Continuing our POLITICO feature, where we dig into the latest polls and loop in other data streams to tell the story of the 2016 campaign.

All the focus is on whether Donald Trump will secure 1,237 delegates on the first ballot at this summer’s national convention in Cleveland – and the efforts to deny Trump those delegates, and line up commitments on subsequent ballots.

But there are early signs of a potential backlash to denying Trump the nomination if he’s the delegate-leader going into the convention but doesn’t have a majority. The threat isn’t just that Trump will bolt the party in a discordant manner – it’s that even Republicans who don’t support Trump think it would be unfair to pick someone else, at least for now.

According to a McClatchy-Marist poll of Republican and Republican-leaning voters released this week, 52 percent think the party “should nominate Donald Trump for president” if Trump has won the most delegates going into the convention “but not enough to be nominated on the convention’s first ballot. Forty percent think the party “should nominate a different person.”

The opposition to denying the delegate-leader the nomination is slightly lower here than in other polls, and that’s all related to Trump. Polls that ask the same question, but don’t name Trump as the leading candidate, show even less support for handing the nomination to another candidate.

For example, a Fox News poll last month found 59 percent of Republican voters thought the nomination “should automatically go to the candidate who wins the most delegates in primaries and caucuses, even if that candidate doesn’t have a majority.” In a Bloomberg Politics poll last month, 63 percent of Republicans said the candidate “with the most delegates from the state primaries and caucuses should win, even if he does not get a majority.”

Every pollster asks the question using slightly different wording, but CNN/ORC, CBS News/New York Times and Monmouth University (which, like McClatchy-Marist, mentioned Trump by name) all found solid majorities of GOP voters resistant to the idea of handing the nomination to a candidate other than the leading vote-getter.

It’s not just Trump supporters who feel that way. In the McClatchy-Marist poll that asked whether Trump should be the nominee, about 30 percent of voters who said they supported Ted Cruz or John Kasich also said that the party should nominate Trump, even if he falls short of the majority.

And that was the case this week in Wisconsin, where 55 percent of GOP primary voters told exit pollsters that if no one wins a majority of delegates, the party should nominate the candidate who won the most votes. That includes the vast majority of Trump voters, about 83 percent – but also 40 percent of Cruz voters and 35 percent of Kasich voters.

If Trump – who is the only candidate with a realistic shot to clinch the nomination outright – falls short over the next two months, Republicans who want delegates to hand the nomination to another candidate on later ballots will have to convince voters that it’s a fair process.

Cruz’s campaign announced Friday it raised $32 million over the first three months of this year, which includes roughly $12.5 million brought in during the month of March.

That represents a month-over-month increase throughout the quarter; Cruz raised $7.6 million in January and $11.8 million in February.

But the February-to-March uptick is only slight – even as the GOP presidential field narrowed considerably, and much of the party establishment rallied around Cruz. And March was also two days longer than February.

The Texas senator’s full report isn’t due to the Federal Election Commission until April 20, so it’s not clear whether Cruz was able to recruit new donors to his campaign, especially after Marco Rubio ended his run on March 15.

Still, Cruz’s fundraising has enabled him to stay competitive with Trump – who, despite claims of a net worth of $10 billion, hasn’t been willing to open up his wallet to a great degree. Trump’s campaign-finance report isn’t yet available, but the real-estate mogul did spent about $5.7 million on television and radio advertising from March 1-28.

That’s more than the $3.3 million the Cruz camp spent, but Cruz got about $2 million in backup from super PACs supporting his candidacy. And that doesn’t even include the millions spent by groups that are seeking to deny Trump the GOP nomination, which also boosts Cruz in many cases, especially now with Rubio out of the race.

Wyoming is both the smallest U.S. state in population – and the most Republican.

But on Saturday, Wyoming’s Democrats – outnumbered by Republicans more than three-to-one and representing just 20 percent of state voters – will gather at two dozen locations across the state to weigh in on the race between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.

The state is expected to favor Sanders, who has easily won caucuses in a number of other Western states. There’s some evidence of energy on the Democratic side: The party has added more than 2,700 voters since early January – a 6.5 percent jump in registration.

Over the same time period, Republicans have added fewer than 1,600 voters, only a 1.1 percent rise.

Despite the intense interest in the GOP nominating contest nationwide, there’s a reason for the lack of GOP enthusiasm: Wyoming Republicans aren’t holding a presidential preference poll as part of their delegate-selection process this year.

The Democratic race is getting much closer – in some respects. Sanders has won seven of the past eight contests – and he’s likely to make it eight out of nine in Wyoming on Saturday.

At the same time, Sanders is catching — and, in some cases, surpassing — Clinton in national polls of Democratic voter preferences. The latest HuffPost Pollster average gives Clinton a lead of only 2.5 percentage points, easily the closest margin of the campaign.

That bump is being reflected in the states that are yet to vote. Sanders has narrowed Clinton’s lead in New York to 12 points, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released last week. Quinnipiac found the race in Pennsylvania tighter, too — with Clinton ahead by just 6 points in a poll released this week.

Later on the calendar in delegate-rich California, Clinton’s lead over Sanders in the June 7 primary is down to 6 points, according to a new Field Poll survey out Friday.

Sanders’ surge doesn’t change the basic math: He trails Clinton by more than 2 million votes of those cast thus far, and 250 pledged delegates. (Among superdelegates who have expressed a preference, Clinton has a lead of another 438 delegates. Those superdelegates can reconsider between now and the convention.)

That makes Sanders very unlikely to surpass Clinton among pledged delegates between now and June 14, the final primary on the calendar. But along the current trajectory, it’s possible Sanders could stand as the preferred candidate of Democrats in national polls at the end of the primaries — even as Clinton has accrued more votes and delegates over the course of the five-and-a-half months of voting.

Actual votes and delegates are what matters – and, given Sanders’ former status as an independent, he’d be unlikely to persuade superdelegates en masse to abandon Clinton and override her lead among pledged delegates. But it could put Democrats in an awkward spot between the end of voting and the convention: trying to marshal popular support for Clinton at a time when more Democrats say that want Sanders — especially if Sanders takes his fight for the nomination all the way to the convention.

The presidential nominating races aren’t the only contests of consequence this month: Democrats are also picking Senate nominees in congested primary fields in Maryland and Pennsylvania.

In Maryland, where the Democratic nominee will be the prohibitive favorite to succeed retiring Sen. Barbara Mikulski, Reps. Donna Edwards and Chris Van Hollen are locked in a margin-of-error race with just over two weeks to go until the April 26 vote.

A Washington Post-University of Maryland poll this week showed Edwards with a 4-point lead over Van Hollen among likely Democratic primary voters, 44 percent to 40 percent.

Voters view both members of Congress favorably, but Edwards has a slight edge: 64 percent have a favorable opinion of Edwards, compared to 15 percent with an unfavorable opinion and 21 percent with no opinion. For Van Hollen, it’s 56 percent favorable, 16 percent unfavorable, 28 percent no opinion.

Van Hollen’s lower name identification is problematic: He’s served in Congress for longer than Edwards, and he’s had a much higher profile in Washington than his opponent, rising through the ranks of House Democratic leadership.

Van Hollen also has enjoyed a campaign-cash edge throughout the campaign and has outspent Edwards on Maryland airwaves. But Edwards has been boosted by a number of outside groups, like EMILY’s List, which have kept her at near-parity with Van Hollen in paid advertising.

Edwards also has two built-in bases. Though both members of Congress represent an eighth of the state, Edwards’ district is more Democratic than Van Hollen’s. And Edwards — an African-American woman — is likely to benefit from an electorate that, in the last competitive primary election in 2008, was 62 percent female and 37 percent black.

But primaries like these often break late, and the fight is on for the 16 percent of likely voters who didn’t pick one of the two candidates — even as the presidential circus moves to Maryland over the next two weeks.

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