What to watch on Super Tuesday: Why the delegate math shows Haley has little room to stop Trump

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

81% : Expect Trump to get vote share about similar to what he and Cruz combined to get that year, as he continues to enjoy sky-high polling among Republicans, the only voters who get to participate here.
81% : Adding our best-case scenarios for Haley and Trump together, here's our estimate of the rough range of possible outcomes in the delegate race through next week:Trump's best scenario has him just sneaking past the finish line only a week after Super Tuesday, with Haley adding only a few dozen stray delegates to her tally.
80% : But while the ingredients for a potential Haley win are largely present, Trump does have his own strengths.
74% : Trump carried Essex County, the heart of that region, in both the 2016 and the 2020 elections -- after it had twice voted for Barack Obama.
72% : This is an open primary in which Rubio won and Trump placed third in 2016.
72% : The best case for Trump is that the nine delegates decide to back him like they did in 2016.
71% : Haley's best-case scenario involves her keeping Trump under two-thirds and then snagging a delegate or two in the Nashville-area 5th District.
64% : Another closed caucus gives the advantage to Trump.
63% : This territory is holding a territorial caucus, which is typically good news for Trump.
63% : An open primary in a state where Trump has that much baggage could give Haley an opening.
59% : The state's Republican governor, Brian Kemp, remains popular despite having distanced himself from Trump.
59% : In another closed primary, Trump is the heavy favorite to win the majority here, which would give him all 13 at-large delegates (assuming he eclipses 50% in the two-way race).
58% : But if Trump wins a majority of the statewide vote, he'll be the heavy favorite to win those remaining delegates at the convention.
58% : But we have a bonus for loyal readers: Here's our outlook through the next two weeks of the contest, when Trump could hit the magic number to become the presumptive nominee.
54% : But even under Haley's best-case results, she would still fall miles behind Trump and delay his win by only a week or two.
53% : Anchored by the old mill towns of Bangor and Lewiston and taking in a wide rural swath that contains one of the highest concentrations of white voters without college degrees in the country, Maine's 2nd District is ideally suited to Trump, who should rack up massive margins there.
53% : But there are also plenty more blue-collar pockets for Trump to tap.
52% : Instead, the vastly smaller universe of registered Republicans, a group Trump has been winning by around 50 percentage points in primaries so far, will cast all of the ballots.
52% : There's also a University of New Hampshire poll that just last week put Trump ahead of Haley by 30 points in Vermont.
51% : Here's another state where a candidate who breaks 50% wins every delegate.
45% : And Maine is far friendlier to Trump, who carried one of its two congressional districts in the 2016 and 2020 general elections, than any other New England state.
45% : Haley's best bet is likely to be that they stay unbound -- and that the caucus comes and goes without Trump's getting any closer to the nomination.
43% : In 2016, the last contested Republican race, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas won Alaska's caucuses narrowly over Trump, with their combined share of the vote reaching 70%.
43% : For Trump, attaining a simple majority should be no problem.
41% : Haley has won just one contest -- Washington, D.C.'s -- and her reliance on a coalition that leans heavily on affluent, college-educated suburbanites (including non-Republicans who may simply see her as a vehicle to register disgust with Trump) faces two mighty Super Tuesday headwinds.
39% : She has leaned heavily on white, college-educated voters, while Trump has racked up massive margins in areas where white voters without four-year degrees predominate.
39% : While Texas has an open primary, the rightward shift of the state GOP electorate, as reflected in the intraparty civil war that has been brewing in recent years, suggests a majority of the statewide vote -- and 36 of the state's 47 at-large delegates -- will be a lock for Trump.
39% : It's also true that Utah hasn't been kind to Trump.
38% : Trump also easily won the state's primary in 2016, claiming 49% of the vote, 31 points ahead of his nearest foe.
37% : That fall, Trump earned just 45% of the vote in Utah -- still enough to win, but also the third-lowest share ever recorded by a GOP presidential candidate in the state's history.
36% : Overall, 41% of white adults in the state have college degrees; that's 6 points lower than in South Carolina's 1st District, which Haley narrowly carried over Trump on Feb. 24.
36% : Trump has had a rocky time in Georgia.
36% : It's hard to cobble together a path for anything else to happen except Trump's winning it -- just like he did in 2016 over Rubio, the home-state candidate.
34% : Twenty-nine delegates are dished out based on the statewide result, and Trump can claim all of them with at least 50% of the vote.
33% : While some have remained hostile to Trump, many other Republicans have made their way to his bandwagon.
31% : That having been said, the scant GOP primary polling conducted in Massachusetts has shown Trump consistently over 50%.
29% : There also remains a strain of old school, middle-of-the-road Yankee Republicanism in quirky Vermont: In the 2016 GOP primary, John Kasich finished just 2 points behind Trump (who won with only 32%), and the combined vote share for Kasich and Rubio reached 50% -- higher than in almost any other contest that year.
26% : And Republican Gov. Spencer Cox, who has refused to endorse Trump and urged his party to select a different candidate, says there's "no doubt" Trump will achieve that.
23% : As president in 2020, Trump took 87% of the GOP primary vote even with a protest candidate -- former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld -- on the ballot.
23% : And in 2024, it's difficult to see Trump falling under the 50% threshold.
22% : With such a vast pool of them, including many Trump-phobic and college-educated suburbanites, there's a slim chance that just enough of them see the GOP primary as an enticing opportunity to vote against Trump and come out for Haley.
4% : Trump figures to clean up among that core group of registered Republicans -- voters who turned strongly against the state's Republican former governor, Charlie Baker, due in no small part to his outspoken criticism of Trump.

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