Clinton and Trump Just About Max Out in New York (D), New York (R)

The New York primary was everything Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump hoped it would be, and then some.  Trump exceeded the 50% threshold he needed to win all of the statewide delegates, while doing exceptionally well on a district-by-district basis.  As a consequence, Trump won 89 out of the 95 delegates with his 60/25/15 win over John Kasich and Ted Cruz, with the potential for a few more, while Kasich took four delegates and Cruz was shutout.  In the delegate counting game -- in which every single delegate matters in Trump’s quest to attain the 1,237 delegates required to clinch the GOP nomination within the primary season -- Trump almost maxed out.

How did Trump do in the “Trump Tracker”?  You may recall that about a month ago I laid out a path for Trump to get to 1,237 within the primary season.  Versus that path, as you can see below, Trump picked up three delegates and is now only three behind “pace” -- and he may even make that up when the last few New York delegates are sorted out.

	THE TRUMP TRACKER
Date	State	Trump Path	Trump Actual	Diff.	Cum.   Diff.
5-Apr	WIS	12	6	-6	-6
19-Apr	NY	86	89	3	3
26-Apr	CT	24
26-Apr	DEL	16
26-Apr	MAR	29
26-Apr	PA	17
26-Apr	RI	13
3-May	IND	37
10-May	NEB	0
10-May	WV	34
17-May	ORE	13
24-May	WAS	4
7-Jun	CAL	129
7-Jun	MON	27
7-Jun	NJ	51
7-Jun	NM	9
7-Jun	SD	0
TOTAL		1238		-3	1235

Hillary Clinton has not been in the “need every delegate” mode ever since she swept the South.  But she badly needed a win nonetheless in her virtual home state of New York in the wake of Bernie Sanders western caucus sweep, and the more decisive the better.  The 58/42 margin of her victory certainly qualifies as a momentum-recapturing thumper.

Next Tuesday should result in more of the same for both frontrunners, with five primaries in the East on April 26:  Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware, Maryland and Pennsylvania.  At stake are delegate hauls nearly twice the size of New York, 172 on the GOP side and 462 for the Dems.

Polling is pointing to clear outcomes.  Trump leads in each of the big three states (where polling has been extensive) by roughly 15-20 point margins, while Clinton leads by about the same margin in Pennsylvania and Maryland and in the high single-digits in Connecticut and Delaware.  

BTRTN

We had quite a good day in the prediction business, picking both races' winners correctly, Kasich over Cruz for second place in the GOP primary, and missing the percentages by less than three percentage points per candidate overall.

New York	BTRTN Prediction	Actual
Trump	57	60
Kasich	24	25
Cruz	19	15

New York	BTRTN Prediction	Actual
Clinton	55	58
Sanders	45	42