Nate Silver's Blog, page 138

Marco Rubio Never Had A Base

Except in the improbable event that he comes back to win the Republican nomination, Marco Rubio is likely to become a political idiom. As Mike Huckabee is synonymous with a candidate who wins Iowa on the basis of evangelical support but can’t expand beyond that, or Fred Thompson is a stand-in for a candidate who launches his campaign too late, a “Rubioesque” candidate will be one who is everyone’s second choice.

For a long time, polls have shown Rubio as perhaps the most broadly acceptable candidate within the Republican field, with high favorability ratings1 and competitive performances in hypothetical one-on-one matchups against Donald Trump. But Rubio has just about 20 percent of the Republican vote so far and has won only Minnesota and Puerto Rico. Hawaii results are still pending as I write this, but he did terribly everywhere else on Tuesday and will probably fail to receive any delegates from Michigan, Mississippi or Idaho.

Data like this can produce cognitive dissonance. At times during the campaign, Rubio perpetually seemed to be either overrated or underrated, depending on who was doing the rating. But there’s nothing inherently contradictory about it. If Trump is the candidate with a high floor of support but perhaps a relatively low ceiling, Rubio is the opposite, with a lot of potential supporters but a low floor — he doesn’t have much of a base.

Increasingly, that potential looks as though it will go unrealized. But I want to back up and consider why Rubio is in this predicament. I won’t focus on recent strategic decisions made by his campaign, such as his potty humor directed at Trump, insofar as these decisions are more the effect of his problems (when you’re losing, it’s rational to employ high-risk strategies) than the cause of them. Instead, I see three main issues for Rubio that have dated back to the start of his campaign:

Problem No. 1: Rubio hasn’t built up a lot of voter loyalty.

It’s not my job to judge the candidates’ credentials, but I sympathize with Republicans who think Rubio’s are a little light. As a first-term senator at a time of political gridlock, he hasn’t gotten much legislation passed: According to the Thomas database, the only bill to have become law of which Rubio was the main sponsor is the Girls Count Act of 2015. His most high-profile legislative effort, on immigration reform, ended in failure. Rubio did have some accomplishments as speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, although he hasn’t talked about them much on the campaign trail. Perhaps that’s because Rubio is wary of drawing comparisons to Barack Obama, who, likewise, was a first-term U.S. senator and a former state legislator when he sought the presidency.

But Rubio didn’t replicate Obama’s success in one important way. Whereas Obama built a gigantic ground operation from the earliest stages of his campaign, Rubio failed to develop much of one. That contributes toward a low floor. If you’re not contacting voters personally, they aren’t all that invested in you, and although they may come your way from time to time, they also may abandon you at the first sign of trouble.

Also unlike Obama, Rubio didn’t receive all that much media exposure. Instead, like every other Republican candidate, he was overshadowed by Trump, who got nine times as much coverage on network news as Rubio did in 2015. Without that vetting having taken place earlier in the campaign, Republicans are learning a lot about Rubio as they’re already in the midst of voting, contributing to the volatility in his political standing.

Problem No. 2: Trying to be everything to everyone isn’t easy.

You may remember our old friend the Republican “five-ring circus” diagram, which depicts the overlapping constituencies that the Republican candidates seek to win votes from. From the start, we’ve put Rubio in the “establishment” circle, thinking he’s too far removed from his days as a tea-party-backed candidate to still qualify as one.

The establishment circle is a special place, however. It’s not that there are literally all that many establishment voters (except, maybe, in the northern Virginia suburbs, where Rubio performed well). Instead, the more successful establishment candidates seek to be consensus candidates, keeping the peace with some or all party factions. Consider Mitt Romney, who was elected governor in Massachusetts as a pragmatic moderate, then ran as a movement conservative in the Republican race of 2008 and then was somewhere in between those things when he was nominated in 2012. Or Obama, who in 2008 ran as a “post-partisan” candidate to some Democratic voters and as a progressive hero to others.

Such candidates can be accused of shape-shifting or flip-flopping, but they often capture their party’s nomination. Such a strategy requires a lot of political dexterity, however. Not only do you have to stay “on message,” you have to sustain multiple messages to multiple audiences. (Trump, although hardly a consensus candidate, has some of this ability.) It helps to have surrogates vouching for you to different constituencies, something Rubio didn’t have a lot of until recently. And it helps to have enough media exposure to avoid being typecast in one role, something Rubio hasn’t had all that much of in Trump’s shadow.

Problem No. 3: Rubio’s cosmopolitan image is an odd match for his conservative politics.

The Republican race is tricky to map demographically, especially in comparison to the Democratic one. Trump’s best congressional districts so far, according to data that my colleague Aaron Bycoffe and I have collected, include such diverse places as NV-1 (Las Vegas), AL-4 (rural northwest Alabama) and MA-9 (far eastern Massachusetts, including Cape Cod).

Rubio’s best districts have a bit more in common. Here are the five congressional districts where he received the largest share of the vote through Super Tuesday:

TX-33: A highly Democratic district covering parts of Dallas and its suburbs.MN-5: A highly Democratic district covering parts of Minneapolis and its suburbs.GA-5: An extremely Democratic district covering parts of Atlanta and its suburbs.MN-4: A highly Democratic district covering parts of St. Paul, Minnesota, and its suburbs.VA-8: A highly Democratic district in northern Virginia, covering the Washington suburbs.

Now, if Rubio were a moderate or liberal Republican (or a conservative running in moderate garb, like John Kasich), this is pretty much what you’d expect to see. But he isn’t: Rubio’s voting record and issue positions are quite conservative, and he’s run as a conservative. Furthermore, although this has varied some from state to state, exit polls haven’t shown Rubio doing especially well with moderate voters; in South Carolina, for example, he won 23 percent of the vote from moderate Republicans, about the same as his share of the vote overall. It may be that Rubio’s most reliable voters are conservatives who live among liberals, a difficult group to build a base from.

The other thing we can tell about Rubio’s supporters is that they have high socioeconomic status, especially as measured by education. So do Kasich’s — whereas by contrast, Ted Cruz’s and especially Trump’s have lower incomes and education levels. Roughly speaking, you can plot the Republican candidates on a two-by-two grid that looks like this:

That chart is a simplification, of course, most notably because it implies that the four quadrants are equally sized when they probably aren’t. Trump, in particular, is proving that there’s a fairly large market for populism among Republicans and independents who vote in Republican primaries, especially those with lower socioeconomic status. Trump’s voters average out to being fairly moderate, although they aren’t conventionally so: From what we can tell, for instance, his voters don’t care very much about abortion or gay marriage, although they do care about immigration.

Rubio, by contrast, may be proving that there’s not all that large a market for what you might call an upscale or cosmopolitan conservative. Many voters in the near-in suburbs, Rubio’s best areas geographically, long ago left the Republican Party. Rubio might have the image to win them back — young, Hispanic, optimistic — but he doesn’t have the policies, being staunchly conservative on issues such as abortion and gay marriage. Likewise, while Rubio appears to do well among nonwhite Republicans, there are very few of them voting in the primaries, and Rubio has turned away from the moderate immigration positions that once might have won him more Latino support.

Rubio is also somewhat boxed in by Cruz and, to a perhaps underappreciated extent, Kasich. If Cruz weren’t in the race, there would be a scramble between Rubio and Trump for voters in the bottom-right corner of the chart, who have lower socioeconomic status but are highly conservative (and often very religious). Rubio might win it: He could position himself as the only true conservative in the race, and polls suggest that more Cruz supporters have Rubio as their second choice than Trump. If Kasich were out of the race, meanwhile, Rubio could pivot more toward the center — at an opportune time, given that the calendar is turning to blue and purple states. But with Cruz and Kasich still running — and in fact, seeming to gain ground in recent days — Rubio is back to where he started, as a lot of voters’ second choice.

Could Michigan Change The Course Of The GOP Race?

For this week’s politics Slack chat, we preview today’s primaries and caucuses. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

Check out our live coverage of today’s primary elections.

micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): It’s not quite as super as Super Tuesday, but it’s Tuesday and there are elections, so that’s something. Republicans vote in four states: Michigan, Mississippi, Idaho and Hawaii. Democrats go to the polls in two: Michigan and Mississippi. So let’s set the stakes in each state one by one. Let’s start in Michigan. Clare, who’s favored in the GOP race? And what should we be looking for in the results?

clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): Well, Donald Trump is still favored to win in Michigan, and that lovely little bifurcated state is pretty much the big prize of today.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): Don’t call my state bifurcated, Clare.

clare.malone: It’s gimpy, man. I just call it like I see it.

natesilver: Just gonna plant this little clip here:

harry (Harry Enten, senior political writer): Where’s the Columbia Lions football clip?

clare.malone: I think as far as what we’re looking for in the results, especially following some unexpected results on Saturday, where Trump didn’t win some states we thought he might, we’re looking to see if people have slumped a bit in their support of him. John Kasich has been spending an awful lot of time in Michigan, and Trump might have turned off some sensible Michiganders with his Thursday night debate performance, so it’ll be interesting to see what the win, place, show is up there.

Oh, and to Nate’s above, all I have to say is muck fichigan.

natesilver: Our polls-plus model gives Trump an 8 percent chance of losing Michigan. Which is not high, obviously, although also not zero.

In general, today isn’t a huge day for delegate allocation because everything is quite proportional. But Michigan will matter for The Narrative, will it not? And in turn how everything plays out between now and March 15.

clare.malone: I think the narrative point is key here — Mitt Romney, I’ll note, recorded robocalls for Kasich and Rubio, both in Michigan.

harry: The state has 59 delegates at stake, with a 15 percent threshold, and awards its delegates proportionally. One candidate can take all the delegates if they clear 50 percent, but no one is likely to do that.

micah: Will Marco Rubio clear 15 percent?

natesilver: I’d put Rubio at less than even money to reach it. Our polls-plus model puts him at 14 percent, and it wouldn’t surprise me if there’s some last-minute tactical voting shifting from Rubio to Kasich.

harry: Yeah, there are signs Rubio will not make the threshold. Moreover, there are signs from the latest Monmouth University poll that Rubio is declining and Kasich is rising quickly. It’ll be interesting to see if Kasich beats out Ted Cruz for second and if he can replace Rubio as the mainstream conservative in the Illinois primary next Tuesday; Trump leads in Illinois but is only at 33 percent in our weighted polling average for the state.

The narrative coming out of Michigan could be that Kasich has some momentum, and that’s important since next Tuesday is do or die for Kasich in Ohio, where our polls-plus model has him as a slight favorite but our polls-only model has him as a slight underdog.

natesilver: If Kasich comes close to Trump in Michigan, that will obviously bode very well for him in Ohio. If Kasich beats Trump — well, I think that’s a different ballgame.

clare.malone: That’s all assuming that a lot of people who have recently joined the Trump train are doing so because they figure he’s got the momentum so why the hell not — Kasich winning in Michigan might get some of those people to stop a little.

micah: Clare, what is Trump’s appeal in Michigan?

clare.malone: It’s the whole white working-class Democrats demographic that we’ve been hearing so much about as one of the big strongholds of Trump support. Michigan is filled with people who have been hurt by globalization, jobs leaving the country, etc., and there’s something about the Trump aura and his promises to return America to greatness that really speaks to the Rust Belt; it’s a nostalgic region in many ways.

natesilver: While Michigan’s economy has recovered quite nicely — unemployment is around 5 percent — its working-class population has been through some hard times in the past decade or two.

clare.malone: Right. There are a lot of notions of perpetual underdog-ness that are a big part of the region. That’s up Trump’s alley.

natesilver: There are parts of Michigan that are good for each of the candidates, however. Western Michigan has more evangelicals than you’d think, which will be good for Cruz. It has a fairly pragmatic state Republican Party, which could be good for Rubio. And it borders Ohio, good for Kasich.

Part of the reason Trump might hold on there, in fact, is because the rest of the vote will split two or three ways.

harry: Rick Santorum did quite well in Michigan in 2012. One other thing I’d like to point out is that the primary in Michigan is open. It’ll be interesting to see if we get a crossover vote from independents and Democrats who want to stop Trump, as they tried to do in Virginia, or if the openness merely allows Trump to do well as he has tended to do in open contests so far.

natesilver: John McCain won Michigan in 2000, for what it’s worth.

micah: Before we move on, give me some vote/delegate benchmarks: What would be good for Trump/Rubio/Kasich/Cruz?

harry: To be on track to win the nomination, per our benchmarks, Trump should get 25 delegates, Rubio 23 and Cruz 22. Kasich isn’t even listed on our tracker.

micah: Well, Kasich, even if he wins Ohio and Michigan, doesn’t really have a delegate path to the nomination, right?

harry: Kasich is basically playing for a contested convention.

clare.malone: Right. He said it would be “exciting” the other day.

natesilver: I’m just going to take our polls-plus forecast and basically add 3 percentage points to everyone to say what would constitute a “good” night. Trump would love to get 40 percent, which would quiet some of the talk about his having a ceiling, although the mid-to-high 30s would probably still suffice for him to win. Kasich would love to get in the high 20s. Cruz would love to break 25 in a state that wasn’t expected to be good for him. Rubio would just like to get on the board with some delegates, which means 15 percent.

Listen to the latest episode of the FiveThirtyEight elections podcast.

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micah: OK, what’s going to happen on the Democratic side in Michigan?

clare.malone: Democratic side: Hillary Clinton probs gonna win that one. #analysis

natesilver: Yeah, Trump losing Michigan wouldn’t be a Lakers-Warriors upset, but it would be a big upset. Clinton losing would be an ENORMOUS upset.

harry: Clinton, by the way, has led in every single poll taken in Michigan, and it’s a state that Bernie Sanders should win if he is to have any shot at the nomination. According to our demographics-based targets, Sanders would win Michigan by 4 percentage points if the race were tied nationally.

micah: Let’s go to Mississippi GOP …

clare.malone: Mississippi could be another place for Cruz to shine, right?

micah: Isn’t Trump favored in Mississippi?

natesilver: Trump is favored in Mississippi. Though we haven’t gotten enough polls to run a forecast for the state, he’s won every surrounding state. You could get into an interesting argument about whether Mississippi or Michigan is the more likely upset state, I suppose.

harry: Mississippi is fascinating to me because it is the last Deep South state to vote. (Florida is not the Deep South.) So far, Trump has been able to win with support in the lows 40s in the Deep South. But there were strong signs on Saturday that Cruz was taking supporters from the other non-Trumps, and Cruz nearly won in Louisiana. Can he do the same in Mississippi tonight? It may be too little too late in terms of the delegates, but it would be something else given that the polling hasn’t generally been all that close.

natesilver: Yeah, so that’s why it’s tricky. Mississippi should inherently be stronger than Michigan for Trump. But, also, there’s a clear anti-Trump to coordinate around in Mississippi but less so up north.

clare.malone: Right, I think Cruz is actually the most interesting guy to watch tonight. He’s the most proven spoiler so far this race — I’m still on the Maine results. And if Cruz can kill the Rubio faux-momentum with more strong finishes or even notch an upset in, say, Mississippi, well then … what the heck does that do to the race? That’s probably mostly just a thought exercise, since it seems unlikely Trump would fall that far but still.

natesilver: Weird question, but is Rubio hoping for Trump to have a kinda-good night?

micah: Honestly, I’m not sure anything helps Rubio beyond winning states.

clare.malone: Hmm … maybe in some twisted way, yes. That campaign, Rubio’s, is obviously in a little bit of turmoil — there were reports from CNN that some campaign aides were thinking that he should drop out pre-Florida if he doesn’t do well today. If Cruz did well and Rubio didn’t, that wouldn’t look so hot.

harry: It depends on whether or not Rubio can come away with a victory or two, say in Hawaii or Idaho.

natesilver: Would a Hawaii win matter for The Narrative? We won’t get results in until the wee hours of the morning. BTW, I hate The Narrative, but it matters more than usual in this case because both voters and party actors are trying to coordinate around several different strategies.

Let’s talk Idaho, though. A Rubio win there would be a real surprise.

micah: Harry seems to think it’s possible.

clare.malone: Last poll in February had Cruz in second behind Trump.

harry: I just think it’s unknowable, and I do know that Rubio campaigned out there recently. I would not trust any of the polls from that state, to be honest. It’s a closed primary, and it is rarely competitive.

clare.malone: KNOWN UNKNOWNS!

natesilver: That poll had Trump up. But it’s also a couple of weeks old, and we know that Cruz has gained on Trump nationally since that time. Also, Cruz has an outright lead on Trump in Google searches in Idaho, which seems meaningful if we’re looking for little scraps of information. I think Idaho leans Cruz.

harry: Concur with Nathaniel’s assessment.

micah: And Hawaii?

natesilver: Betting markets have Rubio favored there, I guess on the theory that he does well on islands? Or in states where people are nice, like Minnesota? Hawaii is an island with really nice people, so maybe it favors Rubio?

clare.malone: Yeah, for some reason, I see Hawaii as a Rubio state: Rich Republicans with island houses. I think the idea would be that Hawaii Republicans are analogous to those rich suburbanites who love Rubio in the Midwest and elsewhere.

natesilver: I dunno, though, Cruz seems like a pretty good default pick in eccentric caucus states too.

harry: Hawaii has a lot of Mormons at the BYU campus. It is not a Trump state.

clare.malone: Want me to fly out and see what Cruz’s Hawaii ground game is like?

natesilver: Also a lot of Mormons in Idaho. One annoying thing about Nevada is that the entrance poll didn’t include a breakout of LDS voters.

clare.malone: Anecdotally, they were fairly split between Cruz and Rubio when I talked to people in Nevada.

micah: Two more things before we wrap: 1) Clinton is favored in Mississippi by a ton, right?

harry: Clinton is a HUGE favorite.

natesilver: Yeah, and Sanders is even at some risk of not getting 15 percent, which would deny him any delegates.

clare.malone: Whoever can spell “Mississippi” fastest wins that primary, I believe. So could be a tossup. But Clinton is pretty verbally dexterous, so I’d concur with the stats guys on this.

harry: And this is the whole problem with Sanders’s campaign. It’s not just that he loses states; he loses states by a big margin. You can’t do that when delegates are allocated proportionally. Clinton learned that in 2008, and Sanders is learning that now.

natesilver: I feel like we’re underselling the importance of Michigan to the Democratic race. It should be among the more representative states to have voted so far. A fairly large black population, but also some huge college campuses. Liberal-ish but not super liberal. So if Clinton wins there by 20 or something, it doesn’t bode well for Sanders. Then again, I have a gut feeling — WHICH YOU SHOULD TOTALLY IGNORE — that Sanders could beat his polling there.

clare.malone: I mean, if Sanders does well with working-class whites, then maybe he could, sure.

harry: What’s your definition of beating polling, Nate? I do think he’ll beat the Mitchell poll that had him down 37 percentage points.

natesilver: The polls have sorta been all over the place on the Democratic side in Michigan, so fair point. Our polls-only forecast has it at Clinton +21. But I’m talking single digits, I suppose. Err … I’m not predicting single digits, but I think Bernie’s range is a little wider than our model has it.

micah: Let’s say Sanders keeps it close, what would that suggest about the overall state of the Democratic race?

clare.malone: Well, it would depend on which types of voters he did well with, right? If he did better with minority voters, that could say something significant.

harry: According to our delegate tracker, Sanders should win a majority of delegates if he’s on pace to win the nomination. If he falls short of that but is competitive, I think it means Clinton isn’t blowing him away nationally but she has a clear lead.

natesilver: It might suggest a little bit of complacency on the part of Clinton’s voters. In sports, we’d call Michigan a “let-down game.” Michigan was also home to one of the most famous upsets in polling history, when Engler beat Blanchard in 1990 as Democrats thought they had it in the bag and didn’t turn out to vote.

harry: Nate was 12 for that one. Let’s just say I was younger.

clare.malone: A young man never forgets his first polling upset.

micah: All right, to close, let’s play our headline game; what will the headline of The Wall Street Journal be tomorrow morning?

clare.malone: “DOW PLUNGES,” which is basically what it is 50 percent of the time.

natesilver: “DOW RISES.”

harry: “Mike Bloomberg’s decision continues to sadden Wall Street.”

natesilver: Micah, I’m better at New York Times headlines.

clare.malone: “Trump Tramps Through Three States” (Could not get one more “T” for the life of me.)

micah: I like that.

natesilver: Trump Survives Challenge As Rivals Look To Sharpen Pitch

clare.malone: Or flatten it (that was a music joke that … fell flat).

micah: Nate, what the hell does that mean?

natesilver: I mean, the modal outcome is pretty ambiguous. Trump wins MI/MS but not by as much as we would have expected a couple of weeks ago. Loses ID/HI but nobody pays much attention to them. Status quo, so you get a weird ambiguous headline.

clare.malone: Basically, everyone is just waiting for NEXT Tuesday: “Nation Waits With Bated Breath For A Week From Now.”

harry: I’d like to point out that we still have contests before next Tuesday. The Virgin Islands Republican caucus is on Thursday, and the Guam and Washington, D.C., Republican conventions are on Saturday. I will be following those closely because I have no life.

natesilver: We want to break some news here, actually. We contacted the Virgin Islands Republican Party and confirmed that their caucus is on Thursday. Other sites list the date incorrectly.

micah: BREAKING!

natesilver: No, seriously. They’re having their caucus on March 10, not March 19.

micah: Credit to Aaron Bycoffe.

natesilver: Credit to Bycoffe, yes. Also the Republican National Committee’s rulebook, which says March 10.

micah: Harry, we still need your headline!

harry: I don’t do Times headlines, but my Daily News headline is “Clown Wins Two States.”

Bloomberg Might Have Produced President Trump

That Michael Bloomberg won’t be running for president can’t be considered a huge surprise. The former New York mayor was previously rumored to be seeking the White House in 2006, 2007, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015, according to news reports compiled by The Atlantic’s David Graham, but failed to enter each time.

Bloomberg’s decision, announced on Monday afternoon, is still a reasonably big deal, however, because as Bloomberg himself concluded, his candidacy could potentially have thrown the election to Donald Trump.

There are various ways to get at this conclusion. While there hasn’t been a ton of public polling testing Bloomberg’s candidacy, most of it showed Bloomberg taking more votes from Hillary Clinton than from Trump in a potential three-way race.

Ideologically, Bloomberg wouldn’t have all that much space to himself. Bloomberg’s policies are more center-left than truly centrist, making it hard for him to differentiate himself from Hillary Clinton. And Trump already in many ways resembles an independent candidate.

Bernie Sanders, if he were the nominee, might have provided Bloomberg with slightly more running room. But after Super Tuesday, with Sanders running well behind the delegate pace he needs to win the Democratic race, Clinton now looks like the much more likely Democratic nominee — perhaps a factor in Bloomberg’s decision.

It’s also hard to see how the demographics would work for Bloomberg. As it happens, I’ve been working on a model of a potential third-party candidacy. Because we’re writing this story on short notice, I’m going to be more circumspect than usual about describing it. But the basic conclusion is that it’s incredibly hard to find many votes for a center-left third-party candidate without eating substantially into the Democratic coalition.

The model, which is built on data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, divides the American electorate into six roughly equal groups:

African-Americans (12 percent of voting population): extremely Democratic-leaning.Hispanic, Asian, “other” and mixed races (14 percent): Also strongly Democratic leaning, especially in recent elections.White evangelicals (23 percent): Strongly Republican.White cosmopolitans (20 percent): These are white, non-evangelical voters who favor both gay marriage and a pathway to citizenship for immigrants who entered the country illegally. They’re a highly Democratic-leaning group, mostly concentrated in urban areas and college towns.White “picket fence” voters (15 percent): These are whites who are neither evangelicals nor cosmopolitans, but have high socioeconomic status as indicated by income, education levels, home ownership and other factors. This is a largely suburban, center-right group who went for Mitt Romney over Barack Obama about 2 to 1 in the previous election.White working-class voters (16 percent): Whites who are neither evangelicals nor cosmopolitans, and have lower socioeconomic status. Once a good group for Democrats, they now vote Republican about 2 to 1.

As I’ve said, I’ve found it very difficult to get Bloomberg to more than about 30 percent of the vote. Even that would be extremely generous, in my view. But it isn’t that hard to imagine him taking most of his potential votes from Clinton. Here’s one hypothetical case:

PREDICTED VOTE SHARESVOTER GROUPSHARE OF ELECTORATECLINTONBLOOMBERGTRUMPAfrican-Americans12%80%15%5%Hispanics, Asians and “other” races14652510White evangelicals23101080White cosmopolitans2045505White “picket fence” voters15156520White working-class voters16151570

In this scenario, Bloomberg wins about half of white cosmopolitans, along with about two-thirds of white “picket fence” voters. But he doesn’t make much inroads with the other groups, especially white evangelicals and working-class voters, who mostly go with Trump. Bloomberg takes a few black and Hispanic votes away from Clinton, but not many.

This would produce a fairly close popular-vote outcome: Trump 35.5 percent, Clinton 34.7 percent, Bloomberg 29.8 percent. (To repeat, I think this is probably very optimistic for Bloomberg.) But he’d deprive Clinton of some of the white swing voters she’d need to win the Electoral College. In fact, according to our model, this scenario would result in a fairly lopsided Electoral College win for Trump, with Trump getting 311 electoral votes to 181 for Clinton and 46 for Bloomberg, whose wins would be restricted to a handful of predominantly white states like New Hampshire with a high number of moderate and independent voters.

To repeat, this scenario does not have Trump winning all that many votes: only 35.5 percent, a figure that coincides with his low favorability ratings among the general population. But that would nonetheless be enough for Trump to win most swing states if Clinton and Bloomberg split the remainder of the vote. Here are the estimates our model produces for the traditionally most competitive states:

STATECLINTONBLOOOMBERGTRUMPWINNERColorado33.632.134.3TrumpFlorida34.629.136.3TrumpIowa30.032.937.1TrumpMichigan35.429.934.6ClintonMinnesota31.733.634.7TrumpNevada36.429.933.7ClintonNew Hampshire29.237.833.0BloombergNew Mexico39.032.628.4ClintonNorth Carolina33.824.042.2TrumpOhio32.228.739.1TrumpPennsylvania32.831.835.4TrumpVirginia35.228.836.0TrumpWisconsin31.034.734.3Bloomberg

Clinton holds up well in states in states such as New Mexico, where Democrats rely on a substantial minority turnout. But she’d be vulnerable in predominantly white states, which would mostly go to Trump (Iowa, Ohio, Minnesota) or in some cases to Bloomberg (Wisconsin, New Hampshire).

As I’ve said, these scenarios are hypothetical. But I’d encourage you to play around with the numbers yourself and see if you can get a Bloomberg-like third-party candidate within range of an Electoral College victory. More likely, a candidate who appealed to wealthy, secular, cosmopolitan white voters, but not religious whites or working-class whites, and who still ceded most minority voters to Democrats, would have a heck of a time building a plurality (much less a majority) coalition. Essentially, such a candidate would be splitting the Democratic base, while only picking up a few voters who ordinarily vote Republican.

That would be bad news for Clinton, bad news for Bloomberg — and great news for Trump. And despite fanciful maps put forward by Bloomberg’s advisors that had him competing in Tennessee and Texas, Bloomberg saw the writing on the wall and decided not to run.

Elections Podcast: Cruz Rising

Our elections podcast crew discusses last weekend’s primaries, Republican Ted Cruz’s rise in the polls and whether Donald Trump’s “ceiling” is a real thing. Plus, what to expect from the Democratic and Republican primaries Tuesday.

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Donald Trump Would Be Easy To Stop Under Democratic Rules

The other Republican candidates’ chances of stopping Donald Trump look marginally better today than they did on Friday. Trump won just two of five contests over the weekend and only 30 percent of delegates. Trump remains the front-runner, however, having won 43 percent of the delegates overall among the 20 states and territories to have voted so far.

Although that’s short of a majority, Trump will have a chance to improve on his pace as the calendar turns toward states that have more aggressive delegate allocation methods — especially winner-take-all Florida and Ohio, which vote March 15. If Trump wins both states, he’ll have a good chance of eventually getting a delegate majority. If he loses both, we might be headed to a contested convention in Cleveland. And if Trump splits them — perhaps the most likely outcome based on where polls stand — we’ll continue to be on knife’s edge.

The reason these details matter so much is because of how the GOP’s delegate rules are structured. If the Republican nomination were contested under Democratic delegate rules instead, Trump would find it almost impossible to get a majority of delegates, and a floor fight in Cleveland would already be all but inevitable. If every state awarded its delegates winner-take-all, conversely, Trump would be much further ahead, although the bigger swings these rules enable would give his opponents a chance to catch up later on. In the rest of this article, I’ll run the numbers on how many delegates Trump, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio would have won so far under three alternate sets of rules, including the two I just mentioned.

First, I’ll apply winner-take-all rules in every state.

Second, I’ll apply Democratic delegate rules. Unlike Republicans, Democrats have essentially the same rules from state to state. Specifically, their delegates are allocated proportionally, subject to a 15 percent qualifying threshold. Also, about 15 percent of Democratic delegates are superdelegates who will go to the convention unbound to any candidate.1 One complication I’ll ignore: States award some of their Democratic delegates by congressional district — some states’ Republican rules do this also — but this makes relatively little difference under proportional allocation, so my calculations are based on the statewide vote instead.

Third, I’ll apply what I call uniform Republican rules. This one requires a bit more explanation. Republican delegate rules vary quite a bit from state to state, ranging from being extremely proportional (as in, say, North Carolina) to strictly winner-take-all (in Arizona, for instance). Under my uniform rules, the allocation is the same in each state instead and is intended to reflect a compromise between proportional and winner-take-all methods. Specifically:

One-third of delegates in each state are awarded to the winning candidate. If the winning candidate gets more than 50 percent of the state’s vote, the bonus increases to half a state’s delegates.Five percent of delegates in each state are unbound, essentially making them superdelegates.The remaining delegates in each state are allocated proportionally, subject to a 15 percent minimum threshold.

These rules might seem arbitrary, but they’re meant to reflect a rough average or consensus of the methods Republicans are applying now. For instance, about 23 percent of Republican delegates are awarded winner-take-all by state2 and another 14 percent are winner-take-all by congressional district. That’s 37 percent total, close to my one-third winner-take-all bonus.3

Meanwhile, states where Republican delegates are awarded proportionally usually have a qualifying threshold, as Democrats do. The average threshold is about 15 percent, so that’s what my uniform rules apply. Furthermore, some of the proportional states become winner-take-all if a candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote, although others don’t. Hence, my compromise rules award half of the delegates to any candidate winning with a majority of votes, plus whatever additional delegates he picks up from his proportional allocation.

Finally, although Republicans don’t have superdelegates in the same way that Democrats do, they will have some delegates go to the convention unbound. Specifically, the delegations from North Dakota, Wyoming and several territories won’t be bound to any candidate; also, some delegates selected in Pennsylvania’s “loophole primary” are technically unbound. These cases represent about 5 percent of Republican delegates or perhaps a bit more, depending on how you evaluate some ambiguous rules in West Virginia and other states.

Here’s how many delegates Trump would have under each allocation method:

TRUMP’S DELEGATE COUNT UNDER …DATESTATE OR TERRITORYCURRENT RULESWINNER-TAKE-ALL RULESDEM. RULESUNIFORM GOP RULESFeb. 1Iowa7086Feb. 9New Hampshire11231418Feb. 20South Carolina50501830Feb. 23Nevada14301319March 1Alabama36502233Alaska11097Arkansas16401322Georgia43762946Massachusetts22422129Minnesota8086Oklahoma140129Tennessee33582236Texas4804029Vermont81669Virginia17491729March 5Kansas9097Kentucky17461727Louisiana18462030Maine9086March 6Puerto Rico0000Total391526306398Share of all delegates43%58%34%44%How Trump’s delegate total would change under different rules

Source: The GREEN PAPERS

Trump had 391 delegates as of Sunday evening, according to The Green Papers. Under my proposed uniform Republican rules, he’d have pretty much the same number of delegates, 398. In other words, so far Trump has neither been helped nor hurt much by the variation in delegate rules from state to state. States where Trump has benefited from more aggressive methods, such as South Carolina, have been offset by others like proportional Massachusetts.

But switching to Democratic rules would make a big difference. Between the highly proportional allocation method and the large number of superdelegates, Trump would have received only 306 delegates so far, more than any other candidate but still just 34 percent of the total. It would be hard for Trump to ever get a majority under these circumstances; he’d have to get at least 72 percent of the elected delegates from the remaining states, or he’d need help from superdelegates who might not be willing to provide it to him.

Conversely, if all Republican delegates were awarded winner-take-all, Trump would already have 526 delegates, or 58 percent of the total so far. He’d be in good shape for the nomination, although he’d still have to worry about another candidate like Cruz getting hot and winning most states in the second half of the calendar.

Speaking of which, here are the numbers for Cruz:

CRUZ’S DELEGATE COUNT UNDER …DATESTATE OR TERRITORYCURRENT RULESWINNER-TAKE-ALL RULESDEM. RULESUNIFORM GOP RULESFeb. 1Iowa830917Feb. 9New Hampshire3000Feb. 20South Carolina00129Feb. 23Nevada6064March 1Alabama130118Alaska12281017Arkansas150129Georgia1701813Massachusetts4000Minnesota130118Oklahoma16431424Tennessee1601410Texas1041556599Vermont0000Virginia8086March 5Kansas24401927Kentucky1501511Louisiana1801914Maine12231216March 6Puerto Rico0000Total304319255292Share of all delegates34%35%28%32%How Cruz’s delegate total would change under different rules

Source: The GREEN PAPERS

Cruz’s total is somewhat indifferent to these rules changes. He’d have slightly more delegates under a winner-take-all system than he does now, but he’d also be much further behind Trump. As a corollary, although he’d have fewer delegates under Democratic rules, he’d be much closer to Trump.

Rubio’s delegate math is more sensitive to rules changes:

RUBIO’S DELEGATE COUNT UNDER …DATESTATE OR TERRITORYCURRENT RULESWINNER-TAKE-ALL RULESDEM. RULESUNIFORM GOP RULESFeb. 1Iowa7086Feb. 9New Hampshire2000Feb. 20South Carolina00129Feb. 23Nevada7075March 1Alabama1097Alaska5043Arkansas90107Georgia1601813Massachusetts8085Minnesota17381323Oklahoma130118Tennessee90129Texas302719Vermont0032Virginia1601612March 5Kansas6065Kentucky7086Louisiana5000Maine0000March 6Puerto Rico23232022Total15461192161Share of all delegates17%7%21%18%How Rubio’s delegate total would change under different rules

Source: The GREEN PAPERS

Of course, winner-take-all would be awful for Rubio, who has won only Minnesota and Puerto Rico; together they’d give him just 7 percent of delegates. However, Democratic rules would be pretty good for him. He’d have 21 percent of delegates, not all that far behind Cruz’s 28 percent and Trump’s 34 percent, and with a chance to emerge as the nominee out of the highly probable contested convention.

Note how profoundly all of this would change the strategy for Republicans hoping to stop Trump. Under winner-take-all rules, it would be essential to winnow the field down to one main challenger, if it weren’t already too late. Under Democratic rules, the strategy would be for candidates to stay in the race instead, keeping Trump well short of a majority as everyone prepared for a contested convention. The Republicans’ actual rules are somewhere in between, making it hard to find the right approach.

Listen to the latest episode of the FiveThirtyEight elections podcast.

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Republican Voters Kind Of Hate All Their Choices

If we woke up one day and found that the daytime sky had permanently turned from blue to orange, we’d eventually get used to it. That wouldn’t make it any less strange, however.

So even though the battle between Donald Trump and the Republican “establishment”1 has been a story since the summer, we should still pause now and again to gawk at the spectacle. On Thursday, Mitt Romney, the previous Republican presidential nominee and the closest thing the GOP has to a party elder, denounced Trump in the strongest possible terms. Trump responded by making what sounded to me like a blow job reference.

This is really happening. At least I think.

But as spectacular as the clash between Trump and Republican “party elites” has become, the coverage of it tends to obscure another, perhaps equally important part of the story. Trump does not just divide rank-and-file voters from Republican poo-bahs. He’s also extremely divisive among Republican voters, much more so than a typical front-runner. In exit polls so far, only 49 percent of Republican voters say they would be satisfied with Trump as their nominee — remarkable considering Trump’s lead in votes and delegates. But compounding the GOP’s problems, Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz would leave only slightly more Republican voters happy.

Sean Trende, at Real Clear Politics, wrote about these satisfaction numbers earlier, so my goal here is not to duplicate his work but to provide some additional context. Specifically, it’s to point out that what we’re seeing among the Republican electorate this year is not remotely normal.

The exit polls have asked Republican voters in seven states — here’s Tennessee, for example — whether they’d be satisfied if each of Cruz, Rubio and Trump won the nomination. Remember, these are actual voters — voters who gave Trump a win in six of the seven states where the exit poll asked this question — and not some hypothetical universe of “likely voters.” On average, just 49 percent of these actual Republican voters said they’d be satisfied with Trump. The numbers for the other two candidates were better, but not by much: 53 percent of voters said they’d be satisfied with Rubio, and 51 percent with Cruz.

SHARE OF REPUBLICANS SATISFIED WITH CANDIDATE AS NOMINEEDATESTATECRUZRUBIOTRUMP2/9/16New Hampshire3841513/1/16Alabama494756Arkansas575846Georgia555553Tennessee505453Texas685943Virginia435944Average7 states515349Many Republicans would be dissatisfied with Trump, Cruz or Rubio

Source: National Election Poll Exit Polls

You might wonder whether this sort of thing always happens during a nomination campaign. The short answer is that it doesn’t. By comparison, 79 percent of Democrats this year have said they’d be satisfied with Hillary Clinton as their nominee, while 62 percent have said so of Bernie Sanders.

Eight years ago, the battle between Clinton and Barack Obama was much tenser. With a few notable exceptions in Appalachia, however, both Clinton and Obama were widely acceptable to Democrats in 2008. On average in the 35 states where the exit polls asked the question, 69 percent of Democrats said they’d be satisfied with Obama as their nominee, while 71 percent said so of Clinton:

SHARE OF DEMOCRATS SATISFIED WITH CANDIDATE AS NOMINEEDATESTATECLINTONOBAMA1/26/08South Carolina77%83%1/29/08Florida80702/5/08Alabama7069Arizona7470Arkansas8347California7670Connecticut7273Delaware7069Georgia6479Illinois6078Massachusetts7870Missouri6774New Jersey7366New Mexico7372New York7867Oklahoma6749Tennessee7661Utah68782/9/08Louisiana63642/12/08Maryland6979Virginia64822/19/08Wisconsin68823/4/08Ohio7366Rhode Island7563Texas7066Vermont70823/11/08Mississippi58694/22/08Pennsylvania73645/6/08Indiana6766North Carolina63695/13/08West Virginia74425/20/08Kentucky7643Oregon70796/3/08Montana6774South Dakota7669Average35 states7169In 2008, most Democrats were happy with both their choices

Source: National Election Poll Exit Polls

How about the Republican race in 2012? The exit polls posed the satisfaction question in only four states, and Romney’s numbers weren’t great. But they were still much better than Trump’s. On average, 63 percent of Republicans said they’d be happy with Romney as their nominee.2

SHARE OF REPUBLICANS SATISFIED WITH CANDIDATE AS NOMINEEDATESTATEGINGRICHROMNEYSANTORUM1/10/12New Hampshire35%61%38%1/31/12Florida5465533/13/12Mississippi6657674/3/12Wisconsin6760Average4 states526355Republicans were relatively satisfied with Romney in 2012

Source: National Election Poll Exit Polls

I also looked up these numbers for the 2004 Democratic and the 2008 Republican races, elections that bear some similarity to this year’s Republican race because there was no clear front-runner early on. Although it took a while for John Kerry and John McCain to catch on with voters, they eventually became very popular. In 2004, an average of 79 percent of Democrats said they’d be satisfied with Kerry as their nominee, while 77 percent of Republicans said so of McCain in 2008.

Not only is Trump’s 49 percent satisfaction rating lower than any recent party nominee’s, it’s also lower than almost all the losers’. Rick Santorum in 2012 was more widely acceptable than Trump, for example. The only exception was Ron Paul in 2012, although the exit polls asked about him in only two states.

CAMPAIGNCANDIDATESTATES POLLEDSHARE OF PARTY’S VOTERS SATISFIED WITH CANDIDATE2004 Dem.Kerry1679%2016 Dem.Clinton8792008 Rep.McCain6772008 Dem.Clinton35712008 Dem.Obama35692012 Rep.Romney4632016 Dem.Sanders8622004 Dem.Edwards9572012 Rep.Santorum4552008 Rep.Huckabee4542016 Rep.Rubio7532012 Rep.Gingrich3522016 Rep.Cruz7512016 Rep.Trump7492012 Rep.Paul233No recent precedent for a front-runner as divisive as Trump

Source: National Election Poll Exit Polls

So how is Trump winning? Partly it’s because the field is so divided, as Trende wrote. Campaign reporters perhaps ought to do more to distinguish between a candidate who is winning 34 percent of his party’s vote, as Trump has done so far, and one winning with 60 percent, as Clinton has. Clinton has a much clearer mandate than Trump does. But it’s also partly because Rubio and Cruz leave many Republicans dissatisfied. Maybe if Romney had run himself?

Check out our live coverage of the Republican debate.

Elections Podcast: Breaking Down Super Tuesday

After a long night of watching Super Tuesday results, our elections podcast crew convened a late-night session to discuss what we learned and what comes next.

http://c.espnradio.com/s:5L8r1/audio/2694142/fivethirtyeightelections_2016-03-02-023242.64k.mp3?ad_params=zones%3DPreroll%2CPreroll2%2CMidroll%2CMidroll2%2CMidroll3%2CMidroll4%2CMidroll5%2CMidroll6%2CPostroll%2CPostroll2%7Cstation_id%3D4278Subscribe: iTunes |Download |RSS |Video

Virtual @ClareMalone streaming in as we prepare to record our Super Tuesday reax podcast. pic.twitter.com/lCcrsmXdvf

— Micah Cohen (@micahcohen) March 2, 2016

You can stream or download the full episode above. You can also find us by searching “fivethirtyeight” in your favorite podcast app, or subscribe using the RSS feed. Check out all our other shows.

If you’re a fan of the elections podcast, leave us a rating and review on iTunes, which helps other people discover the show. Have a comment, want to suggest something for “good polling vs. bad polling” or want to ask a question? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

Can Republicans Still Take The Nomination Away From Trump?

It’s tempting to go granular after a night like Super Tuesday. What if Marco Rubio had won a few more votes in Virginia? What if Donald Trump had a few more in Oklahoma and Alaska? What about the delegate math? It’s not that these are unworthy questions. After a night that was pretty good for Trump but also not the kind of historic showing that would have put the Republican race away, we’ll have plenty of time to dissect what happened in the coming days.

But another, perhaps more important question is still unanswered: Does Trump have a mandate from Republican voters?

I know: The whole “mandate” thing is fuzzy. But this definition comes pretty close to my meaning: “that the electorate broadly supports your plans and has told you so with an electoral victory.” Are Republican voters, at enormous consequence, really ready to transform their party into the party of Trump? Or instead, do his victories so far reflect the lack of a clear alternative?

This is a familiar argument, and to some people it would seem to have an obvious answer: of course Trump has a mandate! He’s won 10 of the 15 states and far more delegates than anyone else. He’s also leading in national polls — and polls of most future states. He’s been the center of attention for more than half a year and his voters have stuck with him.

But there’s also the fact that Trump has received only 34 percent of the Republican vote, aggregated across all primaries and caucuses to have voted so far. He did not really improve on that figure on Super Tuesday; Trump had a combined 33 percent of the vote through the first four states (Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada); he got 34 percent in Super Tuesday states themselves.

CANDIDATECUMULATIVE POPULAR VOTEDonald Trump34.2%Ted Cruz28.1Marco Rubio21.7John Kasich6.6Ben Carson5.8Jeb Bush1.7Chris Christie0.4About one-third of Republicans have voted for Trump so far

Reflects results through early morning on March 2, 2016

Source:www.thegreenpapers.com

There’s been a lot of debate among pundits about this — in particular, about whether Trump has a “ceiling.” Some of it has been pretty aggravating to follow because it tends to conflate Trump’s ceiling (the share of voters who would potentially be willing to vote for Trump) with his floor (the share who will stick with him no matter what). It also tends to neglect that Trump is more popular in some parts of the country than others. So far, he’s received as little as 21 percent of the vote (in Minnesota) and as much as 49 percent (in Massachusetts).

The simplest test of Trump’s mandate (or lack thereof) would be if every other candidate dropped out and Trump were matched up with Rubio or Cruz one-on-one. However, Tuesday’s results made that less likely. The dilemma is that while Cruz has done better so far, winning more states (including three on Tuesday), votes and delegates than Rubio, there’s reason to think Rubio will do better going forward. In contrast to Cruz, who has benefited from a calendar full of states with lots of evangelical voters, Rubio’s best states are probably ahead of him and he has higher favorability ratings than Cruz.

As a result, we’ve increasingly seen the campaigns, especially Rubio’s and Kasich’s, talk about winning at a contested convention in Cleveland. I’m of a few minds about this. First, the fact that the other campaigns are resorting to drawing up plans for a contested convention has to count as a pretty good sign for Trump. Second, the talk may be premature. As the calendar turns toward states with more aggressive (sometimes winner-take-all) delegate rules — particularly Florida and Ohio on March 15 — it will become easier to rack up a delegate majority even with plurality support. That probably works to Trump’s benefit, although it also means that Cruz or Rubio could rack up quite a few delegates if they “get hot” later on during the campaign.

But the possibility of a contested convention is part of why the notion of a “mandate” is important. If (for instance) Trump has won 37 of 50 states and 49.9 percent of delegates going into the convention, then technically Republicans might be able to deny him the nomination. For that matter, technically they’d be able to deny Trump the nomination even if he had a delegate majority by changing the rules at the last minute. But the cure might be worse than the disease. It could look as though Republican elites were overriding their voters’ popular will (because, uh, that’s pretty much what they’d be doing). It might even be a casus belli for Trumpism. Even if some Republicans thought it was essential to prevent Trump from winning the presidency, there could be better means to accomplish that, especially by forming a conservative third-party ticket.1

By contrast, if Trump didn’t have that seeming mandate — if he were far short of a delegate majority, if he were still unable to secure more than 34 percent of the vote as we got deeper into the calendar, if he’d started to lose quite a few major states (even if not always to the same opponent) in April and beyond — it would be less risky to deny him the nomination.

All of this is speculative, and unavoidably so, because we haven’t had a contested convention since the modern primary era began in 1972. My point is simply that anti-Trump Republicans ought to look for ways to test their voters’ resolve to back Trump. They could develop better anti-Trump advertising campaigns, which have received shockingly little financial backing so far. Even if they can’t push Trump’s opponents out of the race, they can push back against a media-driven coronation of Trump or a premature consolidation around him. They ought to make Trump fight like hell for the nomination through all 50 states. But if he seems to have earned it, they probably shouldn’t count on taking it away from him.

The FiveThirtyEight Elections podcast discusses the Super Tuesday results.

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Super Tuesday Could Be Historic For Trump

For this week’s 2016 Slack chat, the FiveThirtyEight politics team takes a 30,000-foot view of Super Tuesday. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

Check out our live coverage of Super Tuesday.

micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): It’s Super Tuesday! The Tuesday that beats all other Tuesdays. We’ve written a lot about the states that will vote today and who’s favored in each on both the Republican and Democratic sides. So for today’s chat, let’s take a step back: What’s at stake? Can Donald Trump lock up the Republican nomination? Can Hillary Clinton secure the Democratic nomination? What does Ted Cruz need to do to remain viable? How about Marco Rubio?

Let’s start here, though: If the polls are right, and Trump wins 9+ states out of the 11 available, what should the banner headline say on the front page of tomorrow’s New York Times?

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): “Trump Sweeps South To Firm Grip On G.O.P. Race”

harry (Harry Enten, senior political writer): I’d rather do the New York Daily News headline.

micah: OK, Harry, what’s the NY Daily News headline?

harry: My guess is Trump is either in a clown or KKK costume.

natesilver: That’s not a headline, Harry.

harry: “America is not smarter than a 5th-grader.”

clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): I’ll go Times. I feel like it’s gonna be one of those “THIS IS HISTORIC” ones. So it’ll be along the lines of, “Trump Firmly in Lead of GOP Race with Super Tuesday Sweep; Clinton Continues Rise, Democrats Increasingly Scared Shitless of Trump Inevitability.” (Because I think you can say “shit” in NYT headlines once Trump wins the nomination, right?)

natesilver: “In Pants, Poop.” I don’t think Democrats are actually scared of Trump yet, though.

clare.malone: I dunno. I think they are definitely taking him seriously. I don’t think you can afford to discount him, given what you see in the GOP field, what happened this fall.

harry: I think some Democrats honestly are scared. You can see it in Greg Sargent’s writing.

natesilver: It might be changing, but if so I think it’s relatively recent. It’s not a perfect indicator, but I was looking at Hillary Clinton’s (boring) Twitter feed. There’s very little in there about Trump.

clare.malone: There was a front page Times story today about Clinton’s team prepping for Trump. (I read the actual factual physical paper this morning, and I think it was above the fold.)

micah: Yeah, I think that’s changing, and if she does as well as we expect tonight, she’ll probably pivot almost fully to focusing on Trump.

harry: Look at what Clinton has done so far this campaign: They have left nothing to chance once they realized the Bernie Sanders threat. They see how Republicans didn’t pay attention to Trump, and look what happened to them.

natesilver: You still have a lot of Democrats who either (i) don’t know how close Trump may soon be to winning the GOP nomination or (ii) are rooting for him because they think he’ll be easier to beat in November. I agree that the Clinton campaign itself probably won’t make that mistake, though.

The Clinton campaign will look really smart, in retrospect, for organizing the hell out of Iowa even before they really had a Democratic opponent and securing their win/tie there.

micah: So, in a world where Trump wins 9+ contests today, fill in the blank: “Donald Trump is the ___________ front-runner to win the Republican nomination.”

clare.malone: Mad Libs!

natesilver: Indisputable.

clare.malone: Formidable.

harry: I concur: Formidable.

micah: And if Clinton meets/exceeds her polling today, do this one: “Hillary Clinton is the ___________ front-runner to win the Democratic nomination.”

natesilver: Overwhelming.

harry: A big scandal would need to come to light for her to lose.

natesilver: Harry: “Hillary Clinton is the a big scandal would need to come to light for her to lose front-runner to win the Democratic nomination.”

micah: Yeah, Harry isn’t good at these games.

clare.malone: Yeah, Harry is not great at Mad Libs. I don’t have a good word, though. Nate’s works, I guess. Or something along the lines of … “Inevitable once again.” Because that old HRC inevitability was touch-and-go for a while.

natesilver: “Reinevitable.”

micah: We should try to make “reinevitable” a thing.

So why are you all choosing stronger words for Clinton than for Trump?

clare.malone: Because math and stuff?

harry: Because a big, big part of the base of the Democratic Party is African-American, and she is winning them 7-to-1. But it’s more than that: The delegate rules on the Democratic side are fully proportional. If Clinton gains a large lead in the delegate count, a Bernie comeback is going to be near impossible.

natesilver: Because the Democratic race isn’t as existentially strange as the GOP race.

clare.malone: I just came from a Trump rally and saw a guy wearing Topsiders. The GOP race is existentially strange indeed.

micah: All right, let’s move to Rubio … what’s at stake for him today? What’s his best case/worst case?

clare.malone: Scoops up some solid second places, I think, gathers a decent number of delegates into his basket.

harry: He wins a state or two, clears the delegate threshold in every state and finishes ahead of Cruz in almost every state.

micah: If he doesn’t win any state — which seems plausible, or even likely — he’s not screwed?

clare.malone: He still has Florida to pin his hopes on, right?

natesilver: He still has Florida to pin his hopes on, but it’ll be tough for him to gain ground in Florida if he doesn’t have anything to hang his hat on tonight.

harry: Yes, and he is losing in every single poll there.

natesilver: Without a win, the morale of Rubio supporters will be low, other candidates are less likely to drop out, his press coverage will be awful, etc. There’s probably a narrow path wherein he runs a lot of strong seconds and beats Cruz all over the place, but a win would really help, perception-wise.

harry: Seems like Rubio folks are expecting to have to rally the troops. If Rubio could somehow manage to win Alaska, Minnesota and Virginia and Cruz wins Texas, it could somewhat dent Trump.

clare.malone: Alaska could be his Super Tuesday lord and savior — whodathunk?

natesilver: “You forgot Alaska” could be the new “you forgot Poland.”

harry: Side note: Bush won that “you forgot Poland” election.

micah: What about Cruz? Is it basically a binary thing for Cruz? Win/lose Texas?

natesilver: Win Texas and hope Rubio has a bad night.

clare.malone: Yeah, I think Cruz is soon to be hitting the booze, alone, no longer a presidential candidate.

harry: He needs a bigger-than-expected win in Texas. Win Alaska (maybe? doubtful). Get over the delegate thresholds in all the Southern states. Have Rubio not win a single state and fail to get over the thresholds in some states.

natesilver: Arkansas and Oklahoma once seemed like winnable states for Cruz also, but Trump has closed strongly in polling pretty much everywhere. I will note that Trump has sometimes underperformed his polling on election day itself, however, while Rubio and Cruz have tended to outperform theirs. So there’s a bit of hope for Cruz/Rubio, just not much.

harry: Arkansas is still a weird state. There isn’t a lot of data there. SurveyMonkey, which has been optimistic on Trump compared to the polling average, had Trump only up 7 percentage points over Cruz there.

clare.malone: An Oklahoma pollster laid out the Cruz problem to me in a way that I thought was really good; he said Cruz won the battle in Iowa but in doing so, lost the war (all this is referring to evangelicals). They are no longer on Team Cruz because they’re getting icky feelings from him, like his team isn’t playing straight.

harry: The “Cruz is a liar” thing really seems to have stuck.

natesilver: Look, maybe one way to put it is that if Super Tuesday goes as we expect — lots of states light up for Trump — we move from the “end of the beginning” to the “beginning of the end.”

micah: Are John Kasich and Ben Carson factors at all?

clare.malone: Carson never; Kasich not today.

natesilver: Kasich’s plan: 1. Win Ohio. 2. ??? 3. Become Republican nominee.

harry: Kasich is a factor in Vermont. He’ll do fairly well there, and it’s possible in doing so that he keeps Rubio from hitting the threshold for viability, allowing Trump to sweep its small delegate prize.

micah: All right, so it seems like the range of outcomes depending on today’s results are Trump Big Front-runner —> Trump Front-runner. But let’s go back to the Democratic race: What’s Sanders’s best-case scenario?

clare.malone: Eat a pint of Ben and Jerry’s at the end of the night. Win Oklahoma.

natesilver: Win Massachusetts, Oklahoma, Colorado and Minnesota.

harry: Ha! And Vermont! That won’t keep him close in the delegate count, but it’ll look good.

natesilver: Oh, and Vermont. VERMONT IS A MUST-WIN FOR BERNIE SANDERS.

harry: I want that ice cream, and I want it now. Can we get ice cream after this chat?

micah: Only if it’s Bernie’s Yearning:

Any parting thoughts?

natesilver: To bring this full circle: Our headline tomorrow morning might wind up being a little bit Timesian too, because a Trump sweep or near-sweep would be historically significant.

Listen to the latest episode of the FiveThirtyEight Elections podcast.

http://c.espnradio.com/s:5L8r1/audio/2692891/fivethirtyeightelections_2016-02-29-173431.64k.mp3?ad_params=zones%3DPreroll%2CPreroll2%2CMidroll%2CMidroll2%2CMidroll3%2CMidroll4%2CMidroll5%2CMidroll6%2CPostroll%2CPostroll2%7Cstation_id%3D4278Subscribe: iTunes |Download |RSS |Video

Elections Podcast: Super Tuesday Is Here

Our elections podcast crew previews Super Tuesday and discusses whether Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are locks to win the Republican and Democratic nominations, respectively. Be sure to read our guides — Republican and Democratic — to Super Tuesday.

http://c.espnradio.com/s:5L8r1/audio/2692891/fivethirtyeightelections_2016-02-29-173431.64k.mp3?ad_params=zones%3DPreroll%2CPreroll2%2CMidroll%2CMidroll2%2CMidroll3%2CMidroll4%2CMidroll5%2CMidroll6%2CPostroll%2CPostroll2%7Cstation_id%3D4278Subscribe: iTunes |Download |RSS |Video

You can stream or download the full episode above. You can also find us by searching “fivethirtyeight” in your favorite podcast app, or subscribe using the RSS feed. Check out all our other shows.

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