On Tuesday, voters in Indiana selected Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Bernie Sanders to lead them in November’s general election. Indiana was the last major state to vote before California chooses its presidential nominees on 7 June, so its primary was predicted to be pivotal. And boy, was it.
Trump is now almost certain to be the Republican presidential nominee – not least because his nearest rival, Ted Cruz, suspended his campaign after the results were announced. And despite Sanders’ win, Hillary Clinton is still on course to be the Democratic nominee. With 98% of the results in for Indiana, here’s a look at how the delegate math is now in favour of Trump and Clinton.
Winning 53% of the Hoosier State’s Republican vote, Trump scooped up all 51 available delegates and crossed the 1,000-delegate mark. The New York businessman only needs 190 more delegates to secure the nomination.
There are just nine Republican primaries remaining before the party convention in July, with a total of 445 delegates available. Now that Cruz has stepped out of the race, Trump will collect almost all of those delegates.
The Cruz campaign had no doubt looked at the math: to have stopped Trump from reaching the finish line, the Texas senator would have had to grab all 172 delegates in California. That feat looked unlikely, given that he was polling 26 percentage points behind Trump in the Golden State.
Simply put, Trump’s opponents were less popular than he is. Cruz’s announcement last week that Carly Fiorina would be his running mate appears to have had little effect. In a survey of 3,940 registered voters by Morning Consult, only 18% of Republicans said they more likely to vote for Cruz now he was running with Fiorina, 22% said it made them less likely to vote for Cruz, and 60% said it had “no impact”.
Trump’s only remaining opponent, John Kasich, has the support of just one in five Republicans.
Trump’s success in Indiana can be attributed to a few factors. The state’s population is 86% white and it has a median household income of $49,000, almost $5,000 less than the national median. Both race and income have been shown to correlate with support for the New York businessman. Now that the Republican nomination is all but a done deal, Trump will begin to use those demographics to calculate his chances of winning in November.
Despite Sanders’ surprise victory in Indiana, the Democratic race is fundamentally unchanged – Clinton looks near certain to be the nominee.
Sanders finished the night with 52.5% of the vote and 43 delegates. However, Democratic primaries are not winner-takes-all and so Clinton’s vote share in Indiana translated into 37 delegates. In terms of net differences, the only ones that matter in primary races, Sanders only won six extra delegates – and that simply isn’t enough given that Clinton is ahead by 321 pledged delegates and by 481 superdelegates.
For the Vermont senator, there is worse to come. To win the nomination, Sanders needs to capture around two-thirds of the remaining pledged delegates. But polling shows him trailing in Montana, New Jersey and, crucially, California.
California will be decisive in the Democratic race, since it offers 546 delegates. Sanders will need to win the majority to have a chance of securing the nomination, but he has an approximately nine-point gap to close on Clinton.
Despite this, it seems unlikely that Sanders will drop out of the Democratic race until he has no choice. And there seems to be party consensus that this is a good thing – a poll released this week by NBC News and Survey Monkey found that 57% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters want Sanders to stay in the race until the convention.
Given the size of Trump’s and Clinton’s leads, it’s likely both candidates will begin to turn their attention away from the remaining primary elections and towards the upcoming national election. Current polling suggests that Clinton has an average lead of six percentage points over Trump.
