Nate Silver's Blog, page 139

Don’t Assume Conservatives Will Rally Behind Trump

If Donald Trump wins the Republican presidential nomination, he’ll have undermined a lot of assumptions we once held about the GOP. He’ll have become the nominee despite neither being reliably conservative nor being very electable, supposedly the two things Republicans care most about. He’ll have done it with very little support from “party elites” (although with some recent exceptions like Chris Christie). He’ll have attacked the Republican Party’s three previous candidates — Mitt Romney, John McCain and George W. Bush — without many consequences. If a Trump nomination happens, it will imply that the Republican Party has been weakened and is perhaps even on the brink of failure, unable to coordinate on a plan to stop Trump despite the existential threat he poses to it.

Major partisan realignments do happen in America — on average about once every 40 years. The last one, which involved the unwinding of the New Deal coalition between Northern and Southern Democrats, is variously dated as having occurred in 1968, 1972 and 1980. There are also a lot of false alarms, elections described as realignments that turn out not to be. This time, we really might be in the midst of one. It’s almost impossible to reconcile this year’s Republican nomination contest with anyone’s notion of “politics as usual.”

If a realignment is underway, then it poses a big empirical challenge. Presidential elections already suffer from the problem of small sample sizes — one reason a lot of people, certainly including us, shouldn’t have been so dismissive of Trump’s chances early on. Elections held in the midst of political realignments are even rarer, however. The rules of the old regime — the American political party system circa 1980 through 2012 — might not apply in the new one. And yet, it’s those elections that inform both the conventional wisdom and statistical models of American political behavior.

This doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll be completely in the dark. For one thing, the polls — although there’s reason to be concerned about their condition in the long-term — have been reasonably accurate so far in the primaries. And some of the old rules will still apply. It’s probably fair to guess that Pennsylvania and Ohio will vote similarly, for example.

Still, one should be careful about one’s assumptions. For instance, the assumption that the parties will rally behind their respective nominees may or may not be reliable. True, recent elections have had very little voting across party lines: 93 percent of Republicans who voted in 2012 supported Romney, for example, despite complaints from the base that he was insufficiently conservative. And in November 2008, some 89 percent of Democrats who voted supported Barack Obama after his long battle with Hillary Clinton.

But we may be entering a new era, and through the broader sweep of American history, there’s sometimes been quite a bit of voting across party lines. The table below reflects, in each election since 1952, what share of a party’s voters voted against their party’s presidential candidate (e.g., a Democrat voting Republican or for a third-party ticket). There’s a lot of fascinating political history embedded in the table, but one theme is that divisive nominations have consequences.

ELECTIONDEMOCRATSREPUBLICANS195223%8%195615419601651964132019682614197233519762011198033151984267198817819922327199615192000139200411720081110201287Share of party’s voters voting against its presidential candidate

Sources: Gallup (1952-1972), National Exit Polls (1976-2012)

In 1972, for instance, about a third of Democrats voted for Richard Nixon rather than George McGovern, who won the Democratic nomination despite getting only about a quarter of the popular vote during the primaries. The Democrats’ tumultuous nomination process in 1968 was nearly as bad, with many defections to both Nixon and George Wallace. The 1964 Republican nomination of Barry Goldwater produced quite a few defections. Primary challenges to Jimmy Carter in 1980 and George H.W. Bush in 1992 presaged high levels of inter-party voting in November.

There are also some exceptions; Republicans remained relatively united behind Gerald Ford in 1976 despite a primary challenge from Ronald Reagan. And there were high levels of Democratic unity behind Obama in 2008, although one can argue that a party having two good choices is a much lesser problem than it having none it can agree upon.

Overall, however, the degree of party unity during the primaries is one of the better historical predictors of the November outcome. That could be a problem for Republicans whether they nominate Trump or turn around and nominate Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz or John Kasich; significant numbers of GOP voters are likely to be angry either way.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that Republicans are bound to lose; I’d agree with David Plouffe’s assessment that a general election with Trump on the ballot is hard to predict and that Trump “could lose in a landslide or win narrowly.” But if I wouldn’t bet on an anti-Trump landslide, I’m also not sure I’d bet against one. The presumption that presidential elections are bound to be close is itself based on an uncomfortably small sample size: While three of the four elections since 2000 have been fairly close, most of them between 1952 and 1996 were not. Furthermore, the closeness of recent elections is partly a consequence of intense partisanship, which Trump’s nomination suggests may be fraying. The last partisan realignment, between about 1968 and 1980, produced both some highly competitive elections (1968, 1976) and some blowouts (1972, 1980).

Although what voters do will ultimately be more important, it will also be worth watching how Republican Party elites behave and how much they unite behind Trump. On Twitter this weekend, there was a lot of activity behind the hashtag #NeverTrump, with various conservative intellectuals and operatives pledging that they’d refuse to support Trump in November. Rubio’s Twitter account employed the hashtag also, although Rubio himself has been ambiguous about whether he’d back Trump.

It’s reasonably safe to say that some of the people in the #NeverTrump movement will, in fact, wind up supporting Trump. Clinton, very likely the Democratic nominee, is a divisive figure, and some anti-Trump conservatives will conclude that Trump is the lesser of two evils. Others will get caught up in the esprit de corps of the election. Some of them might be reassured by how Trump conducts himself during the general election campaign or whom he picks as his running mate.

But I’d be equally surprised if there were total capitulation to Trump. Instead, I’d expect quite a bit of resistance from Republican elites. One thing this election has probably taught us is that there are fewer movement conservatives than those within the conservative movement might want to admit. Rank-and-file Republican voters aren’t necessarily all that ideological, and they might buy into some of the Republican platform while rejecting other parts of it. They might care more about Trump’s personality than his policy views.

But there are certainly some movement conservatives, and they have outsized influence on social media, talk radio, television and in other arenas of political discourse. And if you are a movement conservative, Trump is arguably a pretty terrible choice, taking your conservative party and remaking it in his unpredictable medley of nationalism, populism and big-government Trumpism.

If you’re one of these ideological conservatives, it may even be in your best interest for Trump to lose in November. If Trump loses, especially by a wide margin, his brand of politics will probably be discredited, or his nomination might look like a strange, one-off “black swan” that you’ll be better equipped to prevent the next time around. You’ll have an opportunity to get your party back in 2020, and your nominee might stand a pretty decent chance against Clinton, who could be elected despite being quite unpopular because Trump is even less popular and who would be aiming for the Democratic Party’s fourth straight term in office.

But if Trump wins in November, you might as well relocate the Republican National Committee’s headquarters to Trump Tower. The realignment of the Republican Party will be underway, and you’ll have been left out of it.

 

Who’s on track to win the Democratic and Republican nominations? Check out our new interactive delegate tracker.

Christie’s Endorsement Of Trump Totally Makes Sense

UPDATE (Feb. 26, 5:20 p.m.): Not long after Chris Christie endorsed Trump, Maine Gov. Paul LePage jumped on board the Trump train too.

Well, this is big news: New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie endorsed Donald Trump for president on Friday. This is Trump’s first endorsement from a Republican governor, and, more to the point, Christie is easily the most mainstream Republican who has backed Trump so far.

But just how surprising is Christie’s endorsement? Is it a one-off — or a sign of things to come?

My view is that it’s not quite as shocking as it might seem. We noticed during the campaign that Christie was strangely reluctant to go after Trump, even after Trump spread mistruths about Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the Sept. 11 terror attacks. This seemed to us like a poor strategic choice for Christie, whose campaign slogan was “telling it like it is” and whose alpha-male personality gave him the chance to break out of the “establishment lane” and compete for Trump voters.

There’s a lot that ties Christie and Trump together, however. Christie and Trump have a close personal relationship. Trump has long done business in Atlantic City and is quite popular among New Jersey Republicans. Neither Christie nor Trump is especially conservative, and they’re certainly not small-government conservatives. Both can rankle their fellow Republicans, as Christie did with his self-serving convention speech and embrace of President Obama during the 2012 campaign.

Some of this may also be plain old opportunism. Trump is the most likely Republican nominee, after all. (Or at least one of the two most likely if you’re feeling very generous to Marco Rubio.) If nominated, Trump will have to pick a running mate. And if he’s elected president, he’ll have to appoint a Cabinet. Vice President Christie or Attorney General Christie ain’t all that far-fetched.

Christie also replicates many of Trump’s weaknesses, however. Like Trump, Christie is very unpopular with general election voters. Like Trump, he has been accused of cronyism and corruption. Like Trump, he can come across as a bully. So Rubio and Ted Cruz won’t have to change their messaging all that much.

Still, the Christie endorsement steps on Rubio’s buzz after a strong debate Thursday night and once again proves how easily Trump can control the news cycle. Christie, long a favorite subject of political reporters, will also be an effective surrogate for Trump.

It probably also won’t be the last major endorsement for Trump. Even if most “party elites” continue to resist Trump, a lot of Republican elected officials will be looking after their own best interests instead of the collective good of the party. Some will back Trump because he’s popular in their states. Some will be looking for opportunities within a Trump administration. Some will agree with Trump’s views on immigration or his critique of the political establishment. So there will be more of these endorsements, probably. But it isn’t surprising that Christie is one of the first.

Marco Rubio Finally Steps Up As The Anti-Trump

After Donald Trump’s win in South Carolina on Saturday, there seemed to be a general consensus about where the Republican race stood, one we pretty much agreed with. Trump, according to betting markets, had about a 50 percent chance of becoming the nominee. Marco Rubio, who had closed strongly to finish in second place in South Carolina, had about a 40 percent chance as the leading traditional candidate. And the rest of the GOP field had only about a 10 percent chance combined.

But somehow over the course of five days between the South Carolina primary and the GOP debate in Houston on Thursday night, the conventional wisdom changed. The news media began to talk about Trump as not just the plurality favorite, or the odds-on frontrunner, but instead as the “inevitable” Republican nominee. Trump’s stock shot up in prediction markets to a 75 percent chance of the nomination.

Was this justified or out of proportion? Certainly, Trump had a good week. He crushed his competition in Nevada. He got excellent polls in states such as Florida and Virginia. He earned his first two endorsements from members of Congress. And some reporting suggested that major GOP donors were unwilling to contribute to anti-Trump advertisements, even though Trump could be a total disaster for the Republican “establishment.”

Some of these achievements are not quite the unambiguous successes they might seem, however. Trump’s Nevada win was yuge, as you might say, but fairly close to what was predicted by polls and prognosticators, meaning that the result could have been priced into the conventional wisdom beforehand. Meanwhile, with so many polls coming out in so many states, it can be easy to cherry-pick: Trump had a really excellent set of polls on Thursday, but he had some mediocre ones earlier in the week. Those endorsements? Yes, Trump finally got on the board, but Rubio got 20 of them since South Carolina while also knocking Jeb Bush out of the race.

Then Rubio took matters into his own hands in the Houston debate. I’d written ahead of time that it would be smart for Rubio to attack Trump, so you won’t be surprised to learn that I thought he had a good night, even though Trump was effective in parrying some of the attempts. My FiveThirtyEight colleagues agreed — Rubio averaged an A- in the grades our staff submitted anonymously, as compared to a B for Ted Cruz and a C+ for Trump.

CANDIDATEAVERAGE GRADEHIGH GRADELOW GRADEMarco RubioA-A+B-Ted CruzBADDonald TrumpC+B+D-John KasichCA-FBen CarsonD+A-FFiveThirtyEight’s Republican debate grades

Will voters at home see things the same way? There’s always the chance they won’t. Furthermore, there’s reason to think that most of Trump’s supporters are firmly attached to him: Even if Trump has a ceiling, he also has a floor, with 30 percent to 35 percent of Republican voters having been committed to him for months.1

Even if Rubio doesn’t pick off many Trump supporters, however, his debate performance probably helped him in other respects. First, while it can be easy to overestimate how much this matters, he’ll probably succeed in changing his news coverage a bit. The media, perhaps having grown wary of Rubio’s previous overpromising, had been taking an increasingly glass-half-empty view of his candidacy. Even though Rubio had some decent news this week — the endorsements, the Bush dropout, a series of polls showing him pulling ahead of Ted Cruz in Southern states, a couple of second-place finishes — the press wasn’t having any of it. Now, at the very least, they’ll need to introduce some notes of caution, while Rubio will improve the morale of his supporters and surrogates.

Second and more importantly, Rubio emerged forcefully as the anti-Trump candidate. In contrast to his previous, sometimes passive performances, Rubio was so eager to be the alpha male on stage that he’d butt in on exchanges between Trump and Cruz in addition to picking his own fights with Trump. That sends a signal to Republican voters, donors and party elites: If you want to take down Trump, I’m your guy. These Republicans can now choose to coordinate around Rubio as an anti-Trump focal point, both in the sense of having the best chance to beat Trump and as the best conduit for attacks.

The debate could also inspire further attacks on Trump from Rubio and other Republicans. Lines of attack on Trump University or Trump’s employment of undocumented immigrants haven’t been tested much, but that’s better for Rubio than their having been tested and failed.

Rubio does have a narrow path to the nomination. It will probably require, first, for him to improve upon his current polling on Super Tuesday: Even a couple of percentage points taken from Cruz would probably be enough for Rubio to beat Cruz almost everywhere but Texas. A couple more percentage points and Rubio could be competitive with Trump in states like Virginia. Then he’ll have to make some further progress before March 15, when winner-take-all Florida and Ohio vote, and probably hope that one or more of his rivals drops out. Polls of a hypothetical one-on-one matchup between Trump and Rubio show a competitive race.

It’s not a great hand to play, particularly since there’s no guarantee Rubio’s rivals will concede the race any time soon. But we’re already so far off the empirical radar in terms of anything that has happened in a nomination campaign that it’s hard to assess the odds exactly. Perhaps that’s why prediction markets have fluctuated so much: Trump at once seems like the inevitable GOP nominee and an impossible one. In Houston, Rubio put that existential dilemma aside and recognized that, whatever Trump’s odds to begin with, they’ll be lower once he’s finally attacked.

Listen to the latest episode of the FiveThirtyEight Elections podcast.

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Bernie Sanders Doesn’t Need Momentum — He Needs To Win These States

The media narrative of the Democratic presidential race is that Bernie Sanders has lost momentum to Hillary Clinton. After nearly beating Clinton in Iowa and then crushing her in New Hampshire, Sanders had a setback on Saturday, the story goes, losing Nevada to Clinton by 5 percentage points. And this weekend, Sanders is about to lose South Carolina and lose it badly.

All of this is true insofar as it goes. But it doesn’t do nearly enough to account for the demographic differences between the states. Considering the state’s demographics, Sanders’s 5-point loss in Nevada was probably more impressive than his photo-finish in Iowa. It was possibly even a more impressive result than his 22-point romp in New Hampshire. Meanwhile, a big loss in South Carolina would be relatively easy to forgive.

That doesn’t mean Sanders is in great shape, however. Based on the polling so far, Sanders is coming up short of where he needs to be in most Super Tuesday (March 1) states, along with major industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania where he’ll need to run neck and neck with Clinton later on.

These conclusions come from a set of state-by-state targets we’ve calculated for Sanders and Clinton, which are based on some simple demographic factors in each state. As has been clear for a long while, Sanders performs better in whiter and more liberal states. But the abundance of new polling from Super Tuesday states, along with the Nevada result, gives us the data to establish more accurate benchmarks than the ones we set before. (See last week’s article “Bernie Sanders’s Path To The Nomination” for our previous estimates.) In particular, although Sanders might not have won the Hispanic vote in Nevada, he’s clearly made up ground among Hispanic voters. African-Americans, in contrast, remain overwhelmingly in Clinton’s camp. There may also be an urban/rural divide in the Democratic vote, with Sanders performing better in more rural areas.

Here are the latest numbers. I must emphasize that these are not predictions of what will happen in these states. Instead, they’re estimates of what would happen if the national vote were evenly divided between Sanders and Clinton (which it isn’t yet). In other words, they tell us whether each state is Sanders-leaning or Clinton-leaning relative to the national average. Sanders will need to beat these targets to have a shot at the nomination, especially since a tie would probably go to Clinton because of superdelegates. As you can see, however, Sanders is currently running behind these benchmarks in states with recent polling.

Take the Super Tuesday states, for instance. Our benchmarks suggest that Sanders ought to win Vermont, Minnesota, Colorado, Massachusetts, Oklahoma and Tennessee to be on track for the nomination. Sanders is going to rout Clinton in Vermont, of course; he’s also slightly ahead in Massachusetts polls, although not by as much as our targets say he “should” be. There hasn’t been enough recent polling in Colorado or Minnesota for us to make forecasts of the caucuses there, but we’d probably consider Sanders the favorite in those states also.

Sanders trails in polls of Oklahoma (narrowly) and Tennessee (badly), however, when he probably needs to win those states too. Meanwhile, he’s losing states such as Georgia by a wider margin than our benchmarks suggest he can afford. The Democrats’ delegate allocation is quite proportional, so these margins matter; underperforming his targets on Super Tuesday would mean that Sanders would have to make up more ground later on with less time left on the clock.

But the March 15 states don’t look great for Sanders either: He trails Clinton in Ohio when that’s a state where he should be able to fight her to a draw. There’s less polling for the contests beyond March 15, but the states where we have recent numbers, such as Pennsylvania, are fairly discouraging for Sanders also.

So Sanders is doomed? If he doesn’t beat these polls, then probably yes — Sanders is not going to win the Democratic nomination if he’s losing Ohio by 13 percentage points. And if Clinton has a really good night on Super Tuesday — by winning Massachusetts, for instance — that would take almost all the suspense out of the race.

But Sanders still has time to make up ground. And as we said at the outset, he’s made progress so far.

Let’s step back a bit. The benchmarks in this article are similar to the ones we published last week, but with some important exceptions. For instance, our earlier benchmarks reflected a combination of polling, demographics, Facebook “likes” and fundraising, but this time, they reflect demographics only. For a variety of reasons, we think this is a methodologically superior approach.1 For example, we’re now treating African-Americans differently from Hispanics and other non-white voting groups. Whereas Clinton leads emphatically among African-Americans, her advantage among Hispanics is more ambiguous. See the footnotes for more detail on our methodology.2

These new benchmarks make Sanders’s performance in white, liberal and rural Iowa look worse than before; they suggest that he should have won Iowa by 19 percentage points instead of essentially tying Clinton. In New Hampshire, Sanders won by 22 percentage points, but the benchmark says he should have won by 32 percentage points, a 10-point gap.

In Nevada, however, Sanders came within 5 percentage points of his benchmark. And what if Sanders loses South Carolina by 25 percentage points, as polls now have it? That’s only slightly behind his benchmark of a 20-point loss. It might not seem like it on the surface, but by these numbers, he’s been gaining ground.

But, again, I don’t want to make this out to be incredibly encouraging for Sanders. His polling in the Super Tuesday states looks pretty bad, even after allowing for the fact that they aren’t a great set of states for him. Still, follow the numbers in these states and not the talk about who has “momentum.”

Listen to the latest episode of the FiveThirtyEight Elections podcast.

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Elections Podcast: Racism Among Trump’s Supporters

Our elections podcast convenes a special edition of “good use of polling or bad use of polling?” to discuss some recent data suggesting that many of Donald Trump’s supporters are intolerant and racist.

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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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Nevada Was Great For Donald Trump, Bad For Ted Cruz

Let’s get right to the point: Donald Trump had a great night, easily winning the Nevada GOP caucuses on Tuesday. The 46 percent of the vote he received is by far the highest share won by Trump, or any other Republican, in any state so far. Marco Rubio placed a distant second, with 24 percent of the vote, and Ted Cruz finished in third with 21 percent.

If South Carolina, which Trump won Saturday, provided some bits of good news for Trump skeptics — Trump faded over the course of the week and finished with less of the vote than he had in New Hampshire — his victory in Nevada was much more emphatic. Trump proved he could win in a relatively low-turnout environment,1 suggesting that his lack of a traditional “ground game” may not be that harmful to him.

The result underscores that preventing Trump from winning the nomination is likely to require both that anti-Trump Republicans coalesce around an alternative and that they adopt a much more aggressive strategy in probing Trump for signs of weakness. On the first point, anti-Trump Republicans have made some progress: Rubio, who narrowly finished second in both South Carolina and Nevada, has received a cavalcade of endorsements in recent days as Republican “party elites” have increasingly rallied around him as the top alternative to Trump.

But there are not yet many signs of a concerted effort to attack Trump. Instead, reports from Politico and other news organizations suggest that potential conservative donors are largely sitting on the sidelines. Remarkably little advertising money has been spent against Trump so far, especially given his position in the race. Rubio has also conspicuously avoided attacking Trump.

Here are a few other stray thoughts about the Nevada result — written early in the morning from New York and not, unfortunately, the New York-New York Hotel and Casino:

There were a lot of reports about voting irregularities. Although it’s hard to say exactly how widespread these issues were, they are nevertheless another reason to prefer primaries to caucuses — and they may put Nevada’s status as a “first four” state in jeopardy in 2020 and beyond. They don’t, however, invalidate Trump’s win. One of the functions of polling is to provide a check against profound voting irregularities, and the results in Nevada were reasonably in line with both pre-election polls and the entrance poll in the state.Tuesday night’s results were very bad news for Cruz. It’s not just that it was his third third-place finish in a row. It’s also how Cruz lost. He carried only 27 percent of the white born-again and evangelical Christian vote, behind Trump’s 41 percent. Cruz also lost this group in New Hampshire and South Carolina. But, unlike in South Carolina, Cruz also trailed among “very conservative” voters in Nevada, 34 percent to Trump’s 38 percent. Finally, Cruz continues to struggle among “somewhat conservative” and moderate voters. He earned just 16 percent and 7 percent among those groups, respectively, according to the entrance poll.How about Rubio? Well, he just got blown out by Trump in a state that was once thought to be the most favorable for him of the first four contests. He’ll also have to suffer through a few news cycles of mockery over his second-place “victories.” The good news for Rubio: He beat Cruz for the second state in a row. No, second place is not winning, but Rubio would have better chances against Trump in a smaller field, and the fastest way to shrink the field is to beat Cruz. Rubio did beat his polling average for the third time in four states, although there were no Nevada polls conducted after South Carolina.Did Trump win Hispanics in Nevada? You can be sure that Trump will tell us he did! There was a lot of nerd-fighting over who won the Hispanic vote in the Democratic caucuses in Nevada, and we suspect there will be some over the Republican caucuses as well. Indeed, the entrance poll had Trump beating Rubio 45 percent to 28 percent among Hispanics. But keep in mind that the sample size on that result is somewhere between 100 and 200 people. That means the margin of sampling error for the Hispanic subgroup is near +/- 10 percentage points (or even higher). Perhaps more importantly, just 8 percent of Republican voters were Hispanic (or 1 percent of the Nevadan Hispanic population), and they are not politically representative of the larger Hispanic community.One not-so-great sign for Trump: As was also the case in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, he didn’t perform as well with late-deciding voters. Instead, Rubio easily won the plurality among people who decided whom to vote for in the past few days, according to the entrance poll. But in Nevada, the share of late-deciders was considerably lower than in the first three states, and Trump dominated among voters who decided early.

Lastly, we should keep in mind that this was just one state. Trump won 46 percent of the vote, blasting through his 33 percent (or thereabouts) ceiling, right? Not totally. It’s been clear for a while that Nevada Republicans loved Trump. As far back as October, polls have had Trump beating his national averages in Nevada. Meanwhile, Morning Consult polls, which have had Trump averaging 36 percent nationally over the course of the Republican primary, had Trump at 48 percent in Nevada. Believe it or not, states are not all the same! Recent polls have shown Trump getting anywhere from 50 percent of the Republican vote in Massachusetts to 18 percent in Utah. It’s certainly possible that Trump uses his momentum from Nevada to propel himself to even greater heights. But sometimes what’s billed as “momentum” is really just demographic and cultural variance among different states.

What’s Going To Happen In Nevada Tonight?

For this week’s 2016 Slack chat, we preview tonight’s Republican caucuses in Nevada. The transcript below has been lightly edited. (FiveThirtyEight PSA: We will not be live-blogging the Nevada results tonight, as they won’t come in until well past our bedtime. We will, however, have some Nevada analysis ready for you to read while you drink your coffee tomorrow morning.)

micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): It’s Republican caucus day in Nevada!

clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): Sho is.

micah: You’re still in Vegas, right, Clare? Have you gambled away your plane ticket home?

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): People are voting as we type this! Except they’re not — because voting in a caucus is a huge pain and the caucuses don’t start until tonight.

clare.malone: I am still in Vegas, a city that very much appears to not know there is an election today. Like most of America, probably.

harry (Harry Enten, senior political writer): I, for one, look forward to a completely inept state party running a caucus where they will record votes on the back of an envelope, take pictures of those results and send those pictures into headquarters.

natesilver: Nevada: the state where you have no idea who’s going to win before the caucus, and also no idea who won after the caucus.

micah: Donald Trump is going to win, right? So sayeth our forecasts.

harry: Well, I think almost everybody thinks that Trump is going to win. Two reasons for that: Limited polling information suggests as much and most voices on the ground, like my good ol’ friends Jon Ralston and Nick Riccardi, say the campaigns’ internal polls say the same thing. But the turnout is going to be excruciatingly low, which increases the chances that the polls could be wrong.

clare.malone: So we have a couple more second-place “victory speeches” to look forward to!

harry: The 3-5-2-2 strategy looks good.

micah: Marco Rubio’s the favorite to finish second?

natesilver: Let’s not pretend that we have any idea. I mean, really. Look at the confidence intervals in our “forecast.” It’s basically saying ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

clare.malone: OK, who does well if there’s bigger turnout? “Bigger” in a relative sense, given last time’s turnout was 33,000 or so.

natesilver: The smaller the turnout, the more potential for a surprising outcome. I don’t doubt that Nevada is a pretty good state for Trump. But if turnout is like 2-4 percent of the voting-eligible population, there’s a large element of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ involved.

micah: Clare, do you have any sense from being on the ground in Nevada of whether turnout will exceed these very low expectations?

clare.malone: I do not think it will exceed. I went to a Rubio rally the other night and talked to people who were undecideds, and one of the women said she caucused last time but very likely wouldn’t because it was confusing and seemed to her a little “corrupt.” But more broadly, and here I will make a SHAMELESS PLUG for a piece I wrote, but one of the bigger groups that turned out last election in Nevada were Mormons (25 percent of the electorate), most of whom voted for Romney. Political scientists I talked to said that that number is probably going to be way lower this year. People are split, Mormons included, and there’s just less enthusiasm for spending your Tuesday night at a caucus. Nevada still doesn’t have the pride that Iowa has about its caucuses — they’re a new beast!

micah: Even if LDS turnout is a bit lower, they could still prove decisive. Which way do you think they’ll go? Do we have any idea?

clare.malone: I think the LDS vote is very much split and there are good arguments for Ted Cruz or Rubio. And yes, some Mormons will vote for Trump. Rubio has more of the sheen of a traditional conservative, which, in general, the Mormon community has liked in the past. And Rubio’s immigration record is actually a boon, given that Mormons are more liberal on that issue than most Republicans (they spend a lot of time abroad in their missions, which is a factor that comes into play).

On the Cruz side of things, his Constitutional conservative thing plays well, given that it’s a theological tenet of Mormonism that the Constitution is divinely inspired. And he’s been trying to pick up some of the Rand/Ron Paul libertarians — also a Mormon contingent in that ideological aisle.

So, I think it’s going to be an interesting little slice of the pie to watch tonight.

natesilver: Nevada might be a pretty good state for either Rubio or Cruz if not for the fact that Trump literally has his name in lights on a building there. And there are certain parochial interests in Nevada. In Morning Consult’s polling of all 50 states, Trump’s top two states were Nevada and New Jersey. Guess what they have in common? (Although, to be fair, there’s no gambling at the Trump hotel.)

micah: What explains that, though? Is that just name recognition? Or are people like, “Well, that Trump hotel is top-notch … he should be president!”?

clare.malone: Nevada is coming off a huge housing crisis, and I think a lot of people are ready to receive that Trump message of “throw the bastards out, overhaul the system.” And he’s also, might I say, a little Vegas himself? So it might be a bit cultural.

harry: How is there no gambling at Trump’s hotel? Here’s what I know: Turnout in 2012 was just over 30,000. Turnout in 2008 was around 45k. Those were both on Saturdays. This is a Tuesday night.

clare.malone: What’s on TV on Tuesday night? That could be key. Shit, guys, “NCIS” is on. Ballgame over.

micah: So what are the stakes? This feels a little low stakes to me, tbh, but is that just because Nevada is hard for the East Coast media to cover — there’s little polling and results won’t come until midnight Eastern time at the EARLIEST — so they’re downplaying the contest?

harry: I think if Trump wins, the train continues. If Trump loses, the media will cover it big time. The reason? It’s the same as always: The media wants a contest. Plus, it’ll show Trump has a weakness in caucuses and potentially out West in general.

natesilver: If Nevada had its act together and held a primary, the stakes would be higher.

micah: Nate, you’re really coming off as anti-Nevada.

natesilver: I love Nevada! I think Nevadans should have the opportunity to vote in a primary. But the caucus is a hard event for the media to cover, and also hard for it to set expectations between the lack of polling and the low turnout.

micah: “Reno 911!” is an all-time great show.

clare.malone: What if Rubio finishes a strong second (whatever that means), that’s good, no?

harry: Well, Rubio wants to get to a one-on-one against Trump ASAP. So anything that helps him do that is helpful.

clare.malone: Keeps the people who have been endorsing him over the last few days happy. My inbox has been, I would say, 40 percent press releases from the Rubio campaign telling me which congressman believes in Marcomentum.

natesilver: Rubio finishing ahead of Cruz would be not unimportant. If you’re filling in Cruz’s map, then other than the South, the next place you might expect him to do well is in Western caucus states: libertarian-ish, low turnout. If he finishes third in a Southern state, then finishes third in Nevada, the map looks even tougher for him than before.

clare.malone: Cruz had Glenn Beck out here stumping for him — bringing in the big guns. I think Rubio seems pretty confident. He’s out of the state already, I believe. On to Minnesota and Michigan.

harry: Cruz’s map is essentially Reagan’s from 1976. Win in the West and the South. But it’s unclear — after South Carolina and recent polling — that he can do either.

harry: Can we talk about John Kasich for a second here?

clare.malone: Always. He’s in the South this week!

harry: He’s not in Nevada.

clare.malone: Nope.

harry: How is he running a national campaign?

clare.malone: He’s in Mississippi and Georgia, I believe.

harry: He didn’t run in Iowa. He’s not running in Nevada. He sorta campaigned in South Carolina.

clare.malone: I think he’s running for VP. Which to me, means you need to stay in for a while.

natesilver: I want to pick apart one more thing on Rubio, though. Rubio actually spent a fair amount of time in Nevada earlier in the campaign. He’s got a lot of state legislator endorsements.

In Nevada, @marcorubio dominates the state legislative endorsement race. https://t.co/oGhA0zZ2CM pic.twitter.com/5jnwoExsmh

— Boris Shor (@bshor) February 23, 2016

clare.malone: The lt. governor of the state is Rubio’s campaign chair. That helps.

harry: And he has the endorsement of Dean Heller, the Republican senator from that state.

natesilver: At some point, there was talk about how Nevada could be Rubio’s first victory. When did that stop? Did his campaign conduct a bunch of polling and conclude “oops, Trump”? Or are they doing a really, really good job of lowering expectations?

micah: Yeah, I think it would be pretty easy to argue that if Rubio doesn’t do well in Nevada, maybe even win, it’s a sign of something wrong. One thing we know for sure: The Rubio campaign has maybe done the most amazing job of managing expectations in the history of U.S. presidential elections.

natesilver: Ehh, I’m not sure about that, Micah.

micah: Nate, the Republican Party elite is consolidating around Rubio and he hasn’t won a single state — or even come particularly close!

natesilver: Usually the party consolidates around a candidate during the invisible primary before voters have weighed in at all. Basically, Rubio just won the invisible primary after the visible primary started. Which is, uh … a little different.

micah: But I don’t think that happens if expectations weren’t managed as they have been.

natesilver: Well, Rubio miserably underperformed expectations in New Hampshire. And the party stuck with him then.

micah: But the race didn’t start with New Hampshire. If Rubio’s third-place finish in Iowa wasn’t perceived as such a boon …

natesilver: If “the party” had been reading FiveThirtyEight, they’d have gotten behind Rubio in 2013!

harry: The only candidate besides Rubio left in the race that most party elites would even think of getting behind is Kasich, and Kasich isn’t really running a national campaign. That’s why after Jeb Bush left we are seeing the consolidation.

Bush was holding these guys back.

micah: For sure, but I think that consolidation behind Rubio is the result of two main factors: 1. Every other candidate sucks (from the GOP elite’s POV), and 2. Expectations spin by the Rubio folks. It was just all well executed.

clare.malone: Maybe it’s less expectations and more practicality masquerading as expectations?

micah: Yeah, maybe it’s both.

clare.malone: Because to me, the Rubio campaign’s strongest argument behind the scenes is, “Hey, our guy will look like a relatively normal Joe to the general electorate. You cannot say the same for Cruz, despite all his resources, and you, Mr. fill-in-the-blank-congressman, just need to make a decision now of practicality.” Rubio is the “love the one you’re with” candidate.

micah: Alright, let’s get back to Kasich before we wrap. Let’s posit for a second that he’s not running to be Veep. Does he have any path to the nomination? Or would he be in Nevada if he had a path?

clare.malone: I’m not sure he has a path, but he would need to do well in Ohio and Michigan.

harry: He’s trailing Trump in a Quinnipiac poll out this morning by 5 percentage points in Ohio, and his supporters are far less likely to say their mind is made up.

natesilver: It’s hard to think Kasich has any path at the nomination. He’s running in the “establishment lane,” too, but he has very little establishment support. No endorsements of any kind since January. No endorsements by someone outside of Ohio since September.

micah: Penultimate question: Kasich’s message (“let’s all come together”) is basically the opposite of Trump’s, so if you don’t like Trump’s message, you probably think having Kasich on the national stage is good for the country. But Kasich also pulls support more from Rubio than from Trump, so the longer Kasich remains in the race the more of a problem he becomes for Rubio. So if you’re anti-Trump, do you want Kasich in the race and on the debate stage to offer a different vision of what the GOP should be? Or do you want him gone?

clare.malone: Honestly, who outside of the people of New Hampshire and us know what John Kasich’s message is? I think he’s a bit of a nonentity in many ways, nationally.

harry: Call me ruthless, but you want Kasich out now if you don’t like Trump. Look, I understand the Kasich frustration. Here’s a guy who has been in politics pretty much all of his life. He’s offering a different message. At the end of the day, though, you got to know when to fold. And Kasich has no infrastructure and not that much money.

natesilver: Yeah, this is an easy question. If you want to stop Trump, you want Kasich out.

micah: Final question: Besides the topline result, what one thing will you be watching for in Nevada tonight?

clare.malone: Turnout, I guess, to see if there’s any surprise organizing that was going on. But I mean, I might be watching “NCIS,” so not sure I’ll check in on this whole presidential election thing.

natesilver: I’ll be watching for how badly the Nevada GOP bungles the vote counting. Otherwise, yeah, this is a topline-result kind of contest. There will be entrance polling, but with such a small turnout in a quirky state, I’m not sure how many inferences it will allow us to make.

micah: Take us home, Harry.

harry: I’ll be watching to see if Rubio finishes ahead of Cruz again. If that happens, the movement to crown Rubio as the anti-Trump will move even faster.

Listen to the latest episode of the FiveThirtyEight Elections podcast.

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Nevada May Show Trump Can Win Even With Low Turnout

So far, the higher the turnout, the better Donald Trump has done:

In Iowa, about 8 percent of the voting-eligible population participated in the Republican caucuses, according to a calculation by Dr. Michael McDonald. Trump won 24 percent of the vote.In South Carolina, 20 percent of the voting-eligible population voted in the Republican primary on Saturday. Trump won 33 percent of the vote.In New Hampshire, 27 percent of the voting-eligible population participated in the GOP primary. Trump won 35 percent.

Is this a coincidence? Probably, at least in part; it’s hard to make very much out of three data points, and there are several conflating variables. For instance, there’s been evidence for a long time that Trump is more popular in both the Northeast and the South than in the Midwest. Also, several candidates dropped out after Iowa and several more still after New Hampshire; even if Trump is picking up less of that support than other candidates, that still helps him some.

Nonetheless, if you’re Ted Cruz, this might give you some explanation for why you beat Trump by 3 percentage points in Iowa but lost to him by 10 points in South Carolina. Even though Republican turnout hit a record high in Iowa, it was still much lower than it would be in a typical primary, since caucuses discourage participation and disenfranchise voters. Cruz’s ground game had more opportunity to make a difference in Iowa, and Trump had less of an opportunity to benefit from irregular voters who might show up for Trump but wouldn’t typically participate in a GOP nomination contest.

We’ll get much more evidence on the importance of turnout over the next few weeks, starting today when Nevada holds its caucuses. In 2012, according to estimates from McDonald, only 1.9 percent of the voting-eligible population — about 33,000 people — participated in the Republican caucuses in Nevada. That’s tiny: About a third of what turnout was in Iowa in 2012 and less than a tenth of what it was in New Hampshire.

DATESTATETYPEREPUBLICAN TURNOUT (2012)Jan. 3IowaCaucus5.4%Jan. 10New HampshirePrimary24.9Jan. 21South CarolinaPrimary17.6Jan. 31FloridaPrimary12.8Feb. 4NevadaCaucus1.9Feb. 4-11MaineCaucus0.6Feb. 7ColoradoCaucus1.8MinnesotaCaucus1.3Feb. 28ArizonaPrimary11.9MichiganPrimary13.8Mar. 3WashingtonCaucus1.1Mar. 6AlaskaCaucus2.8GeorgiaPrimary13.7IdahoCaucus4.1MassachusettsPrimary7.8North DakotaCaucus2.2OhioPrimary14.1OklahomaPrimary10.5TennesseePrimary11.7VermontPrimary12.4VirginiaPrimary4.6Mar. 6-10WyomingCaucus0.3Mar. 10KansasCaucus1.5Mar. 13AlabamaPrimary17.7HawaiiCaucus1.0MississippiPrimary13.6Mar. 20IllinoisPrimary10.5Mar. 24LouisianaPrimary5.6Apr. 3District of ColumbiaPrimary1.1MarylandPrimary6.1WisconsinPrimary18.7Republican turnout varied radically in 2012

Turnout estimates reflect share of voting-eligible population.

Source: electproject.org

The reason Nevada is such an interesting test case is because it otherwise looks like a really good state for Trump. Recent Nevada polls have Trump way ahead, with about 40 percent of the vote. Meanwhile, the polling firm Morning Consult, which has been conducting polls throughout the Republican nomination contest, has had Nevada as one of Trump’s best states. He’s polled at 48 percent among respondents in Nevada since the summer, according to Morning Consult, well ahead of his national average of 36 percent and tied for his second-best performance in any state. (Interestingly, the West is generally not a great region for Trump in Morning Consult or other polling. But Nevada — with its glitzy hotels, casinos, East Coast transplants and retiree population — seems to be a big exception.)

But those polls may have trouble identifying the tiny fraction of Nevadans who will show up at the caucuses today. In 2008, a CNN poll released two days before the Nevada caucuses had John McCain winning with 29 percent of the vote, followed by Mike Huckabee at 20 percent and Mitt Romney at 19 percent. The actual results? Romney 51 percent, with McCain in third with just 13 percent (behind Ron Paul and ahead of Huckabee). That’s about the least accurate poll I’ve ever seen. But, with voter participation in Nevada as low as it is, we should be sympathetic to the pollsters; they’re essentially looking for needles in haystacks.

So if Trump gets 40-something percent of the vote in Nevada, in line with the polls, that will be a sign that turnout might not be such a problem for him. Iowa, where the campaigns are much better organized than anywhere else, will appear to be more of a one-off fluke.

If Trump is in the 20s or low 30s instead — and certainly if he loses Nevada — that will suggest there are openings for Cruz and Marco Rubio later in the calendar. Certainly these opportunities would include the other caucus states, but to a lesser extent, they might include other primary states, too, where turnout usually isn’t quite as high as in New Hampshire and South Carolina.

Listen to the latest episode of the FiveThirtyEight Elections podcast.

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Elections Podcast: A Round Of Candidate Buy/Sell/Hold

Last weekend’s election results from Nevada and South Carolina were not entirely surprising, but they provided some clarity about where the Democratic and Republican presidential races stand heading toward Super Tuesday. Our elections podcast team uses the betting market odds to play a round of “buy/sell/hold” and gauge who we think is likely to prevail and why.

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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.

Trump Optimists And Trump Skeptics Are About To Go To War

If you think the arguments between the Republican candidates have been bad, well, you’ve seen nothing yet. Pundits, reporters and political analysts are about to really have at it. Two competing theories about the Republican race are about to come to a head, and both of them can claim a victory of sorts after South Carolina.

The first theory is simple. It can be summarized in one word: Trump! The more detailed version would argue the following:

Trump has easily won two of the first three states.Trump is ahead in the polls in pretty much every remaining state.Trump is ahead in delegates — in fact, he may win all 50 delegates from South Carolina.Trump has been extremely resilient despite pundits constantly predicting his demise.1 He’s been at 35 percent in national polls for months now. That’s as steady as it gets!

So, ummm, isn’t it obvious that Trump is going to be the Republican nominee?

Not so, say the Trump skeptics. Their case is pretty simple also:

Trump is winning states, but he’s only getting about one-third of the vote.Trump has a relatively low ceiling on his support.Trump now has a chief rival: Florida Senator Marco Rubio.

What did the Trump skeptics find to like about South Carolina? Quite a lot, actually. They’d point out that Trump faded down the stretch run, getting 32 percent of the vote after initially polling at about 36 percent after New Hampshire, because of his continuing struggles with late-deciding voters. They’d note that Trump’s numbers worsened from New Hampshire to South Carolina despite several candidates having dropped out. They’d say that Rubio, who went from 11 percent in South Carolina polls before Iowa2 to 22 percent of the vote on Saturday night, had a pretty good night. They’d also say that Rubio will be helped by Jeb Bush dropping out, even if it had already become clear that Rubio was the preferred choice of Republican Party “elites.”

“So what?”, sayeth the Trump optimists. Second place means you’re a loser! There’s no guarantee that the other candidates will drop out any time soon. And as Trump himself has argued, it’s a mistake to assume that all of the support from Bush and other candidates will wind up in Rubio’s column. Some of it will go to Trump!

Indeed, other candidates remaining in the race would be a big problem for Trump skeptics. Bush is gone, but John Kasich is still in, and he may hinder Rubio in states like Ohio. More importantly, Ted Cruz is still winning something like 20 percent of the Republican vote. Although Cruz’s delegate math doesn’t look good — his strongest states are those that allocate their delegates proportionally, whereas Rubio and Trump are variously strong in winner-take-all states — he’ll stay in the race through Super Tuesday and possibly for a lot longer.

Their other point is more of a strawman argument, however. The Trump skeptics aren’t presuming that Rubio will magically pick up all the support from Bush (and eventually, from Kasich and Cruz). They’re looking at polls that have consistently shown Rubio picking up more second-choice support than Trump does. In some polls, that’s enough for Rubio to tie or overtake Trump. In others it isn’t. But virtually all polls have the race getting closer as the field winnows. Likewise, almost all polls (both state polls and national polls) show Rubio with higher favorability ratings than Trump.

I should note that the Trump skeptics find the Trump optimists a bit exasperating on this point. (Why are you talking about yourself in the third person, Nate?) The idea that Trump has a ceiling — or to be more precise, will encounter a lot of upward resistance as he seeks to gain more support — is not some type of special pleading. Instead, it’s a point the Trump skeptics have raised from the very earliest stages of Trump’s campaign. And they’ve seen some evidence to validate it from Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, along with from recent polling.

A reasonable person might adjudicate the case as follows: Yes, if the Republican nomination becomes a two-man race between Trump and Rubio, it could be pretty close. But that might not happen, or it at least might not happen for a while, not until Trump is off to a pretty big head start in delegates. What happens in a three-way race between Trump, Rubio and Cruz is a little murky. This reasonable person would concede that Rubio had a chance. But who’s the favorite? Trump!

The Trump skeptics might bring up one last line of argument. They’d claim, perhaps more tentatively than they did before, that GOP elites still have some ability to influence the race. Maybe voters don’t care about what “the establishment” thinks, but individual Republican politicians can still have some influence — South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s endorsement of Rubio very probably helped him, for instance. These elites have quite a bit of money to throw around, especially with Bush out. They have some more subtle advantages: They can pack a debate hall with Rubio supporters, for instance. Or they could try to rule by brute force: If the Republican race goes to a contested convention, which is not at all unimaginable, we’re suddenly back in the pre-1972, smoke-filled-rooms era, although probably with delegates vaping instead of puffing on cigars.

Betting markets, weighing all of this information, see the Republican race thusly: Trump at about 50 percent to win the nomination, Rubio at 40 percent, and the rest of the field at 10 percent. I might quibble here and there, but that seems like basically a sound assessment. Now, let’s get back to arguing on Twitter.