If you’re a casual follower of political news, you may have been a little surprised Thursday when news headlines in the middle of a weekday morning suddenly started blaring “Donald Trump Clinches GOP Nomination.”
Pundits and party elders have been calling Trump the presumptive nominee for weeks. So what changed? And why does it matter? Here’s a quick explainer on the “magic number” and what happened on Thursday.
To be the nominee of the Republican Party, a candidate needs a majority of the delegates who show up at the Republican National Convention to vote for them. There are a total of 2,472 GOP delegates, so a majority is half of that number plus one, or 1,237 delegates. That’s the number that Trump surpassed Thursday, causing all the hoopla.
There weren’t any primaries yesterday or today, so where did the extra delegates come from?Each state has different rules for delegates. Most delegates are bound to vote for a specific candidate on the first ballot at the convention, but some are “unbound.” (They’re kind of like a Republican version of superdelegates.) These folks can vote for whomever they want, but they can also pledge their support for a particular candidate before the convention. Enough unbound delegates from North Dakota, Colorado and Pennsylvania pledged their support to Trump to get him over the 1,237 line. As of Thursday afternoon, our NBC News count now has Trump at 1,238 delegates.
But wasn’t Trump already the nominee?
On May 4, NBC News declared Trump the “presumptive” nominee of the Republican Party. That’s because after his decisive win in Indiana’s May 3 GOP primary, his remaining competitors – John Kasich and Ted Cruz – dropped out of the race. As the only man left standing, he became the race’s presumptive nominee.
Okay, so is he now the “official” nominee?
Nope, Trump remains the presumptive nominee of the party until he is formally nominated at the Republican National Convention in July in Cleveland. The main thing that’s changed is that he’s assured enough delegates to win on the first ballot, a feat he was on a glide path to accomplish anyway, but one he achieved before the end of the primary season.








