Tuesday’s primary elections in Rhode Island, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland gave Donald Trump five massive wins together with an even more massive delegate haul, propelling his lead over Ted Cruz to more than 400 delegates, as shown above. Trump’s hapless opponents managed to accrue, as of this writing, only 10 delegates of the 171 available Tuesday night (although 30 from Pennsylvania have yet to be accounted for).
On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton won four of five states in a predictable (and predicted!) fashion. Clinton’s delegate lead is now nearly as great as it was at the end of March, prior to Bernie Sander’s big winning streak in a string of Western states and Wisconsin.
The complete set of delegate graphs for both Republicans and Democrats can be seen below, based on Taniel’s spreadsheet, as always.
The Republicans
Donald Trump is now just a hair below the magic number of half of the delegates allocated to date. He has only surpassed this threshold once, briefly, after winning South Carolina, back when only three states had voted.
The share of remaining delegates needed to win, shown below, has dropped in concert with the increase seen in the graph above. Currently, Trump needs slightly more than half of the remaining delegates. Now Cruz can’t win a majority even if he were to win every single delegate still available in future contests and get all of the remaining uncommitted delegates from prior contests.
The delegate totals, below, tell the tale of the recent East Coast primaries: Trump steadily rising toward the goal of 1,237 (dashed line), while Cruz and Kasich stagnate.
The Democrats
About three-quarters of the pledged delegates up for grabs in the Democratic primaries have been allocated already. And thanks to the proportional allocation system used on the Democratic side, it would take gigantic 80-to-20 wins for either candidate to move the needle much on the graph below, which shows the share of delegates allocated to date. Hillary Clinton remains solidly in the lead, with Bernie Sanders about 10 points behind her.
Conversely, with only a quarter of the delegates left, the lines on the next graph—the share of remaining delegates needed to win a majority—have begun to move fast. Eventually, probably after California votes in early June, the lines will go to zero and 100. Right now, Clinton needs a little more than a third of remaining delegates to win, while Sanders needs almost two-thirds.
The graph of delegate totals below shows Clinton 366 delegates away from a majority of pledged delegates, while Sanders needs 659.
Finally, Clinton’s lead is now nearly back to its high point in early March.