Last night, Republican frontrunner Donald Trump posted a substantial – though not unexpected – pickup of delegates in what has become known as the “Acela Express” primary covering the states of Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island.
However, despite Trump’s strong showing, the trajectory of the race has changed little. Trump was widely expected to win the overwhelming majority of delegates in all five states. Consequently, last night’s victory has done little to change the overall delegate calculus or bring Trump closer to a path towards the threshold of 1237 delegates required for nomination on the first ballot.
Despite this victory, fierce competition in the race continues, with only two major remaining sources of uncertainty remaining: namely, Indiana, which allocates 57 delegates in an open primary on May 3rd, and California, which allocates 172 delegates in a closed primary on June 7th. Based on currently known dynamics, the outcome of this race is likely to be decided by the resolution of extant uncertainties in those two.
Last night, Trump won every county in all five states holding primaries, adding 109 explicitly bound delegates to his total, in addition to a probable 40 supportive but unbound delegates in Pennsylvania, known for its odd manner of directly electing unbound delegates.
Unlike most other states, Pennsylvania employs an archaic method of district delegate allocation under which three delegates from each of its 18 Congressional districts, for a total of 54, are directly elected on the ballot in a state-run primary, alongside the presidential preference contest.
According to a cursory analysis performed by Bearing Drift, Trump’s campaign was successful in electing 31 of its loyalists as delegates, while the campaign of Ted Cruz fell short, electing only four reliable supporters of its own.
Of the remainder, ten remain explicitly uncommitted, while nine have pledged to support their district’s top vote winner.
This latter group presents the greatest difficulty in preparing an accurate first ballot headcount. As none of these 19 are explicitly involved in the process for the sake of helping their personally-chosen candidate, their first ballot votes remain subject to their own personal inclinations and the post-mortem judgement of voters back home.
Observers cannot be sure that the nine pledging support to the top vote winner will carry through on their promise, though most probably will, leaving Trump with the lion’s share of this group of nine.
Meanwhile, those who avoided any explicit associations in a race essentially constituting a referendum on Trump should be considered driven by overarching strategic concerns – most notably, which nominee is, per their view, in the best interests of the party.
Therefore, as out-of-state observers count heads, the best estimate of Pennsylvania’s delegation would assign 57 delegates to Trump, four delegates to Cruz, and ten in opposition to Trump.
With Pennsylvania delegates summarily allocated, the night’s total delegate pickups stand with Trump gaining 149, Cruz gaining 7, and Kasich gaining 5, leaving the remaining contenders at 994, 566, and 153, respectively – though, at this point, delegate totals for Cruz and Kasich are irrelevant, given the mathematical impossibility of either securing 1237 on the first ballot.
To reach his threshold, Trump must gain an additional 243 of the race’s 502 remaining delegates, or roughly 48.4% of delegates yet to be bound.
In counting delegates in the remaining states, Trump will most certainly win all of New Jersey’s 51 delegates, to be allocated on a statewide winner-take-all basis on June 7th, the final day of the race, leaving him with the task of winning 192 – or 42.6% of the delegates from outside New Jersey.
At present, Cruz is widely expected to sweep the winner-take-all states of Nebraska, South Dakota, and Montana, in line with his past victories in Western states bearing similarly-situated electorates. Should Cruz fail in any, the results could be catastrophic to his campaign. Observers will need to wait until the last day of the primary season to learn the results from Montana, the only state of the three with an open primary, where Cruz’s campaign faces the greatest risk of an upset.
Should Cruz sweep these three, Trump would need to win 53.5% of delegates outside New Jersey, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Montana to secure a first-ballot nomination.
West Virginia, which votes on May 10th, follows a similar method to Pennsylvania in directly electing delegates, though unlike Pennsylvania, the state’s at-large delegates are also directly elected by popular vote in a state-run primary.
If Trump wins the same proportion of West Virginia delegates as he did in Pennsylvania – a state with a similar electorate employing a similar method of allocation – he will gain an additional 27 delegates, leaving him needing 165 more, or 50.8% of delegates not yet allocated.
This majority threshold poses a problem for Trump’s quest to gain ground in the proportionally-allocated western states of Oregon, Washington, and New Mexico, which collectively account for 96 delegates between them. While polling in these states remains scarce, estimating Trump to run near his national polling average of 43.0% is not without precedent. He’ll likely overperform in the border state of New Mexico, pulling a total in line with or slightly above his 47.1% victory in Arizona on March 22nd, while slightly underperforming in the Pacific Northwest.
If Trump should capture 43% of the delegates in these three states, he’ll gain an additional 41 delegates, bringing his remaining requirement to 124 delegates – or 54.1% – of the 229 delegates to be allocated between the states of Indiana and California, which make the assignations of their 57 and 172 delegates, respectively, on a winner-take-all basis in each Congressional district, with only a handful of at-large delegates assigned statewide.
Of the two, Indiana votes first, conducting its open state-run primary on May 3rd, a full month before California’s closed primary on June 7th.
For those endeavoring to stop Trump, the Indiana contest is widely seen as do-or-die. Should Cruz come from behind to post a decisive victory similar to Wisconsin, Trump would be on a path to fall short of 1237, requiring a gain of 116 – or 67.4% – of California’s 172. However, if Trump sweeps Indiana, the Midwestern state will likely become Cruz’s Waterloo, leaving Trump with a target of 67 – or 39.0% – of the 172 delegates from California.
At present, Trump currently leads Cruz by an average of 6.3 points in Indiana, according to three polls all conducted within the past week. Consequently, the Cruz campaign has made Indiana its sole focus at present, allocating to the state the candidate’s full attention as well as an enhanced commitment of financial resources.
The Cruz campaign has been preparing for the make-or-break contest in Indiana for weeks, shifting in a massive grassroots army from its “Camp Cruz” operation immediately following victory night in Wisconsin. Surrogates have been deployed, and rumors abound of a potential endorsement by Republican Mike Pence, the Hoosier governor who currently enjoys strong popularity among his home state’s Republican base – much in the mold of Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, whose endorsement helped carry Cruz to victory on Walker’s home turf.
Pence, however, is running for re-election in 2016, and may choose to avoid the controversies surrounding the presidential nominating contest. His victory is far from secure – in 2012, when first elected, he captured only 49.6% of Indiana’s gubernatorial vote.
Whether Pence weighs in will be a poll-tested strategic consideration, in which he chooses the least-damaging of two scenarios: risking the alienation of Trump supporters by endorsing Cruz, or risking damage to their shared Republican brand in 2016 if the unpopular Trump should become the standard bearer of the Republican Party.
Consequently, as a result of its winner-take-all allocation, Kasich has pulled out of Indiana, leaving the ongoing fight for votes as a two-man operation pitting Cruz against Indiana frontrunner Donald Trump.
For Cruz to remain strongly competitive, he must win a substantial majority of Indiana’s 57 delegates, followed up with another strong performance in California one month later.
At this point, the race’s uncertainties are chiefly contained within Indiana and California – the two states which observers and candidates alike will be giving a disproportionate share of attention in the final six weeks of the 2016 Presidential primary season.
While the race for a first ballot nomination is far from over, it could become Trump’s race to lose as soon as May 3rd, should he dominate Cruz in Indiana’s open primary. In less than a week, the hopes of the anti-Trump contingent could be dashed as the Republican Party finds itself adjusting to a new status quo; or, the race could continue all the way through June 7th, the final day of voting on which California’s 172 delegates will be allocated.
This foregoing analysis assumes that Trump’s magic number of delegates is indeed 1237, as that is the RNC’s requirement for a majority at the convention. However, in reality, Trump’s magic number is somewhat short of 1237 – though it remains difficult to estimate by how much.
In a handful of states, members of the Republican National Committee are unbound, while in other states which have elected unbound delegates, such as Pennsylvania, Trump may benefit from a gravity effect, in which his drawing near to the 1237 threshold is sufficient to persuade unbound delegates to not deny the nomination to a candidate who finished so close.
The next major milestone will be Indiana. One week from today, this race may be all but over, or it could be scheduled to go down to the wire in California. In the meantime, Republicans from across the nation will watch and wait with great anticipation.
