A few weeks ago, I posted an outlook for all of the April Democratic primaries. This outlook included my initial estimate for the New York primary, showing Bernie Sanders at 38.8% in the Empire State. We are all aware that both candidates have been campaigning relentlessly in New York, and for that reason I didn’t believe that the needle would really move much from the initial estimate. This assumption of mine is based on the concept of “dynamic equilibrium” that I learned about in my Political Science senior seminar during my undergrad, from a book called The Gamble that covered the 2012 general election. The idea is that, if both candidates are campaigning with approximately the same vigor and intensity in a state, they will both likely get about the same amount of media coverage there, capture the same number of votes in that time frame, etc. It’s a useful way to think about elections. Anyways, it does appear that Hillary Clinton has lost a very small amount of ground compared to my original estimate. Here are my final numbers for New York:

I am expecting Bernie to do a couple of points better than the original outlook for a couple of reasons. First, his Facebook presence has become barely more favorable than it was, settling out at 70.00% of Democrat likes. This is similar to Virginia (70.37%), Florida (69.56%), and Iowa (71.87%). Secondly, his relative search interest on Google is decent; with the three day relative average coming in at about 2.05-2.1. This is in the ballpark of Illinois (2.05), Oklahoma (1.98), and Nebraska (2.02). The demographic makeup of the state, as well as the closed primary contest format still remain the greatest hurdle to any good Sanders performance in New York.

I am somewhat inclined to believe that New York’s unique primary rules will alter the results of tomorrow’s primary more in favor of Hillary. To vote in the Democratic primary, voters had to have been registered a Democrat by the end of 2015. My belief is that this will most certainly disproportionately affect Sanders supporters. A good friend of mine refers to the New York primary as the most closed primary of the season, and it will be interesting to see if that setup produces results that vary widely from the above projection. Thanks for reading.

-Tyler