I use a mix of NYT's county map with the estimated votes remaining tool left on, the AP district results page (I am gonna try and swap this one out if I can. For whatever reason last night it kept refusing to count anything out of Milwaukee. Which was fine because there were clear winners on both sides but still). I've got a decent idea of who does well with what demographics, and try and get a good map of each state accordingly. The 538 live chat is pretty useful for filling in the gaps, plus a few other good places.
Anyhow, final votes came in and it looks like Trump edged out Cruz in the 3rd, giving us a final total of 36-6. It gets pretty interesting if you dig into the exit polls. As I said earlier, Cruz's victories with highly educated voters indicates that they're jumping from their preferred candidate of Kasich to Cruz, who is more likely to stop Trump. But you see this even more with some of the exit questions. A fifth of Cruz voters say that they would be concerned if he were president. If we assume that they're all Kasich voters and transfer them accordingly, Cruz drops from 48% to 38%, while Kasich jumps from 15 to 25. Cruz still takes home the 18 delegate prize, but he's not gonna hold onto all six districts. 2nd drops out of his hands for sure, though possibly into Kasich's instead of Trump's.
And for people talking about how 20% of Bernie voters think they won't go for Clinton, the Wisconsin exit poll has 40% of all GOP voters saying they'll abandon the party if Trump is the nominee, and 35% if it's Cruz. All of these numbers (maybe not Trump's) are likely to drop when the time actually comes. Right now voters are comparing the rival candidate to their preferred one, while in November they'll have to compare the rival candidate to the enemy's. Lesser of two evils and all that. But considering that the nominee is prolly gonna be either Trump or Cruz, this'll be pretty significant.
For the Democrats, final shakedown is 47-36 Bernie, with three delegates still pending. The Democrats actually split their delegates like the GOP did with at-large and by-district portions, but they're all proportional while the GOP is winner-take-all for each group. Hence why we're waiting on three delegates, as we're basically looking at whether districts went 3-3 or 4-2. Overall this can lead to a difference between the share of the popular vote and share of delegates, but not as badly as the electoral college or GOP style systems do. By pure proportional vote, Bernie would get 48 or 49 delegates, and he is in that ballpark. Being a delegate off is something he can survive.
Overall, Hillary's won 57% of the popular vote so far, and 55% of the delegates. So the funky pseudo-proportional system does work decently enough, even if it still isn't perfect in really fine toothed close elections. Bernie looks like he successfully hit his original target, but may be a tiny bit short of his new target. We'll have to see what happened that made the polls underestimate him and Ted Cruz. Undecided voters breaking hard for Cruz makes sense. Not sure if it does for Bernie, but perhaps polls once again kinda fucked up on getting their minds around turnout in the open primary, even if it wasn't as bad as in Michigan.
The pessimistic angle to Bernie's win is that, looking at neighboring states and the demographics, Bernie did as well as you'd expect. He got 60% in Minnesota, and 50% in Michigan. Wisconsin would, reasonably, be somewhere in the middle. If Bernie had a better campaign (read: not outsourcing shit to reddit), I think he could've hit that 60%, but so be it. Massachusetts is still a threatening harbinger for what's to come. In WI, Bernie needed to beat the polls, but not the demographics. In the Northeast, that's not gonna be the case. Too many rich people and black people, plus a bunch of people who actually work in the industries that Bernie is railing against. Overall though, it was still a good night for Bernie and an especially good one Ted Cruz. Bad night for Trump. Maybe bad night for Kasich. And Clinton don't give a fuck.
And a preview of next week's coverage: Bernie wins. Nobody cares because Wyoming.
