CNN has just projected very early in the evening that billionarie Donald Trump will handily win the New York Republican primary. CNN calling it early means Trump is in for a whopping victory.
On the Democratic side, exit polls show a very close race: former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton 52% and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders 48$.
Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump notched a resounding victory in his home state of New York on Tuesday, giving the GOP front-runner some much-needed breathing room following a turbulent campaign shakeup and a bevy of primary victories by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.
News networks projected the Manhattan real estate mogul won soon after polls closed across the state. His margin of victory won’t be clear until more votes are counted. Trump needed to win more than 50 percent of the statewide vote, as well as more than half of the vote in each of the state’s congressional districts, in order to win all 95 of New York’s delegates.
If Trump succeeds in winning nearly all of the available delegates, he will be more likely to win the GOP nomination on a first ballot at the convention in Cleveland — assuming he also wins coming primaries across the Northeast, where he is similarly popular among Republican voters. If he fails to pick up a large majority of New York’s delegates, Trump is more likely to fall short of the 1,237 delegates needed to secure the nomination — setting up a contested convention in July.
graphic via shutterstock.com
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.