HARTFORD — Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton grabbed their respective primary wins in Connecticut on Tuesday night.
Donald Trump has won all five Republican presidential primaries held today in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware and Maryland, giving the billionaire businessman a boost in a critical night as he seeks to shut out his opponents.
Trump declared himself the GOP’s “presumptive nominee,” even though he is short of the required delegates. He won at least 82 of the 118 delegates that were up for grabs on Tuesday–the rest will be determined once the full counts are in based on the percent of votes each candidate got–but is still 310 delegates away from the needed 1,237 to be declared the official nominee. Ted Cruz has 559 delegates and John Kasich has 148.
Hillary Clinton won the Democratic primaries in Connecticut, Delaware, Pennsylvania and Maryland.
Bernie Sanders meanwhile pulled away with a win in Rhode Island, breaking Clinton’s possible sweep in the Northeast.
Clinton entered Tuesday's five primaries having already accumulated 82 percent of the delegates needed to win her party's nomination. While she can't win enough delegates to officially knock Bernie Sanders out of the race this week, she can make it virtually impossible for him to catch up to her in the remaining contests.
Trump's win in Pennsylvania, the biggest prize in Tuesday's five contests, lends a boost to his embattled campaign which is facing a growing challenge from rivals Ted Cruz and John Kasich who announced this week that they are teaming up to thwart his rise.
While the Republican winner in Pennsylvania gets 17 delegates up front, the other 54 are directly elected by voters. They are allowed to support any candidate they choose at the national convention, but their names are listed on the ballot with no information about whom they support, meaning that voters who haven't studied up on their choices will be voting blind.
To win the nomination, a Republican candidate needs 1,237 delegates. Before Tuesday night, Trump had 845, meaning he needed 392 to cinch the nomination. There are a total of 2,472 delegates to be split, with just 749 left in the states that haven't yet voted, so Trump needs more than 50 percent of the remaining delegates. If no candidate reaches 1,237, it would mean an open convention for the first time in more than half a century.
Trump needed to win 50 percent of the state-wide vote to get all 28 delegates in Connecticut, plus he needs to win each of the five districts. If Trump had won the state-wide vote by a margin less than 50 percent, he would have split the delegates with the other candidates, but that didn't happen. He won with about 58 percent of the vote.
Meanwhile, while Clinton has been threatened in the race by Bernie Sanders' unexpected success, she is still far closer to cinching the number of delegates needed to win the Democratic nomination. Coming into Tuesdays elections, she had 1,930 delegates compared to Sanders' 1,191. A Democrat needs 2,383 delegates to win the nomination, and there are still 1,644 available in the remaining states. She needs just 453 of those votes, or 27.55 percent of the remaining delegates.
In Connecticut were 71 delegates up for grabs on the Democratic side. Of those, 36 are district delegates that are given proportionally to candidates based on how they do in each district. Another 19 are given proportionally based on the results of the statewide election. Of the remaining delegates--superdelegates, as they're called--15 have pledged their votes to Clinton, and one remains undecided. Because Sanders and Clinton split the vote nearly evenly, despite Clinton's win, they will each get a number of delegates.
