Indiana Primary Polls: Bernie Sanders Inches Closer For Democrats, Republican Donald Trump May Suffer An Unsustainable Loss

Bernie Sanders supporters are already looking on to next week’s Indiana primary polls as it appears imminent that their candidate will lose every state up for grabs on New England’s Super Tuesday.

Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, Rhode Island, and Connecticut are all slated to go to Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries. If polls are accurate, Donald Trump will also be taking home five-out-of-five states. Because of those losses, their remaining competition — Bernie, Ted Cruz, and John Kasich — can only hope to fare better in Indiana.

Democratic Indiana Primary Polls

For Sanders, that goal is achievable. While Hillary has inched out a win in all three of Indiana’s recent polls, she was never able to overtake Bernie by more than the survey’s margin of error. With a week to go, Sanders could easily end up taking the state.

In both CBS/YouGov, Fox News and WTHR/Howey Politics’Indiana polls, Clinton came out ahead between three and five percentage points ahead of Bernie. Fox, the primary survey with the largest number of respondents, 603, and the smallest margin or error, 4 percent, gave Hillary a lead over Sanders of 4 percentage points.

Unfortunately for Bernie, breaking even in Indiana isn’t enough right now. Sanders needs to be trouncing Clinton in order to catch up to her in the pledged delegate counts, especially if she wins big in Tuesday’s five New England primaries. If polls for those races hold true, Hillary could be pulling an additional 100-200 delegates ahead.

In the face of these Bernie Sanders polls in the Indiana primary and other races, the campaign has argued that growing national momentum is on their side. They also point to extra delegates that Bernie has picked up because of huge turn-outs in county caucus conventions in places like Nevada. With that commitment, it’s unlikely the Democratic Socialist candidate will drop out even if he loses big in New England this week. Tad Devine, Sanders’ senior strategist, explained to New York Times what the direction would be going forward if such a heavy loss occurs.

“If we are sitting here and there’s no sort of mathematical way to do it, we will be upfront about that. If we have a really good day, we are going to continue to talk about winning most of the pledged delegates because we will be on a path toward it. If we don’t get enough today to make it clear that we can do it by the end, it’s going to be hard to talk about it. That’s not going to be a credible path. Instead, we will talk about what we intend to do between now and the end and how we can get there.”

Republican Indiana Primary Polls

On the Republican side, Donald seems to have carved out another significant advantage over his rivals going into the Indiana primary. Polls of likely GOP voters show a preference for Trump, although it is not as large as some of the leads he’s gone into other big primaries with. Last week, Donald walked away with nearly 60 percent of the overall vote in New York.

On the other hand, Trump’s potential victory in the Indiana primary is likely to be much less decisive than its New York counterpart. Donald’s biggest lead in the state’s GOP polls is 8 percentage points over runner-up Ted Cruz. Still, in this match-up Trump would walk away with 41 percent of the vote to Ted’s 33 percent. In third place, Kasich languishes behind with just 16 percent of the vote. The other two recent polls available more or less matched these findings.

Indiana Delegates

On the Republican side, 57 delegates will be doled out based on a winner-take-all system. Though Trump’s lead in the Indiana polls is relatively small, he could still easily end up taking home almost all of the delegates — something analysts say he needs to do to lock up the nomination before the GOP convention in July.

For Democrats, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have 92 delegates at stake in the primary. Nine of them are super delegates, seven of whom have pledged their support for Hillary. Though polls still show a loss for Bernie, Indiana does have an open primary where independents may vote — something that has been a favor to Sanders in races like Michigan, where he landed a surprise win against Clinton.

Now that you’re up to date on the Indiana primary polls, check out the Inquisitr‘s other analysis of the polls for elections taking place on Tuesday in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Delaware.

[Photo by Tom Pennington/Getty Images]