We’re now a little more than halfway through the 2016 primary season. Hillary Clinton is the prohibitive favorite to win enough Democratic delegates to easily capture her party’s nomination this summer. Donald Trump is all but certain to win the most Republican delegates between now and his party’s convention, but not necessarily enough to assure himself the GOP slot in the general election. Tuesday’s nominating contests—in Utah and Arizona for the Republicans; in Utah, Arizona, and Idaho for the Democrats—are near-perfect illustrations of why that is. Let’s take a closer look.
The Republicans
Thanks to a split field, Trump has built a commanding lead in the delegate race despite winning less than 40 percent of the votes cast in GOP primaries and caucuses this year. Of the three men still in the race, Trump is the only one with a realistic chance of securing the 1,237 delegates needed to win the nomination on the first ballot at this summer’s convention. According to the Associated Press’ estimates, he needs to win about 53 percent of the remaining delegates to hit that magic number. That won’t be easy, but it’s certainly possible given the winner-take-all and winner-take-most GOP contests that dot the remainder of the primary calendar. Ted Cruz would need to win about 78 percent of the remaining delegates, a near-impossible task, while John Kasich would need to win 105 percent, an actually impossible task. Yet both soldier on in the fight to force a contested convention, where each hopes their fellow #NeverTrump Republicans will be so thankful for their efforts that they’ll hand them the nomination.
So how will Tuesday night fit in? Polling has been few and far between in Utah and Arizona, but the numbers we do have suggest any suspense tonight won’t be about the actual statewide winners. In the most recent Arizona poll—taken after Marco Rubio dropped out—Trump led Cruz by 13 points and Kasich by 29 while Nate Silver and his FiveThirtyEight team put the odds of a Trump victory at about 93 percent. Meanwhile, in the most recent Utah poll—also taken after Rubio’s exit—Cruz leads Kasich by 24 points and Trump by a whopping 42, and FiveThirtyEight sees Cruz with a 98 percent chance of victory. If those numbers hold up when the votes are actually cast—never a certainty, particularly when polling has been so sparse—Trump will again be the one walking away with the lion’s share of delegates. And, once again, the Trump-favoring status quo will have been the result of an unholy combination of a split field and the way Republicans dole out delegates.
The Republican primary in Arizona—where Trump’s make-Mexico-build-a-wall rhetoric plays particularly well among immigration hard-liners—is a winner-take-all affair, meaning Trump can pick up all of the state’s 58 delegates with only a plurality of the vote, as he did in Florida earlier this month. Meanwhile, the GOP caucus in Utah—where Trump-skeptical Mormons are expected to hand him a rare defeat—is only a winner-take-all contest if one candidate wins a majority of the vote. If someone doesn’t, the 40 delegates will be handed out proportionally, meaning Trump will still add to his total even if he get trounced by 30-plus points. This is where the split field comes in, along with the Stop Trump crowd’s remarkable inability to pick a single horse and stick with it. In FiveThirtyEight’s current polling average, Cruz sits at exactly 50 percent, meaning a point either way will decide whether Cruz wins all of Utah’s delegates or if Trump goes home with a handful of his own. And Kasich represents more than a point either way—he’s currently polling at around 25 percent.
If Cruz comes up just shy of a majority in Utah on Tuesday night, Republicans looking to assign blame for blowing an easy opportunity to deny Trump a few delegates won’t have a shortage of targets. First and foremost, there will be Kasich, who spent part of the weekend campaigning in Utah despite the fact his ostensible chief goal—stopping Trump—is better achieved by denying the Donald a delegate than winning one for himself. Then, too, there is the GOP establishment in Utah, which has been incapable of choosing between Kasich and Cruz. Mitt Romney and current Utah Gov. Gary Herbert are telling Republicans to vote for Cruz, former Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt is backing Kasich, and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman has been unwilling to choose between the two. Much like we’ve seen play out on the national stage for nearly a year now, the anybody-but-Trump plan that could work in Utah in theory is in danger of becoming an everybody-but-Trump strategy that splits the vote and fails in reality.
The Democrats
Polling is even harder to come by for Tuesday’s Democratic contests, but the numbers we do have suggest the status quo. Bernie Sanders is expected to be competitive—and perhaps even victorious—in Utah, where 33 pledged delegates are up for grabs on Tuesday, and in Idaho, where another 23 are. Any delegate advantages he wins in those predominantly white states, though, are likely to be offset and then some by what is expected to be a relatively easy Clinton victory in Arizona, a more diverse state that will award 75 pledged delegates that night.
The most recent state polls show Hillary leading Bernie by more than 25 points in Arizona, and Sanders on top in Utah by only single digits. (No one seems to have any idea what Democrats are thinking in Idaho, though the demographic makeup of likely caucusgoers there suggest Sanders should do well.) It’s possible, then, that Bernie wins two of Tuesday’s three contests and Hillary nonetheless wakes up on Wednesday with an even larger delegate lead than she had this morning—just as she has after every single multicontest date on the Democratic primary calendar this year.
Sanders and his supporters don’t want to hear it, but the cold, hard math means that something catastrophic will need to happen to Clinton’s campaign for him to win the nomination. He can win a few more states, but those battles won’t help him win the delegate war. According to the Associated Press’ estimates, Hillary needs to win only about a third of the outstanding delegates still up for grabs—an incredibly low bar for a major candidate in a two-person race given the proportional way Democrats award delegates. While there is still a battle being fought in the GOP, the Democrats have essentially already decided.
Read more of Slate’s coverage of the 2016 campaign.
