More than $1 million of Bernie Sanders’ spending is earmarked specifically for the pricey Los Angeles market. | AP Photo 5 numbers that mattered this week

Continuing our POLITICO feature, where we dig into the latest polls and loop in other data streams to tell the story of the 2016 campaign. Here are five numbers that mattered this week.





Bernie Sanders’ fundraising juggernaut may be sputtering toward the finish line of the Democratic presidential primaries, but he's poised to outspend Hillary Clinton in television and radio advertising by a wide margin in two key states voting on June 7.

Of the $2.5 million on the books in California and New Mexico leading into the primaries there, Sanders is shelling out $1.8 million. Clinton’s spending thus far — which could always be supplemented over the next week and a half — totals only about $700,000.

Southern California is the prime battleground within California: More than $1 million of Sanders’ spending is earmarked specifically for the pricey Los Angeles market, compared to about $578,000 of Clinton’s spending.

Even with that, it’s clear the campaigns aren’t spending much in either state — especially California, the nation’s largest state and home to two of the six largest media markets in the country. The combined $2.5 million is far less than they spent in recent contests in New York ($10.5 million) and Pennsylvania ($6.7 million) — and about equal to what they spent in Connecticut.

There’s still a week or so for both campaigns to increase their presence on the airwaves, including in markets where they’ve been silent thus far: Neither campaign is spending any money in the expensive San Francisco market — with the exception of about $12,000 of Clinton spending on radio stations that broadcast in Cantonese, Mandarin and Vietnamese.





So who’s leading in California? It depends on which poll you believe.

One major problem right off the bat: There have only been two polls of likely Democratic primary voters conducted this month — a Public Policy Institute of California poll conducted May 13-22, and a SurveyUSA poll conducted over the final few days of that field period, May 19-22.

And the two polls showed wildly disparate results. The PPIC survey reflected a tight race, giving Clinton just a 2-point lead over Sanders, 46 percent to 44 percent. But the SurveyUSA poll showed Clinton leading by a much more comfortable, 18-point margin, 57 percent to 39 percent.

The two surveys also differed methodologically. The PPIC poll was conducted using live telephone interviewers dialing both landlines and cellphones. That’s long been considered the “gold standard” of survey research, and the PPIC results were picked up by a number of news organizations, including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and both POLITICO and POLITICO California.

The SurveyUSA poll, on the other hand, used automated phone calls made to landlines — combined with a little more than a third of voters “not reachable on a home telephone,” who surveyed “on their smartphone, tablet or other electronic device.” That poll was mostly ignored by larger media outlets.

Both pollsters have good track records: The website FiveThirtyEight.com gives PPIC a grade of “A-,” and SurveyUSA an “A” mark.

Observers won’t be left in the dark for long. We have yet to hear from the Los Angeles Times, which conducts a poll along with the University of Southern California run by a bipartisan team of D.C.-area polling firms. And the well-respected Field Poll, which has been surveying California for nearly seven decades, will release its survey next week.





Sanders has insisted throughout most of the race that increased voter turnout benefits his campaign. But two real-world examples offer a competing theory.

The Vermont senator won caucuses in Nebraska and Washington state by wide margins in March. But both states also held nonbinding primaries this month — with turnout multiple times that of the caucus — both of which Clinton carried.

In Nebraska, nearly 35,000 Democrats attended the caucuses on March 5, which Sanders carried by about a 14-point margin. But Clinton won the nonbinding primary on May 10, in which 79,000 voters participated, by 7 points.

It was the same story last week in Washington state. The March 26 caucuses drew record turnout — more than 230,000 voters, according to the state Democratic Party — and went overwhelmingly for Sanders: 73 percent to 27 percent.

In the beauty-contest primary, however, Clinton flipped the script. The secretary of state’s office will be counting mail-in ballots for a week — but as of Friday evening, Clinton was leading by less than 5 percentage points, with nearly 786,000 votes tallied.

(Clinton’s lead has narrowed. She had a roughly 8-point advantage when The Associated Press declared her the winner of the nonbinding primary.)

The primary victories do nothing to help Clinton, of course. Neither candidate actively campaigned in the state or urged voters to participate. But Harry Enten and Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight used the primary results to evaluate the claims of some Sanders supporters that the system was “rigged” — finding that Sanders was hurt slightly by closed primaries, but also helped by caucuses in Nebraska, Washington and 11 other states.





The alert flew across The Associated Press wire on Thursday morning: Donald Trump had garnered a majority of delegates to the Republican convention in Cleveland, and he was the presumptive GOP presidential nominee.

So how did that happen on Thursday morning, about 36 hours after polls closed in the last GOP primary in Washington state? It’s because enough unbound delegates have told the AP that they intend to support Trump at the July convention.

Trump has won 1,144 bound delegates during the primaries and caucuses, according to the AP’s tally — 93 delegates shy of the 1,237 needed to earn a majority. But in interviews with unbound delegates — who mostly come from states that didn’t hold presidential-preference polls or states where delegates are elected directly on the primary ballot — the AP assigned delegates if they committed to a candidate.

Trump was hovering near the 1,237 mark on Thursday morning on the eve of the candidate’s visit to North Dakota, which held a convention to send unbound delegates to Cleveland. Stephen Ohlemacher, who has been tracking delegates for the AP, reached two delegates riding together in a car on their way to the Trump event.

Ohlemacher’s overall count stood at 1,235 — but after both delegates told him by phone that they were committed to Trump, the only candidate still in the race, the AP alerted that Trump had crossed the threshold. That meant that Trump wouldn’t have to wait until the June 7 primaries to cross the 1,237 mark.





Presidential candidates are fond of telling voters that each election is the most important in recent history. And there’s some evidence voters increasingly believe it.

An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll this week measured how voters perceive the stakes: 48 percent said it makes “a great deal of difference,” and 23 percent said it makes “quite a bit of difference.” Only 17 percent said it makes “just some difference,” and 11 percent said it makes “very little difference.”

The question hasn’t been tracked consistently over time, but these numbers rival polls conducted immediately before recent general elections, when voters are most tuned in. In October 2012, a combined 76 percent said it mattered a great deal or quite a bit, just slightly higher than the 72 percent who said the same in October 2004 and the 71 percent this year.

Voters didn’t always think the presidential election was so important: In October 1996, when then-President Bill Clinton held a large lead over former Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.), only 40 percent said it mattered a great deal or quite a bit who won.

But the 2016 race has been shattering records for interest and viewership.