Yesterday [Tuesday, April 19] the inevitable took place and Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump walked away with a victory in the New York primary for their respective parties.
The two had a clear advantage as Clinton served as one of New York’s senators for eight years while Donald Trump’s profile and background in New York puts him at the top with New York’s Republican voters.
It was just last year that Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy in the state of New York and yesterday’s showing proved her allegiance and strength in the state.
“We started this race not far from here on Roosevelt Island,” Clinton said during a victory speech in Midtown Manhattan. “And tonight–a little less than a year later–the race for the Democratic nomination is in the homestretch and victory is in sight.”
For the Democrats, Secretary Clinton’s victory puts a halt to the momentum that Bernie Sanders had been so ardently promoting.
A win in a state as diverse as New York clearly shows where both Clinton’s strengths and Sanders’s weaknesses lie. Exit polls show that Sanders did particularly well with voters who wanted more policies that were more liberal than President Obama‘s.
His shortcomings, however, appeared in the form of the ghost that’s been trailing him this entire campaign—among Black and Hispanic communities.
While he was expected to outperform Clinton in more upstate communities like Buffalo, Clinton either passed him or managed to tie.
On the Republicans’ side, Donald Trump’s victory has carved out a very clear path to victory that has left his opponents behind, most notably, top contender Ted Cruz who finished third in the state. For Mr. Trump, this is the victory he’s been needing following a recent slew of defeats and hard hits.
Exit polls showed Trump dominating within all demographics, including women and college-educated voters, groups in which he’d once done terrible.
As the Republican primary moves toward moderate blue-states such as Pennsylvania and Rhode Island in the coming weeks Ted Cruz may likely continue to suffer. While his conservatism has won him key states in the South and West, he’s struggled to grasp the same kind of success along the East Coast, a trait that left him trailing behind John Kasich in New York’s primaries.
While Kasich’s showing didn’t do much to deter Trump’s win, he managed to outperform the billionaire in his own native borough of Manhattan: a place more moderate Republican voters seem to call home.
This demographic reigns supreme in the blue-state Republican primaries to come, a fact that could very well give Kasich a chance to continue to hack away at Donald Trump’s delegate count.
