Momentum From New York Could Help Trump and Clinton Moving Forward

— -- Victories in New York could help the two parties' respective front-runners moving forward into next week.

After today's primary in New York, there is an “Acela corridor” day of voting next week with voters in Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland heading to the polls.

Hillary Clinton is expected to win her adopted home state tonight -- though Sen. Bernie Sanders has been tightening the gap in recent days, every poll has had her winning New York.

"It's definitely fair to say if Sanders hasn't really shown the ability to win these races outright, then his path to the nomination will look pretty nonexistent," said Phillip Wallach, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution.

Sanders himself noted that Clinton beat him in the South. He said she "cleaned our clock in the Deep South, no question about it. We got murdered there. That is the most conservative part of this great country ... but you know what, we're out of the Deep South now," Sanders said during a debate in Brooklyn last week.

Wallach said that Sanders' talk is part of the campaign's game plan.

"The Sanders campaign has been doing a lot of expectations management, trying to claim that they'll be winning an important moral victory if they keep the margin of Clinton's win small, but really in terms of figuring out who's going to win the nomination, they don't need moral victories -- they need victory victories," Wallach said.

An average of national polls released since March 21 has Clinton leading by 7 points, but the most recent poll, released by NBC/WSJ on Monday, had that gap at only 2 points.

When it comes to the Republicans, all parties appear well aware that it's all coming down to delegates.

Trump is counting on his fellow New Yorkers to come out strong for him today, which could lead to him taking home all of the state's 95 delegates.

"Supposing that he wins a pretty solid victory, as he's supposed to, he'll use this as a way of saying, you know, I'm unstoppable except for some kind of treachery by the party," Wallach said.

"He'll have sort of the wind in his sails in a way he hasn't for a little while now, but again what really matters the most is exactly how many delegates he's able to accumulate," he added.

The Northeast states coming up likely won't be of much help to Trump's main rival, Sen. Ted Cruz, as he had some of his strongest victories in his home state of Texas and in states with large evangelical bases, which are largely behind him. Therefore, his focus (and Gov. John Kasich's), according to Wallach, should be on keeping delegates from Trump.

"Cruz does not really have a path to getting the necessary number of delegates [1,237] at this point and certainly Kasich never really has, so for Cruz and Kasich, every delegate they manage to keep away from Trump is a victory," Wallach said.