As we keep getting closer to filling in the entire map, Tuesday night’s primaries cover one of the biggest remaining gaps—the Northeast. (Granted, some authorities, most prominently the Census Bureau, consider Maryland and Delaware to be part of the South, not the Northeast. After Tuesday’s results, it’s likely the Sanders campaign will also consider Maryland to be part of the South.) In an example of how elite pundits are gonna pundit, there have been multiple references to it as the “Acela Primary,” apparently because Amtrak’s prestige line sweeps those pundits through all five states as they travel to more exciting places not located in those states ... despite the fact that probably few of any of those states’ residents have ever set foot on an Acela train.
The Northeast primary is the fourth biggest night of the cycle in terms of number of delegates. (The only bigger one left after this is June 7, which has both California and New Jersey.) On the Democratic side, for instance, Pennsylvania has the fifth most delegates of any state, at 189, and Maryland is no slouch either, at 95. That’s more than the more populous Indiana (83) and Arizona (75), and tied with the much more-populous Virginia (95), which is a factor of how blue Maryland is at the presidential level.
Tuesday night will, in all likelihood, move both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump significantly closer to clinching the parties’ nominations. Polls show Clinton with large leads in Pennsylvania and Maryland, and the only state that looks like a true tossup on the Dem side is Rhode Island, where there are few (24) delegates at stake and a narrow victory for one side or the other will amount to a difference of only one or two delegates. And polls show Trump flattening the opposition in all five states … which he absolutely needs to do, if he’s to have any hope of clearing the 1,237 mark and avoiding a floor fight at the GOP convention.
Polls close at 8 PM ET in all five states, so there will be a lot of results pouring in all at once. Daily Kos Elections will be, as always, liveblogging the results once polls close. Below, take a look at much more information about delegate allocation and demographics in each of the states.
CONNECTICUT
Democratic delegates: 12 at-large, 7 party leaders and elected officials, 8 in CT-01, 7 in CT-02 through CT-05: 55 total pledged
Democratic polls: Clinton 49, Sanders 46 (HuffPo Pollster aggregate)
Republican delegates: 13 statewide, 3 in each of the five CDs: 28 total pledged
Republican polls: Trump 57, Kasich 28, Cruz 19 (aggregate)
Connecticut, according to the polls, is shaping up to be somewhat competitive on the Democratic side, with Hillary Clinton holding a single-digit lead in the three polls from April. I’m a little surprised how close the race is, but you might not be—you might think “well, that’s in New England, and Connecticut is also whiter than the national average, so Bernie Sanders should do well there.”
Both those things are true, but bear in mind that there are really two, maybe three, different New Englands: There are the less urban, less religious, clean politics, and generally cantankerous northern states (Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, where Sanders dominated), the more urban, heavily Catholic, machine politics duo (Massachusetts and Rhode Island), and then Connecticut, which is really more of an extension of the New York metropolitan area (with the exception of the easternmost part of the state, which falls on the other side of the state’s notorious Yankees/Red Sox line). FiveThirtyEight’s state similarity index makes that clear: Its most similar state isn’t a New England state, but rather New Jersey.
So instead, I would expect Clinton to be winning by a number in the low teens in Connecticut, as she did in Long Island and Westchester County. One demographic slice where Clinton has done well is suburbs with incomes over $100k like those, and Connecticut, for many years, had the nation’s highest median household income. While recently it has fallen slightly behind Maryland and New Jersey, it’s still near the top with an MHI of $70k. Also, it’s not that much whiter (69 percent) than the national average (62 percent), with large minority populations in its largest cities of Hartford, Bridgeport, and New Haven. But if you follow the polls, this looks like it'll be close, and it looks like they’ll close-to-evenly split the state’s 55 delegates. (There’s a 15 percent threshold at both the state and CD level, but neither will have trouble meeting that.)
Then there’s Donald Trump cleaning up on the Republican side. That may seem initially surprising, since the state’s affluence and its longtime tradition of moderate, establishment-friendly Republicanism suggests that John Kasich should have a good shot here (and Kasich, certainly, is overperforming his national averages here). But bear in mind that, again, we’re talking about the New York media market here, and Trump is performing in line with how he did in New York’s suburbs.
There are two slices of the Republican Party that Trump does especially well with, and we tend to focus on one of them (unabashedly racist white working-class Southerners, whose xenophobia is so deeply felt that it trumps their evangelicalism) while overlooking the other half: White working-class, mostly Catholic Northeasterners who aren’t especially driven by social conservatism and may in fact identify as moderate, but who are animated by Trump’s appeals to nostalgia (which, of course, has its own coded racist appeal) and his outgoing, brawling personality. In other words, the prototype New York Post/Boston Herald readership … and all of Tuesday’s states, and Connecticut, in particular, have a lot of that type of Republican.
Connecticut’s Republican delegate allocation scheme is winner-take-all at the CD level, and potentially winner-take-all at the state level too. If Donald Trump tops 50 percent statewide (as he’s on track to do), he gets all 13 statewide delegates. If not, the delegates will be proportionately split with anyone else who gets at least 20 percent of the vote (which could wind up excluding Ted Cruz altogether). Each of each district’s three delegates goes to the person who wins the district, with no second-place prize … so, conceivably, Trump could win every delegate in Connecticut.
DELAWARE
Democratic delegates: 5 at-large, 2 PLEOs, 2 for city of Wilmington, 8 for remainder of New Castle County, 2 for Sussex County, 2 for Kent County: 21 total pledged
Democratic polls: one poll from April at Clinton 45, Sanders 38
Republican delegates: 16 statewide
Republican polls: one poll from April at Trump 55, Kasich 18, Cruz 15
Despite its small size, Delaware has a split personality: Most of the state, geographically, has more in common with Maryland’s Eastern Shore, but most of its residents are crammed at its northern end around Wilmington, which functions mostly as an extended suburb of Philadelphia. In other words, it has a lot in common, politically and demographically with both Maryland and Pennsylvania, and we can expect it to vote a lot like its neighbors. (There is one poll on the Dem side showing a high-single-digit race, but it’s from Gravis, which is not only a Republican internal pollster but has racked up a pretty lousy track record this year, so take it with much salt.)
Delaware has only one congressional district, but, oddly, on the Dem side, they have a delegate allocation scheme that instead delves down to the county level and even lower than that. That will actually benefit Sanders a bit, forcing 1-1 splits in three of the four jurisdictions rather than relying on the statewide total, which will probably be more lopsided in Clinton’s favor. On the Republican side, things are pretty simple: Whoever gets the most votes statewide takes all 16 delegates. (The one poll makes it very clear that’ll be Trump.)
MARYLAND
Democratic delegates: 21 at-large, 10 PLEOs, 6 in MD-01, 7 in MD-02, 8 in MD-03, 10 in MD-04, 9 in MD-05, 7 in MD-06, 9 in MD-07, and 8 in MD-08: 95 total pledged
Democratic polls: Clinton 55, Sanders 36 (aggregate)
Republican delegates: 14 statewide, 3 in each of the 8 CDs: 38 total pledged
Republican polls: Trump 49, Kasich 22, Cruz 22
One detail about Maryland that people often forget is that it has one of the highest African-American percentages of any state: 29 percent, which puts it behind only three Deep South states (Mississippi, Louisiana, and Georgia). There’s a large black population in not just the city of Baltimore (and, increasingly, in the suburbs of Baltimore County, though that seems to be largely people moving out of the city), but also in Prince George’s County, the middle-class suburbs southeast of Washington. When you combine that with several more suburban counties with very high incomes and a large number of people working in federal government jobs (Montgomery County and Howard County), you’ve got all the hallmarks for a heavily pro-Clinton state. And that's exactly what the polls are showing, giving her a nearly 20-point lead on aggregate.
Democratic delegates are awarded proportionately statewide and in the CDs, with a 15 percent threshold in each. Unlike in some of the southern black-majority CDs, Sanders probably won’t have trouble hitting the cutoff (especially in MD-04, which contains the University of Maryland). That said, Clinton will probably still be running up the score in the 4th and the state’s other black-majority district, Baltimore’s MD-07. Sanders might be able to draw even with a 3-3 split in MD-01, which includes the Eastern Shore’s rural population.
On the Republican side, the delegates are awarded winner-taker-all at both the statewide level and the CD level. There’s no 50 percent requirement for WTA status, so even if Trump is held to 49 as the polls are currently showing, that's probably still enough for him to win all the GOP delegates on Tuesday, unless Kasich is somehow able to eke out a win in one of the state's more affluent areas (which would probably be, if anywhere, MD-08 in Montgomery County).
PENNSYLVANIA
Democratic delegates: 42 at-large, 20 PLEOs, between 5 and 14 delegates in the state’s 18 CDs: 189 total pledged
Democratic polls: Clinton 55, Sanders 39 (aggregate)
Republican delegates: 17 statewide, 3 in each of the 18 CDs: 71 total pledged
Republican polls: Trump 48, Cruz 27, Kasich 24 (aggregate)
The Keystone State is the biggest prize of Tuesday night. On the Democratic side, Clinton isn’t averaging as large a lead in aggregated polls in Pennsylvania as she is in Maryland. But Pennsylvania (which has the fifth most delegates of any state on the Dem side) has nearly twice as many delegates as Maryland, so it’ll probably result in a bigger net gain of delegates for her than Maryland.
Unlike the other states on Tuesday, which are all essentially urban or suburban, Pennsylvania does have a large rural swath in the middle of the state (sometimes called “Pennsyltucky,” or “the T,” based on its shape once you cut out the Pittsburgh and Philadelphia areas). Like upstate New York and downstate Illinois, where he did fairly well among the rural working-class white voters who vote Democratic, here’s probably where Sanders can make up some ground, possibly winning CDs like PA-09 and especially PA-05 (where he’ll benefit from the presence of Pennsylvania State University and its 46,000 students).
Unfortunately for him, a 3-2 split in his favor in PA-05 (which has only 5 delegates, because, despite PSU’s presence, most of its residents are Republicans and it’s a red district at the presidential level) will probably get drowned out by the 10 delegates in PA-01 and the 14 in PA-02, the two black-plurality districts based in Philadelphia which will probably be Clinton’s strongest districts in the state. (Sanders probably will clear the 15 percent threshold in those districts with little trouble, so he won’t get shut out there.)
For the Republicans, the 17 statewide delegates are elected winner-take-all, so Trump should have little trouble with grabbing them. There are three delegates in each CD, so there could be some variation here: John Kasich could grab some delegates in the more affluent suburban areas (possibly PA-06 or -07 in the Philadelphia suburbs, but more likely PA-04 and -18 in the Pittsburgh area, where he retains some vague hometown favorite cred, having grown up there). And while Pennsylvania doesn’t have a large evangelical population, it’s possible that Ted Cruz could chip away a few delegates in the more religiously-ardent parts of the state (especially PA-16 in Lancaster County, where the Mennonite population tends to be very socially conservative).
One other minor thing to watch out for is that Pennsylvania, like Illinois, has voters vote directly for delegates on the ballot, rather than for the candidates themselves. So it’s possible we could see a replay of what happened in Illinois, where enough of Trump’s supporters didn’t vote for Trump-backing delegates with non-white sounding names that it may have cost him a few delegates overall.
RHODE ISLAND
Democratic delegates: 6 at-large, 3 PLEOs, 8 in RI-01, 7 in RI-02: 24 total pledged delegates
Democratic polls: two polls in Apr.: one at Sanders 49, Clinton 45, and one at Clinton 43, Sanders 34
Republican delegates: 10 statewide, 3 RNC, 3 in RI-01, 3 in RI-02: 19 total pledged
Republican polls: Trump 60, Kasich 22, Cruz 12 (aggregate)
Rhode Island is the only state on the Democratic side where we’ve seen any polls with Sanders in the lead (including, most recently, a PPP poll with Sanders up by 4, as well as a much-earlier Brown University poll). It’s not surprising that it should be close, because while it’s not that similar to the northern New England states where Sanders cleaned up, it is very similar to Massachusetts, where the primary was very close. Like Massachusetts, it’s a whiter-than-average state (74 percent, with most of the rest Latino rather than black), and has a significant student population, so those work in Sanders’ favor. Also like Massachusetts, though, it's a very religiously active state (which is a plus for Clinton), with the nation's second-highest percentage of Catholics (after Massachusetts).
Another key point is that unlike the other four states, which are all closed primaries, Rhode Island is semi-open (while Republicans can’t participate in the Dem primary, independents can), so some of Sanders’ indie backers are better able to vote in Rhode Island. Whether Sanders or Clinton narrowly wins Rhode Island, though, there aren’t a lot of delegates at stake in this small state, and the net difference will only be a couple of delegates.
On the Republican side, unlike all the winner-take-all states, Rhode Island awards its statewide delegates proportionately to anyone who hits 10 percent (so Cruz could still be in the danger zone in this state that's almost entirely devoid of evangelicals). In each CD, the top three finishers each get one delegate, unless Trump hits 67 percent (in which case he’d get two in each CD). So, out of all the states, this is actually Kasich and Cruz’s best shot at walking away with a few consolation delegates (though we’re literally talking one or two apiece).