Nate Silver's Blog, page 103
June 7, 2017
Is Celebrities Running For President A Thing Now?
In this week’s politics chat, we discuss whether President Trump’s election changed our understanding of what traits are valuable in winning the White House. The transcript below has been lightly edited.
micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): Welcome all. For today’s chat, we’re tackling this question: Can anyone run for president?
This comes off a Washington Post story that reported “presidential buzz seems to be building around an unusually large and varied group of Democrats and famous names from outside of politics — a parlor game that includes pretty much every current Democratic senator and governor, mayors and House members, barons of the business world and, of course, the occasional wild-card celebrity.”
We’ve heard The Rock, Mark Zuckerberg and Oprah floated.
The idea seems to be that Trump showed that nontraditional candidates can win, and with his approval ratings so low, there’s a lot of interest.
So before we get to some of these names, let’s talk about that idea — is it sound to conclude from the 2016 election that traditional credentials for a White House run — holding high political office or high military office, for example — matter less than we thought?
perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): I will take this moment, early in the chat, to try to get my personal traffic numbers up and suggest people read the FiveThirtyEight version of this idea.
clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): Maybe Trump’s election does change things a little — Trump had virtually nothing to qualify him for the office so why can’t any old schmo run? — but there’s also the flip side of this, which is that Americans might, by the end of four years of Trump, want someone who exhibits a modicum of experience.
perry: Clare said that very well. Trump won with no experience. Is he showing experience matters by being inept?
clare.malone: I still think that on the Democratic side, you look at the candidate potential — a lot of the ones that I actually think have legs — i.e., bases of support — are older, experienced pols: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, etc.
micah: So maybe it’s true that experience matters less than we thought. But now Trump’s problems are making it matter more?
natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): Lurker Nate agrees with Clare and Perry. Usually, you become the next president by implicitly or explicitly arguing that you counteract the flaws of the previous president.
micah: GET OUT, NATE!
harry (Harry Enten, senior political writer): Folks, Nate is not supposed to be here.
He cannot help himself because he is a junkie. Seek help, Nate. Seek help.
clare.malone: Nate, are you on a plane?
natesilver: I’m stuck on a plane and I’ve already watched all their episodes of “Portlandia.”
micah: Enough is enough. I have had it with these motherfucking Nates on this motherfucking plane!
harry: There’s a difference between having experience and being an outsider. Trump had no experience and was an outsider. Sanders is someone who has plenty of experience, but most people would probably still deem him an outsider.
perry: Is it possible voters will want someone who has the posture of an outsider but has some experience?
Harry beat me to that by a few seconds.
harry: When we say whether “someone who counteracts Trump’s flaws,” do we mean someone with experience or an insider? I don’t know if “insiderism” will be prized in 2020, but experience may be.
micah: So yeah, maybe voters will disentangle those two things? Or will they want an experienced insider to draw the sharpest possible contrast with Trump? (Assuming Trump is about as unpopular in 2020 as he is now.)
clare.malone: Hm.
Maybe you want someone who can still posture as being against the system, but working from the inside? Trump tried to say that he was the person for that — “I alone can fix it”– but in some ways, that was all wrong, because he’s never really been on the inside of the global elite. New York real estate wealth is actually rather parochial, even when you license your name elsewhere.
perry: Warren/Sanders are kind of outsiders in a certain way. Former Vice President Joe Biden is an insider. Who was the last real insider president? George H.W. Bush? Hillary Clinton lost. So did John Kerry. So did John McCain. I’m not saying this is a trend, but I’m just thinking out loud here.
clare.malone: Yeah.
George H.W. Bush is interesting. Insidery up the wazoo — CIA director!
perry: Party chairman, veep.
clare.malone: Coming on the heels of a verrrry popular president, though.
harry: I guess you could argue Richard Nixon was more an insider? But very few.
clare.malone: You could argue people were voting for a third Reagan term with the elder Bush.
natesilver: Lurker Nate advises chatters to consider whether George W. Bush, the son of a president, should also be considered an insider.
perry: I thought about him. But he kind of ran as an outsider.
clare.malone: But, Nate, that’s not how he sold himself. Yeah, what Perry said.
perry: But yes, George W. Bush was hardly a radical shift.
harry: I would say Al Gore was definitely seen as the status quo in that election. Regardless how they were viewed in the primary.
perry: Short answer: I don’t know. Will voters value real experience, like what Biden has, after Trump? Maybe?
micah: OK, so maybe the sweet spot is what Clare noted: Outsider sheen, insider experience.
perry: This is an important question.
micah: So that would argue Warren over Biden, Perry.
perry: I think an outsider/insider candidate is great, if you have a good one. I wonder if a real insider can win now. Like Biden really, really knows the Hill, the White House. Is that valued now, more than in 1988 or 2008 or 2016?
micah: Harry, we got any polling on any of this?
clare.malone: At a certain point, does the American public grow suspicious of a man who has been running for president for the past 20 years?
perry: But he’s so authentic, Clare.
clare.malone: I know Biden is popular as a Democrat, but doesn’t this bald ambition in a man in his 70s wear thin?
perry: I’m kidding, mostly.
clare.malone: Hah. It’s fascinating to me.
harry: The fascination with Biden is interesting to me, too. Here’s a guy who has declared he is running for president twice. He failed bigly both those times. Then he sort of ran in the invisible primary in 2016 and got out. Biden is a fairly moderate guy in a party arguably moving left. Oh and he is from a state that is the home of corporations.
perry: But are we concluding people don’t want a real outsider?
clare.malone: I don’t think Democrats do.
perry: Zuck, Oprah, The Rock? I’m not sure that is true.
micah: I think they want outsider packaging, right?
harry: I can say a majority of Democrats don’t want Oprah to run. Of course, that could change if she ever declared.
clare.malone: The Democratic base seems like it has more of a palate for outsider packaging with a squishy insider filling.
perry: Clare, why are Democrats different than Republicans on this? I think you’re right, but I’m not sure why.
clare.malone: In part, because they’re moved by the incompetence of the Trump White House. There’s this sense, I think, that Trump has brought chaos to the institutions people were so used to having work smoothly. And perhaps that’s given people some pause about how much they need government to run relatively well.
natesilver: A candidate with political experience, in good-lookin’ outsider packaging? Lurker Nate thinks this is a job for … Martin O’Malley.
clare.malone: O’Malley is … not good at talking.
perry: Does this at all get into the Democrats being the party of technocrats/wonks, which I think is one of their weaknesses? Going to Yale/Harvard is maybe overvalued among Democrats. (I would like to thank the Yale admissions office for whatever post-graduate success I’ve had, right here, in case they are reading this chat.)
clare.malone: Well, this is why Bill Clinton worked — he was marrying the wonkiness with authenticity that was supposed to speak to the historical working-class roots of the party. He was Ivy League but with a drawl.
And he was the last Democrat to win the South. I mean, that’s changed for a host of reasons, but…
harry: Lurker Nate needs to watch more episodes of “Portlandia” … I thought this survey from Public Policy Polling was interesting. Not so much for the absolute values, but how well the Democrats did against Trump relative to one another. Biden and Sanders did equally well, pretty much. So did Sens. Cory Booker and Al Franken. Meanwhile, the Rock did the worst. If nothing else, that indicates that the want for a true outsider isn’t clear. At least not yet. (Early polling only gets us so far.)
micah: Here’s what the picture was in 2015, pre-Trump, according to Pew:
perry: So the voters picked a candidate, and then decided they liked that candidate’s attributes.
clare.malone: Franken.
Is.
Interesting.
perry: I keep floating him.
clare.malone: I like the idea.
perry: And people keep saying I am crazy. But he seems of the moment to me.
micah: Yeah, Perry — I think voters decide which candidate they like then prioritize that candidate’s attributes.
clare.malone: Franken has charm. Franken is an outsider.
micah: I’m all aboard the Franken bandwagon.
clare.malone: Franken is from the Midwest.
perry: He seems like an outsider, and he seems very smart.
clare.malone: Franken did a little blow, which seems to now be a presidential requirement.
perry: lol
clare.malone: Why wasn’t Kirsten Gillibrand included in the poll?
micah: Won’t Democrats not want to nominate a white man? Or the opposite?
clare.malone: Yeah. Actually, why the hell aren’t they polling any woman besides Warren? I call bullshit, PPP.
perry: Let’s be honest, because of Hillary Clinton. And I think that’s unfair.
clare.malone: It’s actually massively irritating. Is Warren the only woman who Democrats will now consider because she’s older but the (perceived) complete political opposite of Clinton?
perry: I don’t think it’s Democrats. I think we are talking pollsters/experts, too.
Sen. Kamala Harris does not fall into this, either.
clare.malone: THE ROCK was included over female senators!
natesilver: The polling isn’t going to be meaningful for anyone who lacks decent name recognition now.
micah: Clare, I’m with you, but don’t you dare demean the Rock.
perry: The Center for American Progress had an event with a bunch of 2020 potentials speaking: Booker, Harris, Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Gillibrand, Chris Murphy.
micah: OK, but let’s zoom out: We seem to think that Democrats will want someone who seems competent in Washington but maybe with an outsider sheen … how will gender and race get weighed?
harry: I think it’s going to be weighted tremendously.
micah: But which way? …
perry: I think negatively. Others may disagree.
micah: I could see it going both ways: The system is rigged toward white men. But Democratic voters are young and diverse and, I imagine, prize diversity more than the country overall does.
clare.malone: I’m honestly 50-50. I think it’s more likely to be a man, but on race, I’m not sure. I could see it being to their advantage to have a minority to recapture Obama momentum and turnout.
micah: But Clinton didn’t get a similar bump among women, did she?
harry: The gender gap was larger than at any point in recent history. The polling on that gap stayed steady through Election Day, but Clinton ended up doing worse overall.
clare.malone: Yeah, was going to say same as Harry. She won women overall by a lot but not white ones.
micah: So like, Democrats could theoretically nominate Cory Booker and not get Obama-level black turnout. They could nominate Elizabeth Warren and not win women by decisive margins.
perry: Right.
How do you see Democrats winning in 2020, mainly, through 1) greater minority turnout; 2) more college-educated whites, or 3) winning back Obama-Trump voters. The people who think No. 3 tend to be pushing white guys, even if Obama himself is not white of course
clare.malone: Nos. 1 or 2 seem better bets for Democrats. Trump voters may be more loyal and hard to break from their new world view.
perry: Right, which to me means any of these people could win, but I would not plan my strategy around Sherrod Brown winning Obama-Trump voters.
micah: Are Obama-Trump voters the same as Reluctant Trump voters? Or are those different groups?
clare.malone: Different groups.
harry: Yeah different, Micah. The reluctant Trump voters were better educated than the Obama-Trump voters.
micah: Let’s take our original question from the other side: The criteria that we thought was valuable to become president — again, political or military experience — we thought was valuable because it was valued by “The Party” — elected officials, political operatives, donors, etc. This is “The Party Decides” theory, that these people had huge sway over who got the nomination.
So, Trump perhaps proved that those traits aren’t as valuable as we thought. Or, maybe he proved that the party doesn’t decide? Or, has less influence than we thought?
harry: OK, let’s have a conversation, Micah.
micah: That’s generally the idea here, Harry.
clare.malone: Now now.
micah: (The Micah-Harry tiff continues.)
harry: Clinton used the party to pretty much squash Sanders’s hopes of winning the nomination. She used Harry Reid in Nevada to win those caucuses. She used James Clyburn in South Carolina to win that primary. And away she went. Not only that but she got Biden not to enter the race.
In other words, it’s not clear to me that “the party decides” is broken on that side of the aisle.
natesilver: The Party Decides Under Certain Conditions And Doesn’t Decide Under Other Conditions And There’s No Reliable Way To Tell In Advance Which Is Which.
perry: I think I agree with that. Alternatively, is the party weak on Democratic side, too?
harry: I would argue that “the party decides” might still work when there is a clear consensus of who the party wants.
clare.malone: So, that’s also interesting: If the party doesn’t decide, what force or who does?
micah: Voters!
clare.malone: You know what I mean, Micah. — What’s the special sauce that gets these nonparty-approved people to the top of the game? Media coverage that’s favorable? Name recognition? Is there something that we can say that unifies them? Just being outsiders?
micah: I think in modern politics you need outsider-y charisma That’s a prerequisite in TV politics.
perry: Can we tell who is charismatic beforehand? I covered Congress for years, and Sanders never seemed charismatic to me.
natesilver: Lurker Nate think media coverage important! Trump go on TV a lot! Maybe that good practice for candidate job!
micah: Lurker Nate should be a permanent part of these chats, replacing regular Nate.
clare.malone: Sanders has the internet to thank for being considered “charming.”
harry: Was Sanders really charismatic? I don’t think he was on television anyway.
clare.malone: Up close, he’s just kinda abrasive. But watching clips of him from a podium, he’s fired up and has cool hair.
perry: Right.
micah: Maybe charismatic isn’t the right word, but you know what I mean.
perry: Who are we counting as successful in this era? Just the elected presidents?
micah: I guess, just look at everyone elected since Ronald Reagan? George H.W. Bush is the exception that proves the rule.
perry: Neither Bush was charismatic in any real way.
harry: The latter Bush had some charm.
perry: The second Bush was the ultimate party-decides person. The party literally picked him.
micah: Didn’t the later Bush win the “I’d have a beer with that person” race?
harry: That isn’t the same as charismatic.
clare.malone: My grandmother thought George W. Bush was handsome. Does that count? I think that’s why she voted for him.
perry: Mitt Romney is very handsome, right?
micah: But Romney was wooden.
perry: I have no idea what charismatic means, is my point.
micah: Literally, he’s made of wood. Fun fact.
Charismatic is the wrong word.
perry: Is Warren charismatic?
micah: How about … “marketability”?
clare.malone: Zeitgeist-y. That’s what it is.
perry: I like Clare’s word.
clare.malone: People who capture the zeitgeist of the moment, and that is Sanders/Warren right now.
perry: Right. Of the moment.
micah: That seems circular to me.
perry: I feel like the moment chose Obama in 2008 and maybe would not have at any other time. Clare was saying the moment is Warren/Sanders. Does everyone agree with that?
harry: I don’t know whose moment it is. Or whose it might be.
micah: Too early to say.
clare.malone: “@natesilver is typing”
natesilver: Lurker Nate think that energy on left of party!
perry: Ezra Klein at Vox wrote a piece saying the moment might be angry/fiery populist. Which I think is an interesting distinction — like you have to be really mad at Trump. Not Booker- or Biden-level mad, but extra mad.
harry: Yeah, the energy is for a type of politician, not for an ideology. Someone who is really mad at Trump. Remember the “energy” was with Howard Dean in 2004. Dean was not really a lefty during his time in Vermont, but he was very anti-Bush.
perry: Right. That’s what I meant.
micah: OK, to wrap up …
As 2020 approaches, should we have a more open mind as to who is a viable candidate? Should we take Oprah, The Rock, Zuckerberg, etc., seriously? And if the answer is yes, should we take them seriously at the same level as a Biden or a Warren? Or should we take them seriously but still rate their lack of experience as a hindrance?
Lurker Nate, you can weigh in here. Nate, you can too, if you want.
clare.malone: This is the wrap-up? It’s, like, 10 parts!
micah: lol.
clare.malone: No, I don’t think we should take The Rock, Zuck or Oprah seriously. Maybe Zuck a little because he seems to take himself seriously on this but…
natesilver: OK delurking 
June 5, 2017
Are Democrats Or Republicans Winning The Race For Congress?
Are Democrats Or Republicans Winning The Race For Congress?
An updating estimate of the generic ballot, based on polls that ask people which party they would support in a congressional election.
DATES
POLLSTER
GRADE
SAMPLE
WEIGHT
REPUBLICAN
DEMOCRAT
LEADER
ADJUSTED LEADER
MAY 27-30
YouGov
B
1,266
RV
0.76
33%
39%
Democrat +6
Democrat +8
MAY 25-30
Morning Consult
1,991
RV
0.54
39%
43%
Democrat +4
Democrat +7
MAY 20-23
YouGov
B
1,266
RV
0.65
36%
38%
Democrat +2
Democrat +4
MAY 18-22
Morning Consult
1,938
RV
0.40
37%
41%
Democrat +4
Democrat +7
MAY 13-16
YouGov
B
1,293
RV
0.60
33%
40%
Democrat +7
Democrat +9
MAY 12-14
Public Policy Polling
B+
692
RV
1.02
38%
49%
Democrat +11
Democrat +11
MAY 12-14
Morning Consult
2,001
RV
0.36
35%
42%
Democrat +7
Democrat +10
MAY 9-11
Morning Consult
1,731
RV
0.30
37%
42%
Democrat +5
Democrat +8
MAY 6-9
YouGov
B
1,278
RV
0.58
35%
40%
Democrat +5
Democrat +7
MAY 4-9
Quinnipiac University
A-
1,078
RV
1.73
38%
54%
Democrat +16
Democrat +13
Show more polls
KEY
= NEW
A = ALL ADULTS
RV = REGISTERED VOTERS
LV = LIKELY VOTERS
V = VOTERS
When the dates of tracking polls from the same pollster overlap, only the most recent version is shown.
Polls listed here are those that ask either which party’s candidate a respondent would vote for in his or her district or which party the respondent would prefer control Congress.
By Aaron Bycoffe, Dhrumil Mehta and Nate Silver. Notice any bugs or missing polls? Send us an email.
June 3, 2017
Are The U.K. Polls Skewed?
In April, when U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May called for a “snap” general election for June 8, polls showed her Conservatives with an average lead of 17 percentage points over Labour. Such a margin would translate to a giant majority for Conservatives: perhaps as many as 400 of the 650 seats in Parliament. (Conservatives currently control 330 seats; 326 are needed for a majority.) After several unpredictable years in U.K. politics — marked by Conservatives unexpectedly winning a majority in the 2015 general election, the successful Brexit referendum, and David Cameron’s decision to resign as prime minister and Conservative leader — such a result promised to provide May with a mandate as she negotiated the terms of the U.K.’s exit from the EU.
Instead, polls suggest that the Conservative majority is under threat. As we remarked back in April, May’s move was riskier than it seemed because polls in the U.K. have been both highly volatile (shifting abruptly over the course of election campaigns) and fairly inaccurate (often missing the mark on Election Day itself). Conservatives’ lead was wide enough in April that they probably needed multiple things to go wrong to lose their majority. But if there there were both a shift toward Labour during the campaign and a pro-Labour polling error on Election Day, it could be at risk.
The first part of May’s nightmare scenario has come to fruition. Recent surveys show Labour zooming up in the polls and Conservatives having declined somewhat (although some of Labour’s gains have also come at the expense of Liberal Democrats and other parties). Conservatives’ lead varies from poll to poll — it’s as large as 12 percentage points in one poll and as little as 1 point in another — but it averages about 7 points in recent surveys, less than half of what it was when May called the election. The timing of the shift partly coincides with the release of the Conservative party manifesto two weeks ago, which included a proposed change to health care spending that opponents soon labeled as a “dementia tax.” (None of the polls yet reflect any potential effects from an incident on Saturday night at London Bridge, when a van reportedly hit a number of pedestrians.)
POLLSTER
CON.
LAB.
UKIP
LIB. DEM.
OTHER
LEAD
Survation
40
39
5
8
9
Con.
+1
ICM
45
34
5
9
8
Con.
+11
ORB
45
36
4
8
7
Con.
+9
ComRes
47
35
4
8
5
Con.
+12
Opinium
43
37
5
6
8
Con.
+6
Ipsos MORI
45
40
2
7
6
Con.
+5
Panelbase
44
36
5
7
8
Con.
+8
YouGov
42
39
4
7
8
Con.
+3
SurveyMonkey
44
38
4
6
7
Con.
+6
Kantar Public
43
33
4
11
8
Con.
+10
Average
43.8
36.7
4.2
7.7
7.4
Con.
+7.1
Recent UK polls show a tighter race
Sources: UK Polling Report, Wikipedia
Conservatives won only a slim overall majority in 2015 despite winning the popular vote by 6.5 percentage points because 87 seats went to regional parties (especially the Scottish National Party, which won 56 seats), third parties (such as Liberal Democrats) or independent candidates. While FiveThirtyEight isn’t attempting to translate votes to seats — that’s a tricky problem and one that we haven’t had much luck with in the past — other people’s models show that if Conservatives were to win by much less than their 2015 margin, their majority would be under threat. A series of YouGov models released this week have shown Conservatives winning 308 to 317 seats — short of a 326-seat majority — with a 3- to 4-point win. Uniform swing calculations also suggest that Conservatives would be underdogs to retain their majority with a 4-point win, and about even money to do so with a 5-point win.
So to borrow our phrasing from the U.S. election, when we said that Donald Trump was only a “normal-sized polling error” away from winning the Electoral College, May’s Conservatives are now only a normal-sized polling error away from a hung parliament. On average in the U.K., the final polling average has missed the actual Conservative-Labour margin by about 4 percentage points. (This is twice the average error in U.S. presidential elections.) If Labour outperforms its polls by that margin, Conservatives would win the popular vote by only about 3 points — and May would probably have to find a coalition partner to form the next government. If the polls were to miss by any more than that in Labour’s favor, a variety of yet-more-unpleasant scenarios could crop up for May, including some where Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn tried to form a government instead.
But there’s a catch — and a potential saving grace for May. Although the polls haven’t been very accurate in the U.K., the errors have usually run in the same direction: Conservatives tend to beat their polls there. (There’s been no comparable phenomenon in the U.S., where polls have erred toward both Democrats and Republicans about equally often in past elections.) That was the case in 2015, for instance, when Conservatives outperformed their polls by a net of 6 percentage points. There was an even worse error in 1992, when polls showed Labour narrowly ahead but instead Conservatives won in a landslide, making for a 9-point polling miss. That election gave rise to the term “Shy Tory Factor,” the idea that Conservative (Tory) voters were reluctant to declare their true voting intention to pollsters.
YEAR
POLLING AVERAGE
ACTUAL RESULT
ACTUAL V. POLLS
2015
Con.
+0.6
Con.
+6.5
Con.
+5.9
–
2010
Con.
+7.9
Con.
+7.2
Lab.
+0.7
–
2005
Lab.
+6.2
Lab.
+2.9
Con.
+3.3
–
2001
Lab.
+14.2
Lab.
+9.4
Con.
+4.8
–
1997
Lab.
+17.5
Lab.
+12.8
Con.
+4.7
–
1992
Lab.
+1.5
Con.
+7.6
Con.
+9.1
–
1987
Con.
+8.1
Con.
+11.7
Con.
+3.6
–
1983
Con.
+20.3
Con.
+15.2
Lab.
+5.1
–
1979
Con.
+5.9
Con.
+7.2
Con.
+1.3
–
1974 (Oct.)
Lab.
+9.2
Lab.
+3.6
Con.
+5.6
–
1974 (Feb.)
Con.
+2.9
Con.
+0.6
Lab.
+2.3
–
1970
Lab.
+4.1
Con.
+3.4
Con.
+7.5
–
1966
Lab.
+11.2
Lab.
+6.0
Con.
+5.2
–
1964
Lab.
+1.5
Lab.
+0.8
Con.
+0.7
–
1959
Con.
+3.2
Con.
+5.6
Con.
+2.4
–
1955
Con.
+3.3
Con.
+3.2
Lab.
+0.1
–
1951
Con.
+4.5
Lab.
+0.8
Lab.
+5.3
–
1950
Con.
+0.7
Lab.
+2.8
Lab.
+3.5
–
1945
Lab.
+6.0
Lab.
+8.0
Lab.
+2.0
–
Conservatives have recently outperformed their polls
For elections since 1974, results reflect Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales) only and not Northern Ireland. Most UK pollsters have excluded Northern Ireland from their samples in recent years.
Source: Report of the Inquiry into the 2015 British general election opinion polls, Researchbriefings.parliament.uk
Exactly how strong the Conservative tendency to outperform their polls has been depends on where you measure from. Since 1992, Conservatives have beaten their final polling margin over Labour by an average of 4.5 percentage points, and have done so in all but one election. (That was 2010, when both Conservatives and Labour gained ground as Liberal Democrats’ support collapsed, but Labour slightly outperformed its polling margin against the Tories.) Go all the way back to 1945, however, and the average Conservative overperformance is just 1.8 percentage points and is not statistically significant.
Any extra support beyond what polls show would help May to stay out of the danger zone from a hung parliament. For instance, if you assume that Conservatives will benefit from a “Shy Tory Factor” and beat their polls by 3 percentage points, then what looks like an 7-point lead for May is really more like a 10-point lead. Even acknowledging the high uncertainty in U.K. polling, a hung parliament would then only be an outside threat — using some very rough approximations, the chances of it would be somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 percent. By contrast, if the polls are taken at face value, the chances of it are more like 35 percent under the same assumptions.
If that’s the good news for May, here’s the bad news: The conventional wisdom is still pretty confident that she’ll win a majority, more so than the polls are. And the conventional wisdom is almost always wrong.
I’m not just being a trollish contrarian here. The conventional wisdom, at least as espoused by (i) betting markets and (ii) mainstream media coverage, has a remarkably poor track record in major elections around the world in recent years. In the U.K. last year, pundits and punters were irrationally confident of a “Remain” victory in the Brexit vote, even though polls showed it only barely ahead of “Leave.” In the U.S., they ignored how much the race had tightened in the final weeks of the campaign and data that showed Trump would likely do better in the Electoral College than the popular vote. In the French presidential election last month, the conventional wisdom was irrationally worried about a Marine Le Pen victory even though she trailed Emmanuel Macron by 20 to 25 percentage points. In fact, it was Macron who beat his polls, winning by 32 points.
These experiences have given rise to what I’ve called the First Rule of Polling Errors, which is that polls almost always miss in the opposite direction of what pundits expect:
Nate's 1st rule: Almost all polling errors occur in the OPPOSITE DIRECTION of what the conventional wisdom expects. https://t.co/VwPO1598Oc pic.twitter.com/ZCzVCRH5Li
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) May 9, 2017
The rule could potentially apply in the case of the U.K. election because there’s a gap between what the polls show and how the conventional wisdom assesses the race. Media coverage hasn’t been quite as much in lockstep as it was for Brexit or Trump, but the implication is usually that the “smart money” is on May winning a more comfortable victory than polls show. (YouGov has been excoriated by some London media outlets for daring to publish its model showing a hung parliament, for instance.) And betting market prices imply a Conservative win by 9 or 10 percentage points rather than their 7-point lead in the polling average. Since pundits expect Conservatives to beat their polls, the First Rule of Polling Errors would therefore predict that Labour would beat their polls instead. That wouldn’t necessarily yield a hung parliament or a Labour-led government, but it would make things awfully close.
So which idea — The Shy Tory Factor or the First Rule of Polling Errors — will prevail this time? Well, we’ll find out on June 8. But they have a complicated relationship with one another. Conservatives really do have a track record of beating their polls. But if everyone knows this and worries about it happening again — including pollsters — it could make the effect disappear or even reverse itself. My view, therefore — I’ll spend the rest of this article explaining my thinking behind this — is that the error is about equally likely to come in either direction. There’s a significant chance of Conservatives beating their polls again, but Labour is roughly as likely to do so.
Imagine that you move into a new apartment one summer and the thermostat is a little off. To actually get the room to feel like 72 degrees, you have to set the thermostat to 68. All of this is somewhat annoying, but at least you have a good rule of thumb: Take whatever number the thermostat shows and add 4 degrees to get the actual temperature. A lot of people are treating the U.K. polls in this way — as though they’re some sort of miscalibrated instrument that reliably misses in the same direction.
But suppose you ask your landlord — who is no mechanical genius but does the best he can — to fix the thermostat. Will it show the right temperature after that? Well, perhaps. But maybe the landlord replaces the wrong part and it doesn’t help at all. Or maybe the thermostat was working fine, but the air conditioner was broken. The landlord tinkers with it until it shows the right temperature while the A.C. is on, but it now overestimates the temperature when the heat is on instead. Under any given set of circumstances, the temperature could be too hot, too cold or just right.
This is what polling is like in the real world. If an indicator has historically had a bias, but human beings are aware of the bias and have an opportunity to correct it, it will often cease to be biased. Pollsters are under a lot of pressure to get the answer right, and they’re constantly tinkering with their methods. But there are a lot of moving parts, and there’s only one election every few years for them to test their methods upon. If they don’t make any changes, pollsters might duplicate a previous mistake. But they also might overcompensate for one-off circumstances that won’t replicate themselves again. A pollster who lowballed Democrats’ performance in 2008 and 2012 because they underestimated African-American turnout under Barack Obama might switch to a laxer turnout model for 2016, for instance, only to discover that Hillary Clinton didn’t turn out black voters like Obama did. There’s a risk of “fighting the last war” instead of looking ahead toward changes in the landscape.
In the U.S., the result of this series of measures and countermeasures is that the polls have not shown any long-term statistical bias toward Democrats or Republicans. They’ve been accurate in some years and not so accurate in others. But when they’ve missed, they’ve been about equally likely to miss in either direction.
This is also the case in Europeanwide polling. It’s often assumed that nationalist or right-wing parties tend to beat their polls, perhaps because (as is supposedly the case with Shy Tory voters) people are reluctant to declare their support for a “politically incorrect” party to pollsters. But over dozens of European elections over the past several years, there’s been no systematic tendency for nationalist parties to outperform their polls. Yes, it happens sometimes — such as in the 2015 election in Denmark. But the nationalist party has underperformed their polls almost exactly as often, as Marine Le Pen and the National Front did last month in France.
But if there’s no long-term bias in the polls in the U.S. or in Europe, what accounts for Conservatives so consistently beating their polls in the U.K.? I’ve done a lot of reading on this question and … I really don’t know. There aren’t a lot of great systematic explanations for the trend. However, there are lots of hypotheses about why the polls have been off in particular elections. In the U.K. context, some common ones include:
“Shy” voters who don’t state their true voting intentions;
Overly lax turnout models;
Last-minute swings that come too late in the campaign to be captured by polls;
Nonrepresentative samples or improper demographic weighting;
Incorrect assumptions about undecided voters;
Tactical voting (voters abandoning their top choice — often a minor party — for a party they think can win), and
Pollster “herding” toward incorrect targets.
The British Polling Council and the Market Research Society issued a lengthy study after the 2015 general election, for instance, and concluded that the error in that election was mostly a result of Category No. 4. There wasn’t much evidence of actual “Shy Tories” in 2015, the report concluded; the problem wasn’t that Conservative voters were misleading pollsters but that there weren’t enough Conservative voters being polled in the first place. Among other issues, the polls were sampling too many highly informed voters, who were more likely to vote Labour; a similar problem (polls oversampling educated voters) led to Trump’s performance being underestimated in the U.S. There was also evidence of pollster herding in 2015 (Category No. 7): The final polls were within an unusually tight range, and at least one pollster suppressed a result that deviated from the consensus and showed the Conservatives winning big.
Other elections have come with different explanations for the polling miss, however. In 2010 — when the polls did well in capturing the Labour-Conservative margin but overestimated Liberal Democrats — the miss was initially attributed to a late swing (Category No. 3), perhaps exacerbated by tactical voting (Category No. 6). Although, this explanation is now disputed. The huge miss in 1992 really may have been because of Shy Tories (Category No. 1). In 1997, 2001 and 2005, Labour was predicted to win by large margins, but won by smaller margins instead. These were low-turnout elections, however, so incorrect turnout models (Category No. 2) might have been the main issue. The handling of undecided voters (Category No. 5) can also be a problem in lopsided elections such as these. Imagine that Labour is ahead 48 to 32 with 20 percent of voters undecided. In the U.S., that would be reported as a 16-point lead. But British pollsters don’t just let their undecideds be — they either drop from the sample or use some method to allocate them between the parties. If a pollster dropped the undecideds, the 48-to-32 Labour lead would instead be reported as 60-to-40 lead — a 20-point lead rather than 16.
Could it really be a coincidence that all these different errors in all these different elections have just so happened to underestimate Conservatives? Well, maybe. As I wrote earlier, the statistical significance of the Tory overperformance against the polls is somewhat dubious. (It also depends on where you draw the endpoints: It sounds impressive to say that Conservatives have outperformed their margin in six of the last seven elections, but less impressive to say they’ve gone 12 of 19.) It’s perhaps also noteworthy that while Conservatives have outperformed their polls in eight of nine elections when Labour was ahead in the pre-election polling average — but only four of 10 when Conservatives held the lead to begin with, as they do this year. In 1983, for instance, when the Tories entered the election with a 20-point lead, they wound up winning by “only” 15 points instead. The empirically derived rule of thumb “add a couple of points to Conservatives” could just as easily be “add several points to Conservatives if Labour is ahead in the polls, but don’t make too many assumptions otherwise.” Or it could even be “discount large leads in the polls, because parties tend to underperform them,” which would work against Conservatives this year.
PRE-ELECTION POLL LEADER
POLLING AVERAGE
ACTUAL RESULT
ACTUAL V. POLLS
Conservatives
Con.
5.7
Con.
5.4
Lab.
0.4
–
Labour
Lab.
7.9
Lab.
3.6
Con.
4.3
–
On average, neither major party has outperformed polls when already ahead
Averages for all elections since 1945. For elections since 1974, results reflect Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales) only and not Northern Ireland.
Source: Report of the Inquiry into the 2015 British general election opinion polls, Researchbriefings.parliament.uk
There would nevertheless be good reason to expect polls to lowball Conservatives again if pollsters were using the same methods they did in 2015. However, U.K. pollsters are fully aware of their error and have come to different conclusions about how to remedy it. Much to their credit, the pollsters are not herding this year; instead they show outcomes that range from a Margaret Thatcher-style Tory landslide to a hung parliament. These differences are not the result of random sampling error alone but instead reflect pronounced methodological and philosophical differences between the polls. Overall, U.K. pollsters are less traditional in their methods and more “creative” than U.S. pollsters are at trying out new methods, which could turn out to be a good thing or a bad thing. But they aren’t just taking the 2015 miss lying down.
The collective effect of these methodological changes is to show Conservatives with a larger lead than they would have otherwise. Again to their credit, U.K. pollsters often report multiple versions of their polls instead of just the final result; sometimes these are called “raw voting intention” and “headline voting intention.” A recent ComRes poll initially showed Conservatives with just a 4 percentage point lead based on respondents’ self-reported likelihood to vote (this is raw voting intention). After ComRes applied its turnout model and reallocated undecided voters, however, the Conservative lead grew to 12 points instead, which was the headline result.
On average among the various survey firms that published both results, the headline numbers have been 4 or 5 percentage points more Conservative-leaning than the raw version of the polls. By comparison, these adjustments moved the results by only 1 or 2 points toward Conservatives in 2015.
POLLSTER
RAW VOTING INTENTION
HEADLINE VOTING INTENTION
Survation
Tied
—
Con.
+1
–
ICM
Con.
+2
–
Con.
+11
–
ComRes
Con.
+4
–
Con.
+12
–
Opinium
Con.
+4
–
Con.
+6
–
Ipsos MORI
Lab.
+3
–
Con.
+5
–
YouGov
Con.
+1
–
Con.
+3
–
Kantar Public
Con.
+8
–
Con.
+10
–
Average
Con.
+2.3
–
Con.
+6.9
–
Pollster adjustments are shifting results toward Conservatives
Source: Huffington Post Pollster, IPSPS MORI
Are these various adjustments kosher? Or do some of them count as “unskewing”? I have certain approaches I like and others that I don’t, but it’s not really my place to say. My point is merely that pollsters are already attempting to compensate for their historical tendency to underestimate the Conservative vote. They might wind up overcompensating or they might wind up undercompensating. But it’s sort of double-counting to make an additional mental adjustment and to further inflate the Conservative vote above the methodological adjustments that pollsters are already making.
There’s also reason to be skeptical that the contrarian First Rule of Polling Errors (which would imply that Labour beats its polls) will apply in this election, however. The rule is mostly intended for cases in which pollsters are herding toward an artificial consensus, which may be influenced by the conventional wisdom. Instead, U.K. pollsters are experimenting with different methods and have been willing to show a wide range of results. The fact that British pollsters show such a diversity of outcomes is a reason to be more confident in them, not less.
To sum things up, I’d give the same advice that I pretty much always do on the eve of an election. Focus on the polling average — Conservatives ahead by 7 points — rather than only the polls you like. But assume there’s a wide range of outcomes and that the errors are equally likely to come in either direction. Given the poor historical accuracy of U.K. polls, in fact, the true margin of error on the Labour-Conservative margin is plus or minus 10 points. That would imply that anything from a 17-point Conservative win to a 3-point Labour win is possible. And even an average polling error would make the difference between May expanding her majority and losing it.
June 2, 2017
Andrew Miller Doesn’t Have Any Saves, And He’s The Best Reliever In Baseball
The Cleveland Indians’ Andrew Miller is the sort of pitcher we had in mind when we developed the goose egg, our replacement for the save stat that rewards pitchers for throwing scoreless relief innings in clutch situations. Miller isn’t the Indians’ closer — that distinction belongs to Cody Allen — and in fact, Miller doesn’t have a single save yet this season. But no reliever has contributed more to his team’s bottom line so far.
Miller has appeared in 23 games, usually entering in the 7th or 8th inning. All but a handful of those appearances have come in high-leverage situations. He’s yielded just two runs — one of them unearned — while striking out 37 batters and allowing just 5 walks and 13 hits in 26.1 innings. He’s been as unhittable as pitchers get. But while Miller hasn’t earned any saves for his efforts, he does have 17 goose eggs, tying him for the major league lead. He also leads the majors in goose wins above replacement (GWAR), having added 2.3 wins to Cleveland’s tally so far. If his performance so far is the source of any disappointment, it’s that, unlike during last year’s postseason, Miller hasn’t been used in many multi-inning appearances — but that’s on manager Terry Francona, not Miller.
The co-leader in goose eggs is the Brewers’ Corey Knebel, who started out as a setup man but worked his way into the closer role. We’re more interested in pitchers with less conventional usage patterns, however, and a couple of them have fallen off the pace slightly. The Astros’ Chris Devenski, who we highlighted last month for often working multiple innings at a time, is up to 15 goose eggs, but he also has 5 broken eggs (the goose equivalent of a blown save). And the Reds’ Raisel Iglesias, who’s mainly used as a closer but who often enters the game in the 8th inning instead of the 9th, is stuck on 12 goose eggs, mostly because the Reds have been playing like crap and not providing him with enough clutch situations to pitch in.
You can find a complete rundown of goose stats in the table below. We’ll continue to update these numbers once a month or so.
Goose stats through Thursday, June 1
PITCHER▲▼
TEAM▲▼
GOOSE EGGS▲▼
BROKEN EGGS▲▼
MEHS▲▼
GWAR▲▼
Andrew Miller
CLE
17
1
1
+2.3
Corey Knebel
MIL
17
2
2
+1.6
Seung-hwan Oh
SLN
16
1
2
+1.8
Alex Colome
TBA
16
2
2
+1.6
Brad Brach
BAL
15
2
0
+1.5
Chris Devenski
HOU
15
5
1
+0.3
Felipe Rivero
PIT
14
1
2
+1.6
Joakim Soria
KCA
14
3
1
+1.0
Tony Watson
PIT
14
3
2
+0.8
Edwin Diaz
SEA
13
2
1
+1.2
Addison Reed
NYN
13
4
3
+0.3
Greg Holland
COL
12
0
0
+1.8
Raisel Iglesias
CIN
12
0
0
+1.7
Kenley Jansen
LAN
12
0
1
+1.6
Craig Kimbrel
BOS
12
1
0
+1.5
Brandon Kintzler
MIN
12
2
1
+1.1
Jacob Barnes
MIL
12
2
2
+0.9
Trevor Rosenthal
SLN
12
2
0
+0.9
Fernando Rodney
ARI
12
3
3
+0.6
Brad Hand
SDN
12
3
2
+0.5
Hector Neris
PHI
11
1
1
+1.2
Ryan Tepera
TOR
11
2
0
+0.9
Justin Wilson
DET
11
2
0
+0.9
Archie Bradley
ARI
11
2
1
+0.9
Adam Ottavino
COL
11
3
2
+0.6
Kelvin Herrera
KCA
11
3
1
+0.6
Wade Davis
CHN
10
0
1
+1.4
Dellin Betances
NYA
10
1
0
+1.2
Joe Smith
TOR
10
1
1
+1.2
Michael Lorenzen
CIN
10
1
0
+1.0
Cody Allen
CLE
10
2
2
+0.9
Matt Bush
TEX
10
2
0
+0.8
Mike Minor
KCA
10
2
1
+0.8
David Robertson
CHA
10
2
0
+0.7
Will Harris
HOU
10
2
0
+0.7
Matthew Bowman
SLN
10
2
3
+0.6
Derek Law
SFN
10
2
1
+0.6
Arodys Vizcaino
ATL
10
3
1
+0.3
Bryan Shaw
CLE
9
1
2
+1.1
Mike Montgomery
CHN
9
1
1
+0.9
Mychal Givens
BAL
9
2
2
+0.6
Jose Ramirez
ATL
9
2
0
+0.5
Santiago Casilla
OAK
9
3
1
+0.2
Jim Johnson
ATL
9
3
0
+0.1
Joaquin Benoit
PHI
9
3
0
+0.1
Jerry Blevins
NYN
8
0
5
+1.1
Wandy Peralta
CIN
8
1
0
+0.8
Carl Edwards
CHN
8
1
1
+0.7
Tommy Kahnle
CHA
8
2
0
+0.4
Mark Melancon
SFN
8
2
0
+0.3
Jorge De La Rosa
ARI
8
3
1
+0.0
Koji Uehara
CHN
8
3
2
-0.0
Roberto Osuna
TOR
8
4
1
-0.3
Neftali Feliz
MIL
8
4
0
-0.4
Bud Norris
ANA
8
5
0
-0.7
Brandon Maurer
SDN
8
5
0
-0.8
Erasmo Ramirez
TBA
7
0
2
+1.0
Matt Belisle
MIN
7
1
3
+0.7
Yusmeiro Petit
ANA
7
1
2
+0.7
Koda Glover
WAS
7
1
2
+0.6
Hunter Strickland
SFN
7
1
0
+0.6
Darren O’Day
BAL
7
2
2
+0.3
Deolis Guerra
ANA
7
2
0
+0.3
Ryan Madson
OAK
7
2
1
+0.3
Ken Giles
HOU
7
2
1
+0.3
Josh Smoker
NYN
7
2
2
+0.2
Hector Rondon
CHN
7
2
1
+0.2
Blake Parker
ANA
7
3
1
-0.1
Danny Farquhar
TBA
7
3
2
-0.1
Enny Romero
WAS
7
3
3
-0.2
Alex Wilson
DET
7
4
3
-0.4
Ryan Buchter
SDN
7
4
2
-0.6
Aroldis Chapman
NYA
6
0
0
+0.9
Zach Britton
BAL
6
0
0
+0.9
David Hernandez
ANA
6
0
1
+0.9
Shane Greene
DET
6
1
2
+0.5
James Pazos
SEA
6
1
3
+0.5
Nick Vincent
SEA
6
1
3
+0.5
Pat Neshek
PHI
6
1
2
+0.5
Kevin Siegrist
SLN
6
1
0
+0.4
Kyle Barraclough
MIA
6
1
1
+0.4
Taylor Rogers
MIN
6
2
2
+0.2
J. J. Hoover
ARI
6
2
1
+0.1
Luke Gregerson
HOU
6
2
0
+0.1
Shawn Kelley
WAS
6
2
0
+0.1
Brett Cecil
SLN
6
2
1
+0.1
Tony Barnette
TEX
6
3
0
-0.2
Mike Dunn
COL
5
0
1
+0.8
Matt Barnes
BOS
5
1
3
+0.4
Jose Alvarado
TBA
5
1
3
+0.4
Joely Rodriguez
PHI
5
1
4
+0.3
Alex Claudio
TEX
5
2
4
+0.0
Chase Whitley
TBA
5
2
1
-0.0
Juan Nicasio
PIT
5
2
2
-0.1
Jacob Turner
WAS
5
2
0
-0.1
Steven Okert
SFN
5
2
4
-0.1
Josh Edgin
NYN
5
2
2
-0.1
Keone Kela
TEX
5
3
0
-0.3
George Kontos
SFN
5
3
1
-0.5
Jose Alvarez
ANA
5
4
3
-0.8
Ross Stripling
LAN
5
4
1
-0.8
Jake McGee
COL
4
0
2
+0.6
Logan Verrett
BAL
4
0
0
+0.6
Anthony Swarzak
CHA
4
0
0
+0.6
T. J. McFarland
ARI
4
0
0
+0.6
Oliver Perez
WAS
4
0
2
+0.6
Joe Kelly
BOS
4
1
2
+0.3
Chris Rusin
COL
4
1
2
+0.2
Tyler Duffey
MIN
4
1
0
+0.2
Nate Jones
CHA
4
1
0
+0.2
Sean Doolittle
OAK
4
1
2
+0.2
Liam Hendriks
OAK
4
1
1
+0.2
Matt Albers
WAS
4
1
3
+0.2
Jeanmar Gomez
PHI
4
1
1
+0.2
Jeurys Familia
NYN
4
1
2
+0.2
Pedro Strop
CHN
4
1
3
+0.2
A. J. Ramos
MIA
4
1
1
+0.2
Brad Ziegler
MIA
4
1
2
+0.2
Adam Warren
NYA
4
2
1
-0.1
Ryan Pressly
MIN
4
2
0
-0.1
Ryan Dull
OAK
4
2
2
-0.2
Fernando Salas
NYN
4
2
2
-0.2
Hansel Robles
NYN
4
2
2
-0.2
Tyler Clippard
NYA
4
3
4
-0.5
Joe Biagini
TOR
4
3
2
-0.5
Carlos Torres
MIL
4
3
1
-0.6
David Phelps
MIA
4
4
0
-1.0
Fernando Abad
BOS
3
0
0
+0.5
Chasen Shreve
NYA
3
0
1
+0.5
Jonathan Holder
NYA
3
0
0
+0.5
Peter Moylan
KCA
3
0
2
+0.5
Cam Bedrosian
ANA
3
0
3
+0.4
Marc Rzepczynski
SEA
3
0
4
+0.4
Randall Delgado
ARI
3
0
0
+0.4
Austin Brice
CIN
3
0
0
+0.4
Luis Garcia
PHI
3
0
0
+0.4
Bryan Morris
SFN
3
0
0
+0.4
Brian Duensing
CHN
3
0
0
+0.4
Nick Wittgren
MIA
3
0
0
+0.4
Alex Wood
LAN
3
0
1
+0.4
Scott Oberg
COL
3
1
0
+0.1
Donnie Hart
BAL
3
1
3
+0.1
Alec Asher
BAL
3
1
1
+0.1
Tommy Hunter
TBA
3
1
0
+0.1
Ian Krol
ATL
3
1
1
+0.0
Heath Hembree
BOS
3
2
4
-0.3
Dan Altavilla
SEA
3
2
1
-0.3
Tony Zych
SEA
3
2
1
-0.3
Jhan Marinez
MIL/PIT
3
2
0
-0.3
Blake Treinen
WAS
3
2
0
-0.3
Sam Tuivailala
SLN
3
2
0
-0.3
Travis Wood
KCA
3
3
1
-0.6
Jason Grilli
TOR
3
3
1
-0.6
Daniel Hudson
PIT
3
3
2
-0.7
Sam Dyson
TEX
3
6
1
-1.7
Robby Scott
BOS
2
0
6
+0.3
Dario Alvarez
TEX
2
0
1
+0.3
Zach Putnam
CHA
2
0
0
+0.3
Austin Pruitt
TBA
2
0
0
+0.3
Jared Hughes
MIL
2
0
0
+0.3
Dustin McGowan
MIA
2
0
1
+0.3
Josh Fields
LAN
2
0
1
+0.3
Scott Alexander
KCA
2
1
0
-0.1
Richard Bleier
BAL
2
1
0
-0.1
Kyle Ryan
DET
2
1
0
-0.1
Drew Storen
CIN
2
1
2
-0.1
Cory Gearrin
SFN
2
1
0
-0.1
Robert Gsellman
NYN
2
1
0
-0.1
Luis Avilan
LAN
2
1
2
-0.1
Matt Strahm
KCA
2
2
1
-0.4
Dominic Leone
TOR
2
2
3
-0.4
Blake Wood
CIN
2
2
0
-0.5
Robert Stephenson
CIN
2
2
0
-0.5
Pedro Baez
LAN
2
2
2
-0.5
Jumbo Diaz
TBA
2
3
2
-0.8
Sergio Romo
LAN
2
3
0
-0.9
Francisco Rodriguez
DET
2
7
2
-2.3
Ben Taylor
BOS
1
0
1
+0.2
Robbie Ross
BOS
1
0
0
+0.2
Carlos Estevez
COL
1
0
0
+0.2
Chad Qualls
COL
1
0
0
+0.2
Chris Young
KCA
1
0
0
+0.2
Jake Junis
KCA
1
0
0
+0.2
Aaron Loup
TOR
1
0
4
+0.2
Brooks Pounders
ANA
1
0
0
+0.1
Jean Machi
SEA
1
0
1
+0.1
Casey Fien
SEA
1
0
0
+0.1
Keynan Middleton
ANA
1
0
0
+0.1
Frankie Montas
OAK
1
0
0
+0.1
Michael Feliz
HOU
1
0
0
+0.1
Brad Peacock
HOU
1
0
1
+0.1
Asher Wojciechowski
CIN
1
0
0
+0.1
Jason Motte
ATL
1
0
1
+0.1
Miguel Socolovich
SLN
1
0
1
+0.1
Ty Blach
SFN
1
0
1
+0.1
Paul Seward
NYN
1
0
0
+0.1
Justin Grimm
CHN
1
0
1
+0.1
Jose Leclerc
TEX
1
1
0
-0.2
Jordan Lyles
COL
1
1
0
-0.2
Tyler Wilson
BAL
1
1
1
-0.2
Justin Haley
MIN
1
1
0
-0.2
Emilio Pagan
SEA
1
1
0
-0.2
Tom Wilhelmsen
ARI
1
1
2
-0.2
Kirby Yates
ANA/SDN
1
1
1
-0.2
Tony Cingrani
CIN
1
1
0
-0.2
Oliver Drake
MIL
1
1
0
-0.2
Wade LeBlanc
PIT
1
1
2
-0.2
Eric O’Flaherty
ATL
1
1
0
-0.2
Matt Grace
WAS
1
1
0
-0.2
Sammy Solis
WAS
1
1
0
-0.2
Kevin Quackenbush
SDN
1
1
0
-0.2
Chris Hatcher
LAN
1
1
0
-0.2
Danny Barnes
TOR
1
2
0
-0.6
Blaine Hardy
DET
1
2
1
-0.6
Wily Peralta
MIL
1
2
0
-0.6
Joe Blanton
WAS
1
2
0
-0.6
Jonathan Broxton
SLN
1
2
0
-0.6
Junichi Tazawa
MIA
1
2
0
-0.6
Jeremy Jeffress
TEX
1
3
1
-0.9
Jose Torres
SDN
1
3
0
-1.0
Rafael Montero
NYN
1
3
1
-1.0
Gabriel Ynoa
BAL
0
0
1
+0.0
Boone Logan
CLE
0
0
2
+0.0
Chad Green
NYA
0
0
1
+0.0
Warwick Saupold
DET
0
0
1
+0.0
Neil Ramirez
NYN
0
0
2
+0.0
Brent Suter
MIL
0
0
1
+0.0
Bryan Mitchell
NYA
0
1
0
-0.4
Al Alburquerque
KCA
0
1
0
-0.4
J. P. Howell
TOR
0
1
0
-0.4
Jayson Aquino
BAL
0
1
0
-0.4
Vidal Nuno
BAL
0
1
0
-0.4
Casey Lawrence
TOR
0
1
0
-0.4
Stefan Chrichton
BAL
0
1
0
-0.4
Craig Breslow
MIN
0
1
0
-0.4
Hector Santiago
MIN
0
1
0
-0.4
Bruce Rondon
DET
0
1
0
-0.4
Chase De Jong
SEA
0
1
0
-0.4
Xavier Cedeno
TBA
0
1
3
-0.4
Steve Cishek
SEA
0
1
1
-0.4
Dan Jennings
CHA
0
1
2
-0.4
Diego Moreno
TBA
0
1
0
-0.4
Ryne Stanek
TBA
0
1
3
-0.4
Jesse Chavez
ANA
0
1
0
-0.4
Daniel Coulombe
OAK
0
1
1
-0.4
Jandel Gustave
HOU
0
1
0
-0.4
Johnny Barbato
PIT
0
1
0
-0.4
Antonio Bastardo
PIT
0
1
0
-0.4
Miguel Diaz
SDN
0
1
0
-0.4
Tyler Poll
NYN
0
1
0
-0.4
Josh Osich
SFN
0
1
2
-0.4
Adam Conley
MIA
0
1
0
-0.4
Grant Dayton
LAN
0
1
1
-0.4
Evan Scribner
SEA
0
2
0
-0.7
J. C. Ramirez
ANA
0
2
0
-0.7
Josh Collmenter
ATL
0
2
0
-0.8
Ryan Garton
TBA
0
3
0
-1.1
Andrew Chafin
ARI
0
3
3
-1.1
Edubray Ramos
PHI
0
6
0
-2.3
Source: Seamheads.com
June 1, 2017
The ‘Most Powerful Political Players’ Draft, Do-Over Edition
In this week’s politics chat, we’re revisiting the question of who holds sway in the Trump administration, Congress and beyond. The transcript below has been lightly edited.
micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): Welcome, all! There have been reports and rumors of a coming Trump administration staff shake-up. So we’re going to replay one of the most substantive, serious chats we’ve ever done … “The ‘Most Powerful Political Players Of 2017’ Draft Extravaganza!!”
From last time:
We’ll have a pool of political figures, and the goal is to draft the team that will have the most influence on America’s political agenda in 2017. That includes legislation considered and passed in Washington and the states, as well as the country’s general political discourse.
natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): The time window is still 2017?
micah: Let’s do through the 2018 midterm elections.
harry (Harry Enten, senior political writer): Oh, wow, expanding the time window.
micah: Before we pick new teams, though, let’s decide who won the original contest.
Here were the teams:
ROUND
NATE
HARRY
CLARE
MICAH
1
B. Obama
R. Priebus
M. Pence
D. Trump
2
P. Ryan
A. Kennedy
J. Sessions
M. McConnell
3
R. Tillerson
J. Brown
S. Bannon
J. Roberts
4
I. Trump
N. Pelosi
J. McCain
B. Sanders
5
E. Warren
T. Perez
C. Schumer
K. Conway
6
S. Mnuchin
C. Booker
J. Manchin
H. Heitkamp
The original ‘Most Powerful Political Players Of 2017’ teams
micah: Everyone gets one vote, and you can’t vote for yourself.
harry: I can say that I clearly won it last time. I’ll be collecting my medal now. Thank you all.
micah: Harry’s team … good god.
clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): I won.
natesilver: Harry’s team is an order of magnitude worse than any of the other three.
clare.malone: Nate’s is good, too, but Barack Obama …
micah: Obama was a bad pick.
natesilver: I mean, I didn’t think he’d be Jet-Skiing and whatnot. He was president for 20 days, though! He’s making bank, too!
micah: Here’s the problem: I think I won, but I can’t vote for myself. Clare clearly came in second, but should I strategically vote for Harry?
No, I vote Clare.
clare.malone: Micah’s is pretty good — I think I vote for his.
harry: I vote for Micah too.
clare.malone: Suck-up.
natesilver: I vote Clare.
clare.malone: Yesssssss!
micah: Tie!
OK, here’s the pool of people for the new draft, but you can do write-ins too.
Nate, spin the marker to see who goes first.
natesilver: I was “randomly” chosen to go first.
clare.malone: Wow, Nate really cheated on that one, folks.
harry: What a load of horse manure.
micah: Indeed.
With the No. 1 pick …
Nate Silver selects …
natesilver: I pick Trump, Donald J.
micah: Bad pick.
natesilver: I really don’t have to explain this one, do I?
micah: No.
Harry with the No. 2 pick …
harry: I have to choose Vice President Mike Pence.
He’s one of the most powerful vice presidents in history. He could be president by the time this administration is done.
You get the point.
micah: Before 2018, though?
natesilver: Mike Pence is Keyser Soze, I’m convinced.
micah: OK, I have the No. 3 pick.
Mitch McConnell.
He played really well on my first team.
natesilver: Very by-the-book selections so far, I’d say.
micah: Nate, you picked Obama third in the first draft.
natesilver: HE WAS PRESIDENT AT THE TIME, MICAH!
micah: Just admit it … that was a bad pick.
Clare, you’re up with No. 4.
clare.malone: Robert Mueller, special counsel investigating the Trump-Russia controversy.
natesilver: I had him as a second-rounder, but not unreasonable.
clare.malone: This is how you know this is an updated draft, folks. Mueller is going to be an important player in Washington over the long term, aka, through the midterms. What his investigations turn up could be pivotal for telling Republicans how to run vis a vis Trump in 2018.
micah: Or even taking down the Trump presidency.
natesilver: I’m up again and am going to invite PAUL RYAN back to my team.
The fact is, Trump’s lack of interest in the substantive details of legislation gives both Ryan and McConnell a lot of power.
clare.malone: I agree with that.
micah: I’d argue my McConnell pick basically nullifies any value Ryan has to your team. Ryan can legislate all he wants. McConnell is the real choke point. (See: care, health.)
natesilver: Well, on the chance that things start going really, really badly for Trump, Ryan is sort of the choke point for impeachment, since that starts in the House.
micah: And is decided in the Senate.
natesilver: His strategy is also more important than McConnell’s to the extent that the House is more in play for 2018 than the Senate.
micah: That’s fair.
Harry … with the No. 6 pick … (This is usually where Harry falls apart.)
harry: Is that nice?! Is that nice?!
natesilver: Pick Ryan Zinke.
harry: I hate all of you.
natesilver: Pick Jon Ossoff.
clare.malone: We’re laughing our Ossoff in here.
harry: I’m choosing Rep. Mark Meadows, chairman of the House Freedom Caucus. The Freedom Caucus showed its power on health care. Conservative legislation has to go through them.
micah: Hmmm.
clare.malone: K.
micah: Actually … good pick?
clare.malone: Yeah, I mean, they have certainly punched above their weight, I would say, in the past four months.
natesilver: We are so much less salty than we were back in December when we did this before.
micah: Nate, you like that pick?
harry: I think you can disagree with the pick, but it’s less of a joke than what I put together in December.
natesilver: It’s an overdraft, but he’s above replacement level, at least
micah: OK, with the No. 7 pick, I select … Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
The Trump administration has been stymied in a lot of areas, but Sessions has made huge changes in immigration, drug sentencing, etc.
I’d argue he’s had more of an impact than any other administration official.
natesilver: Yeah, and also a trusted voice for Trump on issues that aren’t in the attorney general’s domain.
clare.malone: The Department of Justice is certainly a department where change can be implemented much more quickly and visibly than others.
micah: With the No. 8 pick …
clare.malone: OK, so I’m going to go in a different direction here, a little more 30,000 feet up …
I’m going with Anthony Kennedy, ye olde Supreme Court swing vote.
micah: You stole my pick!!!!
clare.malone: The court is going to be considering partisan gerrymandering, and that’ll be a huge thing to watch as we head toward 2018.
harry: Note: I chose him last time, and everyone made fun of me.
micah: We didn’t make fun of you for that pick, Harry.
clare.malone: We made fun of you for every other one.
micah: Swing vote on the Supreme Court is hard to argue with.
Nate, with the No. 9 pick …
natesilver: Comey comey comey comey comey chameleon.
micah: Wha!?
harry: I’m sorry — is that a sentence?
natesilver: James Comey, former FBI director.
micah: Wait, are you serious?
harry: LOL!
natesilver:
That’s a sweet pick what are y’all talking about.
clare.malone: Prodigious note-taker James Comey could be key. I kinda feel this one.
micah: Comey’s notebook would be a defensible pick, but not James Comey.
harry: That’s like not being able to pick a Jerry Rice level talent (Mueller) and trading up to pick a Boyd Dowler type (Comey). Good player, but not anywhere close.
natesilver: Comey can help to turn the intelligence community against Trump, which is not something you want to have happen if you’re president.
And he’s a potential linchpin in any impeachment proceeding against Trump.
micah: They’re already against him.
Bad pick.
natesilver: I don’t see how you can praise Mueller at No. 4 overall and criticize Comey at No. 9?
harry: We just did.
clare.malone: I’m with Nate’s logic.
micah: Because Mueller will be deciding what to do with the Comey evidence … not Comey.
clare.malone: The investigations are going to be sprawling. And Comey’s firing could be the linchpin.
natesilver: Mueller’s jurisdiction isn’t necessarily related to the firing of Comey, per se.
micah: Comey has talked to Mueller.
natesilver: I think Mueller was a decent pick, but he’s not a stand-in for “Trump scandals” all by himself. He’s one of a large number of vectors that could cause trouble for Trump.
micah: Once Comey hands over his notes … couldn’t his role be over?
Anyway. Harry, with the No. 10 selection …
harry: This is an odd pick that I’m going to make.
micah: Oh god.
clare.malone: oooooh
natesilver: Zinke
harry: OK, not that odd.
natesilver: Darko Milicic.
micah: ⏰
harry: No, I’m going with Jared Kushner.
clare.malone: Risky, but interesting.
natesilver: That’s an utterly conventional pick. Not odd at all.
clare.malone: I think it’s risky given the news this week.
natesilver: You’re so bad at this that you think your good picks are bad picks.
harry: I never said it was a bad pick.
micah: So what is the evidence of Kushner’s influence?
harry: It’s pretty clear that he has Trump’s ears on some things. The reporting goes that he probably helped to get Comey fired. (In other stories, Ivanka Trump and he are probably claiming more influence than they actually have because they’re the anonymous sources behind the story.) Further, he could be going down with the ship. And that in itself is newsworthy.
natesilver: Some of the reporting on Kushner has been a little hagiographic, because he’s clearly a good source for reporters who want to connect with what’s going on inside the White House.
harry: Sure.
natesilver: But I agree that Kushner could be valuable either as an insider or as part of the story that takes down Trump. The risk is that he gets caught in between.
clare.malone: Very Shakespearean.
micah: OK, but to be clear … being “part of the story that takes down Trump” isn’t power. That was my objection to the Comey pick.
natesilver: Wait — yeah, it is. It’s totally power.
micah: Power is active, not passive. Like good writing.
harry: Passive writing can be good, if used correctly.
micah: I have the No. 11 pick …
I’m going with: Gary Cohn.
harry: Great announcer for the Mets.
clare.malone: Hmm.
natesilver: Now that’s the first actually bad pick of the draft.
micah: OK, hear me out.
micah: Chief economic adviser. There’s power in that, by itself.
Reportedly in the running to replace Reince Priebus as chief of staff.
natesilver: Which is a terrible job.
Like Priebus isn’t even going to get drafted, is he?
micah: And even if he fails to get that, Cohn apparently wants to be chair of the Federal Reserve.
But, Nate, if Priebus is replaced, it’ll be as part of a shake-up, and I would imagine the incoming chief would be empowered.
(Note: Nate just said out loud in the room, “That was kind of a bad pick. I’m not just saying that for the chat.”)
Clare with the No. 12 selection …
clare.malone: Imma pick Bernie Sanders.
micah: #FeelTheBern
The first Democrat to be picked?
clare.malone: Because I think he’s still got the clearest kingmaker role in the Democratic Party during a turbulent time period, and I think that counts for a lot. Losing that primary was still the best thing that’s ever happened to him. It’s given him staying power.
micah: I buy that.
harry: Sanders is fine. But I expect more from Clare given her usually keen insights. This seems like a pick I’d make and think I was a genius because how conventional it is.
clare.malone: Given the power vacuum in the party, conventionality about who its biggest movers and shakers are is just fine. Sometimes the purloined letter is lying right on the desktop, hiding in plain sight.
That’s a tortured comparison, but my defense.
harry: Purloined? You were the kid who English teachers loved, weren’t you?
natesilver: My pick: I’ve gotta go Steve Bannon at this point,
harry: Meh. So unoriginal.
natesilver: He may have lost influence, but for the fourth round, there’s some value there.
And if Trump ousts him, he could still be very influential.
harry: It’s fine. I mean, no one is like, “That’s a terrible pick.”
micah: I am.
harry: Now everyone is eating salad. We’ve become healthy ❤️
micah: That is a TERRIBLE pick.
clare.malone: It’s not terrible.
natesilver: Micah, come on — you’d trade Cohn straight up for Bannon.
micah: I really wouldn’t. Even if Bannon retains whatever influence he has, how much is that? It’s not like Trump is pursuing a populist/nationalist agenda, at least domestically.
clare.malone: I don’t think we know how much influence he’s losing or regaining. Don’t we think potentially pulling out of the Paris agreement is him?
micah: That’s normal Republicanism.
Harry with the No. 14 pick.
harry: Folks, this is where I fall apart: Ben Ray Luján.
natesilver: WHAT
THE
FUCKING
FUCK
micah: I genuinely don’t know who that is.
clare.malone: Did you play Little League with that guy or something?
Owe him money?
Is this spon-con?
natesilver: “harry is typing”
micah: This is definitely the Cory Booker pick of this draft.
harry: Who the heck is Ben Ray Luján? He’s the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. If this is going through the midterms, there’s going to be a lot of talk about recruiting on the Democratic side and how the DCCC is spending money. Luján is going to be at the helm of doing that. We all remember Rahm Emanuel going out and recruiting people in 2006, when the Democrats regained control of the House. If the Democrats are successful, I won’t be shocked if Luján gets similar accolades.
micah: 
May 30, 2017
Politics Podcast: Do Democrats Need A Win?
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts |
ESPN App |
Download |
RSS |
Embed |
New to podcasts?
Embed Code
The headline from Montana’s House special election doesn’t read well for Democrats: Republican Greg Gianforte beat Democrat Rob Quist by 6 percentage points, even after he body slammed a reporter on the eve of the election. But in the latest episode of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew debates whether the result in Montana actually bodes poorly for the party and what a big special election win would mean for Democrats.
The team also plays another round “smoke vs. fire” with the controversy over potential collusion between President Trump’s campaign and Russia — parsing through what’s most consequential among many recent revelations. Then, FiveThirtyEight’s Anna Barry-Jester joins the podcast to discuss the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of the House health care bill and the challenges the bill is facing in the Senate.
You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.
The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast publishes Monday evenings, with occasional special episodes throughout the week. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.
May 27, 2017
LeBron James Destroyed Our Elo Ratings, But Can He Beat The Warriors Again?
It’s become a rite of spring. Every year — or at least every year since LeBron James returned to the Cleveland Cavaliers — our NBA Elo ratings are skeptical of the Cavs when the playoffs begin. And every year, LeBron and Co. have smashed our poor algorithm to bits.
In 2015, the Cavs entered the playoffs with a lukewarm 1631 Elo rating. That’s perfectly respectable, but the sort of rating you might associate with the Los Angeles Clippers or another 50-something-win team that you’d expect to lose in the second round or the conference finals. Instead, Cleveland reached the NBA Finals, losing to the Golden State Warriors in six competitive games even with a depleted roster.
In 2016, the Cavs had a similarly good-but-not-great Elo rating — 1642 — when the playoffs began. But they blew through the Eastern Conference playoffs before beating the 73-win Warriors to win the NBA title, famously overcoming a 3-1 series deficit along the way. Their Elo rating finished at 1759, ranking them among the top 25 teams of all-time and implying that the system had massively underrated them initially.
This year, Elo had the Cavs pegged lower still when the playoffs began last month. Although the Cavs were our preseason favorite to win the Eastern Conference, they slumped at the end of the regular season — losing 13 of their final 22 games, including their last four — and their Elo rating fell all the way to 1545. That isn’t good; it’s the sort of rating you’d normally associate with a No. 6 seed or some other team you’d expect to lose in the first or second round. Accordingly, the Cavs’ chances of winning the title drifted around in the low-to-mid single digits — variously at 2 percent to 5 percent according to our simulations — as the regular season wound down and the playoffs began.
But the Cavs have gone 12-1 in the playoffs and won by an average score of 117-103. Their Elo rating has climbed by almost 150 points, to 1691. They clinched a return to the finals by beating the Boston Celtics by 33 points on Thursday. It’s been dominating stuff.
So has Elo learned its lesson? Well, maybe not. Cleveland’s chances of winning the finals are just 10 percent according to the more advanced, “Carm-ELO” version of our ratings — and 13 percent according to the simpler, original Elo algorithm. Bookmakers also have the Cavs as underdogs, but not as heavily, implying that they have about a 30 percent chance to beat the Warriors again and repeat as champions.
Giving Cleveland only a 10 percent chance is not the hill I want to die on. Our NBA projections are pretty simple, and sports betting markets are pretty sophisticated. While there are occasional exceptions, I’d usually defer to Vegas in the event of a major disagreement. Still, we’ve gotten a lot of questions throughout the playoffs about why Elo hasn’t given the Cavs a better chance. There are basically three reasons — but the one that matters the most right now has nothing to do with the Cavs and everything to do with the Warriors.
Reason No. 1: Elo doesn’t account for teams such as Cleveland finding a higher “gear” in the playoffs. We covered this point extensively before the playoffs began, so I won’t go into too much detail here. Our Elo projections — and most other projection systems — essentially treat regular-season basketball as equivalent to playoff basketball. But LeBron’s teams have a long history of performing at a much higher caliber in the playoffs than in the regular season.
Maybe this is because James and his teammates conserve their energy; there aren’t a lot of high-leverage regular-season games in the Eastern Conference, as evidenced by the fact that the Cavs could play so crappily down the stretch run and still stumble into the No. 2 seed. Maybe it’s because LeBron is a terrific half-court player, and there’s a premium on the half-court game in the playoffs as defenses tighten up. In any event, the assumption that playoff basketball equals regular-season basketball seems to be pretty wrong in the case of the Cavs. This is something we plan on re-evaluating as we retune our NBA models this summer.
Reason No. 2: Elo ratings heavily weight recent performance. That hurt Cleveland before, although it’s starting to help them now. Elo ratings were originally devised for chess, which doesn’t have any such thing as a “season.” Instead, performance continuously fluctuates up and down over time. Our Elo-based sports ratings mostly work the same way. The more recent the game, the more heavily it gets weighted.
I’d defend this as being the right assumption to make, in general. The degree to which Elo ratings fluctuate from game to game — which is governed by something called the K-factor — has been tested based on tens of thousands of NBA games. Other things held equal, a game played a week ago ought to tell you more than one played six months ago. Elo can be “smart” about catching cases like the 2014-15 Atlanta Hawks, who started out 40-8 but went 20-14 for the rest of the regular season before being swept by Cleveland in the conference finals.
But for a team whose regular-season performance doesn’t tell you much about how they’re going to fare in the playoffs (like the Cavaliers), there isn’t much benefit to doubling down on recent play. Cleveland played pretty well in the first half of the regular season, but middlingly — sometimes even poorly — in the second half. Elo put a lot of emphasis on that late-season slump as the playoffs approached, and that made it more skeptical of the Cavs.
Elo’s philosophy of rapidly adjusting its ratings is benefiting the Cavaliers now, however. Because of their dominance in the playoffs, the Cavs’ current Elo rating has rebounded. Their 1691 is the highest Elo rating they’ve had since Dec. 25, when they were at 1692 and had a 23-6 record after beating the Warriors.
That’s a very good Elo rating. Since the ABA-NBA merger in the 1976-77 season, the average NBA Finals participant has entered the finals with a rating of 1695. So Elo is saying that despite their regular-season struggles, the Cavs are every bit as strong as the typical conference champion.
The Cavaliers are great … but still a big underdog
YEAR▲▼
FAVORITE▲▼
ELO▲▼
WIN PROB.▲▼
WON▲▼
UNDERDOG▲▼
ELO▲▼
WIN PROB.▲▼
WON▲▼
1967
76ers*
1745
92%
✓
Warriors
1541
8%
1971
Bucks*
1704
91
✓
Wizards
1507
9
1972
Lakers*
1738
90
✓
Knicks
1555
10
2001
Lakers*
1768
89
✓
76ers
1592
11
1986
Celtics*
1807
88
✓
Rockets
1640
12
2017
Warriors*
1850
87
Cavaliers
1691
13
1963
Celtics*
1677
85
✓
Lakers
1533
15
1996
Bulls*
1832
84
✓
SuperSonics
1695
16
1949
Lakers*
1625
84
✓
Capitols
1490
16
1959
Celtics*
1643
82
✓
Lakers
1514
18
2003
Spurs*
1746
81
✓
Nets
1624
19
1974
Bucks*
1709
80
Celtics
1592
20
✓
2002
Lakers*
1717
80
✓
Nets
1601
20
1999
Spurs*
1745
80
✓
Knicks
1631
20
1962
Celtics*
1669
80
✓
Lakers
1557
20
1960
Celtics*
1676
78
✓
Hawks
1575
22
1950
Lakers
1727
77
✓
76ers*
1597
23
1961
Celtics*
1669
77
✓
Hawks
1571
23
1981
Celtics*
1668
76
✓
Rockets
1573
24
2014
Spurs*
1730
76
✓
Heat
1638
24
1966
Celtics*
1650
76
✓
Lakers
1558
24
2015
Warriors*
1802
75
✓
Cavaliers
1712
25
1957
Celtics*
1630
75
✓
Hawks
1541
25
1965
Celtics*
1653
75
✓
Lakers
1565
25
1956
Warriors*
1617
75
✓
Pistons
1529
25
1975
Bullets*
1659
75
Warriors
1571
25
✓
1951
Royals*
1615
74
Knicks
1531
26
✓
1955
Nationals*
1632
73
✓
Pistons
1551
27
2006
Mavericks*
1717
73
Heat
1637
27
✓
1993
Bulls
1741
73
✓
Suns*
1634
27
1987
Lakers*
1738
72
✓
Celtics
1661
28
1984
Celtics*
1706
72
✓
Lakers
1633
28
1983
76ers*
1707
71
✓
Lakers
1638
29
1964
Celtics*
1669
70
✓
Warriors
1602
30
2016
Warriors*
1790
70
Cavaliers
1725
30
✓
2007
Spurs*
1705
70
✓
Cavaliers
1641
30
1989
Pistons*
1763
69
✓
Lakers
1701
31
2009
Lakers*
1760
68
✓
Magic
1703
32
2000
Lakers*
1699
68
✓
Pacers
1643
32
1991
Bulls*
1750
67
✓
Lakers
1697
33
1952
Lakers*
1646
67
✓
Knicks
1594
33
2012
Thunder*
1737
67
Heat
1686
33
✓
1997
Bulls*
1799
66
✓
Jazz
1751
34
1970
Knicks*
1595
66
✓
Lakers
1549
34
2005
Spurs*
1716
66
✓
Pistons
1670
34
2013
Heat*
1755
65
✓
Spurs
1711
35
1958
Celtics*
1603
65
Hawks
1559
35
✓
1992
Bulls*
1742
64
✓
Trail Blazers
1702
36
1980
Lakers*
1712
62
✓
76ers
1681
38
1954
Nationals
1666
61
Lakers*
1607
39
✓
1990
Pistons*
1688
60
✓
Trail Blazers
1663
40
1985
Lakers
1752
60
✓
Celtics*
1697
40
2008
Lakers
1737
59
Celtics*
1685
41
✓
1978
SuperSonics*
1610
59
Bullets
1590
41
✓
1973
Lakers*
1667
59
Knicks
1649
41
✓
2004
Lakers*
1698
58
Pistons
1682
42
✓
1969
Lakers*
1614
58
Celtics
1598
42
✓
1976
Celtics*
1558
57
✓
Suns
1544
43
1982
76ers*
1699
57
Lakers
1686
43
✓
2010
Lakers*
1686
57
✓
Celtics
1674
43
1979
SuperSonics
1620
57
✓
Bullets*
1577
43
1994
Rockets*
1663
56
✓
Knicks
1655
44
1968
Celtics*
1594
56
✓
Lakers
1586
44
2011
Heat*
1721
55
Mavericks
1717
45
✓
1988
Pistons
1692
55
Lakers*
1658
45
✓
1998
Jazz*
1762
54
Bulls
1761
46
✓
1995
Magic*
1628
52
Rockets
1635
48
✓
1948
Warriors*
1491
52
Bullets
1500
48
✓
1947
Warriors*
1423
52
✓
Stags
1432
48
1977
76ers*
1615
51
Trail Blazers
1624
49
✓
1953
Lakers*
1632
51
✓
Knicks
1641
49
* Home-court advantage.
Elo ratings are for each NBA Finals team as they entered the series.
There’s just one big problem for Cleveland: Golden State.
Reason No. 3: Elo thinks the Warriors are insanely great — one of the two best teams ever, along with the 1995-96 Bulls.
The Warriors’ current Elo rating is 1850. That’s the highest rating a team has held upon entering the NBA Finals. And it’s the second-highest rating a team has had at any point in the regular season or playoffs; the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls peaked at a rating of 1853 after sweeping the first three games of the finals. It’s higher than the peak rating of last season’s 73-win Warriors, who topped out at 1839 after starting out the regular season 24-0.
We’ll be publishing a deeper dive on the Warriors next week, but Elo’s affection for them isn’t hard to explain. They’re 27-1 over their last 28 games. That includes a 12-0 record in the playoffs and an average margin of victory of more than 16 points, which is the best playoff scoring margin of all time. And they’ve done all of this in the Western Conference, which is still a lot deeper than the East. The Warriors are making it look so easy that they may even be underrated by the “eye test,” which tends to reward teams that triumph in the face of adversity. Other than in Game 1 of the Western Conference finals, the Warriors haven’t faced much adversity because they haven’t let their opponents get close.
PER GAME PLAYOFF AVERAGES
YEAR
TEAM
W-L
POINTS SCORED
POINTS ALLOWED
SCORING MARGIN
2017
Warriors
12-0
118.3
102.0
+16.3
1971
Bucks
12-2
109.1
94.6
+14.5
2017
Cavaliers
12-1
116.8
103.2
+13.6
2001
Lakers
15-1
103.4
90.6
+12.8
1991
Bulls
15-2
103.9
92.2
+11.7
1961
Celtics
8-2
120.7
109.1
+11.6
1987
Lakers
15-3
120.6
109.2
+11.4
1996
Bulls
15-3
97.4
86.8
+10.6
1986
Celtics
15-3
114.4
104.1
+10.3
1985
Lakers
15-4
126.3
116.2
+10.2
The Warriors have dominated the playoffs like no one before them
Minimum 8 playoff games played.
Source: Basketball-reference.com
To put this in perspective, suppose you took an indisputably great team like the 1986-87 Los Angeles Lakers, who went 65-17 in the regular season and entered the NBA Finals with an Elo rating of 1738. Elo would have given the Lakers only a 20 percent chance to win a seven-game series over the Warriors, assuming that the Warriors had home-court advantage (as they will against the Cavs). Compared with that, the Cavaliers’ 10 percent or 13 percent chance doesn’t seem so bad. Still, I’d put a few dimes down on LeBron at Elo’s odds.
May 24, 2017
Donald Trump’s Base Is Shrinking
A widely held tenet of the current conventional wisdom is that while President Trump might not be popular overall, he has a high floor on his support. Trump’s sizable and enthusiastic base — perhaps 35 to 40 percent of the country — won’t abandon him any time soon, the theory goes, and they don’t necessarily care about some of the controversies that the “mainstream media” treats as game-changing developments.
It’s an entirely reasonable theory. We live in a highly partisan epoch, and voters are usually loyal to politicians from their party. Trump endured a lot of turbulence in the general election but stuck it out to win the Electoral College. The media doesn’t always guess right about which stories will resonate with voters.
But the theory isn’t supported by the evidence. To the contrary, Trump’s base seems to be eroding. There’s been a considerable decline in the number of Americans who strongly approve of Trump, from a peak of around 30 percent in February to just 21 or 22 percent of the electorate now. (The decline in Trump’s strong approval ratings is larger than the overall decline in his approval ratings, in fact.) Far from having unconditional love from his base, Trump has already lost almost a third of his strong support. And voters who strongly disapprove of Trump outnumber those who strongly approve of him by about a 2-to-1 ratio, which could presage an “enthusiasm gap” that works against Trump at the midterms. The data suggests, in particular, that the GOP’s initial attempt (and failure) in March to pass its unpopular health care bill may have cost Trump with his core supporters.
These estimates come from the collection of polls we use for FiveThirtyEight’s approval ratings tracker. Many approval-rating polls give respondents four options: strongly approve, somewhat approve, somewhat disapprove and strongly disapprove. Ordinarily, we only estimate Trump’s overall approval and disapproval. But we went back and collected this more detailed data for all polls for which it was available, and then we reran our approval ratings program to output numbers for all four approval categories instead of the usual two. Here are Trump’s strongly approve and somewhat approve ratings from shortly after the start of his term through this Tuesday:
After a slight uptick in the first two to three weeks of his term, Trump’s strong approval ratings have headed downward. But it hasn’t been a steady decline. Instead, they fell considerably from about 29 percent on March 6 — when Republicans introduced their health care bill — to around 24 percent on April 1, shortly after the GOP pulled the bill from the House floor. They then remained stable for much of April, before beginning to fall again this month after the reintroduction (and House passage) of the health care bill and after Trump fired FBI director James Comey on May 9. As of Tuesday, just 21.4 percent of Americans strongly approved of Trump’s performance.
By comparison, 45 percent of Americans strongly approved of President Obama’s performance as of April 2009, although Obama’s strong approval numbers would fall considerably over the course of his term — to the mid-to-high 20s by the midterms and to the high teens by 2014.
The share of Americans who somewhat approve of Trump’s performance has actually increased slightly, however, from about 16 percent in early February to 17.9 percent as of Tuesday. In part, this probably reflects voters who once strongly approved of Trump and who have now downgraded him to the somewhat approve category. (Trump’s strongly approve and somewhat approve numbers have been inversely correlated so far, meaning that as one has risen, the other has tended to fall.) A potential problem for Trump is that in the event of continued White House turmoil, the next step for these somewhat approve voters would be to move toward disapproval of the president.
The number of Americans who strongly disapprove of Trump has sharply risen since early in his term, meanwhile, from the mid-30s in early February to 44.1 percent as of Tuesday. In most surveys, Trump’s strongly disapprove rating exceeds his overall approval rating, in fact.
The bulk of the increase in Trump’s strong disapproval ratings came early in his term, over the course of late January and early February. It’s possible that this was partly a reaction to Trump’s initial travel ban on immigrants from seven predominantly Muslim countries, which was the biggest news of Trump’s first few weeks in office. But presidential disapproval often rises in the first month or so of a president’s tenure as voters who initially give a new president the benefit of the doubt find things to dislike in his performance.
Meanwhile, the share of Americans who somewhat disapprove of Trump has been small and fairly steady throughout his term, usually averaging around 10 or 11 percent. It was 11.6 percent as of Tuesday.
During last year’s presidential primaries, Trump received about 14 million votes out of a total of 62 million cast between the two parties, which works out to 23 percent of the total. So perhaps it’s not a coincidence that 20 to 25 percent of the country still strongly supports Trump; they were with him from the start.
But 20 to 25 percent isn’t all that large a base — obviously not enough to win general elections on its own. Instead, Trump won the White House because most Republicans who initially supported another GOP candidate in the primary wound up backing him in the November election. Trump has always had his share of reluctant supporters, and their ranks have been growing as the number of strong supporters has decreased. If those reluctant Trump supporters shift to being reluctant opponents instead, he’ll be in a lot of trouble, with consequences ranging from a midterm wave against Republicans to an increased likelihood of impeachment.
So while there’s risk to Democrats in underestimating Trump’s resiliency, there’s an equal or perhaps greater risk to Republicans in thinking Trump’s immune from political gravity.
If you look beneath the surface of Trump’s approval ratings, you find not hidden strength but greater weakness than the topline numbers imply.
Harry Enten and Dhrumil Mehta contributed to this article.
We Started With 14 Possible Paths For Trump’s Presidency. Which Are Most Likely Now?
In this week’s politics chat, we debate what trajectory the Donald Trump presidency is on. The transcript below has been lightly edited.
micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): So just after President Trump was inaugurated, Nate wrote a piece that laid out 14 possible versions of the Trump presidency — basically, 14 different paths the Trump administration might take. We were debating what to talk about in today’s chat, and one of our beloved readers had this idea:
@micahcohen @FiveThirtyEight @538politics Please revisit the different 14 different versions of the trump presidency and talk about how the probabilities have changed.
— Ben Thomases (@benthomases) May 23, 2017
So let’s do that! We never assigned each version a probability, but I’ll paste a scenario in here, you’ll tell me “more likely” or “less likely” (no pushes), and then we’ll quickly talk over why you think the probability has gone up or down.
Everyone got that? (We’re missing our dear colleague Clare today, FYI; she’s doing actual reporting.)
harry (Harry Enten, senior political writer): I got it. I got it.
perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): Yes. Go ahead.
natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): I thought I was supposed to write an article about this, Micah. Did the statute of limitations run out?
micah: It did, yes. You were supposed to file that article about three weeks ago.
OK, No. 1, in the “extrapolations from the status quo” category:
1. Trump keeps on Trumpin’ and the country remains evenly divided. In this scenario, Trump continues to implement his campaign-trail agenda. He still rants on Twitter every morning and picks unnecessary fights, although … he mostly avoids major entanglements with foreign leaders that could really get him into trouble. And it … sort of works. The press regularly predicts Trump’s demise, but difficult periods are followed by comparatively successful ones and he benefits from relatively low expectations. At the same time, he doesn’t win over many new converts. Still, Trump’s base of 40 to 45 percent of the country sticks with him. Given Republicans’ geographic advantages in Congress and the Electoral College, that makes for a very competitive 2018 and 2020.
perry: Less likely.
harry: Less likely.
natesilver: I’m not allowed so say “push”? I guess I’d say less likely. I would have said more likely at the 100-day mark.
harry: Trump’s approval rating is at best at 40 percent. The part of the scenario where the press repeatedly predicts his demise probably still holds true, but I don’t know if there has been a successful Trump period yet.
natesilver: Also, the notion that Trump is mostly avoiding getting himself into real trouble doesn’t hold up as well, with the James Comey stuff.
harry: Trump hasn’t had a foreign policy disaster, but, as Nathaniel notes, he cannot seem to keep quiet on stuff he doesn’t need to be talking about (e.g. Comey).
natesilver: That scenario also posits that “Trump continues to implement his campaign-trail agenda,” which is a pretty debatable proposition based on his lack of big policy wins so far.
Mind you, I still think this scenario is very possible (it was one of the more likely ones to begin with). But I’m not sure that it’s become more likely, per se. He’s bogeying holes instead of parring them.
harry: Heck, Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy (a Republican) has argued that Trump’s budget, released Tuesday, doesn’t follow his campaign-trail agenda. Cassidy said the same thing about the GOP health care bill.
perry: Right. I think this scenario is still possible. Trump governs with a mix of his campaign-trail agenda and general Republican orthodoxy. He holds at around 40 percent approval. But it’s less likely than in January.
micah: No. 2, same category …
2. Trump gradually (or not-so-gradually) enters a death spiral … We don’t yet know very much about how sustainable Trump’s schtick will be as president, so it would be foolish to dismiss the possibility that he’s in over his head and never really recovers. Trump is fighting a lot of battles at once without much of a support structure around him. Moreover, his problems could be self-reinforcing as issues pile on top of one another and public opinion turns against him, especially if the more coolheaded and competent advisers and Cabinet members flee the White House as Trump begins to falter. In this scenario, Trump’s approval ratings wouldn’t necessarily fall off a cliff — his base would give him a mulligan or two — but they would move slowly and inexorably downward, as happened to George W. Bush during his last two years in office. Although a desperate and deeply unpopular Trump could pose some risks to American institutions, the general idea here is that Trump would become too ineffectual too quickly to cause all that much lasting damage. Impeachment and resignation are plausible endgames in this scenario.
perry: More likely.
natesilver: More likely.
harry: More likely.
natesilver: “Trump is fighting a lot of battles at once without much of a support structure around him. Moreover, his problems could be self-reinforcing as issues pile on top of one another and public opinion turns against him …” I mean, that sounds like a pretty good description of the past few weeks.
harry: We just had an article on the site about the chances of freaking impeachment.
natesilver: Now, I would say that having been on this course so far doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ll continue on this course. And you could easily wind up halfway between scenarios No. 1 and No. 2.
harry: Right, it’s merely more likely. Not probable.
perry: This scenario feels like what is happening. There are days when it feels very much like 2005, with Republicans trying to figure out how to break from the president of their party, Democrats gleeful about the upcoming congressional elections, the president’s numbers going gradually down.
harry: And look at Trump’s approval rating. … It isn’t falling off of a cliff, but it is declining.
natesilver: I do think there’s a chance that — I think I said this on the podcast on Monday, so sorry for the repetition — Trump is spending so much time treading water to get out of his various self-inflicted crises that his victories are few and far between.
harry: He got a health care bill past the House. He got a Supreme Court justice. He had the Syria strikes …
natesilver: A health care bill that could get a bunch of Republicans voted out of office because the White House and Paul Ryan did an awful job of thinking through the politics of it. I’ll give him Neil Gorsuch.
micah: No. 3 (I’m truncating these excerpts, BTW, because Nate tends to be … verbose):
3. Trump keeps rewriting the political rules and gradually becomes more popular. Trump won the presidency despite being fairly unpopular, and he remains fairly unpopular now. Nonetheless, what he’s accomplished is impressive, especially given the long odds that many people (including yours truly) gave Trump at the start. Maybe the guy is pretty good at politics? One can imagine various scenarios where Trump’s default approach to politics turns out to be a winning one over the long run, even if it leads to its fair share of rocky moments.
harry: Less likely.
perry: Less likely. And I thought this was pretty likely a few months ago.
natesilver: Less likely, certainly. I suppose with the slight caveat that assessing this scenario would turn heavily on election results (e.g. how well Republicans do at the midterms) and those elections haven’t happened yet.
harry: I should note that “One can imagine various scenarios where Trump’s default approach to politics turns out to be a winning one over the long run, even if it leads to its fair share of rocky moments,” may still turn out to be true.
natesilver: I actually think a big part of Trump’s problem is that the election convinced him he could walk on water, but he can’t.
It’s like when some No. 12 seed wins their first-round game in the NCAA tournament and then starts jacking up wild 3s and playing like crap in their next game. Overconfidence.
perry: He won both the primary and general while not following the rules of politics. I’m not sure if flouting of the rules was why he won or if he won because of other factors while he flouted the rules. Either way, his violation of both casual norms (don’t make a Stephen Bannon-like figure your senior adviser) and real norms (firing the FBI director investigating you) have backfired.
harry: It’s still very early. Bill Clinton had a rocky first few months –– so rocky that his approval rating dropped into the 30s at just about this point of his first term. What may have to happen is that Trump needs to get crushed in the midterms in order to recalibrate.
natesilver: Yeah, I think firing Comey — and (allegedly) asking two intelligence agency heads to push back on the FBI investigation into ties between Russia and the Trump campaign — counts as more than a “rocky moment”
micah: How about a Rocky moment?
natesilver: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btPJPFnesV4
micah: No. 4 … (Now we’re in Category 2, “Trump changes directions”)
4. Trump mellows out, slightly. This is the mildest course change. In this case, after an up-and-down first three to six months, Trump gradually gets better at the job of being president, not necessarily because of a concerted effort to pivot but because he learns through trial and error that he needs to pick his battles. Steve Bannon and other more incendiary advisers lose stature, and Trump’s bonds with Republican leaders in Congress strengthen as he somewhat faithfully carries out their agenda. There are still many profoundly weird moments, but Trump gradually comes to govern more like a conventional Republican. Like most first-term incumbents, he enters 2020 as a slight favorite for re-election.
harry: I’ll argue this has become more likely.
natesilver: Moreless likely
harry: The heck is that?
natesilver: That’s like the T/F (truefalse). I suppose I’d go with more likely.
perry: This is a hard one. I will go with less likely. But parts of this are more likely (he governs like a traditional Republican) and parts are less likely (slight favorite for re-election.)
harry: I once got credit on a multiple-choice science test in 8th grade because I wrote a “d” that looked like an “a.”
Anyway. I’d go with “more likely” because I think he needs a course change and it has been rocky. So it merely opens the possibility more. Not that I think he’ll take this option.
micah: Harry gets the prize for most nonsensical answer so far.
natesilver: He has shown some restraint at times. For instance, in avoiding a government shutdown.
I guess you could ask whether or not there’s been a trend toward more restraint over time.
Upon reflection, I think I’m going to change my answer to less likely.
perry: The Comey thing was just so big that it overwhelms 10 mellowing moves.
micah: Yeah, that’s true.
His first trip abroad has been pretty restrained.
perry: Agree, the foreign trip has been restrained.
natesilver: Yeah. I think if you rated each day from 0 to 10 in terms of how “presidential” Trump was, there wouldn’t be an upward trajectory. Or at least, not a statistically significant one.
micah: We should do that, Nate.
harry: My point is that we have had a rather rocky 3-6 months. He needs to learn how to pick his battles. He hasn’t yet. But this requires waiting. So we’ll have to wait and see.
natesilver: Nobody is saying this is scenario is impossible. In fact, it was one of the most likely scenarios to begin with, IMO. But does the evidence point toward a trajectory of greater restraint? You could argue the case, but my view is that not really, at least not given Comey.
micah: No. 5:
5. Trump cedes authority. I rarely see this possibility discussed, but it has several historical precedents among presidents who found the job mentally or physically overwhelming. The key aspect is that within a year or two, Trump would have effectively relinquished day-to-day control of the government to Vice President Mike Pence and to his Cabinet, instead focusing on the more ceremonial aspects of the presidency and perhaps exploiting it for personal enrichment. There are several variations on this scenario, which range from Trump being surprisingly popular as a sort of celebrity-in-chief to Trump largely withdrawing from the public spotlight.
perry: More likely.
harry: More likely.
natesilver: More likely.
micah: DISAGREE ON SOMETHING!
harry: I disagreed last time and you told me I was nonsensical.
natesilver: I’m not someone who says that Trump’s frequent golfing, etc. is a big deal. But it is an indication that he maybe likes the auspices of the job more the job itself.
micah: What evidence has there been that Trump would cede any power?
perry: I think there is a scenario where the party leaders suggest to Trump, “We can support you, as long as you let us and Vice President Mike Pence do domestic policy and H.R. McMaster/Nikki Haley/James Mattis/Rex Tillerson do foreign policy. You can give speeches.”
That would be done in private.
natesilver: He seems to be enjoying the foreign trip, which sorta fits with this theory.
harry: What evidence? How about the fact that he freaking offered John Kasich control of both foreign and domestic policy in hopes of getting Kasich to join his ticket as vice president.
micah: Reportedly.
harry: Reportedly, but still.
natesilver: In terms of ceding power, he certainly isn’t a micromanager. He totally delegated construction of the health care bill to the House, for example.
perry: I don’t think this is likely. Trump is not a humble man. I just think it’s more likely, because I think Trump’s mistakes have empowered others to try to take authority from him.
micah: That makes sense.
Next …
6. Trump successfully pivots to the populist center (but with plenty of authoritarianism too). This is [David] Frum’s scenario. To recap, it involves Trump becoming more of a true populist, remaining hard-line on immigration and trade but calling for significant infrastructure and social welfare spending. His new direction earns plaudits from the media, which is eager to tell a “pivot” story, and is genuinely popular with independents and Rust Belt Democrats. At the same time, Trump continues to erode the rule of law by using strong-arm tactics with the media, the judiciary and private business, and he collaborates with Republicans to restrict voting rights. Trump’s presidency is fairly successful as far as it goes, but he moves the country in the direction of being an illiberal democracy.
perry: Less likely.
harry: His new budget argues against this option. So: less likely.
natesilver: Less likely. There’s been rather little actual economic populism.
perry: I think he is taking steps to erode the rule of law (Comey firing, sidestepping ethics laws, bashing judges and the press) but I would argue that those steps have been somewhat ineffective so far. I don’t think he is succeeding in breaking those institutions, many of which are bedeviling him. (See the travel ban being struck down, The Washington Post and The New York Times embarrassing him almost daily with stories from leakers inside government.) And the populism has been nonexistent. He has made no real efforts to win Democrats.
micah: No. 7 …
7. Trump flails around aimlessly after an unsuccessful attempt to pivot. In this scenario, Trump is like George Steinbrenner running the 1980s New York Yankees, firing his managers and changing course all the time without ever really getting anywhere. Instead, he churns through advisers and alienates allies faster than he makes new ones. In one version of the scenario, Trump attempts a Frum-ian pivot to the center but it fails — Congressional Republicans don’t go along with with the program, and it costs him credibility with his base more quickly than it wins him new converts. By early 2019, there are impeachment proceedings against Trump, and several Republicans are considering challenging him for the 2020 nomination. Trump winds up being something of a lame duck despite being in his first term, drawing comparisons to Jimmy Carter.
perry: More likely.
natesilver: More likely. Especially given the frequent leaks and rumors of staff shake-ups.
harry: More likely.
micah: But has he attempted a pivot?
harry: He hasn’t yet, but if he stays this unpopular?
micah: Yeah, I guess he’s more likely to?
perry: I know we don’t think of it as such, but firing Comey was an attempt at a pivot, by changing the subject from Russia.
natesilver: He’s flip-flopped on some issues. But this scenario is more arguing that he doesn’t really have a strategy, and that contributes to his undoing. Which seems … very possible based on what we’ve seen so far.
perry: Right. The rumors about Bannon leaving, Gary Cohn rising in power –– those all pointed to some strategic confusion.
micah: No. 8:
8. Trump is consumed by scandal. On the one hand, the threshold for what it takes to make the public truly outraged about Trump is likely to be higher than it would be for almost any other politician. On the other hand, perhaps no president has had such high potential for scandal. Between his business dealings (and potential conflicts of interest), his treatment of women, and his long tenure in the public spotlight, Trump is a target-rich environment, and news organizations are ramping up their investigative teams in hopes of breaking a story.
(We’re in the “three horsemen of the presidential apocalypse” category now.)
harry: More likely.
natesilver: Hmm, tough one. Just kidding.
perry: I think we can say that Nate nailed this one.
natesilver: More likely.
perry: More likely. And happening.
natesilver: Although, I’d note that my (long) description there in the original article did not mention Russia.
perry: True.
harry: How could you miss that? … But this scenario looks like what the last two weeks or so have actually been like.
perry: I feel like we can safely say this is the scenario of Trump’s presidency (for now). And I’m having a hard time seeing it not continuing on this path.
micah: Yeah, we’re firmly on this path at the moment.
perry: He has appointed people who are walking conflicts of interest (Jared Kushner). He has lied so often about ethics issues that the newspaper investigative teams are going to keep adding people and writing bigger pieces.
natesilver: Yeah. And there’s a lag between when he does something dubious and when it gets reported. He’s still cleaning up a lot of messes related to Michael Flynn, for example. So who knows what he’s doing now that will come to light in some big New York Times or Washington Post investigative story in July.
micah: Next!
9. Trump is undermined by a failure to deliver jobs. Although the U.S. economic outlook is fairly bright in the near term, macroeconomic conditions are largely unpredictable more than about six months in advance. Some of Trump’s economic policies, such as imposing tariffs, could also contribute to the likelihood of an economic downturn. Presidents usually see their popularity suffer amidst a declining economy, and Trump could be especially vulnerable after having promised to create so many jobs.
perry: Less likely.
harry: Push.
micah: No pushing.
harry: Fine. Less likely.
natesilver: I peeked out of my office to see how our economics editor/writer Ben Casselman would answer this question.
micah: We need a @benc guest appearance.
@benc joined #14-versions-update by invitation from @micah
micah: Ben, has the situation above become more or less likely?
benc: I would say the situation on jobs hasn’t changed meaningfully since Trump took office. I mean, I guess it’s become less likely insofar as some people were saying Trump’s mere election would spark a recession (which, for the record, I said was dumb at the time). That obviously didn’t happen. But the job market seems to have been pretty much unaffected by Trump so far, for good or ill.
micah: Thanks, Ben!
natesilver: I suppose I’d say less likely, since I don’t think most economists say there’s a recession looming, but note the caveat about “macroeconomic conditions are largely unpredictable more than about six months in advance.”
He has mostly avoided policies that could sabotage the economy so far, such as extremely draconian tariffs.
perry: Trump seems, I would argue, too scared to actually do the really aggressive economic stuff he talked about on the campaign trail, like fighting China on currency, getting out of NAFTA, etc.
The economy may be strong or weak in his presidency, but it seems like he will have little to do with big shifts either way.
harry: A weak economy could make the ground fall out from under him.
He might be looking at, instead of an approval rating of 37 percent, his rating falling to 30 percent. I don’t know if what Trump does makes economic downturn more likely, but presidents get blamed for the economy whether or not it was their fault.
natesilver: To add some data/context here, economists in the Wall Street Journal panel estimate there’s about a 15 percent chance of a recession, which is pretty typical.
(That’s a 15 percent chance within the next year, I believe.)
micah: OK, No. 10:
10. Trump’s law-and-order agenda is bolstered by an international incident or terrorist attack. It’s all too easy to envision this scenario, since the tactics Trump might use if this happened are similar to the ones he used on the campaign trail. A terrorist attack or an international conflagration initially boosts Trump’s popularity because of the so-called rally-’round-the-flag effect, which we saw with Bush after the Sept. 11 attacks. Trump uses his popularity boost to promote nationalism, curtail civil liberties, erode the rule of law and demonize minority groups such as Muslims.
perry: More likely.
natesilver: I’d say less likely.
micah: CONFLICT!
Harry is the tiebreaker.
harry: Push … I’m kidding. I guess it’s more likely.
perry: I’m not predicting an incident. Or, God forbid, an attack. I just think that the odds of Trump seeking to exploit such an incident are higher because it seems like this is one of his only paths to get to more public support and respect. The White House loved how people reacted to the Syria strike.
natesilver: It’s a tricky proposition to test because we arguably haven’t had such an incident so far. So maybe the grade is “incomplete.”
I agree that the White House seemed to like the reaction to the Syria attack, and they also got pretty favorable press coverage for it. At the same time, the response itself was pretty restrained.
micah: Perry is right. Nate is wrong.
No. 11, the first item in our penultimate category: “Things fall apart.”
11. Trump plunges America into outright authoritarianism. While Frum imagines a gradual eight-year drift toward authoritarianism, there are other precedents (such as in Turkey and Russia) for a more abrupt shock to the system. Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, spoke in 2013 of wanting to “bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.” If Trump feels the same way, he could decide that there are lots of advantages to moving quickly while his opponents are still disoriented, and while he has a Republican Congress that has not yet shown much appetite to resist him. How many indicators of authoritarian and anti-democratic behavior has Trump checked off so far? In our opinion, this is a hard question to answer because Trump hasn’t been on the job for very long. But if you started out with the view that Trump represented an existential threat to American democracy, there hasn’t been a lot to reassure you so far.
harry: Less likely.
natesilver: Less likely.
perry: Less likely.
natesilver: This scenario specifically envisions a “shock-and-awe” type of approach to start Trump’s presidency.
harry: There’s no sign Bannon is really in charge, for one thing.
natesilver: It looked like we might be on that trajectory in the first two weeks — with the travel ban — but certainly not since.
perry: I read Frum’s piece and thought it was possible. I think 1. maybe the institutions are stronger than I thought 2. maybe Trump is inept. 3. Trump maybe respects institutions more than I expected (I wasn’t sure he would follow the court orders on the travel ban, but he has).
micah:
12. Resistance to Trump from elsewhere in the government undermines his authority but prompts a constitutional crisis. Have you ever heard talk about the “deep state” or the “military-industrial complex”? We may soon see how much power it actually has. Traditionally, we think of Congress and the judiciary as providing a check on the president’s powers. But there are lots of people within the executive branch (including the military and the federal bureaucracy) who have the potential to stymie Trump, whether by expressly refusing to carry out his orders or by what amounts to sabotage (i.e. by leaking to the press, foot-dragging, etc).
perry: More likely.
natesilver: More likely, for sure.
harry: Isn’t this what’s been going on the past few weeks to a large degree?
perry: Right.
harry: More likely, BTW.
natesilver: It’s very risky for Trump to make enemies in the FBI and the other intelligence agencies. And the entire executive branch has been leaking like the Titanic so far.
perry: Although, I think Nate imagined a scenario where people would be more worried about the “deep state” and take Trump’s side. I think the public has largely sided with the bureaucracy on questions like Trump firing Comey.
micah: We’re now in the final bucket of scenarios — “Trump Makes America Great Again”
natesilver: #MAGA
micah:
13. Trump becomes Governor Schwarzenegger. … [Arnold] Schwarzenegger is one of the better precedents for Trump. … After a rough first couple of years on the job, Schwarzenegger dropped his tough-guy act and shifted significantly to the center, winning re-election in a landslide in 2006. Could Trump do something similar? As Frum notes, Trump doesn’t have a longstanding commitment to the GOP platform. … Unlike in Frum’s scenario, however, Trump wouldn’t necessarily be looking to pivot to the center as a cover for authoritarian impulses. Instead, one can imagine him becoming obsessed with his approval ratings and deciding fairly early in his term that a bipartisan approach would be the best way to improve them. The desire to be popular can do unexpected things to even the most stubborn-seeming politicians.
perry: More likely.
harry: Well the mere fact that this scenario requires a rough first couple of years for Trump makes it more likely.
natesilver: Hmm. I guess I buy Harry’s logic. More likely.
perry: Schwarzenegger reshuffled his staff and moved to the middle. Will Trump do that? Don’t know. But it seems like the smartest way for him to get his approval ratings up.
natesilver: There haven’t been too many feints in this direction from Trump so far, though, other than when he said he was willing to work with Democrats on health care.
But I can imagine a case where the GOP loses the House at the midterms (which I think has gotten more likely), and Trump thinks a more bipartisan course is the best way to save his bacon for 2020.
perry: Right. Bill Clinton did this in 1995, to some extent.
natesilver: Although, also, if the GOP loses the House, then we’re in Impeachment City.
perry: Good counterpoint.
harry: I heard you can get a great deal on a condo in Impeachment City.
micah: That’s a terrible joke, Harry.
LAST VERSION!
14. Trump’s button-mashing works because the system really is broken. Another possibility is that it turns out that the elite consensus is in fact wrong in many areas — on the economic benefits of free trade and open borders, for instance. In that case, Trump does fairly well with a somewhat contrarian approach that “shakes up the system.” It’s not that all of his ideas are brilliant, necessarily, it’s just that deviating from the status quo is a good default because the status quo isn’t working very well.
perry: Less likely.
harry: Less likely.
perry: I kind of wish Bernie Sanders had won so we could try this experiment with a politician without all the legal/temperament issues.
natesilver: I’m going to use my one “push” here because I don’t think we’ve done a serious attempt to assess Trump from a policy perspective, and it would probably be too early to do so anyway.
The metrics we’ve proposed looking at are all long-term things.
harry: The first four words of that scenario — “Trump’s button-mashing works” — make me think it’s less likely.
perry: The elite consensus may be wrong on many issues, but I’m not sure Trump is challenging it in any real way.
harry: The elite consensus could very well be wrong, but as Perry says, we’d need someone not up at 7 a.m. on Twitter talking about who knows what in order to figure out whether button-mashing works.
natesilver: That’s fair enough. And the GOP health care bill — their most consequential policy action to date — made almost no one happy from a policy standpoint.
So I suppose I’d go with “less likely” if forced to choose.
perry: The health care bill also didn’t challenge consensus, just reflected the most unpopular parts of GOP orthodoxy. The budget also doesn’t really challenge GOP elite views.
harry: The only thing that has challenged elite views has been how Trump has acted on Twitter.
I don’t know if it’ll happen or not. I just think it’s less likely than it was.
micah: I haven’t really weighed in on any of these, but for what it’s worth: I actually did think there was a possibility of this one happening. The conventional wisdom is so shitty in so many cases that I thought there was like a 5 percent chance that a non-politician could come in there and get some stuff right — not because I thought all Washington needed was some plaid-draped, plain-American “common sense” to set everything straight, but just because Trump would be mashing different buttons.
But in the first few months of Trump’s presidency, one thing that I think has become 100 percent clear is that the way Washington does things may seem staid and bureaucratic, but many of those processes are there for a reason and have some benefits or at least prevent certain problems.
I guess I’ve grown to have more respect for the bureaucracy.
harry: Congrats on losing your bid for whatever office you wish to run for, Micah.
perry: lol
natesilver: Leaking this convo to James O’Keefe.
micah: OK, to wrap up here, if you had to put all your chips on one version of the Trump presidency (give me the number), which would it be? (Let’s say two years from now, in May 2019.)
Or give me three in order. Like, you’re putting chips on the roulette table.
harry: I have four.
perry: No. 7. “Trump flails around aimlessly after an unsuccessful attempt to pivot.”
natesilver: Nos. 8, 7, 1
harry: I agree on No. 8.
perry: I’ll just pick that one, with scandal (No. 8) and death spiral (No. 2) also close.
harry: I also had No. 2.
No. 12 seems plausible.
And No. 5 does too.
natesilver: The language of No. 8 is that Trump would be “consumed by scandal,” and that seems fairly likely at this point. Whether or not the scandal results in (e.g.) his impeachment isn’t necessarily the issue. Hell, he could even get re-elected. But it seems likely that Russia and other (alleged) scandals could eat up an enormous amount of his bandwidth.
micah: I think it’ll go, in order, No. 12, then 8, then 7, then 6, then 5.
perry: No. 12 is good — forgot about that one.
We seem to think the best outcome for Trump is “Trump keeps on Trumpin’ and the country remains evenly divided.”
That is not a great outcome. But it’s not a terrible one either. I guess this was Bush 2004 to some extent.
natesilver: It’s still awfully early, and so far, Trump’s presidency has been an amalgam of at least half of these scenarios. But the ones that end poorly for him have become more likely, generally, and the ones that end well for him have become less so.
May 22, 2017
Politics Podcast: Trump’s Path Forward
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts |
ESPN App |
Download |
RSS |
New to podcasts?
After the appointment of a special counsel to investigate possible ties between President Trump’s campaign and Russia, can the White House return to business as usual? The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast crew looks at whether past presidents have been able to pursue their agendas in the face of ongoing scandals and investigations. The team also breaks down a new Harvard study showing that media coverage of Trump during his first 100 days was 80 percent negative. Lastly, they look ahead to Thursday’s special election in Montana’s at-large congressional district.
You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.
The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast publishes Monday evenings, with occasional special episodes throughout the week. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.
Nate Silver's Blog
- Nate Silver's profile
- 724 followers
