summer of Trump may be over, at least in Michigan. Trump was never leading in Michigan, but for awhile it seemed like he might make it close. The newest poll may be an outlier, no way to tell without more polling. But for now, Michigan seems like it is reverting to being a “Strong Clinton” state.
This takes Michigan out of the list of states that could easily go either way in a Clinton vs Trump general election and lower’s Trump’s best case:
Trump’s best case drops from winning by 102 electoral votes to only winning by 70. The “expected” case remains Clinton winning by 50 electoral votes.
Looking at the spectrum of states, the “tipping point” has also changed. It used to be Michigan where before the latest poll Clinton had led by 3.6%. It is now Nevada where Clinton leads by 3.9%. This is the worst the tipping point has been for Trump since the beginning of Clinton vs Trump polling:
This trend is not one Trump should be happy about, but make no mistake… it is still a close race. A 3.9% lead can disappear in an instant. Just three states (Iowa, Ohio and Nevada) have to flip to make Trump the winner.
247.2 days until polls start to close. Stay tuned.
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.
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.
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