http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-state-by-state-roadmap-for-the-rest-of-the-republican-primary/Three weeks ago, when we last took a detailed look at Donald Trump’s quest to win 1,237 delegates, his path looked rocky but endurable. The panel of eight experts FiveThirtyEight assembled projected Trump to wind up with 1,208 by the time California and four other states finished counting their votes on June 7, a number that would leave him tantalizingly close to clinching the Republican presidential nomination — probably close enough that he’d be able to get over the hump by persuading some uncommitted delegates to come his way before the convention.
Since then, Trump has gotten mostly bad news. Last week, he lost Wisconsin, which our panel originally considered a toss-up state leaning in Trump’s direction. Then this weekend, he was shut out of delegates at the Colorado state convention. He’s also had a couple of minor setbacks; Trump got no delegates in Utah when we thought he might get a few. All told, Trump would finish with 1,175 delegates if he hits our panel’s original estimate in the remaining states. That’s far enough away from 1,237 that winning over enough uncommitted voters will be challenging, especially given Trump’s lack of success at finding pro-Trump delegates.
But we also have a lot of new information at our disposal. Trump’s polling has held up well in the Northeast, and he has a good chance to beat the panel’s original projections in New York and Connecticut. On the flip side, his loss in Wisconsin bodes poorly for his performance in Indiana, another state we originally had as leaning toward Trump. So it’s time to revisit our projections, going through the remaining states one at a time. (Given how much delegate rules vary from state to state, there’s really no avoiding this level of detail, much to the bane of my editor.)
This time, it’ll just be me (Nate) instead of the panel, but I’ll aim to compensate by issuing three types of projections for each remaining state:
First, a deterministic projection, which lists the single most likely outcome in every state, in my view. Say there’s a state with 50 winner-take-all delegates, and we give Trump a 60 percent chance of winning it. Since the win is more likely than not, we’d score all 50 delegates in his column.
Second, a probabilistic projection, which hedges its bets. In the aforementioned example, Trump would have a 60 percent chance of winning 50 delegates and a 40 percent chance of winning no delegates, which works out to an expectation of 30 delegates.
Finally, a path-to-1,237 projection, which is not the same thing as Trump’s best-case scenario. Instead, it’s roughly what I consider his path of least resistance to finish with 1,237 delegates exactly, not counting uncommitted delegates.1 It’s up to you, dear reader, to think about how realistic it might be, or not — I’ll chime in with some thoughts at the end.
Where they’re available, I’ll use FiveThirtyEight’s poll-based forecasts to inform these projections. (Specifically, I’ll use an average of the “polls-only” and “polls-plus” versions of our model.) However, there isn’t a lot of recent polling in some states, so instead I’ll make inferences from Trump’s performance in nearby states, the state’s demographics, and so forth, tending to give a fair amount of deference to the panel’s original forecasts.
