New York voters went to the polls on Tuesday, April 19, to choose their presidential candidates. This post was updated throughout the day with news, analysis, exit polls and results for the Republican Party contest. For results of the Democratic primary, follow this link.



Update (April 20, 7:45 a.m. PT): Final results





New York Republican primary

Donald Trump: 518,601 votes (60.5%), 89 delegates

John Kasich: 214,755 votes (25.1%), 3 delegates

Ted Cruz: 123,894 votes (14.5%), 0 delegates

Trump could end up with 90 of the 95 available delegates. Next week, elections will be held in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.

Update (April 19, 8:25 p.m. PT): Trump feeling confident

Donald Trump will take 92 of New York's 95 Republican delegates, the New York Times estimates. Ohio Gov. John Kasich will land three delegates and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz will be shut out.

The data-analysis site FiveThirtyEight is estimating Kasich will do slightly better, earning four delegates: one each from the 10th, 12th, 20th and 24th congressional districts.

Trump spent much of the past week complaining about Republican Party rules concerning delegate allocation, calling the system "corrupt" and "phony." But with his overwhelming victory in New York, he now believes he can outpace the anti-Trump operators in the party and reach the 1,237 delegates he needs to clinch the nomination.

"I think I'll get there," he said today before the polls closed.

With 85 percent of precincts reporting, Trump has 59.9 percent of the vote in the New York primary, Kasich has 25.3 percent and Cruz is at 14.9 percent.

Update (April 19, 6:40 p.m. PT): Is Trump on the way to the nomination?

Insurgent candidate Donald Trump today took an impressive step toward a first-ballot nomination at July's Republican National Convention. The real-estate developer and reality-TV star won his home state of New York, and it appears to be by a significant margin statewide. He may get over 50 percent in most of the state's congressional districts. This would mean he'd garner almost all of New York's 95 delegates. We will provide final results when they're available.

Two weeks after winning the Wisconsin primary and becoming the all-but-official Trump alternative, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz will finish in third place in the Empire State, hobbled by his ill-advised criticism of Trump's "New York values." Ohio Gov. John Kasich was supposed to pick up the slack and outpace Trump in at least a handful of congressional districts, thus holding down Trump's delegate haul. But Kasich has placed a weak second.

This result knocks the "Stop Trump" movement sideways. Polls indicate that Trump will do very well in the five Northeastern states that vote next Tuesday. The polling-analysis site FiveThirtyEight declared last week that Trump almost certainly will come up short of a delegate majority after California closes out primary voting in June. But with today's result in New York, that elusive majority is now looking do-able for Trump, which would mean no contested convention.

All of that said, neither Cruz nor Kasich nor the amorphous "Stop Trump" movement plans to call it quits. The fight will go on until Trump nails down the 1,237th delegate he needs and maybe even beyond that point. An anti-Trump splinter group still believes retired Gen. James Mattis running as an independent could be the answer to the Republican Party's troubles.

Update (April 19, 6:01 p.m. PT): Donald Trump wins

Donald Trump has won the New York Republican primary, multiple news sources project. It looks like it might be a landslide. More to come as final results come in from precincts.

Update (April 19, 3:50 p.m. PT): Early exit polls suggest Trump triumph



In early New York exit polls, Trump wins big on arguably the most important question for Republicans: who has the "best chance" to defeat Hillary Clinton. Fifty-six percent say Trump is the man to beat Clinton,

. He's followed by John Kasich with 21 percent and Ted Cruz at 16 percent.

The Republican electorate remains strikingly divided. Half of New York's

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voters so far today say they would "definitely" vote for Trump in November if he's the

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nominee. About 25 percent "flatly rule him out." Meanwhile, around 40 percent of Trump voters say they would not vote for Kasich or Cruz in November.

More than 70 percent of New York Republican voters say the candidate with the most votes going into the national convention should be the nominee.

Nearly 60 percent of today's voters say the primaries have divided the party rather than energized it.

A sign that Cruz probably will not do well: Evangelical voters, his base of support, make up about 25 percent of the Republican electorate in New York today, significantly lower than most other Republican primaries so far.

Nearly 60 percent of New York

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voters support banning foreign Muslims from entering the country.

Perhaps the most telling sign that Trump will win big in New York: "Nearly two-thirds of

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primary voters in these preliminary exit poll results are looking for an outsider rather than someone with political experience." These voters have consistently gone for Trump in the primaries and caucuses so far.

Keep in mind that these are early exit polls. New Yorkers are still voting, and the final exit-poll results -- not to mention the actual vote -- could reach different conclusions.

Update (April 19, 2:50 p.m. PT): Trump up in April ... down in May?

The New York Republican primary offers drama because of the 50 percent threshold for sweeping delegates and the allocation of delegates through congressional districts as well as the statewide vote. But we pretty much know who's going to win: New Yorker Donald Trump.

In fact, the Empire State is likely to start a string of April victories for the businessman and reality-TV star, polls indicate. But that does not mean he's likely to wrap up the nomination before July's convention. On April 26, voters will go to the polls in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.

"The rest of this month is all New England states, and that plays to Trump's advantage," says Matthew Wilson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. "May is a lot of Midwest and Great Plains states, and Ted Cruz has done very well in those parts of the country. That sets up a big battle in California on June 7."

Plus, there's the fact that Cruz has been cleaning Trump's clock at state conventions such as Colorado's. The Texas senator recently scored all 34 of the Rocky Mountain State's available delegates, leading to Trump calling the system "rigged." The Colorado Republican Party decided long ago not to hold a caucus in 2016. (Rick Santorum won the caucus four years ago.)

"The Colorado system is not rigged because it was put in place before anyone thought Trump would be a contender," Wilson says. "Colorado didn't do this to shackle Trump. Colorado did this to save money and have a low-key process because they thought by this point in the game nothing would be uncertain about the future Republican nominee. Not knowing the rules is not the same as the rules being unfair. It's pretty clear Trump did not invest a lot of time in learning how the rules work in these various states."

Update (April 19, 1:15 p.m. PT): The Year of the Unlikable Candidates

The latest

NBC

-Wall Street Journal survey of the American electorate has bad news for Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton. Fifty-six percent of Americans don't like her. That's a remarkably high number for the presumptive nominee of a major party. It should make her campaign strategists very nervous.

Except for the fact that businessman and reality-TV star Donald Trump, the leading Republican candidate, has an even higher "unfavorable" rating. A lot higher. That's where the hyper-partisanship of the Bush and Obama years has put us: facing a choice that apparently only the hard-core supporters want to make.

Writes the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza:

"Seven in 10 women view Trump negatively! Three in four millennials! Eight in 10 Hispanics! Those numbers are historically bad. And, I would say that no candidate could win a general election with them except that I have witnessed Trump flip his negatives to positives with Republican voters, so I am not ready to rule it totally out. What I will say is those numbers make it virtually impossible for a candidate to win a general election."

It doesn't get much better for the

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s foremost alternative to Trump. Only 26 percent of Americans think favorably of Cruz. Forty-nine percent of people view him negatively. (32 percent of Americans view Clinton in a positive light.)

Cruz does have this going for him: a lot of Americans don't know much about him, meaning some of them can be swayed. Clinton and Trump have been in the national spotlight a long time, and so -- despite Cillizza's caveat about Trump -- are going to have a hard time changing people's minds about them.

Update (April 19, 11:25 a.m. PT): First New York, then ... Indiana

California, being the country's largest state and offering up the last primary on the calendar, is getting a lot of attention as Donald Trump fights to get a majority of delegates before the Republican convention. But the New York Times insists that Indiana might actually the most important state yet to vote.

That's right, the unassuming Hoosier State, which votes May 3.

"It may sound strange, but when you start gaming out the rest of the primary contest, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that [Trump's] quest to reach a majority of delegates before the convention could all turn on Indiana," the Times' Nate Cohn writes. He adds, "You can see the basic issue: If he doesn't win Indiana, he has to sweep California and get some lucky breaks elsewhere, which isn't realistic. He would need an upset in a state like Montana, in a region that has been hostile to him."

The problem: no one really knows how Indiana is going to vote. There have been no surveys done in the state, because robo-polling isn't allowed. That leaves political operatives and pundits wondering and theorizing.

In many ways, Indiana, working class and predominantly white, should be a good state for Trump, who's just brought in some more experienced staff for the final push to the nomination. But that same demographic also could find John Kasich appealing, especially seeing as Kasich is the governor of a neighboring state. And then there's Ted Cruz, who has a large Evangelical base in Indiana to dip into.

So Indiana is a danger zone for Trump and an opportunity for Cruz and Kasich. Assuming Trump wins big in New York today and in the other Northeast states that vote next Tuesday, then a Trump win in the Hoosier state will put a first-ballot nomination within reach. A loss there for him will come close to guaranteeing a contested convention. That's how tight the Republican contest has become.

New York Republican primary preview (April 19, 6 a.m. PT): Trump goes for a big win

The battle for the Big Apple -- and the rest of New York -- is upon us. Life-long New Yorker and Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump is expected to win the

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primary, but will he win it by enough?

There are 95 bound delegates for the taking in New York, with 14 based on the statewide vote and three coming from each of the state's 27 congressional districts. If a candidate gets 50 percent (statewide and in a district), he gets all of the delegates on offer. And a non-winner must get at least 20 percent of the vote to score any delegates.

Trump, who needs every delegate he can get in his bid for a first-ballot nomination at July's Republican National Convention, is just over the 50 percent mark on average in the latest statewide polling, but it's difficult to say with confidence where he stands in each congressional district. Nate Silver of the polling-analysis site FiveThirtyEight.com writes that "even if Trump gets 55 percent or 60 percent of the vote statewide, he'll probably be under 50 percent in a handful of districts, preventing a clean sweep." (We will be tracking throughout the day the congressional districts that are most competitive.)AAAA

Republican strategist Karl Rove -- best known as former President George W. Bush's "brain" -- predicts Trump will land 90 of New York's delegates, a result the insurgent candidate surely would be very happy with.

"It might be a little less, but it could be as many as those,"

on Fox News' "The

O'R

eilly Factor."

Other observers say Trump likely will end up with significantly fewer delegates than that.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has been surging lately, with a thumping win in the Wisconsin primary and successful state-convention maneuvering for delegates in Colorado, Virginia and other hotbeds of Republican in-fighting. Trump, frustrated at his inability to master the inner workings of the primary process (beyond winning actual votes at the polls, that is), has called the system "rigged" and "corrupt." He said last week that the Republican National Committee "should be ashamed of itself."

Cruz has responded by labeling Trump a whiner. But Cruz probably isn't going to find much success in New York, seeing as his rigid social conservatism and in-your-face religiosity usually don't go over well in the Empire State, even among Republicans. It didn't help that he hit Trump a few months ago for his "New York values," a line that has come back to haunt the first-term senator now that the New York primary is important to his bid for the nomination.

So the question of the day is whether Ohio Gov. John Kasich, trailing in a distant third place overall in the delegate hunt, can make enough of an impact in New York to significantly hold down Trump's haul there.

Polls indicate that Trump will own New York City, but that he could struggle in the rest of the state. One poll, from Optimus, puts him under 50 percent statewide and under 50 percent in many of the congressional districts outside the city. "If accurate," pointed out the conservative-politics site RedState.com, "this is a disaster for Trump."

The political-news site Politico also raised a warning flag for Trump after looking at the Optimus poll. "Overall," writes Politico, "the survey shows Trump well above the 50 percent threshold in five [congressional] districts. It has him within the margin of error of the 50 percent threshold in another 14 districts. He is below that threshold in eight districts."

The Optimus and other New York polls put Kasich in second place statewide, typically with 20-something percent of the vote, and Cruz way back in third. Politico predicts Trump will win "at least 65 delegates in New York," meaning he could miss out on 30 available delegates in his home state. Cruz, meanwhile, might get no New York delegates.

Trump, who has rejected Republican orthodoxy on trade, Social Security reform and many other issues, knows it's important for him to gain 1,237 delegates -- a majority -- before arriving at July's national convention in Cleveland. Republican Party insiders, fearful that the divisive, bombastic reality-TV star would bring a disastrous defeat in the November general election and seriously rupture the party along the way, are working hard to deny him the nomination at the convention.

If Trump doesn't come into Cleveland with a majority of delegates and a second ballot is thus necessary, anything could happen. Most delegates would no longer be bound to the winner of their state's primary or caucus and could vote for anyone. Would Cruz, who likely will come into the convention with the second-most delegates and has been

those bound to other candidates, become the favorite on a second ballot? Would Kasich, widely viewed as the most palatable of the three candidates to a general electorate, see a big spike in support? Would delegates turn to somebody who didn't even run in the primaries -- say, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, the 2012

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nominee and a vocal Trump critic?

It's looking like we're going to find out. FiveThirtyEight says Trump won't make it over the finish line before the convention. Its latest estimate has the real-estate magnate ending up at 1,155 delegates going into the Cleveland gathering, 82 shy of the number needed to secure a first-ballot nomination. The way it's playing out, there's a good chance it'll all come down to the California primary, which takes place June 7.

"I suspect the political commentariat hasn't fully woken up to how monumental a finish California will be," FiveThirtyEight's Silver writes of the primary in the country's largest state. "Even if Trump is going gangbusters and meeting or exceeding his path-to-1,237 projections, a poor performance in California could leave him well short of 1,237 delegates."

The reason: The Golden State offers a whopping 172 delegates, but only 13 go to the top statewide vote-getter. The rest, like in New York, are allocated three each in the state's congressional districts, meaning California is really "53 micro-primaries."

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Right now, the subject is New York. If Trump sweeps or comes close to sweeping the Empire State and its congressional districts, he gives himself a puncher's chance at winning the nomination outright on the first ballot -- and thus frustrating the party loyalists who have big plans for the convention.

-- Douglas Perry