The Slatest

What to Watch for in New York Tonight

Bernie Sanders greets supporters after a rally on April 11 in Binghamton, New York.

Brett Carlsen/Getty Images

It’s that time again! New Yorkers will get their say in the presidential primaries on Tuesday, with all signs pointing to a Republican win for a native son and a Democratic victory for an adopted daughter. Here’s what you need to know.

The Basics

The Democratic primary—like all of the party’s primaries—will split its pledged delegate pot proportionally based on the final results. The GOP contest, meanwhile, is a good deal more complicated: Fourteen at-large delegates will be awarded based on the statewide vote, with another three handed out according to the individual results in each of the state’s 27 congressional districts. In the event a GOP candidate garners 50 percent of the statewide vote, he’ll take home all of the at-large delegates; if he doesn’t, he’ll split them proportionally with any rival who cracks 20 percent. It’s a similar case in the individual districts. If the winner reaches 50 percent, he claims all three delegates; if not, he wins two delegates and the second-place finisher will snag the third. Voting ends at 9 p.m. across the state.

The Republicans

Trump has had a rough few weeks. He lost by double digits in the Wisconsin primary earlier this month and has since taken an even greater beating in the under-the-radar battle to fill this summer’s delegate roster with loyalists that could decide the nomination in the event of a contested convention. Tuesday won’t fix all that ails him—but it should be the first in a string of upcoming wins that will shift the focus from what’s gone wrong for Trump to what may still go right.

There’s little doubt that the celebrity billionaire will be declared the winner in New York shortly after the polls close. He leads his two rivals by 30-plus points in the RealClearPolitics running average, and FiveThirtyEight pegs his chance at victory at greater than 99 percent. The question, though, is not whether Trump will win—but by how much. Based on the polls, Trump appears a solid bet to reach the 50 percent mark in the statewide vote, which will allow him to sweep all 14 at-large delegates. But polling at the district level is much harder to come by—in large part because registered Republicans are few and far between in some of New York City’s deep blue districts.

One of the few polling outfits that attempted to dive into the individual districts found that Trump was leading in all 27 but not by the margins he’ll need to sweep the night. According to those results, which were provided to Politico last week, Trump was well above the 50 percent threshold in only five districts, within the margin of error in another 14 districts, and below that threshold in the remaining eight. If those numbers prove accurate, Trump could walk away with as few as 65 delegates (if all those districts where he’s not comfortably above 50 percent break against him), or as many as 87 (if those where he’s within the margin of error all go his way). Assuming he’s somewhere in that window, his net gain on Tuesday will more than make up for the ground he lost in Wisconsin earlier in the month—but still won’t be enough to put him back on pace to avoid a contested convention.

The Democrats

Bernie Sanders is currently on a hot streak. He posted commanding victories in two of the three March 22 contests and then reeled off five straight statewide wins in the contests that followed: Alaska, Hawaii, and Washington on March 26; Wisconsin on April 5; and Wyoming on April 9. That streak is likely to come to an end in the state where he was born. Sanders trails Hillary Clinton by nearly 13 points in the RealClearPolitics rolling New York average, and he hasn’t been within single digits of the former New York senator in a single major poll taken in the state this year. Nate Silver and his FiveThirtyEight team give Sanders a 1 percent chance of pulling off the upset.

Bernie is hoping for a repeat of last month’s Michigan primary, where he was an even larger underdog in the polls but still went on to win. History, though, seems particularly unlikely to repeat itself in New York given the state’s demographic makeup includes far more minority voters than in those states where Sanders has fared best this year. Unlike in Michigan, the New York primary is open only to registered Democrats, and the deadline to register for new voters was last month, while the deadline to switch parties for existing voters was roughly six months ago—which should mean fewer of the younger and independent-minded voters that have helped fuel his campaign this year.

A loss on Tuesday would mean more than just an end to Sanders’ “momentum”; it also would tilt the delegate math even more in Clinton’s favor. According to the Associated Press estimates, Hillary enters Tuesday leading by 261 pledged delegates and by nearly 700 total when you factor in superdelegates. After New York, there will be fewer than 1,500 pledged delegates still up for grabs—in other words, Bernie is running out of time. He can, and likely will, soldier on, since his camp maintains that those Clinton-backing superdelegates could still change their minds—an incredibly unlikely but still technically possible development. But his argument for why they should will start to unravel as his path to a majority of pledged delegates narrows even more.

Read more of Slate’s coverage of the 2016 campaign.