Several weeks ago, there was a ton of hype about the Indiana primaries. It was looking like Donald Trump’s trajectory was going to leave him just short of 1,237 delegates which would open up the first truly contested convention in decades, and Indiana would be his last big chance before California to hit the accelerator with a big delegate haul. Similarly, it was a must-win state for Hillary Clinton, to try and reverse the momentum Bernie Sanders got from his string of March victories in caucuses. On top of that, on paper, it looked like a demographically favorable state for Ted Cruz and Sanders, with a lot of evangelical voters on the GOP side and a lot of the rural working-class white voters that have performed well for Sanders in other Midwestern states, plus an open primary that lets Sanders’ independent backers support him. High drama!
Then New York happened, and then Pennsylvania and Maryland happened on top of that. The news narratives changed—suddenly Trump didn’t really even need the Indiana victory, between his bigger-than-expected wins in the Northeast and his polling very well in California. And while Clinton didn’t overperform expectations in the Northeast, the proportionate nature of the Dem race meant that her victories moved her that much closer to nailing down the majority of pledged delegates. Compounding that, once the pollsters finally turned their attention to Indiana, they found Trump and Clinton winning the Hoosier State by substantial margins anyway. Not so much drama after all.
Polls in Indiana close relatively, early at 6 PM Eastern time. In the northwestern part of the state, polls close an hour later (at 6 PM Central time), but if exit polls match the polls we’ve already seen, we may see network calls before the Chicago-area polls close. Daily Kos Elections will be liveblogging the night’s events, starting at 6 PM. Below, we’ll talk a bit about what to expect tonight, in terms of delegate allocation and counties to watch. We’ll also give some very brief attention to the Democratic caucus in Guam, the lone event of this weekend; it will take place on Saturday, May 7.
INDIANA
Democratic delegates: 18 at-large, 9 party leaders and elected officials, 8 in IN-01, 6 in IN-02, 5 in IN-03, 5 in IN-04, 7 in IN-05, 6 in IN-06, 8 in IN-07, 6 in IN-08, 6 in IN-09: 83 total pledged
Democratic polls: Clinton 51, Sanders 44 (HuffPo Pollster aggregate)
Republican delegates: 30 statewide, 3 in each of the nine CDs: 57 total pledged
Republican polls: Trump 43, Cruz 29, Kasich 11 (aggregate)
The polls of the Democratic primary in Indiana have shown mostly a mid-to single-digit race, though there’s one apparent outlier that props up the averages a bit in Clinton’s direction: Indiana-Purdue-Fort Wayne pegs the race at 55-40 in Clinton’s favor. There are enough polls in the heap from April (six of them), though, that absent a Michigan-type situation where everyone’s wrong, we can feel pretty confident about the aggregate’s accuracy. (And the main problem with Michigan was that pollsters simply didn't have a good template for a Democratic primary there, since the 2008 primary was disqualified and it was a caucus state before that. Indiana, if you’ll remember, had one of the most hotly-contested primaries of 2008, with Clinton beating Barack Obama 51-49.)
If you look at a county-by-county map of results so far, you’ll notice an odd pattern among Indiana’s neighbors. The bulk of land mass in Michigan and Illinois went to Sanders (the reason those states were close was that Clinton won the cities by wide margins); however, almost all of Ohio’s counties went for Clinton. FiveThirtyEight’s state similarity index tells us that Ohio is Indiana’s most demographically-similar state, so that might be a clue about how Indiana’s rural areas will perform.
Keep in mind, though, that Indiana as a whole is a more rural state than Ohio—Indianapolis and South Bend, for instance, make up a much smaller part of Indiana's population than Cleveland and Columbus do for Ohio, so Sanders might benefit from having a Dem electorate that's more rural white and less urban non-white. Indiana, for instance, is 80 percent non-Hispanic white, a much higher percentage than the national average (62) or its neighbors (62 in Illinois, 76 in Michigan).
You may also be familiar with an often-discussed quirk of Indiana’s history, that it was settled primarily from the south rather than from the east, and especially in its southern portions (IN-08 and IN-09), it has a more southern flavor than its Midwestern neighbors (which also shows up with Indiana being much more evangelical than the other Midwestern states). At first glance, you might think that would help Clinton, who won easily throughout the South … but Clinton’s victories in the South were powered primarily by African-American voters. Southern Indiana, however, is heavily white (the state’s black population is mostly further north, in Indianapolis and in Chicago-area cities like Gary); the nearby Southern states that also fit that criteria (Kentucky and West Virginia) haven't voted yet, so we can’t use them as reference points.
With that in mind, you would expect Clinton to perform especially well in IN-07 (Indianapolis) and IN-01 (northwestern Indiana), which are also the districts with the most delegates. The big question is whether the rural areas perform for Sanders the way they did in Michigan or the way they did in Ohio; either way, his best districts may turn out to be IN-09 and IN-04, which on top of being largely rural are also the location of the state’s two major college towns (Bloomington, home of Indiana University, in IN-09 and Lafayette, home of Purdue University, in IN-04, respectively). Statewide and CD-level delegates are both proportionate and are subject to a 15 percent viability requirement (which neither Dem candidate should have trouble meeting in any part of the state).
On the Republican side, Indiana is shaping up to be Ted Cruz’s last stand, and he does have one core area of strength here: IN-05, which is located primarily in Indianapolis’s affluent northern suburbs. It’s heavy on the megachurches and it's also where most of the state's country club Republicans live, so it grabs both ends of the Never Trump spectrum; in that way, it’s very similar to WI-05 in crucial Waukesha County, which was Cruz’s anchor when he won in Wisconsin.
Unfortunately for Cruz, the GOP’s bizarre insistence on using three delegates in every CD regardless of how many Republicans live there just keeps working to Trump’s advantage. Cruz can crush Trump among the hundreds of thousands of devoted social conservatives in IN-05, and it’s worth just as much to him as Trump winning among the few Republicans who live in the blue district of IN-01, where the few GOPers there are more likely to be the hard-pressed blue-collar manufacturing-industry types who’ve been his core constituency in the Midwest and Northeast.
Indiana got much of the pundit attention several weeks ago as a “must-win” because it’s a largely winner-take-all state; 30 of its 57 delegates go to whoever wins statewide, without any proportionate allocation. It’s looking pretty clear that Trump will win statewide, so that's why the Cruz camp has turned so downbeat in the last few days. Each of the three delegates in each of the nine CDs is also awarded winner-take-all, so, again, Trump is likely to win the bulk there, though Cruz is likeliest to win IN-05 and probably also IN-03, which has a large socially-conservative base, thanks partly to a big Mennonite population. (The polling just has John Kasich down in non-factor territory in Indiana.)
GUAM
On Saturday, May 7, it's time for the Guam caucuses, which, according to Tim Robbins, are just as important as the South Carolina primary was. (Guam has seven pledged delegates up for grabs, a bit less than South Carolina’s 53, but who's counting, right?) The caucuses, though, are really more like a firehouse primary where voters can show up at any time during the day and cast a secret ballot; polls close at 8 PM local time, which is 6 AM Eastern time on Saturday.
The fact that it’s ostensibly a caucus, and the fact that Bernie Sanders won pretty convincingly in somewhat demographically-similar Hawaii (Guam has a Pacific Islander plurality, with a large Filipino minority), suggest that Sanders might have a shot at winning here, so maybe Robbins shouldn’t have been so dismissive. The 2008 caucus was evenly split between Clinton and Obama, though, and small events like these just tend to go to whichever side is better organized (which looks like how Clinton won this year’s American Samoa caucus), so any prediction here is pure guesswork.