The New York primary usually doesn’t have much impact on the presidential nomination process, coming late in the cycle most years. This year, though, with both parties’ races going deep into the calendar, it’s a marquee event. And making it an even more interesting story this year: Both parties’ frontrunners are, on paper, from New York! (Though, of course, Hillary Clinton has been a New Yorker for “only” 17 years, while Donald Trump may spend a larger part of his year in Florida than in New York.)
As a trivial aside, If Clinton and Trump continue on to the nominations, it’ll be the first time in many decades that both nominees are from the same state. The last time it happened, it was also between two New Yorkers: Franklin D. Roosevelt versus Wendell Willkie in 1940.* To descend further down the trivia rabbit hole: Much like the Republicans are poised to do today, 1940 was also the last time either party nominated someone with only private sector experience (Willkie).
With the polls indicating that New York looks likely to reward its ostensibly native son and daughter, the winners and losers aren't in much doubt—the real question is how the delegates will be split. Trump may be in a position to win almost all of the state's delegates, which would be considerable help as he tries to get back on a trajectory toward 1,237 and thus a clean win on the first ballot at the GOP convention; Ted Cruz and John Kasich’s hopes are to eke out some delegates in favorable congressional districts.
Clinton's certainly not in a position to win almost all of the state's delegates (since they're awarded proportionately on the Dem side), but with so many delegates (247 pledged) at stake in the nation's fourth most-populous state, there will still be a big practical difference between a single-digit victory and a double-digit one. (For example, a 14-point victory for Clinton would pencil out to a net delegate gain for her of about 35, 141-106.)
Polls in the Empire State close at 9 PM ET, though it usually takes around an hour after closing time to get a representative-enough sample of votes from around the state to get a clear sense of how the race is shaping up. Daily Kos Elections, as always, will be liveblogging the night’s events, starting at 9 PM.
Democratic delegates: 54 at-large, 30 party leaders and elected officials, 163 district delegates (between five and seven in each of the state’s 27 congressional districts): 247 total pledged delegates
Democratic polls: Clinton 55, Sanders 42 (HuffPo Pollster aggregate)
Republican delegates: 14 statewide, three delegates in each of the state’s 27 congressional districts: 95 total pledged delegates
Republican delegates: Trump 54, Kasich 22, Cruz 19 (aggregate)
The polls so far have shown a very consistent Clinton lead in a 10-15 point range on the Democratic side; the only pollster that has seen this as a single-digit race has been Republican internal pollster Gravis (twice, including last week). Another potential Clinton advantage is that New York has not just a closed primary, which means independent voters can’t participate in the Democratic primary, but a strict registration policy that requires voters to have changed their party registration many months ago, so that previously uninvolved people who’ve only recently gotten on board with Sanders might find themselves unable to participate.
New York is also a state demographically favorable to Clinton. That may come as a surprise to some people who view the primary through the lens of presidential general elections; New York is one of the most solidly-Democratic states in November, so someone might look at other states where Barack Obama broke 60 percent in 2012 ... Vermont and Hawaii ... and say, well, therefore Sanders will easily win it. (Of course, that would require overlooking the narrow Clinton victory in Massachusetts.)
What makes New York a relatively strong state for Clinton, instead, is the fact that it’s very racially diverse, mostly because of New York City, but also in NYC’s suburbs and also in smaller cities like Buffalo. New York has both a lower percentage of non-Hispanic whites (56.3 percent, according to 2014 data) than the national average (61.9), and a higher percentage of African-Americans (14.4 percent) than the national average (12.3). For comparison purposes, Sanders has won only one state that’s more African-American than the national average (Michigan), and only two states that are less white than the national average (Alaska and Hawaii).
Part of the key to Sanders’ success so far has been that he’s made better headway in rural white working-class areas than predecessor Dem candidates who occupied a similar niche (think Howard Dean or Jerry Brown, for instance); his victory in Michigan and narrow loss in Illinois were based on that, in fact offsetting his losses in those states’ major cities. So if Sanders is going to keep it close, it’s going to be in Upstate New York, especially its more rural parts. That should be especially compounded in Upstate’s college towns, where there’s a large 20-something population, like Ithaca (in Tompkins County) and Binghamton (Broome County).
Sanders also has a bit of a built-in advantage in the sparsely populated North Country, because parts of it, like Plattsburgh (Essex County), are in Burlington, Vermont’s media market. In much the same way that people in the western counties of New Hampshire have been used to seeing him in the news for decades, that’s also the case in New York’s northeastern corner.
New York City’s suburbs, however, may prove fruitful for Clinton. Clinton has tended, in previous states, to perform well in suburban areas with over $100k household incomes, and Nassau County (the closer of Long Island’s two counties) actually comes close to that, throughout its entirety; its median income is $99k. (Further-out Suffolk County is at $86k, and Westchester County, north of the city, is at $83k.) In addition, these suburbs are by no means the lily-white provinces of the Eisenhower era that you might be visualizing: Westchester is only 55 percent non-Hispanic white (making it more diverse than the state as a whole), followed by Nassau at 62 percent and Suffolk at 69 percent.
So as far as congressional districts to watch, Clinton’s best areas are likely to be the black-majority districts (the 5th, 8th, and 9th), though it wouldn't be surprising to see her win every district that falls south of the somewhat-arbitrary “Upstate” line. (Unfortunately for Sanders, there’s no gerrymandered district within NYC to carve out an enclave for white hipsters and college students, though many of their core neighborhoods fall within the Latino-majority 7th.)
For Sanders, districts he might win include the 21st (the North Country), the 22nd and 23rd (college towns plus downscale rural areas), and possibly Hudson Valley districts like the 19th and 20th where Zephyr Teachout ran strongest in the 2014 gubernatorial primary (though Teachout’s regional strength was partly specific to rancorous disputes between Andrew Cuomo and public employee unions that are concentrated in the Albany area). Both the statewide and CD-level delegates are awarded proportionately on the Dem side, subject to a 15 percent viability threshold (which neither candidate should have trouble hitting).
On the Republican side, the rules are considerably more complicated (as we’ve seen in many states). The statewide vote is potentially winner-take-all—if Trump wins 50 percent of the vote, as he’s on track to do, he gets all 14 statewide delegates. If he doesn’t, then they’re awarded proportionately to candidates who get at least 20 percent of the vote, which, according to current polls, would be only Trump and Kasich. At the CD level, it’s somewhat similar: If Trump gets 50 percent in a CD, he gets all three of its delegates. If he doesn’t, and two or more candidates get over 20 percent of the vote, then the winner gets two delegates in the CD and the runner-up gets one delegate.
Trump seems likely to get the statewide winner-take-all haul, and he’ll probably hit 50 percent in many of the heavily-white CDs in the suburbs and in rural Upstate. In fact, if there’s a way to go over 100 percent in some of the nation’s Trumpiest CDs, he’ll probably find a way to do that (like in NY-11 on Staten Island and NY-01 at the furthest end of Long Island, which are the ultimate strongholds for the demographic of New York Post-reading blue-collar non-college Catholics).
It’s the non-white CDs that are most interesting, where Cruz and Kasich will be fighting for scraps, and where there are often so few Republicans that it’s hard to predict what will happen. (If you haven’t had a chance to read Dave Wasserman’s explainer from two weeks ago on how each individual Republican in NY-15, a district in the South Bronx that’s nearly devoid of any Republicans at all, has nearly 50 times the firepower of each Republican in Wisconsin’s overstuffed 5th district, do it now!)
That’s why, for instance, you saw the weird spectacle of Cruz donning a yarmulke and hitting a matzoh factory last week: He’s hoping to eke out enough votes from Orthodox Jews (who might like his social conservatism and Israel stances) to score one and possibly two delegates from many of the heavily-Dem districts in Brooklyn and Queens, especially NY-07 and NY-10 where there are large Haredi enclaves. Ordinarily, that handful of delegates wouldn't matter, but when Cruz’s entire strategy is based on trying to keep Trump from hitting 1,237 and then winning on a second (or 20th) ballot at a contested convention, every one of them is critical.
Kasich doesn’t seem to have a master plan for those delegates (nor does he need one, since he’s already mathematically dead, and his only angle is to be a black horse at a convention that turns into an endless deadlock between Trump and Cruz). He may be hoping for some second-place votes around the margins in few parts of the state where the once-strong Rockefeller Republican tradition has a pulse, though. Watch for him in the most affluent districts in the state, like NY-12 on the Upper East Side and NY-17 in the more posh parts of Westchester County.
*UPDATE: My colleague Jeff Singer points out that Thomas Dewey, FDR’s 1944 opponent, was also a New Yorker (and, in fact, governor at that time). Dewey, however, was the last nominee from either party to have a mustache (and will be, until the GOP runs one of the Duck Dynasty guys in 2020).