FIVETHIRTYEIGHT
You ever feel like you don’t know exactly how to interpret an election night? That’s how I feel about the Republican side of the aisle after Tuesday.... Given that Trump won
every state except for the home state of another candidate, it has to be considered a good night for him. And yet, the main question — are we going to a contested convention? — remains unanswered.
The good news for Trump is that he won the most delegates on Tuesday, and was able to make up for the 66 delegates he lost in Ohio by winning Illinois and Missouri, which could bring as many as 95 delegates, depending on how the district allocation shakes out.
Moreover, Trump performed strongly in all the states that voted Tuesday. He won 36 percent of the vote in Ohio, 39 percent in Illinois, 40 percent in North Carolina, 41 percent in Missouri and 46 percent in Florida. His average performance was 40.3 percent. That’s far above his average 34.6 percent that he had on March 1....there isn’t any sign that Trump’s support is falling. If anything, these results suggest it may be somewhat rising.
The bad news for Trump is pretty clear: even with Missouri, he still has won only a little more than 47 percent of the delegates allocated so far. Moreover, he’ll need to win a little more than 54 percent of the remaining delegates to win the nomination on the first ballot. That’s certainly possible given there are several winner-take-all states to come, and Trump may do well in big East Coast states such as New York and New Jersey. Trump is also in a good position in Arizona, a winner-take-all state that votes next Tuesday.
Still, there are plenty of ways the delegate math can go haywire for him. My own delegate estimate has Trump falling short of the 1,237 delegates he needs because he has done poorly in the west so far, and many of those states haven’t voted yet. It’s also possible that Kasich plays better than we might think among moderate voters in the remaining states to vote in New England and Mid-Atlantic.
Moreover, there are plenty of signs that Trump would have lost a majority of states that voted on Tuesday had Rubio not been in the race. I’m talking about Missouri and North Carolina, where Ted Cruz beat Trump in a one-on-one race in the exit polls. Trump may be rising, though he is still not getting close to a majority of the vote in most states. If the anti-Trump voters can find a better way to coordinate behind one candidate, they probably can beat Trump in a lot of upcoming contests.
When you put it all together, I think the result on Tuesday can best be defined as messy. Trump is likely to have a plurality of delegates after all the contests have finished up on June 7. But a majority? We still don’t know.
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If Trump stumbles at all, or if he has a bad night in California, he could end up with almost 1,237 delegates, but not quite. At that point, another question comes into play -- what about the delegates that have been awarded to other candidates, like Rubio?...Most delegates are bound to candidates for the first vote at the convention. When we talk about Trump's aim for 1,237 delegates, we're talking about the ones that are bound to him.
While state rules vary, a lot of the delegates from former candidates will enter the convention "unbound," able to vote for whichever candidate they wish. Former RNC counsel Ben Ginsberg noted on MSNBC on Tuesday night that there are already several hundred delegates that are in that pool. Theoretically, then, a Ted Cruz -- or a Donald Trump -- could get commitments from those delegates that get them a lot closer to (or past) that 1,237 threshold.
Which is why it's important who those people are -- as in, who the actual delegates are, where they're from, what their politics are. At Bloomberg, Sasha Issenberg has great look at how campaigns are fighting to make sure that even delegates bound to candidates might back their guy as a second choice once it comes time to vote at the convention.
The summary here is ugly. It's very hard to say whether or not Donald Trump can lock up a majority of delegates before the convention, and it's very hard to say whether or not he'd prevail in voting at the convention if he didn't. There are simply too many moving parts.
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But [it does appear that]he’s pretty unlikely to get those 1,237 delegates he needs before June 7, when California is the big prize and five other states also vote.
How unlikely?
We crunched the numbers and figured out that Trump would need to win a whopping 74 percent of the available delegates prior to that date. That includes the 652 delegates at stake in contests held between now and June 7, as well as the 104 delegates that haven't yet been awarded from states that have already voted. Trump would need to win 559 of those 756 delegates.
Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, by contrast, wouldn’t even win the Republican nomination before June 7 if he won all 756 of those delegates.
Is it possible that Trump dominates for the next two months and wraps it up before the final day? Sure. The problem is that, while big, winner-take-all states gave Trump a boost Tuesday, the remaining winner-take-all states are smaller, and there are only seven of them.
There are several other, “winner-take-most” states where Trump could effectively win all of the delegates if he dominates. But again, he would need to dominate.
Secondly, there is some evidence to suggest that, as the nominating contest begins to take in more states in the West and Midwest, Trump doesn’t do quite as well as he did in the South or even the Northeast. Thus far, Cruz has actually won more delegates in the West, and Ohio Gov. John Kasich has won more in the Midwest.
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Plenty of open questions [remain]....Trump has very much demonstrated that he has a ceiling in this race. He has yet to win a majority of the votes in any given state.
And now that Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida is out of the race, that could start to become more of the problem. Trump could break through that ceiling and really dominate a two- or three-candidate race going forward. But if he can’t, we’re headed for the final day of the primary season — when each of California’s 53 congressional districts will separately determine whether this thing goes all the way to the Republican National Convention.