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What’s At Stake In The South Carolina Republican Primary

This article includes polls through noon Friday; check out our primary forecast page for updates.

We’ve been inundated with polls: South Carolina polls, Nevada polls, national polls, general election polls. In fact, there are so many polls that you can tell yourself pretty much any story you like about the Republican presidential primary. Is Ted Cruz surging? There’s a poll for that. Is Cruz stalling out? There’s a poll for that too. Have you heard about the poll showing a Ben Carson comeback? OK, I made that one up. But earlier this week, you could find a poll with John Kasich in second place in South Carolina, even though he was polling at about 2 percent there earlier this month.

If this were a general election, we’d just say “take the average” and be done with it. That’s still pretty good advice. The average lets us say, with a high degree of confidence, that Donald Trump is ahead in South Carolina. (That part’s easy: Trump has led in all but one poll there since July.) With a slightly lesser but still high degree of confidence we can say that Marco Rubio has gained ground: He was at 13.1 percent in our South Carolina polling average before Iowa1 and is at 16.8 percent now. We can also say that Trump has probably lost a couple of percentage points, but probably not more. We can say that Jeb Bush’s numbers are flatter than the places listed here.

But unlike in the general election, where the polling average usually gives you a fairly precise estimate of where the race will end up, the South Carolina polls could still wind up being way off. We warned you about this before Iowa, where the polls mispredicted the order of finish, and likewise before New Hampshire, where they were closer to the mark (although hardly perfect). We’re probably going to have to keep warning you until the Republican race settles down to only two or three major candidates — multiway races are historically associated with much larger polling errors.

So instead of pretending we know exactly how things will turn out, let’s look at the most likely range of outcomes for each candidate as defined by our polls-plus forecast and consider how those outcomes might affect the race going forward.

Donald Trump

90th percentile forecast: 42 percent
10th percentile forecast: 22 percent

Trump is a heavy favorite in South Carolina. He has a 78 percent chance of winning the state according to polls-plus and an 83 percent chance by our simpler polls-only model — although he’s not quite completely safe. In fact, it’s not that hard to imagine the scenario in which Trump loses: Suppose that this week’s NBC/Marist poll had the race pegged correctly, with Cruz within striking distance, and that Trump fares poorly among late-deciders, as was true in Iowa.2 That NBC/Marist poll sure looks a lot like the pre-Iowa polling average, doesn’t it? Additionally, maybe Trump’s comments about the pope will hurt him?

Fortunately for Trump, the NBC/Marist poll is an outlier relative to the prevailing trend. More likely, Trump will win South Carolina, but the share of the vote he secures while doing so is important. Why did Trump get 35 percent of the vote in New Hampshire but only 24 percent in Iowa? Was it because Iowa is a caucus and New Hampshire a primary? Is it that New Hampshire is in the Northeast and Iowa is in the Midwest? (The Northeast and the South seem to be stronger regions for Trump than the Midwest or the West.) We’ll get more data about that in South Carolina. Perhaps the single most important question in the Republican race is how high Trump’s ceiling is and whether he can eventually get to 50+ percent of the GOP electorate. If Trump wins South Carolina with, say, 41 percent of the vote, he’ll be much closer to that majority than if he limps through to a victory with 26 percent instead.

Ted Cruz

90th percentile forecast: 28 percent
10th percentile forecast: 12 percent

It can be a dangerous game to predict in which direction the polls might be off. But for Cruz, I’d probably take the “over” on 19 percent, his standing in our current polling average. The reason is simply that South Carolina’s evangelical-heavy demographics are not that different from Iowa’s, where Cruz won with 28 percent of the vote. Even if you knock off a few points for Cruz’s “ground game” being less helpful to him in a primary than a caucus, it shouldn’t be a stretch for him to wind up in the low 20s.

And yet, maybe some things have changed since Iowa. Cruz’s favorability ratings, which until recently were among the best in the GOP field, have begun to fray as he’s come under attack more often both from other candidates and from Republican Party “elites.” Cruz’s colleagues don’t like the guy — he has no endorsements yet from his fellow senators — and maybe he isn’t wearing well with Republican voters either.

I also believe that Cruz doesn’t have much of a shot at the nomination unless he finishes toward the higher end of his range. Cruz is at a delegate-math disadvantage in the primaries: Most of the states where he should be strong divide their delegates fairly proportionately, whereas the coastal and northerly states that vote later are winner-take-all or winner-take-most. If Cruz can’t get out to a pretty big delegate lead after Super Tuesday, it’s going to be hard for him to catch up later. And if he can’t win South Carolina or at least come pretty close, it’s hard to see him doing all that well in other Southern states on Super Tuesday.

Marco Rubio

90th percentile forecast: 27 percent
10th percentile forecast: 12 percent

Rubio is nearly tied with Cruz for second place in the polls-plus forecast, but that’s because polls-plus gives Rubio some credit for his growing lead in endorsements — including the backing of South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. In the polls-only forecast, by contrast, Cruz is a couple of percentage points ahead of Rubio.

I’m sweating the details on this one because the national media seems to have a hyperbolic reaction to all things Rubio, alternatively declaring him to be on the verge of a breakout or predicting his imminent demise, as they did after New Hampshire. Rubio, who is acceptable to many Republicans but impassions few of them, may be more susceptible to actual or perceived momentum than a love-him-or-hate-him candidate like Trump.

Rubio’s playing a long game, however. Even under the best of circumstances, he’s likely to lose most of the Super Tuesday states to Trump or Cruz. Even under the worst of circumstances, Republicans may come back around to Rubio by process of elimination. That endorsers such as Haley threw their support to Rubio even after his New Hampshire debacle is partly a reflection of Rubio’s resilience — he was reasonably good in last week’s debate, and his polls have held up pretty well — but also an indictment of Bush, Kasich and the other alternatives.

So I’ll be looking to two benchmarks for Rubio. One is whether he approaches 20 percent of the vote; as The New York Times’ Nate Cohn points out, that’s a key threshold for Rubio because many Super Tuesday states use 20 percent as a minimum threshold for awarding delegates. The other, more obvious one is how Rubio fares relative to Bush. Let’s talk about Jeb!

Jeb Bush

90th percentile forecast: 19 percent
10th percentile forecast: 6 percent

I thought Bush was effective in the last couple of debates. His ground game was surprisingly impressive when we visited Iowa. Bush and his super PAC are still dropping more money than any other candidate: In South Carolina, the Right to Rise PAC backing Bush had spent roughly $13 million on ads through Feb. 14 according to data from Kantar Media/CMAG, almost as much as all other Republican candidates and super PACs combined (about $17 million).

So the fact that Bush performed so poorly in Iowa and New Hampshire (don’t give me any spin about his having “beaten expectations”) — and that his numbers have been so flat in South Carolina despite the spending, the debates and the Bush family jamboree — would seem to suggest that Republican voters simply aren’t buying what he’s selling.

Frankly, this has seemed apparent to us for a long time. Nonetheless, I’ll keep an open mind about Bush until we get this last bit of evidence, which is how he fares among South Carolina voters. The thing about the primaries is that they can string candidates along. If Bush can spin some kind of narrative about South Carolina to his donors, welp, it’s only three more days until Nevada and then just seven more days until Super Tuesday and then just another week until Michigan and then just a week more until Florida votes on March 15. Even if Bush is a zombie candidate, his presence in the race makes it hard for the field to consolidate.

There’s also an outside chance that Bush could do legitimately well in South Carolina instead of just muddling through. Some state polls have had Bush in the mid-teens, and our polls-plus model gives him a 27 percent chance of finishing in the top three and even an outside chance of a second-place finish. Personally, I don’t see a Bush second place happening. But one advantage of a statistical model is that it can force you to consider possibilities you might otherwise be too dismissive of.

CANDIDATE1ST2ND3RD4TH5TH6THDonald Trump78%15%5%1%Ted Cruz1138301353Marco Rubio1035331562Jeb Bush1818322417John Kasich311243427Ben Carson15143050Chance of finishing in each position, S.C. GOP primary

Percentages displayed are from FiveThirtyEight’s polls-plus forecast

John Kasich

90th percentile forecast: 16 percent
10th percentile forecast: 5 percent

Kasich has gotten a pretty sizable post-New Hampshire bounce. He’s gained about 6 percentage points in South Carolina polls since New Hampshire, according to our polling average, and also several points in national polls. The problem is that Kasich was starting out at about 2 percent in both cases, so even a fairly large bounce doesn’t really put him on the radar. Kasich doesn’t have a lot on the line in South Carolina — in fact, he’ll abandon the state as votes roll in Saturday to campaign in the Republican stronghold of Massachusetts3 — but his best scenario is that he beats Bush while Rubio also fares poorly.

Ben Carson

90th percentile forecast: 13 percent
10th percentile forecast: 3 percent

Speaking of zombie campaigns, Ben Carson is still running for president! And his presence matters a little more than you might think. A fraction of Carson’s roughly 7 percent of the vote could be the difference between Cruz winning states on Super Tuesday and losing them to Trump, or between Rubio hitting delegate thresholds and failing to do so. If you’re the sort of weirdo who loves these details, you’re in luck: We’ll be live-blogging South Carolina and the Nevada Democratic caucuses all day4 Saturday, and we hope you’ll join us.

Listen to the latest FiveThirtyEight Elections podcast.

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The Pope Is Way More Popular Than Donald Trump

Donald Trump took a break from threatening to sue rival candidates on Thursday and appears to be trying to start a holy war with Pope Francis instead. Trump may not care about any resulting eternal judgment, but he might have reason to worry about worldly opinion: Pope Francis has a net +53 favorability rating among Americans,1 while Trump has a net -27 favorability rating.2

True, Pope Francis is somewhat less popular with Republicans than among Americans overall. But he’s still reasonably well-liked. In a CNN poll in September,3 56 percent of Republicans had a favorable view of Pope Francis as compared to 21 percent with an unfavorable one. Francis had +20 net favorability rating even among self-described tea-party supporters.

For once, this is a fight that Trump didn’t start. Reporters asked Pope Francis, during one of the informal press conferences held on the papal plane4 what he thought of Trump’s position on building a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border. The Pope said that he wasn’t familiar with Trump’s position, but added, “I say only that this man is not Christian if he has said things like that.”

The majority of conservative Catholics would probably agree with that assessment of Trump’s faith. According to a survey conducted in January by the Pew Research Center, just under half (49 percent) of Catholics who are Republicans or lean toward the GOP said that Trump was not very or not at all religious. That was the highest level of skepticism expressed by any of the denominations Pew surveyed. (White mainline Protestants were most likely to give Trump the benefit of the doubt; 35 percent judged him to be not very or not at all religious.)

However, a sizeable share of Catholics are open to seeing Trump in the White House, even if they don’t expect to see him in a pew. In Pew’s survey, 30 percent of all Catholics who are registered to vote said they felt that Trump would be a good or great president. That’s pretty much on par with registered voters in general (31 percent).5 In other words, Catholics are swing voters. In 2012, Catholics gave 50 percent of their votes to Barack Obama and 48 percent to Mitt Romney, according to the national exit poll.

Trump doesn’t need to worry as much about winning over Catholics in coming weeks. The next set of GOP primaries don’t occur in heavily Catholic states. Super Tuesday’s contests on March 1 will include Massachusetts, where Catholics made up 51 percent of Republican voters in 2008, but most of the upcoming states are in the South, where few Catholics reside.6

STATEWINNER AMONG CATHOLICS (2008)CATHOLIC SHARE OF GOP ELECTORATE (2008)New JerseyMcCain57%MassachusettsRomney51New YorkMcCain46ConnecticutMcCain45WisconsinMcCain39New HampshireMcCain/Romney tie38VermontMcCain35MarylandMcCain33LouisianaMcCain32IllinoisMcCain31FloridaMcCain30MichiganRomney29DelawareMcCain28OhioMcCain26CaliforniaMcCain25MissouriMcCain20ArizonaMcCain20VirginiaMcCain19NevadaRomney18TexasMcCain16South CarolinaMcCain13Oklahoma**11GeorgiaRomney11Mississippi**9TennesseeMcCain6Arkansas**6Alabama**5Utah**3Where are the Republican Catholics?

** Sample size too small to reliably determine winner among Catholics

Source: Edison/Mitofsky National Election Pool Exit Polls, 2008

But although the Catholic-heavy states fall later, they could prove important to the delegate math. Many of their delegates are awarded on a winner-take-most (as in New York, where 46 percent of the Republican electorate was Catholic in 2008) or winner-take-all (as in New Jersey, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania) basis.7 So if Trump doubles down on his fight with the Pope, he could wind up paying a price as he seeks to expand his coalition beyond his enthusiastic base — particularly given that he may already have a relatively low ceiling on his support. In 2008, another competitive primary (and one with more comprehensive exit polling than 2012), Catholics were an important part of John McCain’s coalition, and they’re a group that a candidate like Marco Rubio (who is Catholic) or John Kasich could come to rely upon this year.

Plus it’s just plain inaccurate to complain, as Trump did, that “for a religious leader to question a person’s faith is disgraceful.” For someone whose titles include Vicar of Jesus Christ and Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, questioning and clarifying other people’s faith is pretty much the job description.

Does Donald Trump Have A Ceiling?

In this week’s politics Slack chat, we get aboard the Donald Trump train and find it … luxurious. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

micah: Hey, everyone! Some Trump questions for today: Does Trump have a ceiling? If he wins South Carolina by a big margin (as polls suggest he will), does he become the heavy favorite to win the nomination? Is the Trump train leaving the station?

natesilver:

“runaway trump, never goin’ back /
right way on the outsider track /
seems like rubio should be getting somewhere /
somehow cruz is neither here nor there”

micah: CHAT OVER.

clare.malone: I was going to make a gilded ceiling joke, but the thunder is taken.

natesilver:

harry: I’d like to note at the beginning of this chat that I won’t curse, as I have learned that my mother reads these. As for the rest: I’ve made a big enough fool of myself throughout this entire process, so I’m hesitant to declare anything. Still, how can you look at the polls and think anything outside of these three outcomes is possible? 1. Trump wins the nomination. 2. Marco Rubio wins the nomination. 3. Contested convention.

micah: Let’s back up for a second. What’s the evidence that Trump has a ceiling? Since he declared his candidacy, his support has only gone up.

clare.malone: Well, his support in South Carolina is at 35 percent, which is what he won in New Hampshire.

natesilver: There’s a fair bit of evidence that Trump is likely to encounter some upward resistance. Which is not quite the same thing as a hard ceiling. In both Iowa and New Hampshire, his favorability ratings were only around 50 percent. In fact, in New Hampshire, about half of Republican caucus-goers said they’d be unhappy with him as their nominee.

clare.malone: I think to his supporters, Trump is a Teflon candidate — he can do no wrong and in fact only gets more appealing when he’s accused of doing wrong.

harry: The idea here is fairly simple isn’t it. Look at the Monmouth University poll that came out as we were sitting here. Trump’s favorable rating is again just 50 percent. His net favorability rating is only +9 percentage points in South Carolina. Rubio’s is +26. The key for Rubio is to get this to a one-on-one race. Anything else and Trump is going to coast.

clare.malone: But I wonder about the broadening out of the race when it comes to March. Maybe he becomes less unstoppable then.

natesilver: We know he has a high floor. He’s proven it with votes. But he may also have a low-ish ceiling. In that sense, Trump’s “momentum” may matter less than it would for another candidate. It’s certainly not true that 100 percent of Jeb Bush’s votes, for instance, would go to Rubio. Trump would get some. But there’s been a lot of evidence from the start that Trump does underwhelmingly as a second choice.

But this is also why it was a good sign for Trump that he got 35 percent of the vote in New Hampshire instead of the 24 percent he got in Iowa. If you’re at 35 percent — well, you don’t need that much more to go from a plurality to an outright majority. At 24 percent, it’s much tougher.

micah: But I remember people saying the same thing about Mitt Romney in 2012 — i.e., “Well, if you combine Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum’s vote share, that beats Romney.”

harry: Yes, but there is a TREMENDOUS difference. Here’s a GOP national poll from Quinnipiac University from February 2012. With Santorum, Gingrich, Ron Paul and Romney tested, Santorum was ahead 35 percent to Romney’s 26 percent to Gingrich’s 14 percent. When the poll asked about a one-on-one matchup between Romney and Santorum, Santorum’s lead expanded, but only to 13 percentage points. Meanwhile, Romney led Gingrich in a one-on-one by 13 percentage points. In other words, there was no real sign from the polling that Romney was any worse off in a one-on-one than in a multicandidate field. But now look at the data from this year. A Public Policy Polling survey from South Carolina has Trump leading with 35 percent, followed by Rubio with 18 percent. But in a one-on-one, it was Trump 46 percent and Rubio 45 percent. In other words, it’s clear that Trump is benefiting from having the opposition divided.

clare.malone: OK, so Trump’s probably going to win South Carolina by a big margin, probably the same thing in Nevada — to quote Journey, it’s just going to go on and on and on. So what’s a party elite to do? Is this where we show our readers a lot of leg (politically speaking) and talk about contested conventions?

micah: Wait! Before we get to contested … to Clare’s point, are we just left waiting for a two-man race? Is Trump just going to keep winning until then?

harry: Not necessarily. There are still some states he could lose, but if you believe Trump is getting between 30 percent and 40 percent. It’s difficult to beat him if you have two or more opponents.

clare.malone: What are those states, Harry?

harry: North Carolina, Arkansas and Oklahoma, to name a few, judging from polls I’ve seen over the past few weeks.

natesilver: Let me just point out that in the only two states where we’ve gotten actual votes so far, Trump lost one of them. So clearly he isn’t literally unstoppable. But back aboard the Trump train …

micah: All right, we’ll get back to the one-on-one scenario in a second, but what will you all be watching for in South Carolina? Even if Trump wins by 20, are there other things we should be watching for regarding his coalition, the other candidates, etc.?

harry: Well, I think it’s going to be a huge delegate sweep for Trump. When you’re winning by 20 percentage points and doing fairly well across all demographic groups, you’re probably winning (and if you’re not winning, you’re close) in all congressional districts. That means (given the way delegates are allocated in South Carolina) that Trump is going to win all of them and jump out to a fairly sizable delegate lead.

natesilver: The big question is whether South Carolina is the end of Jeb!?

clare.malone: Yah. I think this gets into my latest theory of the ever-fascinating Jeb Bush saga. At first, I thought he was going to stay in through South Carolina and then call it quits. But now I think that he’s gotten the whole family in on the operation and they’re out here to save the party — the Jeb campaign and super PAC are just going to pour as much money as they can into taking Trump down or at least down a notch or two.

harry: I wrote this week’s 2016 newsletter on this: Jeb has the support of Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and plenty of the establishment in the state. [Editor’s note: Though right as this chat was wrapping up Wednesday, it was reported that South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley would endorse Rubio.] Still, Bush is doing quite poorly, and there are no signs of Bush doing well anywhere. It’s not as if his train is moving slowly. It’s as if it’s not moving at all.

natesilver: Jeb is now 7 percentage points behind Rubio in the South Carolina polling average. Obviously, we have to see if that translates into actual votes on Saturday. But it’s amusing that the media declared Jeb a winner in New Hampshire and Rubio a big loser when it’s Rubio who’s moved up a bit in South Carolina polls while Jeb’s numbers have been flat to down.

clare.malone: I don’t know if the media declared Jeb a winner.

natesilver: The media certainly declared Rubio a loser, however, and his numbers have recovered pretty nicely.

clare.malone: Yes, that’s true. The debate yips storyline didn’t stick to the wall.

natesilver: It’s important to remember that things like debates often just have temporary effects. The pre-New Hampshire debate happened to be timed remarkably badly for Rubio. But if he hits his polling average in South Carolina, New Hampshire may have proven not to have mattered that much after all. Also worth mentioning that Rubio is a conservative and New Hampshire is a fairly moderate state. In the exit poll there, Rubio did slightly better among conservative voters than moderate ones.

harry: I think what this has proven is that Rubio is the only candidate who can stop Trump. The fact that he melted down on a debate stage and still has the best favorable ratings of any of the candidates who actually stand a chance is telling. (Side note: Ben Carson may actually have better favorable ratings than Rubio because no one is attacking him.)

natesilver: Harry, that’s slightly too emphatic for me. Maybe nobody can stop Trump. But I agree that The Establishment (maybe that should be the name of an emo band?) would maximize its chances by getting Rubio into a one-on-one race with Trump. How do they manage to do that? I don’t know, but they really don’t have time to screw around anymore because some pretty big delegate prizes are coming up March 1.

clare.malone: I will point out here, just to be the fact-checker that I once was, that Ted Cruz is actually the only candidate who has stopped Trump thus far. Don’t count him out, Harry.

natesilver: Yeah, it’s a bit of a mystery to me why Cruz’s numbers have been so flat.

harry: Cruz’s numbers are flat because he comes off as a jerk.

natesilver: SHOW ME DATA ON THAT HARRY

harry: I mean, we’ve argued this over and over again. His colleagues for the most part hate him. He’s gotten zero — count ’em — ZERO endorsements from fellow senators. Heck, tea party hero Mike Lee won’t even endorse him. Meanwhile, you have Ben Carson basically calling him a liar on stage. And I can say that in person, Cruz was funny and personable. But he clearly rubs people the wrong way.

clare.malone: The Wild Berry Skittles that several people in this room have ingested in the past 20 minutes seem to have some fire baked in. (Note: Skittles probably not baked.)

natesilver: Cruz needs to beat his polls in South Carolina and at least draw it to a photo finish with Trump. Which is not totally out of the question — we all remember what happened in Iowa, and some of the private polls show Cruz and Trump closer to each other than the public ones do.

If Trump beats Cruz by 15 points in what should be a pretty good state for Cruz, it seems safer to say that Cruz has limited upside. Cruz will win a bunch of delegates in Texas and probably win several primaries and caucuses in the Mountain West. But that’s not enough to have a path to the nomination.

clare.malone: He’s probably not going to win, but he may be a spoiler for a long time in this race.

micah: That seems like the key question for Rubio, Clare, right? How long does Cruz stay around?

natesilver: Yeah, it could make Cruz a power broker of sorts. Suppose Cruz stays with the race for a long time and we go into the convention with Trump having 40 percent of delegates, Rubio 30 percent, Cruz 20 percent, and the other 10 percent is other candidates or unpledged delegates. How does that knot get untied?

clare.malone: Cruz wants to stay in for all the Southern states to vote for sure. He’s here for the discernible future.

micah: CONTESTED CONVENTION!

clare.malone: IN CLEVELAND! The greatest city in the world.

natesilver: All right, let’s do one more sanity check. As I type this, Trump has a 46 percent chance of winning the nomination, according to Betfair. Buy, sell, or hold?

harry: I’m still selling this, but I’d have to be the dumbest or most stubborn person alive to think his chances haven’t risen SIGNIFICANTLY.

natesilver: I’m holding. Putting Trump’s chances at somewhere around 45 percent to 50 percent seems reasonable. There are reasons to be skeptical of how high Trump’s ceiling is. That’s been a big part of the reason for our skepticism about Trump from the beginning, really. But he’s ahead in basically every poll in basically every state. Ordinarily, you’d expect a candidate like that to be priced quite a bit higher than 45 percent to 50 percent, so there’s already a pretty steep discount built in.

Check out the latest forecasts for the 2016 presidential primaries .

Listen to the latest FiveThirtyEight Elections podcast.

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Bernie Sanders’s Path To The Nomination

How much trouble will Hillary Clinton be in if she loses in Nevada, where Democrats will caucus on Saturday? How close does Bernie Sanders need to come in South Carolina, which votes a week later? And which states are really “must-wins” for Sanders in March, April and beyond?

We can try to answer all of those questions with the help of the gigantic chart you’ll see below. On the left-hand side of the chart, you’ll find a projection for how each state might go if recent national polls are right, with Clinton ahead of Sanders by about 12 percentage points nationally. The right-hand side is more crucial: It shows how the states might line up if the vote were split 50-50 nationally. Since the Democrats’ delegate allocation is highly proportional to the vote in each state, that means Sanders will be on track to win the nomination if he consistently beats these 50-50 benchmarks. Conversely, Clinton will very probably win the nomination if Sanders fails to do so, especially since superdelegates would likely tip a nearly tied race toward Clinton.

The starting point for these estimates is state-by-state polling from Morning Consult, a non-partisan polling and media firm that has surveyed about 8,000 Democrats online since Jan. 1. That’s a lot of responses, although not enough to provide an adequate sample size for all 50 states; while there are about 800 respondents from California in the sample, for instance, there are only a dozen or so from Montana.

The solution is to blend the polling results with other data. In particular, I used exit polls to determine the nonwhite share of the Democratic electorate in each state and how each state lines up on a liberal-conservative scale (Sanders does better in white and liberal states). I also included the amount of money raised by Clinton and Sanders in each state in individual, itemized contributions, and their ratio of Facebook likes. In states like California where there’s an adequate sample size from the Morning Consult polling, the polling gets a fair amount of weight, but in the smaller states the other factors predominante. (For a more technical explanation of how this is accomplished, check out the footnotes.1)

Don’t get too attached to these: The state-by-state estimates are pretty rough. But they’re calibrated in such a way2 so as to provide a reasonable benchmark of what a 50-50 race would look like. Maybe Michigan is less favorable to Sanders than this estimate holds, for example. That’s fine, but it means he’ll need to make up ground in another state.

What about the states that have already voted? We estimate that in a 50-50 national race, Sanders would win Iowa by about 6 percentage points, and New Hampshire by 26 points. He didn’t quite hit those targets in either state, although he came close — several percentage points better than you’d expect from his current national polling. As we’ve said, however, the real challenges for Sanders lie ahead.

A quick look at the calendar

Nevada. Nevada has a fairly high nonwhite population, but it isn’t especially liberal. Clinton was also well ahead of Sanders in the (relatively small sample) of interviews Morning Consult conducted there earlier this year. It’s possible that Clinton will be hurt because the state holds a caucus, although we don’t have a lot of evidence yet about which Democrat that benefits. In other words — and as much as her campaign might try to avoid admitting it — it’s a state that Clinton “should” win. Conversely, a Sanders win would be a sign he has staying power.

South Carolina. Clinton is the overwhelming favorite in South Carolina, but her margin of victory could be a useful benchmark for where the race stands nationally. Suppose, for instance, that Clinton winds up winning by 17 percentage points in South Carolina (a bit closer than most polls have it). Would that be a good result for her or a bad one? Our chart projects that Clinton would win South Carolina by 11 points in a 50-50 race, so she’d be doing a little bit better than that benchmark. But not a lot better: Such a result would still suggest that the national race had tightened.

Super Tuesday (March 1). Clinton is likely to compile lots of delegates from the seven Southern states that vote on Super Tuesday, although Oklahoma — which is quasi-Midwestern and relatively white — might be Sanders’s best shot at an upset. Sanders should win Vermont by a huge margin, meanwhile. That leaves the Minnesota caucus, Colorado caucus and Massachusetts primary as the races to watch; they’re the sorts of states Sanders absolutely needs to win to have a shot at taking the nomination.

Big-state primaries on March 8 and March 15. This is probably the most important eight-day stretch on the Democratic calendar. Michigan votes on March 8 (as does Mississippi), followed by Florida, Ohio, Illinois, North Carolina and Missouri on March 15. Together, these states will put 857 pledged delegates at stake, or more than 20 percent of the Democrats’ pledged total. (Pledged delegates, chosen by voters, are distinct from superdelegates.) Based on current polling, most of these states favor Clinton either narrowly or substantially, so Sanders will have to make up ground, perhaps enough to win a couple of them outright.

Favorable terrain for Sanders in late March. A series of Western states vote between March 22 and April 9, as does Wisconsin. Almost all of them figure to be favorable to Sanders — including Wisconsin, where he was already almost tied with Clinton in the polls before his New Hampshire win. A possible exception is Arizona, where Clinton beat Barack Obama in 2008 and where the electorate can be tricky to predict.

New York, California and a big blue finale. With some exceptions — Kentucky, West Virginia and Indiana will be interesting to watch — the last quarter of the Democratic calendar mostly resides on the coasts. And there are some big prizes: New York, Pennsylvania and California foremost among them. All three offer advantages and disadvantages to each candidate. For instance, will California’s left-wing politics, which help Sanders, prevail over its racially diverse population, which helps Clinton? Sanders probably needs at least two of the three states, and maybe all of them given Clinton’s lead in superdelegates. A win in California on June 7 would also carry symbolic power, as it’s the last state to vote,3 possibly allowing the winner to claim a mandate from the Democratic electorate.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. If Sanders can hang tight with Clinton in Nevada on Saturday, his chance of eventually notching a win in California and securing the nomination will look a lot better.

Listen to the latest FiveThirtyEight Elections podcast.

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Superdelegates Might Not Save Hillary Clinton

If you look at a Democratic delegate tracker like this one from The New York Times, you’ll find that Hillary Clinton has a massive 394-44 delegate lead over Bernie Sanders so far, despite having been walloped by Sanders in New Hampshire and only essentially having tied him in Iowa. While Sanders does have a modest 36-32 lead among elected delegates — those that are bound to the candidates based on the results of voting in primaries and caucuses — Clinton leads 362-8 among superdelegates, who are Democratic elected officials and other party insiders allowed to support whichever candidate they like.

If you’re a Sanders supporter, you might think this seems profoundly unfair. And you’d be right: It’s profoundly unfair. Superdelegates were created in part to give Democratic party elites the opportunity to put their finger on the scale and prevent nominations like those of George McGovern in 1972 or Jimmy Carter in 1976, which displeased party insiders.

Here’s the consolation, however. Unlike elected delegates, superdelegates are unbound to any candidate even on the first ballot. They can switch whenever they like, and some of them probably will switch to Sanders if he extends his winning streak into more diverse states and eventually appears to have more of a mandate than Clinton among Democratic voters.

Clinton knows this all too well; it’s exactly what happened to her in 2008 during her loss to Barack Obama. According to the website Democratic Convention Watch,1 Clinton began with a substantial advantage in superdelegates, leading Obama 154 to 50 when New Hampshire voted on Jan. 8, 2008. Obama narrowed his deficit in February and March, however, and overtook Clinton in superdelegates in mid-May. By the time Clinton ended her campaign on June 7, 2008, Obama had nearly a 2-to-1 superdelegate advantage over her.

For the most part, these superdelegates had not previously been linked with a candidate when they pledged their support to Obama, but there were also several dozen superdelegates who switched from Clinton to Obama, including some high-profile ones such as Rep. John Lewis of Georgia and former Vice President Walter Mondale.

Back to bad news for Sanders supporters: Clinton begins with a far larger superdelegate lead over Sanders than she ever had over Obama. It’s easy to imagine why they might resist switching, furthermore. Unlike Obama, who was perhaps roughly as “electable” as Clinton, Sanders is a 74-year-old self-described socialist. Unlike Obama, who had the chance to become the first black president, Sanders is another old white guy (although he would be the first Jewish president). Sanders wasn’t even officially a Democrat until last year. I’m not saying these are necessarily great arguments, but they’re the sorts of arguments that Clinton-supporting superdelegates will make to themselves and one another, in part because the superdelegate system was created precisely to help nominate candidates considered more electable by party leaders.

But how close would the outcome have to be for superdelegates to tip the nomination to Clinton? You can find that calculation in the table below.

IF A CANDIDATE HAS THIS PERCENTAGE OF ELECTED DELEGATES …… SHE NEEDS THIS PERCENTAGE OF SUPERDELEGATES TO WIN THE NOMINATION58.8%0.0%55.021.652.535.850.050.147.564.345.078.541.2100.0How far can superdelegates get you?

Superdelegates are mathematically relevant when a candidate has 41.2 percent to 58.8 percent of elected delegates. Below that range, a candidate couldn’t win a first-ballot majority even with the votes of every superdelegate; above that range, the superdelegates’ help wouldn’t be necessary to clinch the nomination.

That’s still a fairly wide range, however. In theory, for example, a candidate could lose elected delegates 58 percent to 42 percent — equivalent2 to losing the average state by 16 percentage points — and still win the nomination through superdelegates.

My guess, especially given what we saw in 2008, is that superdelegates wouldn’t feel comfortable weighing in anywhere near that much on Clinton’s behalf. In the case where she’s won only 42 percent of elected delegates, she’ll have lost to Sanders all over the map, and any conceivable “electability” gains from nominating Clinton would be outweighed by alienating at least half of the Democratic base.

If it’s closer, however, superdelegates could make a difference. Suppose that Clinton wins 47.5 percent of elected delegates to Sanders’s 52.5 percent — equivalent to her losing the average state by 5 percentage points. According to our formula, Clinton would then need only about 64 percent of superdelegates to win the nomination, a figure that seems realistic.

What you’re likely to see in close cases like these is competing claims to legitimacy, with Democratic party elites showing their bias by interpreting the evidence in favor of Clinton. Suppose, for instance, that Sanders is slightly ahead in elected delegates but slightly behind in the overall popular vote, which could happen if he overperforms in caucus states.3 Clinton supporters will argue that popular votes are the truer measure of support. More exotic options might include citing national polls (if Clinton is still ahead in them by June) or the number of states she’s won (if she’s won more than Sanders). If Clinton starts out well behind Sanders but then narrows her deficit, the elites may argue that momentum was in her favor.

It’s hard to know the exact point at which such claims go from laughable to credible, but my guess is that it’s somewhere around the 5 percentage point gap that I mentioned earlier. So superdelegates do provide some advantage to Clinton: They’ll break a true tie in her favor, and perhaps anything that can reasonably be described as a tie in her favor also. It’s just not the massive advantage implied by the delegate count so far.

GOP Deathmatch: Three Men Will Enter. The Winner Will Probably Lose To Trump Anyway.

For this week’s 2016 Slack chat, we try to clean up the mess New Hampshire voters made of the Republican primary’s “establishment” lane. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): Now that we’ve left the Granite State, let’s start this Slack chat by thanking the good people of New Hampshire for muddling the hell out of the 2016 presidential primaries, particularly the Republican race. And that’s what we’re here to talk about: Thanks to John Kasich finishing second in New Hampshire and Marco Rubio finishing fifth, we have a mainstream Republican logjam — Jeb Bush, who finished fourth, is also jammed in there, but it’s not clear to me why. So … why does this logjam exist, and how will it be resolved?

clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): I bet so many people in New Hampshire make their own jam, political and otherwise.

But the political logjam exists because Rubio screwed up, people didn’t feel like they could put their up-in-the-air votes in his hands, and Kasich had basically just been in their heads and so they went with him. He just posted up in the state and ground-gamed the living daylights out of it. He won the war of attrition. And his campaign basically told me on primary night that he had just kinda gotten in people’s heads, and that was the strategy — Kasich was their familiar face.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): I think the muddle exists for three main reasons: 1) As Clare said, Rubio blew a big opportunity; 2) Bush’s super PAC is too big to fail; and 3) the Republican Party and the national media did not do a good job of vetting the GOP candidates because of the singular focus on Donald Trump.

harry (Harry Enten, senior political writer): Let me add a few more reasons: Rubio is too conservative for many in the mainstream lane, so despite being a gifted pol, he leaves a lot to be desired ideologically. Also, the candidate with the best infrastructure (Bush) is disliked by a higher number of voters than the other mainstream candidates. And finally, I’m not sure Kasich is much of a player outside of New Hampshire, but by running a strong campaign up there he helped to keep either Bush or Rubio from breaking out.

Oh, and that whole “dispel” moment for Rubio definitely played a role.

clare.malone: To Harry’s point, it’s still a bit of a puzzle to me why people in New Hampshire didn’t like Bush more. I don’t actually think of him as that unlikable.

And on Kasich, I think it very much remains to be seen if he can translate his homey town hall schtick to other states. But he’ll get some $$$ out of this.

micah: All right, let’s focus on Jeb for a second, then we’ll get to Kasich.

harry: I mean, Jeb is easy to me. Voters aren’t buying the sauce he’s selling at this moment, but the super PAC keeps him in the game.

micah: But is Jeb’s place in the logjam entirely attributable to him finishing 0.4 percentage points in front of Rubio? So the media has resurrected him?

clare.malone: For the record, Jeb and friends spent $36 million in New Hampshire.

natesilver: I mean, this talk about how Bush “beat expectations” is pretty ridiculous. So far, Jeb! has replicated Rudy Giuliani’s numbers almost exactly. Rudy got 4 percent and finished in sixth place in Iowa. Bush got 3 percent and finished in sixth place. Rudy got 9 percent and finished in fourth place in New Hampshire. Jeb got 11 percent and finished in fourth.

Giuliani is widely regarded as having run one of the most embarrassing campaigns in presidential history. You can certainly say that Rubio blew it, and when we see reporting suggesting that some Republican party elites think that too, that’s valuable to know.

But you can’t credibly say that Jeb’s campaign has been anything other than a miserable failure so far.

micah: Tell us how you really feel, Nate.

clare.malone: I agree. And I think he will drop out after South Carolina. Heard it here first, folks. Maybe.

micah: PREDICTION!

clare.malone: That’s right, as the non-numbers hack of this group, I’m going out on a limb.

harry: This has been a weird campaign, but Jeb’s war is one of attrition. He wants to get into a one-on-one with Trump. If he can do that, he feels he can win. And the truth is he might be able to. … The problem is I don’t think most of us think Jeb will get to that one-on-one.

clare.malone: I think he runs through his Lindsey Graham connections in South Carolina and then someone takes him out back and metaphorically shoots him.

micah: There’s a lot standing between Jeb and a one-on-one with Trump.

clare.malone: I also disagree, Harry, that he might be able to handle the aforementioned one-on-one in the unlikely event it would happen.

natesilver: I also don’t get talk about a one-on-one race that doesn’t involve Ted Cruz.

A one-on-one race between Bush and Trump doesn’t really have a conservative candidate. And the GOP is a conservative party, even if we’ve learned that modern American conservatism is a lot more complicated than people give it credit for.

harry: Well, I’m not disagreeing, but I think you’ll see all sorts of people coming out against Trump once it becomes a one-on-one. That’s especially the case if the non-Trump is Bush. Again, though, I don’t think we get to that point.

It’s the Bush thinking, though.

micah: Let me play devil’s advocate: Whether Jeb deserves the “beat expectations” narrative or not, he’s getting it, and he has the resources to capitalize on it. Moreover, in the Jeb-Kasich-Rubio triumvirate, Kasich doesn’t really have the infrastructure or appeal to compete in most upcoming contests, and Rubio remains somewhat of a question mark — his chief argument was electability, and falling on his face cut against the core of that argument. Process of elimination: Jeb. That doesn’t mean he’ll win the nomination, but couldn’t he be the last leg left standing as the mainstream stool is cut down?

natesilver: I’m not sure that Rubio’s chief argument is his electability. He’s also a lot more conservative than Bush and Kasich. That becomes muddled in all the talk about the “establishment lane.”

clare.malone: OK, Micah, that’s a fair point re: infrastructure that’s better than Kasich’s, but I think that Bush has been emasculated to voters in this way you can’t really go back on (thanks to Trump). Rubio screwed up, but he’s not totally done for. I would say Rubio has the most staying power of the three still.

harry: Rubio has multiple arguments. 1. He has electability (sells to the center). 2. He’s not as conservative as Cruz (sells to the center). 3. He’s got a conservative record (sells to the right).

natesilver: To take one important constituency: Talk radio’s never going to get on Bush’s side in a one-on-one race with Trump. It might get on Rubio’s side.

harry: We already heard it get on Rubio’s side after the debate. Mark Levin was blasting Chris Christie and defending Rubio. Rush Limbaugh was defending Rubio against Trump!

clare.malone: Low energy.

natesilver: Bush can win the “Morning Joe” Republicans, but Rubio can win the Rush Limbaugh Republicans. There are a lot more Rush Republicans than “Morning Joe” Republicans.

clare.malone: And Kasich wins the Charlie Rose Republicans.

micah: Is that true? You got numbers to back that up, Mr. Silver?

harry: Well, for one thing, “Morning Joe” is on MSNBC. I don’t know many Republicans watching that.

clare.malone: According to The New York Times, all the Washington Kingmakers are watching “Joe,” at the very least.

harry: I know one guy watching “Morning Joe” who is a Republican. His net worth is in the millions, and he’s a postgraduate living in NYC.

clare.malone: Can I have his number, Harry?

natesilver: Rush has a huge audience. About 13 million people per week. And most of those are red-meat Republicans rather than RINOs.

“Morning Joe” gets something like 500,000 viewers per day, by contrast, so maybe in the range of 1-2 million per week, depending on how much overlap there is in their audience from day to day?

clare.malone: I don’t even remember what we’re talking about now, what with all this “Morning Joe”-ness.

natesilver: Yeah, we’ve gotten diverted here. The key part of the story is that there doesn’t seem to be much of a market for Bush among actual Republican voters. As we’ve seen by his lack of ability to get actual Republican votes.

micah: All right, cue John Kasich …

clare.malone: O-H-I-O!

micah: The Anti-Trump.

clare.malone: Indeed. Both in rhetoric and numbers. I saw him a couple of times in New Hampshire, and while he’s a bit unpolished and loping in the town hall format, he did have a couple of lines that really connected with audiences about being in the struggle together, and how Americans need to share their joys and sorrows more — sounds corny, but it was actually quite touching, especially in a state that’s facing such a huge drug crisis. And the Kasich team has been big on the notion that they’re a positive campaign — so, anti-Trump in their messaging.

And then the exit poll numbers bore out his base of support as being quite divergent from Trump’s: more educated, more likely to see the “Muslims out of America” stance as being terrible for the party, but also, I will note, Kasich connected with people who are dissatisfied but not angry with the party — which ties into his TV/debate persona that’s a little crotchety.

micah: So why can’t Kasich, silver medalist in the Granite State, consolidate the mainstream/governing wing of the GOP?

natesilver: The calendar isn’t helpful to Kasich, what with the turn southward. So it’s not clear where his second act will be.

micah: The Kasich campaign is hinting it might come in the Midwest. Michigan, for example.

harry: Kasich strikes me as McCain 2000 at best.

micah: And Huntsman 2012 at worst.

harry: The funny thing is that Kasich has a strong record to run on, but the message has become all muddled.

natesilver: Except that McCain and Huntsman were running against more traditional front-runners than Kasich is.

harry: Go on, Nathaniel.

natesilver: To put it bluntly, Kasich’s argument is that all the other choices suck worse. Which is also Rubio’s argument and Jeb’s argument. It might be kind of a true argument!

But let’s do a little thought experiment. Suppose that Bush had dropped out in November, or something. Everything else is pretty much the same: Kasich took second place in New Hampshire and Rubio did disappointingly there after finishing well in Iowa. What do Kasich’s chances look like then?

clare.malone: A little better.

harry: Does Kasich have any money or any organization?

clare.malone: Maybe some of the people who were supporting Bush would have transferred allegiance over to him?

natesilver: Yeah, I think that’s right, Clare. Especially since Bush and Kasich are way more temperamentally and ideologically similar than either candidate is to Rubio.

clare.malone: Kasich’s campaign only has $2.5 million cash on hand. Cruz has $18.7 million, and Rubio has $10.4, by comparison.

natesilver: Yep, that’s a problem for Kasich. Especially because he doesn’t get a lot of “earned media.” He’s going to have trouble staying on people’s radar.

harry: I think Kasich is running an interesting campaign, and he’s an interesting political figure. The problem is that when you’re spending two days campaigning in Michigan a week before South Carolina, then you’re in deep trouble. Kasich can stick around for a while, but it’s really difficult to see how he wins.

clare.malone: Do we think he’s just sticking around to get a VP nod? Is that his end game?

natesilver: He’s an extremely realistic VP pick.

harry: I think that’s absolutely true. That’s especially the case if Rubio is the nominee. Or, dare I say, Cruz.

natesilver: But — I dunno. Suppose that Bush and Rubio remain in a stalemate. Or that they both flop — South Carolina is something like Trump 36 percent, Cruz 35, Rubio 10, Bush 10. At some point, does Kasich get a longer look out of desperation?

He does have some upside potential. He’s the governor of Ohio. Not a bad credential. He has a pretty conservative record.

harry: I think Rubio’s going to do a lot better in South Carolina than that indicates, but Kasich could indeed get a second look.

natesilver: SURE WOULD BE NICE IF SOMEONE TRIED CONDUCTING A PUBLIC OPINION POLL IN SOUTH CAROLINA

micah: All right, let’s wrap with a little consideration of Rubio. The debate clearly hurt him. Is that damage inherently fleeting, or does he need to work to rebound in South Carolina and beyond?

clare.malone: He needs to werk.

natesilver: Yeah, he’s got work to do. If I were Marco Rubio, I’d be spending every waking hour prepping for Saturday night’s debate.

harry: Rubio needs a strong third (mid-20s) or better in South Carolina. If he does that, we’ll forget about New Hampshire. If he doesn’t, there’s going to be talk.

clare.malone: He needs to work to rebuild his brand a little with voters, that he can be more … relaxed and confident. This Britney Spears song pretty much says it all:

natesilver: I think Rubio would be fine if he 1) has a good debate and 2) solidly beats Bush in South Carolina. Neither of which are easy! But I don’t think he needs to get into the mid-20s if he does those other two things.

harry: I think the problem is that if Cruz and Trump start running away with this thing, it could spiral away from Rubio. Granted, maybe Rubio only needs to get to the low 20s or mid-20s.

natesilver: Remember, though, unless any of Bush, Kasich and Rubio display more political acumen than they’ve shown so far, the “establishment lane” playoff could wind up being like the Eastern Conference finals: a race to see who will finish second.

Why Chris Christie Failed

Chris Christie’s 2016 presidential campaign had one shining moment: the tripwire he set for Marco Rubio in Saturday’s debate (which Rubio somehow tripped over again and again and again and again). But that was the equivalent of a posterizing dunk for a basketball team that had lost by 20 points. Christie otherwise made very little headway in the Republican race, and he ended his campaign Wednesday after receiving just 7 percent of the vote in New Hampshire.

Some of this was predictable. About a year ago, I wrote an article titled “Chris Christie’s Chances Are Overrated.” The headline seems prescient now — but perhaps that analysis made the right call for the wrong reasons? So let’s quickly re-evaluate the three major faults the article claimed to find with Christie:

Claim No. 1: Christie is too moderate

In one basic respect, Christie’s problem was simple: He has a relatively moderate track record in a party that’s become very conservative. That was obviously a problem in Iowa, where Christie didn’t even try to compete. But even in New Hampshire, the share of Republicans who identify as moderate or liberal dropped to 29 percent from 47 percent four years ago. Christie had a lot of competition for this slice of the electorate, meanwhile, with Jeb Bush, John Kasich and Donald Trump (who does well with Republicans of all ideological positions) also taking their share.

Claim No. 2: Christie probably lacks the discipline to win the “invisible primary”

If endorsements are the best measure of insider support, then Christie’s performance was a little underwhelming. True, he placed third in FiveThirtyEight’s tally of “endorsement points” at the time of his exit from the race. But Christie’s support was thinner than that score implies. Christie, the former chairman of the Republican Governors Association, won the support of three Northeastern governors, along with four House members from New Jersey, one from the Philadelphia suburbs and one from Indiana. That’s it. Basically, exactly the people you’d expect to endorse Christie endorsed him, and no one else did; he wasn’t winning the sort of “out-of-group” endorsements (say, an endorsement from a conservative Republican from the South) that are the hallmark of a consensus-building candidate.

Was this because of Christie’s lack of discipline, as I asserted in the article? That’s harder to say. Christie may have been punished by Republican elites for past sins in which he seemed disloyal to his party, especially his self-aggrandizing 2012 convention speech and his “bear hug” of President Obama after Hurricane Sandy. But his 2016 operation was relatively disciplined — I would argue perhaps too disciplined, since Christie often had trouble making news.

Claim No. 3: Christie no longer has a good “electability” case

Usually candidates who are too moderate for the party base and too “maverick-y” for party elites make up for it by having a lot of appeal to independent voters. That’s not true for Christie, however, who has a -13 percentage point net favorability rating among general election voters. Christie’s numbers improved slightly over the course of the campaign, but not nearly enough to undo the damage wrought by “Bridgegate”; it’s easy to forget now, but Christie was once one of the most well-liked politicians in the country.

Other than in these areas, Christie has some strengths. For my money, he was the most consistent debater in the Republican field from start to finish. He’s one of the better retail politicians in the GOP field, as we saw on our recent visit to New Hampshire.

But the characteristics I mentioned before — electability and ideological alignment with and loyalty to the party — aren’t just incidental. Instead, we’ve sometimes referred to them as the “fundamentals” of presidential nominations. The eventual nominee usually scores high along each dimension, whereas Christie’s marks were middling across the board.

A deficit in these categories is hard to overcome; sheer chutzpah or tactical brilliance usually won’t do it.

Christie also got Trumped

Unless, maybe, you’re Donald Trump, who has a good shot to win the nomination despite neither being all that loyal to his party, nor all that conservative, nor all that electable. As we’ve written, Trump represented another problem for Christie. He usurped Christie’s brand as the telling-it-like-it-is candidate and as the tough-on-terrorism candidate. Trump has also won a disproportionate share of media coverage throughout the campaign, a problem for all of Trump’s opponents but especially Christie, a showy candidate who was once a media phenom of his own.

I suggested earlier that Christie should have run a less disciplined campaign, staging a few controversies to draw attention to himself. Obviously, that’s a bit tautological: It requires a lot of discipline to strategically plant a “viral moment.” But it’s remarkable how few candidates other than Trump understood that attention was the coin of the realm in a field that once had 17 candidates.

Christie also missed some obvious opportunities to take on Trump — particularly, when Trump falsely insinuated that “thousands and thousands” of Muslims had publicly cheered the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks from New Jersey. This was everything that Christie was supposed to be all about — 9/11, New Jersey and “telling it like it is” to preach tolerance of Muslims — and yet, Christie responded only meekly, saying he didn’t recall 9/11 as Trump did.

In a nutshell, Christie was playing a long game when his fundamentals were unsound, which should have instead proposed a higher-risk, more bombastic approach. By the time his viral moment finally came in last weekend’s debate, it was too little and too late.

Elections Podcast: The New Hampshire Results

After watching the New Hampshire primary vote trickle in Tuesday night, our elections podcast team gathered to talk about the results. How will Bernie Sanders’s and Donald Trump’s victories affect the Democratic and Republican races? And what can the GOP “establishment” candidates do now?

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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.

Republicans Need To Treat Donald Trump As The Front-Runner

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Donald Trump became the latest Republican presidential candidate1 to win at least 20 percent of the vote in both Iowa and New Hampshire after an overwhelming victory here on Tuesday; he beat his nearest rival, John Kasich, 35 percent to 16 percent. If Trump’s underwhelming performance in the Iowa caucuses last week was reminiscent of Pat Buchanan, his New Hampshire result put him more on par with Mitt Romney, who also finished second in Iowa four years ago before winning easily here.

No nonincumbent Republican has won both the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary. But between 1980 and 2012, nine Republican candidates received at least 20 percent of the vote in each state. Four of them eventually received their party’s nomination and three others came reasonably close; the final two (Buchanan in 1996 and Ron Paul in 2012) were factional candidates who probably never had much of a shot.

YEARCANDIDATEIOWAN.H.WON NOMINATION?1980George H. W. Bush31.622.7No1980Ronald Reagan29.549.6Yes1988Bob Dole37.428.4No1996Pat Buchanan23.027.3No1996Bob Dole26.026.2Yes2000George W. Bush41.030.4Yes2008Mitt Romney25.231.6No2012Ron Paul21.422.9No2012Mitt Romney24.539.3Yes2016Donald Trump24.335.1—The Republican 20/20 club

So is Trump a genuine front-runner like Romney or more of a turbocharged Buchanan? The answer is probably a little bit of both. At the very least, Republicans can no longer afford to hope Trump fades out on his own — unless they’re ready for him to be their nominee.

It might seem hard to find fault with Trump’s campaign after he more than doubled his nearest rival’s vote total in New Hampshire, but allow me to nitpick a bit. Despite receiving 35 percent of the vote in New Hampshire, 50 percent of Republicans here said they’d be satisfied with Trump as their nominee, according to the exit poll.2 Trump has converted an incredibly high percentage of his potential supporters into actual supporters, but these results (along with Trump’s mediocre favorability ratings) suggest that he has a lower ceiling on his support than a front-runner normally does.

Trump also lacks support from GOP “party elites,” with no endorsements so far from current Republican governors or members of Congress. That’s also highly uncharacteristic of a traditional front-runner.

But Trump’s political skills are considerably better than either Buchanan’s or Paul’s. He has the ability to command the national media’s attention pretty much whenever he wants to, and he has improved as a debater and speaker. Furthermore, Trump’s lack of allegiance to traditional Republican policy positions allows him to adapt himself as he sees fit — a characteristic more associated with shape-shifting, coalition-building candidates like Romney than agenda-driven ones like Paul. Trump’s support also cuts relatively evenly across different demographic groups, another front-runner characteristic.

We recorded a late-night edition of our elections podcast with some thoughts on the New Hampshire results. Listen to it below, or subscribe in your favorite podcast player.

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All of this might not be that much of a problem for Republicans who don’t want to see Trump as the nominee if they had already coalesced around a good alternative, but they haven’t. Instead, New Hampshire was a step backward for them. From Trump’s standpoint, in fact, the 65 percent of the GOP vote that he didn’t receive here was arranged just about as perfectly as the chandeliers at Trump Tower.

The second-place candidate, Kasich, is cash-poor. His 16 percent of the vote in New Hampshire was almost exactly what Jon Huntsman received four years ago, suggesting that Kasich resembles a factional candidate whose appeal is concentrated among Northeastern moderates and independents. On Tuesday, Kasich received 28 percent of the vote among moderate voters, but just 11 percent among conservatives, a group that will become much more prevalent in subsequent states. (Kasich’s actual track record on issues including abortion is fairly conservative, but he’ll have to reorient himself in a hurry.)

After Kasich came Ted Cruz with 12 percent of the vote — a New Hampshire performance in line with the two previous Iowa winners, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum. There are several reasons to think that Cruz could have a higher ceiling than Huckabee or Santorum. But he’s hardly a unity candidate, and Republican elites are at least as opposed to Cruz as they are to Trump.

Following Cruz were Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, each with about 11 percent of the vote (and apparently in that order, with Bush in fourth place and Rubio in fifth). Until about 96 hours ago, Rubio looked like Republicans’ best chance to stop Trump. But the momentum he gained after a third-place finish in Iowa evaporated, presumably in part because of his poor performance in Saturday’s debate and the media freakout that followed.

It strains credulity to suggest that Bush has much momentum of his own, though, after he and his super PAC spent almost $90 million to get 3 percent of the vote in Iowa and 11 percent in New Hampshire. Bush is a known commodity who has arguably already been put forward and rejected by Republican voters, with underwhelming favorability ratings.

If you could somehow combine Rubio’s likability and appeal to conservatives, Kasich’s policy smarts and post-New Hampshire momentum, and Bush’s war chest and organization, you’d have a pretty good candidate on your hands. But instead, these candidates are likely to spend the next several weeks sniping at one another. The circular firing squad mentality was already apparent in New Hampshire, where fewer advertising dollars were directed against Trump despite his having led all but one poll of the state since July. Trump has also been attacked less than Rubio and Cruz in recent debates.

The Republican field probably will consolidate, eventually. In about the only bad piece of news for Trump on Tuesday, it appears possible that Chris Christie will soon end his campaign. And it might not take that much to upend the stalemate between Rubio, Kasich and Bush. I’m guessing, for example, that if Rubio and Kasich had switched places on Tuesday, the national media conversation would be about how Rubio’s “3-2-1” plan was right on track and how it was time for Kasich and Bush to fold up shop. It might seem fanciful to swap the second-place and fifth-place candidates, but only about 15,000 votes separated Kasich from Rubio in New Hampshire.

By the time that consolidation happens, however, Trump and Cruz will have swept up quite a few delegates. And whichever Republican emerges from the “establishment” pack isn’t necessarily a favorite to beat Trump one-on-one (or Trump and Cruz in a three-way race). A lot of Republicans would never consider voting for Bush, in particular.

It would be easy enough to overreact to Tuesday’s results. With only two states having voted so far, we don’t really have enough data to know why Trump finished with 24 percent of the vote in one of them but 35 percent in the other, or which result represents the better baseline going forward. (Be wary of tautological explanations along the lines of “Iowa was a bad state for Trump” or “New Hampshire was a good state for Trump.”) Prediction markets regard Trump as more likely than any other candidate to win the Republican nomination but nevertheless slightly worse than even money against the field, an assessment that strikes me as pretty reasonable.

But for anti-Trump Republicans, there’s a danger to underreaction, too. One reason that candidates like Trump have rarely won nominations in the past is because parties take a lot of steps to fight them. If the Republican Party’s defense mechanisms are broken, or if it assumes Trump will go away without intervention, the rest of the party may be competing for second place.

Check out the latest forecasts for the 2016 presidential primaries.

What’s At Stake In New Hampshire’s Republican Primary

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Before the Iowa Republican caucuses last week, we warned you that the uncertainty in the race was high and that the polls might be way off. That’s even more true here in New Hampshire.

At least we know that Donald Trump will finish first on the Republican side? Well, probably. Trump has led all but one poll here since July; his numbers have slumped by a couple of percentage points since his second-place finish in Iowa, but nobody has come especially close to him. And yet, because the uncertainty is so great in New Hampshire, Trump’s victory is not quite assured: Our polls-plus forecast still gives Trump a 31 percent chance of somehow losing here.

The reason for this is that, historically, the more viable1 candidates there are in a state, the more error-prone the polling has tended to be. Multi-candidate races open up the possibility of last-minute tactical voting and otherwise give voters plenty of options, making them more likely to change their minds at the last minute. Our forecast models account for this dynamic, which is why Trump’s lead is much less safe than Bernie Sanders’s in the two-way race on the Democratic side, even though both candidates lead their nearest competitor by about the same 15-percentage-point margin in the polling average. (I think the model might be a little bit too confident about Sanders — I’d personally put his odds at more like 95 percent rather than 99 percent — but we’ll save that discussion for later.)

So let’s look at New Hampshire from the standpoint of the six leading Republican candidates. For each one, I’ve listed their 90th percentile and 10th percentile forecasts from our polls-plus model to show the most likely range of possible outcomes.2

Donald Trump

90th percentile forecast: 39 percent

10th percentile forecast: 17 percent

We’ve somehow reverted back to the pattern before Iowa, where the other Republicans weren’t spending much time attacking Trump despite his lead in the polls. In Iowa, voters took matters into their own hands and turned away from Trump at the last minute. Could the same thing happen here?

It’s entirely possible; the polls-plus model projects Trump to finish with 27 percent of the vote — a little less than the 30 percent he has in the polling average. But there’s a huge amount of uncertainty around that estimate. Suppose, for instance, that Trump finishes with a vote share in the mid-to-high 30s. Such a performance would erase many of our doubts about Trump’s ceiling and make him look formidable in South Carolina and beyond.

Conversely, if Trump won but with more like the 27 percent of the vote that Pat Buchanan got in New Hampshire in 1996, he’d look more like a factional candidate who was benefiting from the divided field. And if Trump’s vote share falls into the low 20s or even the high teens, meanwhile, he would be vulnerable to losing New Hampshire outright. It would also raise a lot of questions about whether the polls were oversampling Trump voters.

Marco Rubio

90th percentile forecast: 25 percent

10th percentile forecast: 9 percent

The polls-plus forecast still has Rubio in second place, but that’s deceptive. He’s only a fraction of a percentage point ahead of John Kasich, with Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz lurking almost as close. In fact, the polls-plus forecast has Rubio with a 64 percent chance of finishing third or worse and he could easily enough slip to fifth or sixth. Here’s our final matrix of probabilities for Rubio and the other candidates:

CANDIDATEFIRSTSECONDTHIRDFOURTHFIFTHSIXTH+Donald Trump69%19%7%3%1%Marco Rubio11252319139John Kasich102423191411Jeb Bush61620221917Ted Cruz41317222223Chris Christie25101864Carly Fiorina351180Ben Carson396Chance of finishing in each position, N.H. GOP primary

Percentages displayed are from FiveThirtyEight’s polls-PLUS forecast.

I’m erring toward the pessimistic interpretation for Rubio because I’m not sure that polls have had time to fully capture the impact of his poorly-reviewed debate performance from Saturday. At the same time, pundits are often pretty bad at anticipating how voters will react to debates and other gaffes. Ultimately, the impact of the debate will be hard to measure: Rubio could wind up with 18 percent of the vote despite the debate, but would have gotten 22 percent without it.

No matter what happens, the media reaction to Rubio’s finish tonight is likely to be hyperbolic. If he gets (say) 22 percent of the vote, or only 8 percent, a strong reaction might be warranted. But you may also see reporters parsing relatively small differences, like between 16 percent and 13 percent. Mostly, you should ignore them, because there are two more important things to watch in the aftermath of New Hampshire. The first, as FiveThirtyEight contributor Julia Azari writes, is how Republican Party leaders react to Rubio’s performance. Is he continuing to get endorsements? How are people who actually have influence within the Republican Party — not just TV talking heads — spinning his performance? If Rubio finishes narrowly ahead of Bush, are there calls for Bush to drop out? The second thing to watch: How does Rubio perform in this Saturday’s debate in South Carolina.

John Kasich

90th percentile forecast: 24 percent

10th percentile forecast: 8 percent

As I said on our podcast, I suppose I’ll be “that guy” who thinks Kasich has some potential to outperform his polls. As measured by his number of voter contacts (as well as our own observations), he has one of the best ground games in New Hampshire. Also — this was a favorable indicator for Cruz and Rubio before Iowa — he’s seen a late, Election Day spike in Google search traffic. The polls-plus model also has Kasich beating his polls by a couple of percentage points, for what it’s worth. We’ll know soon enough.

The question is how Kasich would take advantage of a strong finish. He has run pretty far to the left in New Hampshire despite having a fairly conservative record as governor of Ohio. That moderation really does help him here, but there are fewer centrist Republicans outside New Hampshire. Furthermore, Kasich doesn’t have all that much money remaining, certainly not as compared with candidates like Bush.

My guess is that there’s a difference between Kasich doing pretty well and doing really well. If Kasich replicates Jon Huntsman’s 17 percent of the vote from four years ago, he might be a good story for a few days but not have much impact beyond that. If he gets to 20 percent or more of the vote, however, finishing well ahead of the other “establishment lane” candidates and even threatening to win here, that’s a different story.

Jeb Bush

90th percentile forecast: 22 percent

10th percentile forecast: 7 percent

Bush is only barely behind Kasich in the New Hampshire polls, and has some advantages Kasich does not: more money, more organization and more support from party elites. That could leave Bush better poised than Kasich to take advantage of a strong finish here.

He also has one big problem, however: Bush is much more of a known commodity among Republican voters, and he’s not very well-liked, with favorability ratings barely better than breakeven within his own party. So one possibility is that Bush has a strong performance in New Hampshire and eventually, after some further reshuffling, becomes the “establishment lane” finalist after all — only to lose to Trump or Cruz.

Ted Cruz

90th percentile forecast: 20 percent

10th percentile forecast: 6 percent

Cruz, who didn’t get much of a bounce after Iowa, probably has the least on the line in New Hampshire. If he does well here, that will be a sign that his turnout operation is effective at identifying evangelical and “movement conservative” voters even in a state that has relatively few of them. It might also mean he’s picked up some support from Rand Paul, who was reasonably popular here and dropped out of the race after Iowa.

But Cruz should mostly be focused on South Carolina and the March 1 primaries, where he’ll need to rack up a lot of delegates to make up for a calendar that will turn worse for him as the election wears on. Both Cruz and Trump would benefit from an ambiguous outcome in which at least three of Rubio, Kasich, Bush and Christie continue to run for some time after New Hampshire.

Chris Christie

90th percentile forecast: 13 percent

10th percentile forecast: 3 percent

I’ve been a little surprised that Christie, who has been excellent in debates and in the retail settings where we’ve seen him here in New Hampshire, is stuck at just 6 percent in the polls. When I mentioned this on Twitter yesterday, there were a bunch of theories: Bridgegate, The Hug, and even Christie’s being a New York Mets fan. I get all that, and we were pretty skeptical about Christie’s chances a year or so ago when other people were more bullish on them. But we’re not talking about Christie winning the nomination; we’re talking about him failing to poll in the double-digits in a state that should be pretty good for him.

Still, there’s some chance Christie could overperform his projection, especially if the Republican debate is not fully priced into the polls. The polls-plus model gives Christie a 7 percent chance of finishing in the top three, an outcome that would have the benefit of being unexpected and would therefore get him a lot of buzz. And if Christie finishes ahead of Rubio, the media buzzards will be circling Rubio’s campaign.

Check our our live coverage and results from the New Hampshire Primary elections.

http://c.espnradio.com/s:5L8r1/audio/2674709/fivethirtyeightelections_2016-02-08-112009.64k.mp3

The FiveThirtyEight elections podcast team is in New Hampshire ahead of that state’s primary. Listen above, or subscribe on iTunes.