Trump Cruises the I-95 Primaries; Clinton Pads Her Delegate Lead (EXIT POLLS)
Trump cruised through the I-95 primaries. Clinton relied on customary strengths.
— -- Donald Trump cruised through the I-95 primaries, pulling economic discontent, his outsider status and pushback against other groups into a yet-more potent political package. In the Democratic race, Hillary Clinton relied on her customary strengths – plus a boost from perceived inevitability – to pad her delegate lead.
Trump dominated against opponents who never had much of a chance: Nearly six in 10 voters in Pennsylvania, Maryland and Connecticut – the states where exit polls were conducted – made up their minds more than a month ago, setting or matching new highs. He won a remarkable two-thirds of their votes, even better than his usual share of early deciders, about half.
Ted Cruz and John Kasich struggled to gain votes even in their top support groups. And their backers paled in enthusiasm compared with Trump’s.
The Democratic results were convincing but less overpowering. Clinton’s big win was in Maryland, where she reached beyond women and racial and ethnic minorities, winning whites and men by record margins in a non-Southern primary. She won more typically in Pennsylvania and narrowly in Connecticut; there Bernie Sanders ran well with men, beat his usual margin among voters younger than 45 and found particular resonance with Wall Street critics.
Exit poll results were analyzed for ABC News by Langer Research Associates. Our summary follows.
The Republican Race
Trump’s backers were fired up. In Pennsylvania, six in 10 said they were excited about the things he’d do in office, far better than Cruz and Kasich’s comparable scores. Indeed four in 10 Kasich supporters and a quarter of Cruz’s said they weren’t voting for their candidate so much as against his opponents. Few more than one in 10 Trump voters said that about their guy.
Kasich – and particularly Cruz – had difficulty finding and even holding on to their core constituencies. Just more than four in 10 voters in the three states with exit polls were evangelicals, 15 points off the average in primaries to date. And, remarkably, Trump beat Cruz by 25 points in this group, among his best performances among evangelicals this year. They split their votes between Trump and Cruz, on average, in previous contests.
Very conservative Republicans, typically a strong Cruz group, went for Trump by a 5-point margin in Pennsylvania, 16 points in Maryland and 29 points in Connecticut – the latter among Trump’s best in this group to date. Kasich, for his part, ran 22 points behind Trump among moderates, and their share of the electorate was hardly bigger in these three states than previously on average.
Substantively, as in New York a week ago and throughout the 2016 primaries, Trump’s victories were built on palpable Republican discontent with the status quo:
• Economically, 46 percent of GOP voters said Wall Street hurts more than helps the economy, and Trump won two-thirds of their votes. He even won 51 percent of pro-Wall Streeters; the rest divided about evenly between Cruz and Kasich.
• Trump won two-thirds of voters who are angry about how the federal government is working. And in Pennsylvania he pulled in 83 percent of those who want an outsider rather than a candidate with political experience, near the record set last week in New York.
• Trump also posted huge margins in the Pennsylvania results among those who support temporarily banning Muslims from entering the country and deporting undocumented immigrants.
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