Yes, Trump is winning a lot of states, and Clinton is winning a lot of states…
How do their numbers match up, head to head? If we pretended that these elections were the General Election, how many states has Clinton won over Trump, by straight-up voting numbers?
(e.g., in New York, Trump got 525,000 votes and Clinton got somewhere over a million. So “Hillary wins New York.”)
I readily agree that this doesn’t mean a whale of a lot, but it’s conceivably a hint as to how the November numbers might fall out.
It isn’t the same as a proper poll, but it has some indicative value.
It’s a snapshot poll of how many people favor the candidates enough to vote for them. With standard opinion polls, we have to take them at their word, but with these primaries, we have their actions on record.
You could also use, as an indicator, how many voters are registered to the major parties. It’s all grist for the grinder.
(That the races are five-way doesn’t change a whole lot: Sanders pretty roughly counterbalances Cruz/Kasich. You could add those votes in and get something similar.)
There are much better models at predicting the general election than using the primaries. Returns are abysmal in primaries - and this varies for different reasons - by different candidates and states.
Despite the media narrative that trump is cleaning up - the reason has more to do with reduced turnout since voters appear to be buying the whole “trump has wrapped up the nomination”
The results from the five states yesterday were among the lowest turnout so far - if your order them by percentage turnout - the five states yesterday were in the six lowest positions.
There is no doubt that people that support trump are more excited than those that support the other two republicans.
This makes it hard to make general comparisons to the general election.
I’m currently in the process of doing some election modeling - and if no one else posts the answer I’ll try and do so if I get around to it.
I voted for Kasich in the primary as an anti-Trump vote. I would never vote for Kasich in the general election unless the Democrats were running someone like Al Sharpton.
I disagree. I don’t think it has any indicative value. Indeed, according to fivethirtyeight, its historically been an anti-indicator of party turn-out. You’d be better off reading tea-leaves.