Update, April 19, 2016, 11:55 p.m. ET: That’s a wrap for tonight. With 95 percent of the vote counted, Hillary Clinton is claiming victory in the New York primary with 58 percent of the vote to 42 percent for Bernie Sanders on the Democratic side. With 95 percent of the vote counted on the Republican side, Donald Trump is at exactly 60 percent of the vote to 25.2 percent for Ohio Gov. John Kasich and 14.8 percent for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. Right now it looks like Trump might actually lose one of those districts to Kasich, which would mean he’d only claim 90 of 95 delegates in the state (with Kasich getting five), a big win anyway you cut it.
The next contests will be next Tuesday in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island. Trump is poised to do very well a week from now according to the latest polling, while Clinton is also set to have another big night. Both are again looking more and more like they will be the nominees, even if the road is a bit tougher for Donald J. Trump.
Update, April 19, 2016, 10:35 p.m. ET: Looking back from July’s Republican National Convention, Tuesday’s New York primary could be thought of as the night Donald Trump secured the nomination. Trump still has a long road ahead, but CNN and other networks called that he will win the state with more than 50 percent of the vote—which would mean he would claim all 14 of the state’s at-large delegates and have a good shot at practically sweeping the rest of the state’s 95 delegates.
Trump still needs to cross that 50 percent threshold in the state’s individual districts in order to claim a maximum number of delegates, but it looks like he might be doing that in most places. In 16 districts, Trump was above 59 percent of the vote. In eight additional districts, he was above 50 percent of the vote. He didn’t trail in a single district, although John Kasich was neck and neck with him in one district and had a chance to claim as many as four delegates total. Trump needs to reach the 50 percent threshold in individual districts to win all three delegates per district, rather than just two out of the three.
Whatever happens in individual districts, though, at this point it looks like Tuesday is going to be a huge delegate haul for him. Such a victory solidifies his delegate lead and gives him a very reasonable path to the 1,237 delegates he needs to clinch the Republican nomination on the first ballot. He seemed to recognize as such, giving a cautious victory speech that focused on core elements of his stump speech and pre-emptively chastised the party for any attempts it might make to block his nomination.
Trump noted that he had won millions of votes more than his remaining challengers—Sen. Ted Cruz and Gov. John Kasich—and that he has an enormous delegate lead with favorable electoral terrain ahead. He also said that the Republican party should not try to “take an election away” from the runaway vote and delegate leader.
“It’s really nice to win the delegates with the votes. You know, it’s really nice,” Trump said. “Nobody should be given delegates, which is a ticket to victory and it’s not a fair ticket, and even though we’re leading by a lot and we can’t be caught, it’s impossible to catch us, nobody should take delegates and claim victory unless they get those delegates with voters and voting.”
As rambling as his statement was, Trump does have a point that the nomination should ideally reflect the will of the voters, especially when that will is so clear. But based on the outcome in New York, it may not even be an issue come convention time: Trump may get his win cleanly.
Update, April 19, 2016, 9:45 p.m. ET: Hillary Clinton has won the New York Democratic primary. It looks like CNN’s exit poll that indicated a close race was way off, with the network now calling the race for Clinton along with NBC News and ABC News. With 41 percent of the vote counted, Clinton is running away with the victory with 60.5 percent of the vote to Bernie Sanders’$2 39.5 percent. If she keeps up these margins, it could be a very big night for Clinton indeed and—in terms of delegate math—a virtual knockout blow. One can’t help but wondering, though, whether issues with affidavit ballots may be playing a part in the enormous apparent difference between the exit poll and the ultimate result.
Update, April 19, 2016, 9:25 p.m. ET: The Democratic race is too close to call early on with CNN’s exit poll showing a 52-48 lead for Hillary Clinton. If the margin is that close, or if she loses by a slim margin, it will be a hugely disappointing night for the former senator from New York who won the state handily in her 2008 primary fight with Barack Obama, even if it doesn’t alter the fundamental dynamics of the race.
According to CNN’s exit polls, Clinton and Bernie Sanders had virtually reciprocal numbers in the exit polls depending on the age group: 61 percent of voters 18 to 44 years old voted for Sanders and 39 percent voted for Clinton, while 61 percent of voters 45 and older voted for Clinton and 38 percent voted for Sanders. CNN’s exit polls had voters over 45 making up 59 percent of the Democratic electorate, which would indicate a Clinton win.
On the Republican side, Donald Trump appears to have won New York voters handily with groups across educational and income backgrounds. According to CNN’s exit polls, Trump won voters with a high school education or less with 67 percent of the vote, voters with some college education with 59 percent, college graduates with 53 percent, and voters with postgraduate educations with 50 percent. He actually fared better with wealthier voters than with poorer ones, winning 50 percent of voters earning between $30,000 and $50,000 a year, 59 percent of voters making between $50,000 and $100,000 a year, and 61 percent of voters making more than $100,000. Crucially, he won 64 percent of voters who considered terrorism the most important issue of this election, a group that made up a full quarter of the electorate. That goes to show you that, in the Republican primary at least, his disgraceful proposed policy of banning Muslim immigrants and his inability to distinguish 9/11 from 7/11 has not hurt him, and the former likely helped.
Update, April 19, 2016, 9:00 p.m. ET: Donald Trump has won the New York Republican primary as we all knew he would, with CNN calling his victory the moment the polls closed in the state on Tuesday.
Now it’s just a matter of seeing how large of a victory it ends up being, which matters towards his delegate count in the state, which matters towards his total delegate count, which matters towards whether he will actually be the nominee. We’ll update you with those numbers as they come in, along with exit polls that might indicate the direction that race is going. But it’s looking like it could be a good night for Trump, one that sets him back on the path towards a first-ballot victory at July’s Republican National Convention.
Update, April 19, 2016, 8:35 p.m. ET: There’s actually one big reason why the New York Democratic primary could be consequential on Tuesday: It could lead to voting reform in the state. The New York City Board of Elections has confirmed that more than 125,000 voters had been removed from the rolls, with those voters who had been purged and showed up having to sign affidavit ballots.
“The people of New York City have lost confidence that the Board of Elections can effectively administer elections and we intend to find out why the BOE is so consistently disorganized, chaotic and inefficient,” New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer said in calling for an audit. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio also promised to investigate the issue.
This wasn’t even the first bit of controversy around voting in New York. As Josh Voorhees noted earlier on Tuesday, Bernie Sanders and his supporters were fuming over the state’s rules that made it particularly difficult to vote in its closed primaries compared to other states.
Original post: Welcome to Slate’s coverage of the New York primaries. We’ve got two really interesting and important contests to watch here on Tuesday: The first is to see if Donald Trump can claim a resounding victory in the Republican primary in his home state to reclaim momentum heading into a series of potentially crucial Northeastern and mid-Atlantic primaries where he should do well. The second is to see whether Trump can capture the 50 percent threshold he needs in individual districts in order to come close to sweeping the state’s delegate count and putting himself back on track towards the 1,237 delegates he would need to claim the Republican nomination on the first ballot.
The much less interesting contest is the one that the majority of New York voters care most about, but which is far, far less meaningful than they’d like to believe it is. That’s the race between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton on the Democratic side, which Clinton appears almost certainly poised to win. This race is more interesting to New Yorkers but less important because with a win in New York—no matter what the margin—Clinton will have all but sewed up the Democratic nomination, or at least solidified the delegate and popular vote lead that should determine such things. Clinton led Sanders by 2.3 million votes and more than 240 pledged delegates heading into the evening, and the only way for him to make ground on her was to start winning big states like New York and fast. The excellent site PoliChart has been tracking what Sanders has to do to overcome Clinton’s lead, and heading into Tuesday it calculated that he needed to win New York by eight points and 19 delegates to stay on track to eventually overcome his current deficit (if he were to run the table in other crucial states).
Sanders did not appear poised to do that in New York, trailing by nearly 13 points in the last RealClearPolitics polling average. As my colleague Josh Voorhees noted earlier on Tuesday “Nate Silver and his FiveThirtyEight team give Sanders a 1 percent chance of pulling off the upset.” There was in fact one early exit poll out of New York that seemed to indicate which direction this race was headed. ABC News asked Democratic voters “who inspires you about the future of the country” and—as of a few hours before polls closed—52 were saying Clinton and only 47 percent were saying Sanders.
Considering Sanders’ whole deal is inspiring voters and Clinton’s whole deal is hinting that voters who might be inspired by Sanders should suck it up and vote for her because she’s better prepared for the job, the fact that Clinton won this by any margin is not a good sign for the Vermont senator.
Who knows, maybe we, Nate Silver, and a bunch of pollsters will be eating crow at the end of the night. But this particular early exit doesn’t make it look that way. In the meantime, stay tuned for important updates on the Republican race, which could actually have a significant impact on who our next president is, and less important updates on the Democratic one, which very likely won’t.
