New York primary 2016: election results and updates

While Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton handily won the New York primary with substantial margins Tuesday, the fight hasn’t ended for the state’s independent voters.

A federal judge in New York heard a lawsuit Wednesday morning on behalf of “disenfranchised and purged voters in the state of New York,” against the state’s Board of Elections for obstructing New Yorkers from the ability to participate in the Democratic primary.

The candidates who were expected to win the New York primary ended up taking home the victory: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t things to learn from CNN and NBC’s exit polls, which provide hard numbers that back up some stereotypes of the campaign — and destroy others.

Even in defeat in New York and most likely in the overall quest for the 2016 Democratic nomination, Bernie Sanders has already won in another, perhaps more important way: His brand of politics is the future of the Democratic Party.

Sanders is the overwhelming choice of young voters, scoring 67 percent of voters under 30 in New York even while losing overall amidst a set of election rules that were highly unfavorable to his cause. National Reuters polls now show him with a large 56-38 edge over Clinton with voters below the age of 40.

Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump commandingly won their respective contests, and both will expand their already sizable delegate leads — though we’ll have to wait until more votes are counted to know by how much exactly. And New York voters finally got a chance to show Ted Cruz what they thought of his mockery of their “values,” by dealing him a humiliating defeat.

Meanwhile, the Bernie Sanders campaign is resorting to increasingly absurd arguments to justify how Sanders can mount a comeback. And, unfortunately for New York’s independent voters, many were locked out of participating tonight by an absurdly early deadline for changing their party registrations. So here are three winners and two losers from New York’s primary night.

There is, to say the least, a certain amount of tension between two of the arguments the Bernie Sanders campaign made today.

First, Sanders blasted New York’s primary for being closed to independents. “Today, 3 million people in the state of New York who are independents have lost their right to vote in the Democratic or Republican primary,” Bernie Sanders said. “That’s wrong.”

Donald Trump looks increasingly likely to be the Republican nominee. Hillary Clinton looks increasingly likely to be the Democratic nominee. And Clinton looks increasingly likely to stomp Trump in a general election:

As you can see on the chart, Clinton and Trump were about tied back in February. But the more the American people have seen of Trump’s campaign, the less they’ve liked him. Both Clinton and Sanders have pulled far, far ahead of Trump in general election matchups.

Bernie Sanders ripped into New York’s primary voting system on Tuesday as a betrayal of democratic government that is preventing millions of people from having a say in choosing the country’s next president.

Speaking in New York City, Sanders criticized the state for holding a “closed primary” in which voters must be registered with a party in order to cast a ballot.

It’s not yet clear how many of the state’s 95 delegates Trump picked up — they’re awarded by congressional district — but it’s likely that he will win a large majority: CNN reported that Ted Cruz’s campaign said it expects to win no delegates tonight. And going into election night, Trump was leading his closest rival, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, by 30 points.

In the Democratic race, 247 pledged delegates are at stake, awarded proportionally. Although it’s not clear how many delegates Clinton picked up, her win is bad news for Sanders, who needs to win a majority of the delegates in all future states in order to have a majority of pledged delegates before the Democratic National Convention.

Clinton was the favorite to win all along. She’s led in the polls for months in New York, the state she represented in the US Senate. And New York is demographically friendlier territory for Clinton, who has fared better with Latino and African-American voters, than some of the states Sanders has recently won, such as Wyoming and Utah.

Still, it’s delegates, not states, that really count in the race for the Democratic nomination. And it’s not yet clear how exactly Clinton fared in the delegate count. New York allocates most of its 247 pledged delegates by congressional district. That means Clinton’s full delegate total won’t be known until results from all congressional districts are in.

Earlier today, I wrote about the ways Bernie Sanders’s campaign has begun to paint the primary results as fundamentally illegitimate. It began with his comments about how states in the Deep South “distort” the who’s ahead and who’s behind in the vote. But it’s ratcheted up tonight as Sanders faces a possible loss in New York that’s partly driven by the fact that the Empire State, like many others, doesn’t allow independents to vote in the Democratic primary.

“Today, 3 million people in the state of New York who are independents have lost their right to vote in the Democratic or Republican primary,” Bernie Sanders said. “That’s wrong.”

Update: Donald Trump has won the New York primary, according to calls by multiple media outlets. The Democratic race has not yet been called.

Original story: For the past few weeks, both parties’ presidential frontrunners have appeared to be on the ropes. Hillary Clinton has lost seven of the past eight contests to Bernie Sanders and seen her national primary polling lead shrink to nearly nothing. Meanwhile, Donald Trump lost badly to Ted Cruz in the Wisconsin primary and has been utterly bungling the delegate selection game.

The votes are still being counted, but Trump’s two remaining rivals, Ted Cruz and John Kasich, don’t even appear to have come close. This is no surprise — the polls showed Trump ahead by 30 points.

Yet the question of just how much of a winner Trump is remains to be determined, and will depend on his final vote total both statewide and in each of New York’s 27 congressional districts.

ITHACA, NY — Tom Blecher thinks there’s only one way Bernie Sanders fails to become the Democratic nominee for president.

“The superdelegates can still take it away from him,” says Blecher, 68, a retired electrician and Sanders volunteer. “That’s all it comes down to. If the superdelegates are in lockstep with Hillary [Clinton], that might be a problem. Otherwise, Bernie’s going to be the nominee.”

Voters from both parties go to the polls today for closed primaries in New York, a state with the potential to award a lot of delegates. It’s the home state of Donald Trump (really) and Hillary Clinton (sort of — she represented it in the Senate). And a win for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary is both unlikely and crucial for the Vermont senator’s chances.

Here’s a quick guide to today’s elections. Results will come in after 9 pm Eastern time.

New Yorkers will wait in line for hours for a good brunch. Waiting in line to vote? Not so much.

Only 25 percent of New York state’s registered voters turned out in the 2014 gubernatorial race. In fact, the New York Public Interest Research Group’s legislative director Blair Horner called voter turnout in the state flat-out “lousy.“ And voter apathy isn’t just a problem during the midterm years. In 2008, only 61 percent of registered New York City residents went to the polls — the worst turnout for any major American city.

Bernie Sanders went full Brooklyn on Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz’s earlier comments mocking “New York values.” Appearing on The Nightly Show on Wednesday, less than a week before the New York primary, Sanders said enough is enough when it comes to disparaging the diverse values of New Yorkers:

Sanders then dropped the mic.