Nate Silver's Blog, page 108

Politics Podcast: A Big Moment For The Trump Presidency

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This week’s FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast features a triple helping of our regular feature: “Good use of polling, or bad use of polling?” The crew also talks about what to expect from Neil Gorsuch’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, which started on Monday, as well as how the American health care debate has changed over the past eight years.

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.

Can Anyone In The NL Central Stop The Cubs?

In honor of the 2017 Major League Baseball season, which starts April 2 , FiveThirtyEight is assembling some of our favorite baseball writers to chat about what’s ahead. Today, we focus on the National League Central with FanGraphs writer Craig Edwards and FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief Nate Silver . The transcript below has been edited.

EXPECTED NUMBER OF WINSRANKTEAMPECOTAFANGRAPHSDAVENPORTWESTGATEAVERAGE1Chicago Cubs9395959794.92Pittsburgh Pirates8182838382.13St. Louis Cardinals7884808481.44Milwaukee Brewers7770737072.45Cincinnati Reds7470747172.1How forecasters view the NL Central

Based on projected wins or over/under win totals. Data gathered on March 16, 2017.

Sources: Baseball Prospectus, Fangraphs, Clay Davenport, Las Vegas Review-Journal

neil (Neil Paine, FiveThirtyEight senior sportswriter): So let’s get started with the elephant in the room of this division: The Cubs are once again huge favorites — 88 percent to win the division, according to FanGraphs. What can we say about them that hasn’t already been said ad nauseam during their World Series run last year?

craigjedwards: Just replace “Will they end the drought?” with “Will they repeat?”

neil: Or maybe “Will they form a dynasty?”

natesilver: I would say that 88 percent to win the division intuitively sounds very high. We had them at 56 percent last year in a similar-ish situation.

craigjedwards: 88 percent is high. Although last season both the Cardinals and Pirates appeared to have better teams than they do this season.

natesilver: But bigger picture … What is there to say except that it’s been a while since we had a baseball team that was set up for this sort of long-term success?

craigjedwards: They basically have the same team back, with few guys to worry about suffering precipitous aging declines, plus Jason Heyward possibly not being as bad as he was last season.

natesilver: Let’s not forget that they’re also up one Kyle Schwarber this year (although he won’t help on defense).

craigjedwards: The only question is the pitching rotation. In 2015 and 2016, they had all their top guys healthy and pitching well. It would take a major disaster in the rotation, but if they don’t meet expectations, that is where it is likely to come from.

neil: Right — did that pitching performance last year contain a lot of luck in addition to skill? They allowed an MLB-low .255 batting average on balls in play (BABIP), 27 points lower than any other team.

craigjedwards: Luck on the pitcher’s part? Yes, but that luck comes in the form of a fantastic defense. That is luck for the pitchers, not luck for the Cubs. That said, their BABIP is going to go up, since even guys who showed no prior ability to suppress contact did so last season. But even if they aren’t quite as good, it is reasonable to expect a low BABIP again because of that defense.

neil: Another note on that pitching staff is that they were the oldest in the majors last year. And yet, only two other teams have relied on their starting rotation for more innings over the past two seasons than Chicago has. Is that a red flag? Or does it even matter?

natesilver: Pitcher aging is weird. It’s kind of like: you’re good, until you’re suddenly not.

craigjedwards: John Lackey is probably the most worrisome, because he is getting to an age where he could all of a sudden be finished.

natesilver: I think the question is what sort of reinforcements they could bring in if Lackey turned into a pumpkin, for instance.

craigjedwards: Jon Lester has also defied the aging curve over the past two seasons, and his velocity is down this spring, so that is a concern as well. Plus, it will be interesting to see how Willson Contreras plays out defensively at catcher, as he’ll be replacing David Ross as Lester’s personal catcher.

natesilver: But let’s keep in mind that the Cubs are not only smart, but rich — so they’re a good candidate to bring a pitcher in at the trade deadline if they need one.

craigjedwards: Chicago’s minor league system isn’t as deep as it was, since its young stars are already in the majors (or were traded last year), but there are a few high-end prospects they could move if they needed to.

neil: I might also be grasping to find holes in the Cubs just to have something to debate. This staff could probably lose half its value from last year and they’d still win 90+ games.

Chicago also seemed to effectively plug the roster holes that opened over the offseason: Lose Dexter Fowler? Here’s Jon Jay. Lose Aroldis Chapman? Here’s Wade Davis. Cut Jason Hammel loose? Here’s Brett Anderson. Like Nate said, they’re getting Schwarber back, too. And I guess it would be hard for Heyward to be worse.

craigjedwards: Heyward has to be better than he was last season. Even if he never hits like he did before he got to the Cubs, an average-hitting Heyward with his defense and baserunning is a four-win player.

natesilver: But we’re talking about a very high bar that the Cubs will have to clear to keep pace with their performance from last year. It’s incredibly hard to win 100+ games two years in a row these days. The last team to do it was St. Louis in 2004 and 2005.

neil: Although maybe the craziest thing there is that, by Pythagoras, the Cubs “should” have won 107 games last year. They underachieved to 103 wins!

Even 95 wins this year will probably be enough to take the division, though. Especially if the projections (see above) are to be believed.

But I also think those projections are pretty shocking. They have Pittsburgh second?!? I was tempted to think that the Pirates’ 2013-15 mini-run basically ended with the 78 wins they posted in 2016.

craigjedwards: Pittsburgh has put itself in a difficult position, trying to contend with a low payroll. Most teams at that end of the financial spectrum — like Milwaukee and Cincinnati, to keep it in the NL Central — can get a few good years in before having to do at least a minor rebuild, but the Pirates are still really close to contending for the next few seasons.

neil: What went wrong last season?

craigjedwards: Gerrit Cole wasn’t himself, Juan Nicasio didn’t work out as the Pirates’ annual reclamation project and Ivan Nova didn’t arrive until too late in the season. Yet they still weren’t that far off from contending last year, despite a really mediocre season from their best player, Andrew McCutchen.

natesilver: The projection systems are all frustratingly non-committal on McCutchen, projecting him to bounce about halfway back instead of either the full recovery or the full collapse. Which undoubtedly makes sense if you average him over a whole range of scenarios. But it seems like there has to be a wide distribution of possibilities there, and that’s very much going to affect the Pirates’ fortunes.

neil: Yeah, maybe no team’s season is hinging more on one player’s projection being in the high range rather than the low.

craigjedwards: He’s also making the transition to an outfield corner, which is generally not good for a player’s value. But if you are just looking at last year’s defensive numbers (which generally isn’t big enough an indicator of a player’s ability), he’s going to get better just because he isn’t really one of the worst outfielders in baseball.

natesilver: I get worried when the indicators for a guy’s athleticism are down. McCutchen doesn’t steal many bags any more. He grounded into a lot of double plays. He’s overmatched in center field, according to the advanced metrics.

neil: And the list of McCutchen-like players from history is no help. Some were good after age 30 (Reggie Smith, Andre Dawson); others were already in decline (Vernon Wells, Matt Kemp).

The other half of that tandem fighting for second place is the St. Louis Cardinals, who are slated for only 81 or 82 wins if you believe the projections above. Do we buy these third-place projections for St. Louis? Or are they discounting the Cards? (Who still won 86 games last year, with 88 Pythagorean wins.)

craigjedwards: The projections for Pittsburgh are all bunched together around 82 wins, while the Cardinals have a couple 84s and a 78 from PECOTA (which keeps their average down). Most of the projections that have the Cardinals higher believe in their pitching and maybe a slight uptick on defense, while PECOTA doesn’t believe in either of those things.

natesilver: It’s been a while since I tracked the performance of the different projection systems religiously, but the Cardinals were a team that had a long track record of beating their projections. Maybe it’s because they always tend to be good at player development and have guys play up to their 60th- or 70th-percentile numbers.

neil: One area where it seems like there might be a lot of uncertainty is in the pitching, like you mentioned Craig, since their rotation was down from 2015’s fantastic performance. What was different last year, and will they be able to recapture that 2015 form this season?

craigjedwards: The blame has mostly gone to the defense, and the Cardinals were pretty bad last year. But they also lost Lance Lynn and John Lackey from the rotation, and Michael Wacha and Adam Wainwright weren’t their usual pitching selves.

neil: They’ve also done a lot of roster reshuffling and added Dexter Fowler (granting that his fielding metrics are sometimes mixed). Will all that help fix the defense? Or is that just wishful thinking?

craigjedwards: I think Fowler will make the defense better. Randal Grichuk moves from center to left, where, defensively, he’s a big upgrade on Matt Holliday and Brandon Moss. So even if Fowler is a bit below-average for a center fielder on defense, it will still make the outfield defense on the whole better than it was last season.

They aren’t going to be great on defense, they just need to not be really bad.

neil: Final Q on the Cards: Craig wrote last season that Mike Matheny should be fired. Is he keeping this team from reaching its full potential? Or isn’t there research showing that managers don’t really matter very much?

craigjedwards: I think tactically, there isn’t a whole lot of difference between good and bad managers, though I’m not sure too many people really defend Matheny’s bullpen management or in-game decisions.

natesilver: And isn’t it plausible that managers matter more than they used to, given how bullpens are used these days? That’s an area where you might expect to see quite a bit of difference, especially in the NL, where you also have to account for pitchers hitting for themselves, etc.

craigjedwards: Another problem with Matheny is what appears to be a disconnect with the front office. He’s had big problems playing younger players when they are given to him, to the point that trades had to be made. It would be one thing if he just made poor strategic decisions and relied on small samples to determine whether a player was hot or cold, but it is getting to the point where he also has trouble following through with the front office’s plans.

This is going to be a big year for Matheny. He got a lot of credit for managing the Cardinals to the postseason, and he will get blame if they don’t make it. That’s not fair, but it doesn’t mean Matheny deserves to keep a job that was a complete gift to him in the first place.

neil: Whichever team prevails between Pittsburgh and St. Louis, they and the Cubs are still far, far above the teams at the bottom of this division: the Brewers and Reds.

Let’s start with Milwaukee. Over the past few years, the Brewers seem to be emulating the successful teardown/rebuild models seen recently in Chicago and Houston (and maybe Atlanta next). How’s that going for them?

craigjedwards: Milwaukee is doing all the right things. They aren’t going to be able to completely mimic the Cubs — they can’t go out and sign big-name veterans like Jon Lester, Ben Zobrist, John Lackey and Jason Heyward — but they are on the right track. They got one of the top prospects in baseball (Lewis Brinson) from the Rangers in the Jonathan Lucroy trade, picked up another one (Corey Ray) from the draft, and they have a handful of pitchers with potential.

neil: So what’s the next step if you’re trying that type of rebuilding effort, but without the Cubs’ resources?

craigjedwards: Well, the Brewers are carrying half the payroll they had when they were contending, so they have to play younger guys with potential or trade value (Jonathan Villar, Orlando Arcia, Domingo Santana and Keon Broxton) and deal away relievers whenever they seem to have value. The fans in Milwaukee still support the team, and they will do very well if they can get a winner there. The Ryan Braun question looms, and it’s going to be hard to contend with the Cubs, Pirates and Cardinals in the same division. But they’re making progress.

neil: Meanwhile, the Reds are kind of a mess. They had one of the worst pitching staffs ever last year — particularly in the bullpen.

natesilver: I’ve become slightly obsessed with modern bullpens, and it’s actually sort of hard/amazing to have a bullpen as bad as Cincy’s in an era where you can take a failed No. 4 starter and turn him into a 2.50 ERA / 10.0 K/9 guy.

neil: The Reds have also traded away a lot of veterans in recent years — Todd Frazier, Aroldis Chapman, Jay Bruce, etc. — yet still only have the 13th-best farm system in MLB. Should they have gotten more in return prospect-wise? Also, when will Joey Votto join that group? Can they realistically get fair value for him?

natesilver: Votto is sort of the Carmelo Anthony of MLB.

neil: Although I will say, the Reds have won a championship in my lifetime, unlike the Knicks.

natesilver: The Reds ranked 22nd in WAR last year among players acquired through the draft, which isn’t going to cut it in a small market. So I wonder if there isn’t some longer-term work to do on scouting and development.

craigjedwards: I think for a small-market team to succeed, one of the biggest factors is starting pitching because it is so hard to acquire, either in terms of cost in free agency or in trades. Having a cost-effective rotation — like we saw with Cleveland last year and the Mets the year before, or even going all the way back to Oakland’s Moneyball days — can make a big difference for a team trying to push itself into contention.

natesilver: Just to bring it back to the Cubs, the thing to remember is that even if you had a team with 103-win talent — and the Cubs probably aren’t *quite* there — they’d still only have something like a 15 percent to 20 percent chance to win the World Series, given how random the playoffs can be. So if we’re thinking in terms of dynasties, there’s a question of how we’d measure one. It’s likely to be a *long* time before we see another team run off three World Series in a row, or four in five years, even if they’re the best team in baseball the whole time.

neil: That’s a great point. As terrific as the Cubs are, baseball is a lot more chaotic than, say, basketball. So compared with, say, NBA teams against the Warriors, other MLB teams have a much better chance as they target the Cubs. And that also means the Pirates and Cardinals — if not the Brewers and Reds — have plenty of reasons for hope this season.

Politics Podcast: The Health Of The GOP’s Health Care Bill

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This week, the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast team talks about how likely it is that the House GOP’s American Health Care Act (or something like it) will become law.

Then, FiveThirtyEight senior political writer Clare Malone discusses her recent article on the momentum of the anti-Trump movement relative to the tea party’s success. Finally, FiveThirtyEight contributor David Wasserman joins the team to talk about the disappearance of purple America.

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.

 

How FiveThirtyEight Is Forecasting The 2017 NCAA Tournament

Editor’s note: This article is an adapted version of

It’s Crowded At The Top Of The NCAA Tournament

FiveThirtyEight’s March Madness predictions are up and ready for your perusal. But while we’re really excited about the tournament, we have to say this is not a year in which we’re going to be able to help you all that much, at least in the Elite Eight and beyond.

That’s because there’s as much parity in the tournament as there’s ever been — not necessarily from the very top of the field to the very bottom, but certainly among a group of No. 1 and No. 2 seeds that aren’t all that easy to distinguish from one another. Meanwhile, the blue bloods have to navigate a minefield of underseeded teams such as Wichita State and SMU, with some having more perilous paths than others.

The one team that potentially stood out from the pack — defending national champion and No. 1 overall seed Villanova — has been undermined by a difficult draw. While the Wildcats are still the nominal favorite to win the tournament, they have only a 15 percent chance of doing so, which is tied for the lowest probability for a frontrunner in our seven years of making tournament predictions.

Our methodology for making these projections is

2017 March Madness Predictions

There Really Was A Liberal Media Bubble

This is the ninth article in a series that reviews news coverage of the 2016 general election, explores how Donald Trump won and why his chances were underrated by most of the American media.

Last summer, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union in what bettors, financial markets and the London-based media regarded as a colossal upset. Reporters and pundits were quick to blame the polls for the unexpected result. But the polls had been fine, more or less: In the closing days of the Brexit campaign, they’d shown an almost-even race, and Leave’s narrow victory (by a margin just under 4 percentage points) was about as consistent with them as it was with anything else. The failure was not so much with the polls but with the people who were analyzing them.

The U.S. presidential election, as I’ve argued, was something of a similar case. No, the polls didn’t show a toss-up, as they had in Brexit. But the reporting was much more certain of Clinton’s chances than it should have been based on the polls. Much of The New York Times’s coverage, for instance, implied that Clinton’s odds were close to 100 percent. In an article on Oct. 17 — more than three weeks before Election Day — they portrayed the race as being effectively over, the only question being whether Clinton should seek a landslide or instead assist down-ballot Democrats:

Hillary Clinton’s campaign is planning its most ambitious push yet into traditionally right-leaning states, a new offensive aimed at extending her growing advantage over Donald J. Trump while bolstering down-ballot candidates in what party leaders increasingly suggest could be a sweeping victory for Democrats at every level. […]

The maneuvering speaks to the unexpected tension facing Mrs. Clinton as she hurtles toward what aides increasingly believe will be a decisive victory — a pleasant problem, for certain, but one that has nonetheless scrambled the campaign’s strategy weeks before Election Day: Should Mrs. Clinton maximize her own margin, aiming to flip as many red states as possible to run up an electoral landslide, or prioritize the party’s congressional fortunes, redirecting funds and energy down the ballot?

This is not to say the election was a toss-up in mid-October, which was one of the high-water marks of the campaign for Clinton. But while a Trump win was unlikely, it should hardly have been unthinkable. And yet the Times, famous for its “to be sure” equivocations, wasn’t even contemplating the possibility of a Trump victory.

It’s hard to reread this coverage without recalling Sean Trende’s essay on “unthinkability bias,” which he wrote in the wake of the Brexit vote. Just as was the case in the U.S. presidential election, voting on the referendum had split strongly along class, education and regional lines, with voters outside of London and without advanced degrees being much more likely to vote to leave the EU. The reporters covering the Brexit campaign, on the other hand, were disproportionately well-educated and principally based in London. They tended to read ambiguous signs — anything from polls to the musings of taxi drivers — as portending a Remain win, and many of them never really processed the idea that Britain could vote to leave the EU until it actually happened.

So did journalists in Washington and London make the apocryphal Pauline Kael mistake, refusing to believe that Trump or Brexit could win because nobody they knew was voting for them? That’s not quite what Trende was arguing. Instead, it’s that political experts aren’t a very diverse group and tend to place a lot of faith in the opinions of other experts and other members of the political establishment. Once a consensus view is established, it tends to reinforce itself until and unless there’s very compelling evidence for the contrary position. Social media, especially Twitter, can amplify the groupthink further. It can be an echo chamber.

I recently reread James Surowiecki’s book “The Wisdom of Crowds” which, despite its name, spends as much time contemplating the shortcomings of such wisdom as it does celebrating its successes. Surowiecki argues that crowds usually make good predictions when they satisfy these four conditions:

Diversity of opinion. “Each person should have private information, even if it’s just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts.”Independence. “People’s opinions are not determined by the opinions of those around them.”Decentralization. “People are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge.”Aggregation. “Some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision.”

Political journalism scores highly on the fourth condition, aggregation. While Surowiecki usually has something like a financial or betting market in mind when he refers to “aggregation,” the broader idea is that there’s some way for individuals to exchange their opinions instead of keeping them to themselves. And my gosh, do political journalists have a lot of ways to share their opinions with one another, whether through their columns, at major events such as the political conventions or, especially, through Twitter.

But those other three conditions? Political journalism fails miserably along those dimensions.

Diversity of opinion? For starters, American newsrooms are not very diverse along racial or gender lines, and it’s not clear the situation is improving much. And in a country where educational attainment is an increasingly important predictor of cultural and political behavior, some 92 percent of journalists have college degrees. A degree didn’t used to be a de facto prerequisite for a reporting job; just 70 percent of journalists had college degrees in 1982 and only 58 percent did in 1971.

The political diversity of journalists is not very strong, either. As of 2013, only 7 percent of them identified as Republicans (although only 28 percent called themselves Democrats with the majority saying they were independents). And although it’s not a perfect approximation — in most newsrooms, the people who issue endorsements are not the same as the ones who do reporting — there’s reason to think that the industry was particularly out of sync with Trump. Of the major newspapers that endorsed either Clinton or Trump, only 3 percent (2 of 59) endorsed Trump. By comparison, 46 percent of newspapers to endorse either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney endorsed Romney in 2012. Furthermore, as the media has become less representative of right-of-center views — and as conservatives have rebelled against the political establishment — there’s been an increasing and perhaps self-reinforcing cleavage between conservative news and opinion outlets such as Breitbart and the rest of the media.

Although it’s harder to measure, I’d also argue that there’s a lack of diversity when it comes to skill sets and methods of thinking in political journalism. Publications such as Buzzfeed or (the now defunct) Gawker.com get a lot of shade from traditional journalists when they do things that challenge conventional journalistic paradigms. But a lot of traditional journalistic practices are done by rote or out of habit, such as routinely granting anonymity to staffers to discuss campaign strategy even when there isn’t much journalistic merit in it. Meanwhile, speaking from personal experience, I’ve found the reception of “data journalists” by traditional journalists to be unfriendly, although there have been exceptions.

Independence? This is just as much of a problem. Crowds can be wise when people do a lot of thinking for themselves before coming together to exchange their views. But since at least the days of “The Boys on the Bus,” political journalism has suffered from a pack mentality. Events such as conventions and debates literally gather thousands of journalists together in the same room; attend one of these events, and you can almost smell the conventional wisdom being manufactured in real time. (Consider how a consensus formed that Romney won the first debate in 2012 when it had barely even started, for instance.) Social media — Twitter in particular — can amplify these information cascades, with a single tweet receiving hundreds of thousands of impressions and shaping the way entire issues are framed. As a result, it can be largely arbitrary which storylines gain traction and which ones don’t. What seems like a multiplicity of perspectives might just be one or two, duplicated many times over.

Decentralization? Surowiecki writes about the benefit of local knowledge, but the political news industry has become increasingly consolidated in Washington and New York as local newspapers have suffered from a decade-long contraction. That doesn’t necessarily mean local reporters in Wisconsin or Michigan or Ohio should have picked up Trumpian vibrations on the ground in contradiction to the polls. But as we’ve argued, national reporters often flew into these states with pre-baked narratives — for instance, that they were “decreasingly representative of contemporary America” — and fit the facts to suit them, neglecting their importance to the Electoral College. A more geographically decentralized reporting pool might have asked more questions about why Clinton wasn’t campaigning in Wisconsin, for instance, or why it wasn’t more of a problem for her that she was struggling in polls of traditional bellwethers such as Ohio and Iowa. If local newspapers had been healthier economically, they might also have commissioned more high-quality state polls; the lack of good polling was a problem in Michigan and Wisconsin especially.

There was once a notion that whatever challenges the internet created for journalism’s business model, it might at least lead readers to a more geographically and philosophically diverse array of perspectives. But it’s not clear that’s happening, either. Instead, based on data from the news aggregation site Memeorandum, the top news sources (such as the Times, The Washington Post and Politico) have earned progressively more influence over the past decade:

The share of total exposure for the top five news sources climbed from roughly 25 percent a decade ago to around 35 percent last year, and has spiked to above 40 percent so far in 2017. While not a perfect measure, this is one sign the digital age hasn’t necessarily democratized the news media. Instead, the most notable difference in Memeorandum sources between 2007 and 2017 is the decline of independent blogs; many of the most popular ones from the late ’aughts either folded or (like FiveThirtyEight) were bought by larger news organizations. Thus, blogs and local newspapers — two of the better checks on Northeast Corridor conventional wisdom run amok — have both had less of a say in the conversation.

All things considered, then, the conditions of political journalism are poor for crowd wisdom and ripe for groupthink. So … what to do about it, then?

Initiatives to increase decentralization would help, although they won’t necessarily be easy. Increased subscription revenues at newspapers such as The New York Times and The Washington Post is an encouraging sign for journalism, but a revival of local and regional newspapers — or a more sustainable business model for independent blogs — would do more to reduce groupthink in the industry.

Likewise, improving diversity is liable to be a challenge, especially because the sort of diversity that Surowiecki is concerned with will require making improvements on multiple fronts (demographic diversity, political diversity, diversity of skill sets). Still, the research Surowiecki cites is emphatic that there are diminishing returns to having too many of the same types of people in small groups or organizations. Teams that consist entirely of high-IQ people may underperform groups that contain a mix of high-IQ and medium-IQ participants, for example, because the high-IQ people are likely to have redundant strengths and similar blind spots.

That leaves independence. In some ways the best hope for a short-term fix might come from an attitudinal adjustment: Journalists should recalibrate themselves to be more skeptical of the consensus of their peers. That’s because a position that seems to have deep backing from the evidence may really just be a reflection from the echo chamber. You should be looking toward how much evidence there is for a particular position as opposed to how many people hold that position: Having 20 independent pieces of evidence that mostly point in the same direction might indeed reflect a powerful consensus, while having 20 like-minded people citing the same warmed-over evidence is much less powerful. Obviously this can be taken too far and in most fields, it’s foolish (and annoying) to constantly doubt the market or consensus view. But in a case like politics where the conventional wisdom can congeal so quickly — and yet has so often been wrong — a certain amount of contrarianism can go a long way.

Does The GOP Health Care Bill Have A Chance?

In this week’s politics chat, we weigh the prospects of the Republican effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

 

micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): Welcome!

harry (Harry Enten, senior political writer): Hey, everyone!

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): Hello from United flight No. 538.

harry: I remember United was also Continental. Remember that?

natesilver: Dating myself, but I remember Piedmont Airlines, which was a big carrier in Lansing, Michigan, when I was a kid and served good honey-roasted peanuts.

micah: For your consideration today: Will Republicans pass something resembling repeal/replace of the Affordable Care Act? Obviously, we don’t know the answer to that question, but we can dive into the factors pushing in either direction.

Let’s start here, though: How’s the rollout of the House Republicans’ bill (the American Health Care Act) going?

natesilver: Phase 1. Fuck up the rollout. Phase 2. Pretend the fuck-up was part of a three-phase plan. Phase 3. ???

micah: Ehhh. How bad has the rollout really been? There’s been a lot of “dead on arrival” talk — isn’t that overkill?

harry: Well, let’s see. Republican Rep. Jim Jordan says he’s going to file an alternative repeal plan. There are some Republican senators who are saying that the bill put forward by House Republicans doesn’t do enough to preserve the Medicaid expansion and others saying the opposite, that it’s too much like Obamacare. The AARP has come out against it. And we haven’t even gotten to the Democrats. That said, the bill isn’t doomed.

clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): Well, the latest I saw on Twitter was Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway trying to distance the White House from it, apparently. So I’m not sure what that says?

micah: That seems like the real wild card, Clare. How much does the White House push this?

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): I keep reading that the rollout is going terribly. Can I just say that Paul Ryan got himself nominated vice president and then became House speaker. He is not clueless. He knew this bill would be bashed by lots of different groups. It is really hard to write a bill that pleases Heritage Action, Sen. Susan Collins, John Kasich and the House Freedom Caucus.

harry: Trump, to be clear, hasn’t endorsed the bill. He says it’s up for review and negotiation. It’s the beginning of negotiations. And, yes, I agree, Perry. It actually reminds me of the GOP presidential primary. There was a majority against Trump, but it was a majority made of different factions that couldn’t come together.

natesilver: But is it hard to write a bill that pleases at least one of Heritage, Susan Collins, John Kasich, Rand Paul, National Review, the AARP and the House Freedom Caucus? Absolutely nobody liked this thing.

perry: I think that was the point. A bill that was too right is not going to pass. One that is too left is not going to pass. I’m not saying this will pass either, but I can see how they got here.

micah: But don’t you think there’s a danger that if the politics of this get too messy (which seems inevitable) that Trump will just throw congressional Republicans under the bus?

clare.malone: I’m not sure Trump would do that much, Micah. It seems unwise, in part because then they would say, “OK, well what you got, then?” They would presumably have to offer some kind of idea of what they actually liked. And they don’t seem to be particularly policy-focused.

micah: Yeah, that seems like part of the problem here. What’s Trump’s endgame? What’s the Paul Ryan/Mitch McConnell endgame? Are those two things at all similar?

natesilver: Relatedly: What’s the constituency for this bill? Who is it a “win” for? And even if the answer is “nobody,” someone has to take one for the team and be willing to sing its praises.

harry: I don’t think it’s that crazy. Some people like oil, and some people like vinegar. To please both, you mix them together. The hope was that there would be just enough in this bill for each side that both would buy in. The risk is that there is just enough in the bill that both sides hate that they could end up hating the whole thing.

clare.malone: Salad dressing, huh?

micah: The Salad Dressing Theory Of Politics by Harry Enten

perry: To go back to Nate’s question, I think the audience for the bill is 216 House members (a majority because of vacancies). Is this something that they can vote for? I’ve seen lots of opposition to the bill from outside groups. But I am seeing the same five to seven Freedom Caucus members who oppose this quoted again and again. Are we sure 22 Republicans in the House will vote this down? I can concede the Senate is a different ballgame.

harry: There was a theory posited by our friend Sean Trende of Real Clear Politics that Senate Republicans just want to be able to say: “We presented a bill to kill the ACA. Republicans voted for it. The Democrats didn’t. We need more votes. Vote Republican in 2018.” Not sure I buy that. But it’s a thought.

micah: Blame red-state Democrats, basically.

natesilver: Before we move on, just one more bit of pushback on your contrarian claim that the rollout wasn’t so bad, Micah. There was some basic blocking-and-tackling stuff that they failed at. Like, not communicating this three-phase plan thing, unless they really did make that part up as they went along.

micah: What’s the three-phase plan again?

natesilver: Phase No. 1 is supposed to be the current plan — which they say can be passed through reconciliation. Phase No. 2 is executive order stuff. And Phase No. 3 is stuff that needs to be passed with 60 votes in the Senate.

perry: Specific parts of the rollout were bad. The hiding the bill last week. They have not explained well why they did not wait for a Congressional Budget Office score. They should have had some conservative validators lined up to sell the bill.

micah: I was amazed watching “Morning Joe” on Tuesday — they said they couldn’t get anyone from the administration on to talk about the bill. So that does speak to a botched rollout.

clare.malone: Well … who’s in charge of the rollout? Isn’t it really Ryan and company? Not necessarily the White House?

harry: Yeah, it wasn’t the administration’s bill.

natesilver: It’s like playing against the ’85 Bears and throwing a pick-6 on the opening possession because your receiver blew a route. Nobody said things were going to be easy, but you still have no excuse.

clare.malone: I DON’T GET THAT.

micah: So let’s dive into “whose bill is this?”

clare.malone: Paul Ryan

micah: Not Trump?

clare.malone: Naw.

perry: Ryan is the lead figure of this bill. Trump is involved now but can distance himself, since he can always say the Hill wrote the bill. So what Clare said.

harry: What are the signs that Trump had anything to do with this bill? House Republicans had this bill under lock and key for weeks. Hence, the Rand Paul stunt.

natesilver: I think it’s Ryan sort of trying to average out the desires of House Republicans and winding up with a solution that looks like it was crafted by committee.

perry: Also, if not Trump, Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price and Vice President Mike Pence will get blamed if this fails. They are closest to the House GOP.

micah: IDK, Trump is the head of the party. To what Perry just said, the administration was reportedly working with House Republicans the whole time. It seems a bit rich for the White House to turn around now and say, “This isn’t us.”

perry: Price was heavily involved in this bill. Pence did a rally with Ryan recently and said this was a huge administration priority.

clare.malone: Well … welcome to Trumpism (to Micah’s point).

harry: Yes, but as Perry wrote previously, there are so many players in Trump world. A bill could have the hand of Trump world in it, but that doesn’t mean Trump himself was part of it.

clare.malone: Trump and Steve Bannon, his chief strategist, are in the business of pure practicality politics vs. ideology politics, right now, right? If things are looking bad, looking like they’re unpopular with your people, they give themselves the latitude to say, “Hey, we’re new to this, and we agree with you that these Washington insider guys got some things wrong.”

micah: That’s my guess, yeah.

perry: So before we conclude that Trump is walking away from this bill or might, are we sure that is true? He tweeted his support for it. He had meetings this week with the GOP whip team. I am from Louisville, Kentucky, and read local papers there. Trump is going to Louisville on Saturday. I have to assume that he will be pushing on Rand Paul. Conway called into a Louisville radio station this week to say that Paul should get behind the effort. Trump tweeted the same thing. If Trump goes to a member’s home state and pushes them on a bill, that is pretty involved.

harry: I don’t think there’s any sign that Trump will give up on this bill. It’s just that this is a starting point. It’s essentially a blueprint. I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but that’s what the man said. Trump, in case you didn’t know, likes to think of himself as a negotiator.

natesilver: But is Trump attached to getting this bill passed, or is he attached to getting some bill passed? Or does he just want to pick a fight with Rand Paul, who’s an easy target in some ways?

micah: Good transition: Let’s talk endgames. What happens if they don’t pass anything? Clare, related to your big piece on Republican voters: Is there a revolt?

clare.malone: There are certainly some in the GOP’s base — those who were, say, Ted Cruz voters in the primary who flipped to Trump out of pragmatism — who voted for Trump for certain promised legislation and executive action. More specifically, that was “repeal and replace Obamacare!” and “Supreme Court nominees!” that you heard at every campaign event during the primary season.

So, if they weren’t to pass something, I’m not sure you’d see a revolt right away, per se, but that would give some cannon fire to primary challenges down the road, right?

perry: I feel like the optimal goal for Republicans, other than passing a bill, is to have the bill fail but be able to blame it on someone else. And the Democrats have no power and can’t be blamed. I don’t think the Freedom Caucus wants to get blamed. Or Rand. Or Ryan. Or McConnell. Usually, this kind of bill would die in committee, without a real floor vote. Don’t think Ryan or McConnell can afford that. Read Sarah Kliff on the Senate parliamentarian and how she could rule that parts of the bill do not meet Senate rules for reconciliation. She is the perfect fall person. If they can blame her, that would be perfect for the Republicans: “The bill failed, but it was some government bureaucrat!”

Is that too cynical?

natesilver: I don’t think it’s too cynical, necessarily. They’re in a real pickle. The other way they could try to get a similar result is to intentionally insert a provision in the bill that couldn’t pass through reconciliation instructions — e.g., allowing the sale of insurance across state lines — and then blame Democrats for killing things via the filibuster.

micah: I think we’ve learned that there’s no such thing as “too cynical.”

So you both think there won’t be a mass voter-led revolt if the GOP leaves Obamacare mostly as is? Even if they have a good fall person?

harry: Which voters, Micah? Primary voters, maybe. Because general election voters probably will be fine with it.

micah: Yeah, and to Clare’s point about Cruz voters: We learned there weren’t many of those.

clare.malone: Like, a tea party type deal?

micah: Tea party-lite?

clare.malone: I don’t think that would happen, given how much full-on power Republicans have right now. Psychologically, I’m not sure the GOP’s base is there.

They would be angry, yes, but not fire-ants-in-their-pants angry.

perry: I’ve always believed the conservative opposition to Obamacare would be less intense after Jan. 19, 2017. I wonder if there will be much of a backlash at all if this fails.

micah: The opposition was always more about the “Obama” than the “care,” in other words.

harry: Only 31 percent of Republicans want to repeal the law without a replacement package in place, so I’m going to agree with the panel here. Many want repeal, for sure, but even many Republicans don’t want to throw the baby out with bathwater.

micah: The lower-third on CNN right now is “Sources: Trump fully committed to selling health bill.”

clare.malone: If the chyron says it, it must be true.

micah: Words to live by.

natesilver: I’m going to change my name to Nate Sources.

micah: So, before we begin to wrap up, I just want to make sure that we’re not getting carried away with how much danger this effort is in. To recap, the consensus seems to be that Republicans botched the health care bill rollout, the bill pleases no one, Trump will push for it but may abandon the effort if the going gets tough, GOP voters wouldn’t freak out too much if something doesn’t pass and some Republican leaders may not even be trying to pass anything.

clare.malone: Well, the ultimate endgame is that none of us are making it out alive.

harry: The math for the Republicans is rather simple: To repeal, they need their caucuses to vote aye. They don’t need to get any Democratic votes. That in itself is a reason to be optimistic for Republicans that a bill could pass. Perhaps it’s not this bill, but a bill.

natesilver: Being alive is a pre-existing condition, which unfortunately isn’t covered.

micah: Being alive is an existing condition, Nate.

perry: I don’t agree with the consensus then. I think the bill has a good chance of passing the House, since I don’t see the 22 votes against. And I don’t right now see the third vote against in the Senate. If they can get this bill to votes, I think it can pass. I don’t think a long process of amending the bill will be that helpful to passing it.

micah: I may or may not have exaggerated the consensus.

clare.malone: i.e., partisanship is a hell of a drug? (to Perry’s point).

natesilver: I agree with the consensus, as laid out by Micah, and also think the bill has a chance of passing! They aren’t mutually exclusive.

perry: I’m not predicting passage.

micah: SOURCES: PERRY PREDICTS HEALTH CARE BILL WILL PASS!

natesilver: :champagne:

perry: Exactly! I think Nate is right: This all looks terrible right now, but the bill could still pass. Is that the consensus?

micah: I think so, yeah. (I don’t think we’ve ever reached consensus in a chat before.)

natesilver: Look, Republicans will get their act a little bit more together, partisanship will help at the margins, and maybe Trump can intimidate a few wanderers into supporting the bill. On the other hand, there are some big public relations blows yet to navigate, like the CBO score and whatever pushback they get from constituents at the spring recess.

I think the modal (most likely) scenario is that the House passes a more conservative bill than what’s on the table now and it gets stymied in the Senate.

perry: I think I agree with this, while not being sure what “stymied” in the Senate looks like.

natesilver: Yeah. It could die with a bang rather than a whimper, get filibustered, get ruled out of order by the parliamentarian, or lose on a floor vote. Lots of ways it could die. Or the Senate could gut the bill and do something token-ish that was actually fairly popular and dare the House to pass it in order to save face.

micah: OK — any final thoughts?

harry: This is just the beginning. Remember how long it took for the ACA to pass? It was long enough for Democrats to have 60 votes in the Senate when it started and then need reconciliation to pass the final parts because Scott Brown won the special election in Massachusetts.

natesilver: To me, it’s interesting that Obamacare sort of spontaneously became more popular the moment that Trump won the election. That’s suggestive to me that there isn’t much of a mandate for what the House bill might do and certainly not what the House Freedom Caucus’s version of a bill might do.

If the House bill is polling at, I dunno, 35 percent favorable and 51 percent unfavorable, then how long is its lifespan going to be?

harry: I saw a fascinating poll on this — about what made opinion flip. It seemed, to the authors of the poll, that it wasn’t the underlying parts of the ACA. Opinions on those stayed the same. Rather, they argued the popularity of the bill spiked because people were becoming more knowledgeable of what was in the law.

natesilver: I don’t buy that interpretation, since the popularity spike came immediately after the election.

harry: What interpretation would you buy? That people started thinking about it differently?

natesilver: I think it was the public telling the GOP that it was on a leash. And that it didn’t have license to start messing with entitlement programs, even theretofore fairly unpopular entitlement programs.

clare.malone: But Republicans did leave enough of the original elements of Obamacare in their plan to have it be called “Obamacare Lite” by some on the right.

So there could still be something to the idea that people are more aware of aspects of it.

perry: Micah has been predicting this process would go like 1993 and 2009 for weeks. I wasn’t so sure. It looks like he was right.

harry: To Clare’s point — yes, there could something. Perhaps it’s both that and what Nate suggested. To Perry’s point, health care is really hard. It probably cost Democrats a bunch of House seats in 2010.

Why It’s So Hard For The GOP To Agree On Health Care

We’re used to talking about how unified Republicans are — they approved President Trump’s Cabinet appointments almost unanimously, for example. But the House’s health care bill, which was unveiled on Monday, mostly seemed to divide them. Members of highly conservative groups in the House, such as the Freedom Caucus and the Republican Study Committee, have already bashed the draft legislation for maintaining too many of the policies and principles of Obamacare and for adopting a tax credit that they say is a “new entitlement.” However, conservative health policy wonks, whose views could be in sync with more mainline factions of the GOP, have critiqued the bill from another direction, saying it would considerably increase the number of uninsured people. Even the White House’s initial reaction was tepid, although Trump called the bill “wonderful” in a tweet on Tuesday morning. I’m not sure how I’d go about forecasting the probability of its passage, but it didn’t have an auspicious debut.

Health care is a notoriously difficult issue to tackle — most presidents have failed in their efforts to make wholesale reforms, or paid a substantial political price for attempting to do so (or both). But it’s worth considering why this is the case. Part of the answer is that in contrast to something like a Cabinet nomination, which is a simple yes-or-no question, health care is much more multifaceted, allowing for a myriad of possible legislative solutions.

Authors of the Affordable Care Act, for example, have sometimes referred to the “three-legged stool,” where the legs can be thought of as affordability (the government helps people pay for their insurance if they can’t afford it on their own), access (people can get health care even if they have a pre-existing condition) and cost control (there’s some mandate or incentive to ensure that healthy people sign up for insurance, avoiding the death spiral that can result when the proportion of sick people in the insurance pool is too high). If one leg of the stool wobbles, the whole thing might collapse; removing the requirement that insurers cover people with pre-existing conditions, for instance, would reduce access. But if sick people sign up for insurance and healthy people don’t, that could trigger a death spiral.

Depending on how different members of Congress prioritize these objectives, they’ll almost inevitably wind up with multiple, somewhat incompatible ideas for a health care bill, and it can be hard or even impossible for a group to come to a consensus when it has more than two such alternatives. Republicans also face the additional constraint of needing to pass their bill using the reconciliation process — which limits what it can contain — or almost certainly facing a Democratic filibuster.

The other, related factor is that there’s a fair amount of ideological diversity within the GOP, even though that variation can be hidden on most votes. That is to say, Republicans lawmakers range from “conservative” to “very conservative” to “very, very conservative.” That might sound like a joke, but these are actually fairly meaningful differences. The statistical system DW-Nominate rates members of Congress on a scale from negative 1 to positive 1, where negative scores are liberal and positive ones are conservative. It’s fairly well known that Republicans have grown more conservative over the years. But the spread between the most and least conservative Republicans hasn’t narrowed. Moderate Republicans have been replaced by conservatives, but conservative Republicans have been replaced by very, very conservative Republicans.

Where Republicans all line up to one side of an issue — for instance, on tax cuts — these differences don’t matter much. The most fiscally conservative Republicans might want an especially large tax cut, for instance, but they probably wouldn’t oppose a small one. But on health care, to repeat ourselves, there are more than two sides, and every tweak that caters to one group’s preferences probably contradicts someone else’s.

There’s a contrast here to Democrats, who have also lost much of their moderate, centrist wing, but whose most-liberal members aren’t appreciably more liberal than they were 20 or 30 years ago. Their ideological range has narrowed — instead of spanning from “very liberal” to “moderate,” they now range from “very liberal” to “somewhat liberal.” That may make the party more cohesive, perhaps at the cost of other objectives, such as making it more appealing to centrist voters. Democrats also haven’t historically faced the same divisions between “establishment” and “anti-establishment” members of the party that Republicans have (although that may be changing). So just because Democrats were able to pull together enough to pass Obamacare doesn’t necessarily mean Republicans will be able to do the same to repeal and replace it. There just might not be any single Republican health care bill that can earn the votes of a majority of the House and Senate.

Nate Silver And Mark Cuban Talk A Lot Of Politics And A Little Basketball

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief Nate Silver found themselves on stage together last weekend at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. They covered a wide range of topics, including Cuban’s political aspirations, President Trump’s political skills and the Mavericks’ bad season. We’ve reprinted a condensed and lightly edited version of the interview below.

Nate: Are you prepared here at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference to announce your candidacy for president of the United States?

Mark: [laughter] I’ll get back to you on that.

Nate: OK. But is it something you’ve thought about seriously?

Mark: Have I thought about it? Yes. Seriously is relative. Circumstantially, yes, but I’m nowhere near ready to decide anything. You know, there’s still a few years to see how things go and what direction they go, so … let’s just say, it’s not just a lifelong dream of mine to be president of the United States.

Nate: Donald Trump was able to win the nomination and the presidency. Do you consider that a kind of game-changing event?

Mark: Game changing event? Yes. Is he paving the way for businesspeople? No. Probably the exact opposite. So it probably hurts more than helps somebody who wanted to come from the business side as opposed to the political side. But it really depends on how he governs, if he governs, and what the results are. Because if things are great, then it’d be a positive, but it also is going to open a door for more Trumpian-like people, I guess, which I would not classify myself as. And if it doesn’t work, then it may swing back the other way, toward more traditional politicians. We’ll have to see.

Nate: You were a critic of Trump’s during the campaign, I believe endorsed Clinton at some point. Have you become more optimistic or more pessimistic?

Mark: Well, I’ll get back to you, but I was actually one of the first people to support Trump. When he first came out, I said he was authentic, he wasn’t scripted, he wasn’t a traditional politician, and those were all positive things. And then I got to know him. [laughter] And it wasn’t so much that I was really pro-Hillary. People think I’m a Democrat. I’m not. I’m an independent. People think I’m a progressive. I’m not. I’m far more middle of the road, particularly on fiscal issues and probably a little bit left on social issues. But it really was as much a protest against him and a movement to try to stop him — which obviously failed miserably. In terms of what happens next, it’s only been, what — 42 days? The whole country is Gilligan’s Island.

Nate: Right. The fact that we’re counting the number of days, right, it’s probably a bad sign.

Mark: It’s a very bad sign.

***

Nate: Is he like a once in a lifetime fluke? How did he become president?

Mark: You know, it’s funny. I made a huge mistake in how I evaluated it, obviously. I thought logic and common sense and facts mattered to most voters. But the reality is, we all — including all of us here — tend to take the path of least resistance. We just want to get through our lives, we want to get through our days. We want to give ourselves, our family, our kids a reason to smile, right? If you’re stuck and things aren’t going well and you don’t see very high prospects or positive prospects for your children and your family, you get what you got if you vote for a traditional politician. What’s the worst that can happen if I vote for Trump and he turns out to be an idiot, right? More of my friends will have opioid issues? If things are already going poorly, if things aren’t going the way you anticipate, go for it. It’s Hail Mary voting.

Nate: About 15 percent of the electorate did not like either Trump or Clinton, and they broke substantially to Trump. That’s why he won. People who did not like Trump voting for Trump gave him the margin he needed.

***

Nate: There’s almost a more profound point here about forecasting. It’s like precisely when people feel complacent about something is when they let their guard down.

Mark: Well, yeah, it’s a greater than zero chance, but also, it’s not like either side stopped marketing up until the very end. I went out with Hillary Clinton to Detroit, and I’m like: “What are we doing in Detroit? That’s not a good sign. Why don’t you bring me back to Pittsburgh?” So they had an inkling, but they thought they would get through it. But, you know, polls only go up to a certain point in time, and if there’s uncertainty and you keep on marketing and you keep on selling, you can transition people’s minds.

Nate: You also have a lot of backlash against business. People might say it’s deserved or maybe not. On the left, you have the Sanders wing of the party, where I think it’s obvious a lot of the energy is. So to be a kind of a pro-business, pro-gay-rights centrist, do you think there’s a constituency for that?

Mark: Either there will be or there won’t be. The crazy part is that if you look at what Trump is doing, a lot of the stuff is far left of what Bernie wanted in terms of trade and other things. I wasn’t a big Bernie Sanders fan because I think free runs out at some point, but I got the excitement about him. But even then, I think a lot of it was anti-Clinton as much as pro-Bernie.

Nate: Do you feel like Trump’s win was a loss for rationality in some sense? Or do you think that there’s a deeper level that’s almost rational?

Mark: No, I think it shows the bifurcation of the country. I think there’s certain people that believe in information and facts and making reasoned decisions and there’s certain people, like I was just saying, that are like, “It can’t get any worse.” I would go to places — particularly in Texas, once they found out I switched and was supporting Hillary Clinton — the things that they would say about Obama being the ultimate socialist, about he’s just two steps away from communism, about how he’s going to take everything away from us, yada, yada, yada. Those aren’t conclusions you just naturally come to on your own. Those are marketed conclusions, and I think that’s really what won the day for Trump as much as the dissatisfaction with the way things are going.

***

Nate: What’s it like to make — and I probably experience like a tenth of this, and you experience a whole portion of it, and Clinton experiences 10 times what you do, right? — but what’s it like to make high-pressure decisions when everything you do is going to be scrutinized?

Mark: I like it. When I got the chance to do interviews for the Clintons, I didn’t want to go on MSNBC. I wanted to go on Fox. Any position I have, I want to be challenged so I can get smarter about it. So I don’t mind it, and if I’m wrong, I’m wrong. And it won’t be the first time, it won’t be the last time. But I like that. When it comes to making decisions that are going to be in the public eye, whether it’s the Mavs, whether it’s politics, whatever it may be, I kind of like scrutiny, intellectual scrutiny.

Nate: The politics of Texas are changing a little bit. It’s one of a handful of states where Clinton actually did better than Obama had.

Mark: Mm hmm. She actually won Dallas County.

Nate: She won Dallas County. I think won Houston, right? You know, why do you think Texas is shifting in a different direction?

Mark: Well, there’s urban centers and then there’s rednecks, you know. [laughter] It’s like crossing a timeline when you leave Dallas County to go farther out or when you go, since Texas is such a big state, anywhere outside an urban area — it’s just a different world. It’s just culturally … I mean, we live in two different worlds. There’s urban, there’s intellectual, and there’s everybody else, and that’s part of the challenges we face as a country.

Nate: Texas becoming more purple … Ted Cruz is up in two years for Senate.

Mark: No. No.

Nate: [laughter]

Mark: That’d be the worst. No. No governor, senator, congressman — hell no. If I’m going to go down, I’m going to go down in flames going for the big job, right?

***

Nate: I think part of what we’re learning is that other people in the government have a lot of power and authority and that maybe you don’t have so much power as president. I hope we don’t test that proposition.

Mark: Right, yeah. I mean, it remains to be seen, right, because he comes out and says one thing about foreign policy and then Tillerson and the others go out there and give speeches in Europe that say the exact opposite. How’s that happen? And he tweeted today about Obama wiretapping Trump Tower. Now, the president doesn’t have the authority to issue a wiretap. The FBI does have the authority to initiate a wiretap once it gets a warrant. So basically without him even realizing it, he’s confirming that the FBI got a warrant to wiretap him.

Nate: Or he’s confirming that he reads crazy conspiracy theories.

Mark: Or, yeah, maybe they brought it up on “Fox and Friends and Family” or whatever it is in the morning. [laughter] You know, those intelligence briefings are tough. In between the cat stories and the dog stories, you have to be able to get your information and know which is which.

Nate: I was also in 2015 very skeptical about Trump, right? Less skeptical in the general election, but like, do you think he’s very good at what he does? Or just was in the right place at the right time?

Mark: At which point in his career?

Nate: To become president. Is he just like randomly mashing buttons and happened to pick the combination that was fruitful for this point in time?

Mark: I don’t know. I don’t honestly know. You can’t look at him and particularly knowing people who work for him and listen to them and say, “Boy, the guy just knows his stuff cold.” I remember talking to him about a business thing during his campaign, and I tried to put it in real-estate terms. And I’m thinking, “He’s going to catch me on something, that I missed some point; he’s going to say, ‘No, that’s not how we do it.’” I could tell he didn’t get it, and I had to rephrase it, and I was kind of shocked. And this is the honest to God truth: I had multiple people that I talked to on his campaign over some private messaging apps if I would have given them a job would have left his campaign because they were terrified. And others told me that there’s no chance he gets elected, but in the slight — they would say 30 percent — chance he does, somebody’s got to be there to watch over him.

Now, most of those people are already gone, because I will say this about him, he has no personal attachments to anybody except maybe his daughter. Not even his sons. I mean, people are fungible to him, and if you’re not helping him — it’s like, when I would get into these Twitter wars with him and I would nail him, oh, Cuban’s the worst, he’s an idiot, he’s dopey, he’s this, he’s that, and then if I could help him with something on business, he loved me. And the Mavs would win a game — I remember one time, Deron Williams hits a game winning shot against the Kings, and he’s on the phone calling me, congratulating me and telling me how exciting it was, and then three weeks later, I’m dopey. That’s who he is.

Nate: [laughter] Do you think Trump is a product of social media and the media environment? Or is he a classic kind of …

Mark: No, social media is an asset for him. I used to give him so much shit because he has no clue how to use social media and he would troll himself and not realize it. Seriously.

Nate: See, I think like, most politicians are terrible at using …

Mark: Yeah, to them, it’s a PR newswire. It’s just out there, because in reality, if only 15 percent of adults are on Twitter and out of the 25 million or whatever that follow him, half are probably bots, half of the remaining are probably foreign, and so to reach the rest of the country … it’s how people interpret what he tweets, it’s how people understand what his tweets are.

***

Nate: Do you find it satisfying that you have a win or a loss at the end of the day and that’s all people care about? Even though it might imperfectly reflect your decision-making?

Mark: I just hate to lose. Unless we go like 17-4 the rest of the way, this is going to be my first losing season since grade school. I mean, that’s fucked up. It’s not satisfying in the least bit, but it is what it is. And I think we’ve kind of evolved this season, so hopefully we’re in a good position.

Nate: You’re going to have to move on from Dirk at some point …

Mark: Nah. Somebody’s got to be the first 50-year-old — Dirk will be the Satchel Paige of the NBA, playing knuckleball somewhere.

Nate: But it’s been a very successful run. If you could replicate that and, say, you have a team that’s going to be good for 10, 12, 15 years with a 10 or 15 percent chance of winning the championship any year versus a team that has a three-year dominant window, does either of those appeal to you more?

Mark: If I knew I was going to get three rings and just be horrible the rest of the way, I’d probably take the three rings and then try to change the agreement. But yeah, I mean, rings are the thing. I want a really big ring.

Nate: You would trade … let’s say you have 10 60-win teams that make the conference semifinals …

Mark: Yeah, we won 50-plus games 10 out of 11 years in a row.

Nate: But you would trade that for one additional ring?

Mark: Yeah. Yeah.

***

Nate: You’ve talked about how using analytics or any kind of more rigorous approach, there’s not as much low-hanging fruit as there was. How many teams out of the 30 NBA teams you think still don’t get it?

Mark: I think they all get analytics. I think they don’t all get how to use analytics. You talk about efficient markets. Analytics is the most efficient market, and in my opinion, it’s changing the most dramatically right in front of our eyes because of deep learning, new networks, etc. And so, now, we all have to scratch our heads and say, “What variables and how do we weight them and does it correlate, is it causation, etc.?”

Nate: Have you had experiences where you had a model that fit the past data really well and then you applied it and it was disastrous?

Mark: I wouldn’t say disastrous. Like one of the things that we liked to use one summer was the shooting percentage, the number of games that you shot over 60 percent versus the number of games that you shot under 60 percent across D-League, college, the NBA. And those who had a greater than 2-to-1 ratio typically had success. And it worked fairly well until we had a couple of the exceptions that proved the rules. And so, yeah, there’s been times where we thought, yeah, this is really an indicator, and it turned out not to be.

Nate: Do you deliberately experiment with different lineups and different strategies or …

Mark: Absolutely.

Nate: Because to me, that’s one of the big lessons. You learn that no forecasting method is perfect, right, but there’s a lot of value in actual, real data.

Mark: Whether it’s starting Nerlens last night and having him guard the 5 or guard the 4 and Dirk guard the 5 or whatever, or playing more zone the year we won, I always try to be contrary. So if everybody’s shooting threes and layups, how do you defend that? And then it means the midrange is going to be wide open, right? And so if you can get past that point expectation, there’s an opportunity there. But the year we won, I asked coach to play zone an entire preseason game so we’d get good at it because nobody ever practiced against the zone. And if nobody’s ever practicing against it and they’re only playing us two or four times a year, they’re not going to change their habits just for us. And if we don’t get good at a zone and play a zone and if other teams aren’t lousy at attacking a zone, we don’t win. I mean, going back to that Miami series, the minute we’d go into a zone, you’d see LeBron pounding the ball and eating up time, which was what we wanted.