Nate Silver's Blog, page 141

Why Young Democrats Love Bernie Sanders

MERRIMACK, N.H. — Perhaps the most eye-popping statistic to come out of last week’s Iowa caucuses was Bernie Sanders’s overwhelming advantage among young voters. According to the Iowa entrance poll, Sanders beat Hillary Clinton 84 percent to 14 percent among Democrats aged 171 to 29. He also won voters aged 30 to 44 by a 21 percentage point margin. But Clinton easily won among voters aged 45 and older, allowing her to essentially tie with him in the state. Pre-election polls in New Hampshire suggest that the age divisions in the Democratic electorate could be at least as dramatic here.

AGESANDERSCLINTON17-29841430-44583745-64355865+2669Sanders won Iowa’s youth vote overwhelmingly

Edison Research Iowa Entrance Poll

These differences are really something. In 2008, Barack Obama performed better than Clinton among younger Democrats, but not by nearly the margin that Sanders won them in Iowa. And although generational affinity might have explained some of Obama’s success with young voters — Obama was 46 years old at the time of the 2008 primaries — it doesn’t work for the 74-year-old Sanders, who is six years older than Clinton.

When you see a demographic trend this striking, it usually has multiple explanations. In this article, I’ll focus on how younger Americans view political labels like “socialist” and “libertarian” differently than older ones, and how that might be helping Sanders. I’ll explore several alternative explanations for Sanders’s support among young Americans in a follow-up article next week.2

Young voters have a more favorable view of socialism

Bernie Sanders proudly describes himself as a “socialist” (or more commonly, as a “democratic socialist”). To Americans of a certain age, this is a potential liability. I’m just old enough (38) to have grown up during the Cold War, a time when “socialist” did not just mean “far left” but also implied something vaguely un-American. If you’re older than me, you may have even more acutely negative associations with “socialism” and may see it as a step on the road to communism. If you’re a few years younger than me, however, you may instead associate “socialism” with the social democracies of Northern Europe, which have high taxes and large welfare states. Sweden may not be your cup of tea, but it isn’t scary in the way the USSR was to people a generation ago.

Indeed, views of socialism are highly correlated with a voter’s age. According to a May 2015 YouGov poll, conducted just before Sanders launched his campaign, a plurality of voters aged 18 to 29 had a favorable view of socialism. But among voters 65 and older, just 15 percent viewed socialism favorably, to 70 percent unfavorably.

Young voters don’t necessarily back socialist economics

That doesn’t mean America is undergoing a leftist or revolutionary awakening, however. The biennial General Social Survey has a long-standing question about wealth redistribution, asking Americans whether the “government in Washington ought to reduce the income differences between the rich and the poor … perhaps by raising the taxes of wealthy families or by giving income assistance to the poor.” While no one question can summarize Sanders’s left-of-center economic program in a sentence, this is probably about as close as you’re going to get; his plan would raise marginal tax rates to as high as 77 percent on the very richest Americans to pay for a host of social programs.

The General Social Survey question asks respondents to place themselves on a 7-point scale ranging from favoring government efforts at redistribution to opposing them. To make things a little more intuitive, I’ve translated those responses to a 100-point scale, where 0 represents the most conservative/right-wing position (no redistribution!), and 100 the most liberal/left-wing position (hell yes, redistribution!). The chart below summarizes how both Americans overall and Americans aged 18-29 have responded to the question over time.

Americans end up pretty much in the middle of the road.3 Whereas 50 would represent an exactly centrist position, the average score among all Americans in 2014 (the most recent edition of the survey) was 54. Americans aged 18-29 scored a 60, just slightly further to the left. But these are really modest differences, and they haven’t changed much over time. In 1996, 20 years ago, the average response among all Americans was a 54, and the average among Americans aged 18-29 was a 59, almost exactly the same as now. It’s possible that Sanders will trigger a shift toward more support for economic redistribution in the future, but there hasn’t been one yet.

What socialists and libertarians have in common

Just as “socialism” is becoming more popular with young Americans, so is another label that implies a highly different set of economic policies. Americans aged 18-29 are much more likely than older generations to have a favorable view of the term “libertarian,” referring to a philosophy that favors free markets and small government. Indeed, the demographics of Sanders’s support now and Ron Paul’s support four years ago are not all that different: Both candidates got much more support from younger voters than from older ones, from men than from women, from white voters than from nonwhite ones, and from secular voters than from religious ones. Like Sanders, Paul drew more support from poorer voters than from wealthier ones in 2012, although that’s not true of libertarianism more generally.4

If both “socialism” and “libertarianism” are popular among young voters, could it be that younger voters have a wider spread of opinions on economic redistribution, with more responses on both the “0” and “100” ends of the scale? It could be, but that’s not what the data shows. In fact, on the General Social Survey question I mentioned earlier, younger Americans were more likely than older ones to be concentrated toward the center and not toward the extremes on the redistribution issue.5

The cynical interpretation of this is that the appeal of both “socialism” and “libertarianism” to younger Americans is more a matter of the labels than the policy substance. Relatedly, it’s hard to find all that much of a disagreement over core issues between Clinton and Sanders, who voted together 93 percent of the time when they were both in the Senate from 2007 to 2009.

But terms such as “liberal” and “conservative” are fairly cynical also, at least in the way they’re applied in contemporary American politics. Rather than reflecting their original, philosophical meanings, they instead tend to be used as euphemisms for the policy positions of the Democratic and Republican parties, respectively. Those parties’ platforms are not all that philosophically coherent, nor do they reflect the relatively diverse and multidimensional political views of individual Americans. Instead, the major American political parties are best understood as coalitions of interest groups that work together to further one another’s agendas.

What’s distinctive about both the Sanders and Ron Paul coalitions is that they consist mostly of people who do not feel fully at home in the two-party system but are not part of historically underprivileged groups. On the whole, young voters lack political influence. But a young black voter might feel more comfortable within the Democratic coalition, which black political leaders have embraced, while a young evangelical voter might see herself as part of a wave of religious conservatives who long ago found a place within the GOP.

A young, secular white voter might not have a natural partisan identity, however, while surrounded by relatively successful peers. In part, then, the “revolutions” that both Sanders and Paul speak of are revolutions of rising expectations. We’ll explore this theme more fully in Part II of the series, and consider some alternative explanations for Sanders’s success.

Elections Podcast: New Hampshire’s Turn

From the Airport Diner outside of Manchester, New Hampshire, our elections podcast team discusses the final days of campaigning in the Granite State and what to expect from Tuesday’s primary vote.

http://c.espnradio.com/s:5L8r1/audio/2674709/fivethirtyeightelections_2016-02-08-112009.64k.mp3Subscribe: iTunes |Download |RSS |Video

The @FiveThirtyEight politics crew recording new podcast at The Airport Diner in Manchester — hitting feeds soon! pic.twitter.com/IS8nW97G81

— Micah Cohen (@micahcohen) February 7, 2016

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

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

We Thought Marco Rubio Lost The Debate, But New Hampshire Might Think Differently

We here at FiveThirtyEight endorse the conventional wisdom, for a change. Like most other people covering the event, we thought that Marco Rubio had a really bad night in Saturday’s Republican debate, that the three Republican governors (Chris Christie, Jeb Bush and John Kasich) had a pretty good night, and that Donald Trump and Ted Cruz were somewhere in between.

Rubio, who received a C- in our anonymous staff grading,1 came into the night with a lot on the line. He began the evening at 16 percent in our New Hampshire polling average, with Trump at 30 percent. Believe it or not, that 14-point gap is not too much to overcome in New Hampshire; in the past, there have been last-minute swings and election-day polling misfires of about that magnitude in the state. By the same token, however, Rubio’s second-place position in the polls is not at all safe. Kasich and Cruz, both at 12 percent, and Bush, at 9 percent, could easily catch him; perhaps even Christie at 5 percent could also with a really strong finish.

CANDIDATEAVERAGE GRADEHIGH GRADELOW GRADEChris ChristieA-AB+Jeb BushB+A-BJohn KasichBA-CDonald TrumpC+BC-Ted CruzC+BC-Marco RubioC-BDBen CarsonC-B-FFiveThirtyEight’s Republican debate grades

Rubio’s debate is likely to be remembered for his repeating the same line about President Obama almost verbatim four times (example: “Let’s dispel with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing; he knows exactly what he’s doing”). Three of them came in an exchange with Christie, and two of them after Christie had already mocked Rubio for repeating the same soundbyte answers. It was an embarrassing moment for Rubio, particularly given that the line of questioning that started the exchange was about his lack of accomplishments in office, a critique Rubio should have been better prepared for. He was not only repetitive but also nonresponsive.

But a lot of caution is also in order. Pundits haven’t misgauged the impact of a debate since … well, since only about a week ago, when the “smart take” was that Trump had won the final Iowa debate by not having shown up for it, and that Ted Cruz had a poor evening. Instead, Cruz won the Iowa caucuses a few days later, with Trump in second with a vote share well below where polls had projected him.

As I wrote after the previous debate, political reporters are in the “fog of war” phase of the campaign where our reactions aren’t necessarily good matches for those of voters at home. Some of the reason we reporters thought Rubio’s answer was so awful is because it confirmed some of our gossip about Rubio, namely that he tends to give pat, repetitive answers. But we tend to be more sensitive about that stuff, because we watch every debate from start to finish, and then we see lots of the candidates’ stump speeches and town halls on top of it. There’s a fine line between a candidate who seems stilted and repetitive and one who seems “on message” instead.

Is there any evidence that home viewers saw Rubio’s performance differently? Well, maybe. On Google Trends, there was a huge spike in searches for Rubio during the debate — but it came not during his glitchy moments but instead after an effective answer he delivered on abortion about two hours into the debate. Meanwhile, a Google Consumer Surveys poll conducted midway through the debate found respondents thought that Trump, Rubio and Cruz (in that order) were winning the debate. Undoubtedly, this mostly just reflects the fact that Trump, Rubio and Cruz are the most popular Republican candidates to begin with, but it’s also a reminder that one bad answer, or one bad evening, may not weigh all that much on voters’ minds.

The other good news for Rubio is that most all of this will be forgotten about if he performs well in Tuesday’s primary. Nonetheless, even a little bit of slippage for Rubio could produce a big difference in the result. Not only Christie but also Bush and Kasich had strong evenings, in our view, and those are the very candidates Rubio would like to have out of the Republican race.

Maybe Chris Christie Should Have Taken On Donald Trump

RINDGE, N.H. — We caught a glimpse of Chris Christie at Bruchetti’s Pizzeria in Sandown, New Hampshire, yesterday, where the New Jersey governor shook hands and swapped stories with locals and tourists during a brief visit. (Christie didn’t get a slice of pizza. We did.2) If you didn’t know any better, you might have assumed that Christie was in his element and near the top of the field in New Hampshire. He’s a more natural retail politician than some of the others in the Republican field, and he’s from the Northeast, which can sometimes be an advantage. Christie’s moderate conservatism also isn’t a bad fit for New Hampshire, although he’s more of a “big government conservative” than someone in “Live Free or Die” mode.

Instead, Christie is mired in sixth place in the Republican race in New Hampshire, at just 5.3 percent in our latest polling average here. That’s a big decline, with Christie having lost half his support over the past month. He was at 10.9 percent in the New Hampshire polling average on Jan. 1.

What happened? Christie was squeezed in a vice between the other “establishment” candidates on one side, and Donald Trump on the other.

It’s one thing to adopt Christie’s strategy of downplaying Iowa in the hopes of being buoyed by a stronger finish in New Hampshire. That strategy has had a fairly low success rate, but there are important exceptions, such as John McCain in 2008. But it’s another thing when at least3 two other Republicans, including Jeb Bush and John Kasich, are taking almost exactly the same approach. There are a lot of center-right votes to go around in New Hampshire, but not so many that they’re an impressive plunder when split three or four ways.

Marco Rubio has also hurt Christie. A poor finish for Rubio in Iowa might have created an opportunity for a new “great establishment hope” in New Hampshire. Instead, Rubio has gained ground in New Hampshire after beating his polls to finish with 23 percent of the vote in Iowa.

But for Christie, whose yard signs boast of a candidate “telling it like it is,” the biggest problem of all might be Trump. Trump has usurped the Christie brand of being the unrepentantly loudmouthed4 alpha male who will tell you the truths that other candidates avoid.

Christie has repeatedly declined to pointedly criticize Trump, including in November after Trump falsely claimed that news reports showed “thousands and thousands” of Muslims cheering in New Jersey after the Sept. 11 terror attacks. In debates, Christie has been more focused on attacking Rubio.

This may be because Christie and Trump have long been friends. Trump, of course, has been a longstanding fixture in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and the Trump Taj Mahal casino is still in business there, although its future is uncertain. Or it may because Christie was being tactical and thought having Trump at the top of the pack in Iowa would leave more room for a moderate Republican to emerge out of New Hampshire.

But whatever the rationale, Christie’s strategy doesn’t seemed to have worked. The recent endorsement of Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker and a strong debate tonight could help Christie, but leapfrogging so many other Republicans may be too much of a feat even in a state famous for its last-minute changes of mind.

Check out our live coverage of the Republican debate.

Marco Rubio Stole Ted Cruz’s Iowa Bounce

HOLLIS, N.H. — A candidate is moving up in the New Hampshire polls — but it’s the man who finished third in the Iowa Republican caucuses, Marco Rubio, and not the Iowa winner, Ted Cruz. Below is a comparison of our New Hampshire weighted polling average as it was on Feb. 1, the date of the caucuses, and where it stood as of 2 p.m. today (Feb. 5):

CANDIDATEFEB. 1FEB. 5CHANGETrump32.630.5-2.1Rubio10.216.3+6.1Cruz12.012.4+0.4Kasich11.411.1-0.3Bush9.39.0-0.3Christie6.85.5-1.3Carson3.93.9—Fiorina3.63.9+0.3New Hampshire polling average, before and after Iowa

Rubio has gained about 6 percentage points in the New Hampshire polls, while Donald Trump has lost 2 points (although Trump remains the favorite here). There’s still a tiny bit of pre-Iowa data in the polling average, and the numbers will undoubtedly shift around a few points over the weekend. But if any candidate were emerging with massive momentum as a result of his Iowa performance, we probably would have seen it by now.

Cruz isn’t. In fact, his numbers haven’t really moved at all. He’s polling at 12.4 percent today, versus 12.0 percent before Iowa. Usually, candidates get polling bounces after they win Iowa, especially if they also outperform their polls, as Cruz did.

So what’s the problem? One answer is that Iowa and New Hampshire are famously incompatible on the Republican side; no non-incumbent Republican has ever won both states. But from what we can tell,1 Cruz’s bounce in the national polls is also quite small. So there are other issues also at work.

The many storylines coming out of Iowa might have hurt Cruz — he was competing for media attention with Rubio, Trump and the near-tie on the Democratic side between HIllary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. He probably didn’t help matters by waiting until so late Monday evening to speak, and then not being all that effective when he did so.

The “dirty tricks” allegations against Cruz — his campaign falsely implied to some caucus-goers that Ben Carson had suspended his campaign, and issued misleading “voter violation” mailers that drew the ire of Iowa’s secretary of state — may also have lessened Cruz’s buzz and tainted his win.

But to take a slightly broader view, Cruz may have less of a bounce after Iowa because Republican “party elites” just don’t like him very much and didn’t want him to get one. Cruz has received just one new endorsement since Iowa, while Rubio has gotten nine (along with lots of favorable media coverage). Meanwhile, party elites like Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad are still talking about Cruz’s “unethical and unfair” tactics in Iowa, ensuring that storyline stays in voters’ minds.

Trump Still Leads In New Hampshire, But The Ride Could Be Wild

(UPDATE, Feb. 4, 5:45 p.m.): This article has been updated with a new CNN poll.

MANCHESTER, N.H. — The FiveThirtyEight political team has just landed in New Hampshire, where we were hoping to get a clearer picture of the post-Iowa polling landscape. Instead, there are mixed signals. The signs generally show upward movement for Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz and downward movement for Donald Trump, but the magnitude of the shift differs from poll to poll and Trump remains favored to win here.

You also might notice that the pollsters who have weighed in so far are not the most highly rated group, as measured in our rankings. That happens sometimes; the first pollsters in the field after a big event aren’t always the best ones. But here’s what we have to work with:

The most dramatic result is a Public Policy Polling national poll, which shows a near three-way tie between Donald Trump (25 percent), Ted Cruz (21 percent) and Marco Rubio (21 percent). Trump is down 9 points from PPP’s previous poll in December, while Rubio is up 8 and Cruz is up 3.Another national poll, from Morning Consult, doesn’t give the same impression. Trump is well ahead at 38 percent, although that’s down 3 points from a poll the firm conducted just before Iowa, while Rubio is up 4 and Cruz is up 2.What about polls from here in New Hampshire? The only one conducted entirely after Iowa1 is from American Research Group. It shows Trump at 34 percent, unchanged from the firm’s final pre-Iowa survey, and well ahead of Rubio, who at 14 percent gained 3 points from the firm’s previous poll.Two other New Hampshire polls contain a mix of pre- and post-Iowa interviews. The UMass Lowell tracking poll has had Rubio steadily gaining in each edition of the surveys, from 8 percent on Monday to 15 percent now, but he’s still way behind Trump at 36 percent. A Harper Polling survey, conducted Monday and Tuesday, has Trump at 31 percent and Jeb Bush in second at 14 percent.A new post-Iowa poll conducted by CNN, WMUR-TV, and the University of New Hampshire showed Trump in the lead at 29 percent, unchanged since before Iowa, but Rubio moving into second place at 18 percent, a big jump over his previous showing of 11 percent before Iowa. Cruz, who had been in second place in the pre-Iowa poll, fell to third, getting only a 1 percentage point increase since Iowa. The biggest loser was Chris Christie, who fell from 9 percent pre-Iowa to 4 percent afterwards.

In terms of non-polling indicators, Rubio has picked up quite a few endorsements. And the post-Iowa media environment seems changed. Rubio and Cruz are now much closer to Trump in Google search volume, especially in New Hampshire where the three candidates have become almost equal in search traffic. The empirical value of Google search data is something that we haven’t studied fully, but in Iowa it may have been a leading indicator that Rubio and Cruz were gaining ground.

So while we’re mostly taking a wait-and-see approach — there’s not a lot of post-Iowa polling data and certainly not a lot of highly reliable post-Iowa polling data — I feel reasonably comfortable with the following three conclusions:

Trump remains the favorite in New Hampshire. Even if you expect Trump’s numbers to decline further and for him to underperform his polls on Election Day, he starts with a pretty big cushion. Our polls-plus model gives Trump about a two-in-three chance (66 percent) of winning here.Rubio is the most likely candidate to knock Trump off. That’s the conclusion of polls-plus, which gives Rubio a 16 percent chance of winning New Hampshire. Rubio has gained more ground than Cruz in the polls we’ve seen so far, and he’s better-suited to New Hampshire. He could also potentially gain votes from Bush, John Kasich and Chris Christie, who together have 26 percent in our polling average, if they no longer appear viable by Tuesday.Volatility remains really high. Like Iowa, New Hampshire is a hard state to poll. For one thing, the post-Iowa bounces may not be fully “priced in” yet. Our 2008 study of polling “bounces” after the party conventions found that they sometimes take several days to show up fully in the polls. That may be because polling shifts tend to produce feedback: A candidate declines in the polls, which leads to negative media coverage, which in turn makes the decline worse. However, there have also been times when a candidate declined in the polls only to rebound by Election Day. Howard Dean did so in 2004, recovering from a post-“Dean Scream” low of 19 percent in the New Hampshire polling average to wind up with 26 percent of the vote instead2.

There can be huge differences between the polls and the actual results, as we saw before with Hillary Clinton’s upset New Hampshire primary win in 2008 or (even more dramatically) Gary Hart’s in 1984: Hart took 37 percent of the state’s Democratic vote despite polling at just 21 percent. Finally, there’s the potential for late-breaking news, with a Republican debate set for Saturday night and 2012 New Hampshire winner Mitt Romney reportedly considering a potentially needle-moving endorsement. We’ll have a lot more for you over the course of the next six days.

Check out our live coverage of the Democratic debate.

What Howard Dean Can Teach Us About 2016

A bonus 2016 Slack chat this week! We’re premiering a short documentary and companion podcast today about Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign called “The Dean Scream” — the first in a series of films re-evaluating famous moments from past campaigns. So we gathered our election nerds to talk over what can be learned from Dean’s roller-coaster ride. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): So, Harry, tell us what the “Dean Scream” is and how people remember it, and then we’ll talk about why that narrative is wrong and what lessons the whole episode holds for contemporary campaign coverage.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): WAIT YOU’RE TELLING ME THE NARRATIVE WAS WRONG? UNPOSSIBLE!

micah: Nate, we know how much you love narratives.

harry (Harry Enten, senior political writer): Well, the Dean Scream is this:

Dean raised his voice after losing the Iowa caucuses in 2004. A lot of people saw this speech and said he lost control of himself. He went on to lose the New Hampshire primary and the nomination. A lot of people have said it was this speech that started this decline. The problem, of course, is that he lost Iowa before this speech — in fact, it was his concession speech. Historically, an unexpectedly poor performance in Iowa has led to a decline in New Hampshire polling. Additionally, he was already losing ground in New Hampshire polls. So the fact that he lost New Hampshire and then the nomination would have been perfectly expected even without the speech in question.

natesilver: According to our polling average — well, FiveThirtyEight didn’t exist back then, but this is what you’d get if you calculated a polling average in the same manner we do now — Dean peaked at 29 percent in Iowa about 12 days before the voting there.

His polling average was down to 22 percent on the night of the caucuses. Then he actually got 18 percent at the caucus itself.

So that’s an 11 percentage point drop BEFORE the Scream ever happened.

harry: Right, Dean was falling off in both Iowa and New Hampshire before the Scream occurred.

natesilver: For Dean, A Scream

harry: What’s funny is that Dean only came across as screaming on TV, where the crowd noise was toned down.

micah: Yeah, in the room it didn’t seem out of place, right?

harry: That’s right. So no one in the room realized what Dean had done. Oftentimes, things seem one way on television and another in person.

natesilver: The New York Times write-up of the evening didn’t really mention the Dean Scream. “At a rally later Monday evening, Dr. Dean — his sleeves rolled up, bellowing to the crowd and smiling as if [he] had in fact won the race — celebrated his showing.” OK, there’s a reference to “bellowing,” but absolutely zero sense that a huge gaffe had been committed.

micah: So how did it become such a big deal?

natesilver: Because the herd mentality in the political press pool is incredibly strong.

harry: And keep in mind, the day afterward it was already in full swing on the evening newscasts:

But I think it became a big deal because all of a sudden Dean, who had a lead in New Hampshire, dropped in the polls. People are always trying to tie a drop in the polls to an event. In this case, the sexy option was to choose the scream.

natesilver: One thing you see all the time is that the press declares a candidate is gaining or losing “momentum” only AFTER there’s been a change in the polls. They were still insisting that Mitt Romney had “momentum” well after he had stopped moving up in the polls in October 2012, for example, and things were shifting back to Obama instead.

micah: So we’ve already got two lessons from the Dean Scream: Cause and effect aren’t always so clear, and “momentum” as used by the political press is better interpreted as “that candidate gained in the polls” and not “that candidate WILL CONTINUE TO gain in the polls.”

So if the Scream didn’t sink Dean, what did?

natesilver: That’s not as clear. We know “outsider” candidates sometimes sink in the polls as the voting approaches. Donald Trump may be another example of this, given his performance in Iowa this week. But Dean, unlike Trump, had received quite a few endorsements from Democratic elected officials. You can read accounts from the Times and The Washington Post implying that the race was basically over after Al Gore endorsed him.

harry: Well, the thing that certainly helped to sink him in Iowa was that he got into a one-on-one fight with Dick Gephardt. That brought up their negatives, and John Kerry and John Edwards were able to come in and fill the void without taking much incoming fire. I think what also happened is that Dean was thought of as a weak general election candidate. That is, too liberal to win.

natesilver: There are a lot of parallels between the 2004 Democratic race and this year’s Republican one. Maybe Marco Rubio was helped in Iowa by Donald Trump and Ted Cruz fighting toward the end there.

harry: The capture of Saddam Hussein in mid-December 2003 didn’t help Dean, either. It boosted George W. Bush’s approval rating and made his decision to invade Iraq seem like a better decision. Obviously, views on that have shifted, but at the time, Dean, as the anti-war candidate, was hurt.

natesilver: Yeah, it’s pretty hard to remember now because the Iraq War would later become so unpopular, but back then it was thought of as a very risky position to oppose it. In January 2004, after the Saddam capture, approval of the Iraq War was hovering somewhere around 60 percent.

micah: So Dean disappoints in Iowa. His anti-war position becomes a little less viable. Is it still possible the Scream, or more specifically, the way the media handled the Scream, made it harder for Dean to recover from his Iowa loss?

natesilver: Dean lost almost 10 percentage points in his New Hampshire polls in the first several days after Iowa. Which is a larger-than-usual shift.

harry: It’s possible. It’s difficult to disentangle this stuff, but keep in mind that Wesley Clark also dropped in New Hampshire after the Iowa result. I don’t remember Clark screaming in Iowa. Clark and Dean both underperformed their final polling averages in Iowa. John Kerry, meanwhile, outperformed. He sucked up the oxygen in the room. I should also note, of course, that Kerry had always been in second or third place in New Hampshire. He was from right next door. Massachusetts senators and governors have a history of winning the New Hampshire primary, including Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. as a write-in in 1964.

natesilver: The interesting thing, though, is that his polls recovered a few points in the last day or two in New Hampshire and then he overperformed his polls on election night. He got 26 percent in New Hampshire when the polling average had him at 22 percent.

micah: And finished second, so he improved on his finish in Iowa.

natesilver: Keep in mind, as we’re watching whatever bounce there is in the polls for Cruz, Rubio and Trump after Iowa, that it can be a fluid thing. Sometimes it starts out small and gets big. Sometimes it starts big and gets small. Sometimes the bounce shows up in the polls, but less so in the actual vote. Sometimes just the opposite is true.

harry: Right, and that would suggest not some long-lasting gaffe, but rather the drop and then rise that we often see in a candidate’s polling after losing a state. Remember how Mitt Romney dropped in Florida in the immediate aftermath of losing South Carolina in 2012.

natesilver: Some of this is caused by press coverage. Right now, the “Rubio surging” narrative is one the press seems to want to tell, for example. In this case, there’s some justification for that at least, given his performance in Iowa and his newly minted endorsements. But sooner or later, “Rubio has stalled out” or “Rubio isn’t meeting expectations” or “Rubio doesn’t have this locked up” will make for a better story.

harry: Indeed, if we can take some lessons from Dean in 2004 and apply them to 2016: Losing a state the press thinks you’re going to win can be devastating to a campaign. Once a winner becomes a loser, it’s difficult to become a winner again. I’m, of course, thinking of Trump.

natesilver: The press loves a comeback story too, though. And it loves Trump. The biggest risk to a candidate like Trump or Dean, in some ways, is that the press writes them off as a novelty and gets bored with them.

harry: I’d argue one of the things that hurt Dean most was that those polls after New Hampshire showed him losing his lead. If Trump can maintain a large lead in New Hampshire, he may be able to weather the storm. I think the media dismissed Dean because he was losing, and the thought was let’s focus on the serious candidates now.

micah: How did the Dean campaign end?

harry: Well, it essentially ended with a string of losses. He didn’t win a single primary when he was still in the race. Dean made his last stand in Wisconsin, and he came in third there. After exiting the race, he won Vermont. So at least he won one primary.

micah: All right, to wrap: Give me your two biggest lessons from the Dean Scream and 2004 campaign generally that would help us make sense of the 2016 campaign.

natesilver: The lesson is simple. Be wary of the “narrative.” It’s wrong as often as it’s right, and it’s a lagging indicator as often as it’s a leading one.

harry: I think that it’s the power of the media to create a narrative and the importance of expectations. I mean, who would have thought that Howard Dean would take off like he did when he entered the race for president? If expectations had been kept low, his third-place finish in Iowa would have been seen as an amazing performance. Once he took the lead, though, third place was seen as disappointing. His campaign never recovered.

micah: And that last bit does sound eerily applicable.

Check out our live coverage of the Democratic debate.

Why Iowa Changed Rubio’s And Trump’s Nomination Odds So Much

Marco Rubio finished in third in Iowa — a “strong third” in which he outperformed his polls, but third nevertheless. And yet, his chances of winning the Republican nomination nearly doubled according to the bookmaker Betfair, from about 30 percent before the Iowa caucuses to 55 percent now.1 Meanwhile, Donald Trump, who finished ahead of Rubio although behind Ted Cruz, saw his chances halved from 50 percent to 25 percent.

Even if you acknowledge the importance of the “expectations game,” isn’t that a little excessive? Well, maybe.2 But I think Betfair is coming up with approximately the right answer.

Here’s why: Presidential nominations are a lot like the stock market. In the long run, they’re reasonably well governed by the fundamentals. In the short run, they can be crazy. Iowa represented the equivalent of a stock market correction, a sign that sanity might prevail after all.

In the stock market, the fundamentals consist of things like the profitability and growth of a company. In the nomination process, the most important fundamentals are what we call electability (can the candidate win in November?) and ideological fit (does the candidate hold positions in line with the consensus of her party?). A party would prefer to nominate a candidate who scores well in both categories.

Rubio fits the bill, perhaps uniquely among the remaining Republican candidates. His image with general election voters is not great, but it’s better than the other leading Republicans. He’s also quite conservative. That’s convenient, because Republican voters are quite conservative also. In fact, Rubio is almost exactly as conservative as the average GOP primary voter.

By contrast, Trump is problematic in both categories. It’s not always clear what Trump believes or where he would wind up as a general election candidate, but he hasn’t been particularly conservative for most of his career. His electability case isn’t good either; instead he has an extremely negative image among general election voters. If Rubio is a blue-chip stock, Trump is a risky mortgage-backed security.

And yet, Trump was leading in the polls for many months. We’ve spent a lot of time considering why, and I won’t rehash all of that discussion here. But one highly plausible answer is that his national polls partly reflected his overwhelming lead in media coverage, which allowed him to top the field despite having a narrower base of support than Rubio or Cruz.

Under this theory, Trump’s polls and his round-the-clock media coverage are self-reinforcing: Better polls lead to more coverage, which leads to better polls, and so on. In stock market terms, you might even call them a bubble. Back in the summer and early fall, it seemed likely that something would burst the bubble eventually: The media would grow tired of Trump or he’d do something to break his winning streak. At around the time of the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, however, which brought even more attention to Trump, that became far less clear. Trump looked like he might ride the magic carpet all the way to the nomination in Cleveland.

Then Iowa intervened. Voters there researched their decision carefully and heard from all of the candidates, making the media playing field more level. And they decided they didn’t like Trump so much after all.

Maybe Iowa was just a fluke, and Trump will perform better in the next several states. Before Iowa, Trump had a big lead in New Hampshire, for instance, and in South Carolina. But Iowa was the first state to have voted, and the only test we’ve had so far of whether Trump’s support in the polls will turn into votes. Pretty much the whole case for Trump depends on the premise that it will; if the linkage is broken, it becomes futile to cite Trump’s polls in future states as evidence of his resilience.

Iowa might even prove to be Trump’s high-water mark. Rubio and Cruz are going to get a lot more coverage now, and Trump has lost his sheen of invincibility.

So although Iowa is just one data point, it was doubly important. If Trump’s campaign was a bubble, it might burst. If it wasn’t, Iowa nonetheless suggests that Trump might draw more like 25 percent of votes instead of the 35 percent or 40 percent support he receives in national polls. That happens to be an important range: A candidate getting a 35 percent or 40 percent plurality of the vote could easily win a majority of delegates under the GOP’s complex rules, but one winning 25 percent almost certainly couldn’t.

That doesn’t mean the betting markets have things exactly right; I think they’re too low on Cruz, for instance. But one data point can be awfully important when it’s the only data point you’ve got. New Hampshire will be the second, and you can bet it will be a market-mover too.

Hey, you should sign up for our weekly 2016 newsletter, “What I Thought About Over The Weekend.”

http://c.espnradio.com/s:5L8r1/audio/2670303/fivethirtyeightelections_2016-02-02-090203.64k.mp3

Quick reaction to the Iowa results from our elections podcast team. Listen above, or subscribe on iTunes.

Where Does Ted Cruz Go From Here?

For this week’s 2016 Slack chat, the FiveThirtyEight politics team talks about what rewards Ted Cruz can expect to reap from his victory in the Iowa caucuses on Monday. (Also, you should sign up for our weekly 2016 newsletter, “What I Thought About Over The Weekend.”)

micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): Hopefully you all got some sleep after a late night, because we’ve got the future to consider! Ted Cruz’s future, in particular. Cruz outperformed his polls and won the Iowa caucuses somewhat comfortably, with Donald Trump finishing second and Marco Rubio a strong third (just 1 percentage point behind Trump). So how does Cruz’s Iowa win affect his chances of winning the GOP nomination? Let’s start with what the Iowa results mean in New Hampshire, which votes less than a week from now, and then we’ll talk about Cruz’s path more broadly.

Any thoughts on how New Hampshire Republicans will react to Cruz’s win in Iowa?

harry (Harry Enten, senior political writer): According to our New Hampshire forecasts, Cruz is basically in a multi-way tie for second place in polling average at 12 percent. I expect him to grow from that based off his victory, but make no mistake: New Hampshire is a different state than Iowa. If Cruz wins the same percentage of very conservatives, conservatives and moderates/liberals in New Hampshire as he did in Iowa, he would probably get only about 20 percent of the vote.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): It’s fair to assume that Cruz has a fairly low ceiling in New Hampshire. At least I think — until we see what the polls look like in 48 hours, I’m not that sure of anything. But it seems plausible to me that you could have three or even four candidates piled up in the high teens to mid-20s.

clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): Yeah, so I think based on nothing but my gut of guts, and belief in the balance of the universe, that Cruz doesn’t win or come in second place in New Hampshire — he finishes third to Trump (eh, maybe?) and Rubio, who had a very fruitful night last night. I think Cruz’s people are … elsewhere on the primary map, and he’s smart and knows that.

micah: I get why Cruz may have limited upside in New Hampshire. In a lot of ways he’s the typical “peaks in Iowa” candidate, like Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum: strong appeal to religious conservatives. But doesn’t Cruz also have some tea party bona fides? Couldn’t those help him in New Hampshire?

clare.malone: Sure, that’s true. I think if I were Cruz, I would start playing up my constitutional lawyer thing in New Hampshire. He’s a true originalist, and he’s pretty radical and sincere in his beliefs about states rights, liberty, etc. etc., which I think could play well with the New England crowd. He’s got a nice little résumé there.

natesilver: Is New Hampshire really a tea party state? Is “tea party” a useful label anymore?

micah: Well, Cruz seems more of a limited government conservative than either Santorum or Huckabee. And that could work in the “live free or die” state.

harry: I mean Cruz did win 27 percent in Iowa among those voters who said government spending was most important. But he did worst on economy/jobs in the Iowa entrance poll. There are going to be a TON of those voters in New Hampshire.

clare.malone: Nate, do you think the tea party has seeped into the party bloodstream so much that it’s not a faction anymore, is that what you mean?

natesilver: Narrowly speaking, the tea party is more concentrated in the South and the Mountain West more than in New England. Whereas New Hampshire has more of a libertarian streak.

clare.malone: Paul! Paul! Paul!

harry: I mean Cruz won 9 percent among moderates and liberals last night. You know how many of those voters there are in New Hampshire? They made up 47 percent of voters in the last GOP New Hampshire primary in 2012. And a lot of those voters (26 percent) went for Ron Paul, who you might think of as that libertarian candidate Nate and Clare mentioned.

natesilver: Yeah. Occam’s razor is that New Hampshire is moderate, and Cruz isn’t.

In fact, Rubio might also be a little bit too far to the right for New Hampshire.

micah: But the vote will be pretty split, right? Couldn’t someone win with a vote share in the mid-20s? Even low 20s?

clare.malone: Maybe Trump slips thanks to the face-fall last night and someone like John Kasich picks up votes over a Rubio/Cruz?

natesilver: Trump 22 percent, Rubio 21, Kasich 18, Cruz 17 or something in that vicinity is an entirely plausible outcome

harry: One thing we don’t know is how undeclared voters in New Hampshire, who can vote in either party’s primary (but just one), will react to the Democratic and Republican results last night. The more of those undeclared voters who vote in the Republican primary, the better it is for Kasich.

clare.malone: FYI, as we type this, Scott Brown will reportedly endorse Trump tonight.

natesilver: Another guy who hasn’t won an election in five years.

micah: GAME-CHANGER!!!

clare.malone: Do we think he could influence New Hampshire voters just as he did thousands of teenage girls in his early work in Cosmo?

harry: What state is Scott Brown from again?

micah: I guess a lot depends on what happens to Trump’s numbers?

clare.malone: I think they slide.

micah: All right, let’s say Trump’s support slides — where do those voters go?

natesilver: Maybe they were never there to begin with.

micah: Are you on mushrooms, Nate?

clare.malone: Yeah, there’s that, what Nate said. In Iowa, those who were Trump supporters generally said Cruz was the other person on their list, but I’m not sure how that’ll square up with New Hampshirites (is that how you say it?).

harry: Nate is on 10 cans of Red Bull plus a Coke.

natesilver: I’ll try not to get too pedantic here, but the polls overestimated Trump’s support in Iowa. Which is, not unimportantly, the only state to have voted so far. So people citing Trump’s polls in future states as proof of how resilient he is aren’t making any sense at all.

clare.malone: There is half a bottle of Coke and a chocolate on his desk. The man is just on fire today, (semi) au naturel.

natesilver: With all that said, it’s entirely plausible for Trump to win New Hampshire.

Having not seen any data yet, I’d probably still call him the plurality favorite, although I’d take the field against him.

harry: I’m really in a wait-and-see mode on the polls. Before then, I’ll say Trump has a shot, but I remain skeptical.

clare.malone: Yeah, the more I think about it, the more I have no idea where the seeping-away Trump votes go … maybe they don’t vote?

And then the people voting in the more elite lane of the party fill up the space.

natesilver: FWIW, I like Kasich’s chances a little better than Jeb Bush’s or Chris Christie’s in New Hampshire because he’s running explicitly as a moderate, instead of as a (failing) full-spectrum consensus candidate.

harry: Kasich also has a real chance to “expand the electorate,” Nate.

clare.malone: I’m actually excited to see Kasich campaign in New Hampshire, to see how he’s working the room…I’m guessing it’s going to be similar to what we saw with Jeb in Iowa, except Jeb is a dead man walking, and Kasich is on the rise. (Saying you’re excited to see a moderate campaign is like saying you’re excited to eat plain spaghetti with butter, I realize, but whatever. It’s out there.)

natesilver: Jeb’s main virtue in the race may be making Kasich and Christie look good by comparison. Christie actually had a really bad month in New Hampshire, having fallen from about 11 percent to 7 percent in our polling average.

micah: Back to Cruz … Our colleague Carl Bialik noted (pivoting off a piece by GOP pollster and friend of the site Kristen Soltis Anderson) one other thing to watch as we see how much of a bump Cruz gets: Iowa has gone some ways toward leveling the public’s interest — as measured by Google searches — in Trump vs. Cruz vs. Rubio. Trump typically swamps the other two, and he still leads, but …

micah: And that’s BEFORE Cruz won the state!

natesilver: The theory that the ballot test reflects a combination of favorable ratings and media coverage looks really good after last night.

harry: I mean the question here is very simple: How can Trump win when he just lost with more media attention than I imagine would be given to a sex scandal involving the Kardashians and The Situation?

clare.malone: Harry, you know who the Kardashians are??

natesilver: And Iowa suggests that even if the national media coverage is still extremely Trump intensive, voters will consume a more even allocation of news before they actually go out and vote.

We keep getting into these loops and eddies about Trump and Rubio and everyone except Cruz, who won Iowa last night, and who’s a clear second in national polls (and could be in first nationally by tomorrow for all we know). Betting markets have Cruz’s nomination chances at just 13 percent, which seems way low.

micah: OK, so let’s talk about Cruz’s path more generally: He would seem to have a favorable electorate in South Carolina, which vote after New Hampshire, with Republicans voting on Feb. 20.

natesilver: I think so, yes, although South Carolina is not as conservative as you might think.

harry: I think what we want to see from Cruz is the ability to win in a state that isn’t as religious as Iowa. New Hampshire won’t be the final test for that; South Carolina isn’t a great one either, but winning there keeps the ball rolling.

clare.malone: If you look at just where he’s spent his time, Cruz has been hanging out in Iowa the most, and South Carolina second. So, his feet are doing the talking.

micah: If Cruz does end up relying mostly on religious conservatives, though, are there enough of them in the GOP primary electorate for him to win the nomination?

natesilver: So the basic case for Cruz is that he gets the Huckabee/Santorum evangelical coalition, plus a few movement conservative types, plus he has a lot of money, and he’s a really good tactician, and has a good ground game. That’s … something. We know that the Santobee coalition isn’t enough to win the nomination on its own. But combined with Cruz’s various other advantages, it’s interesting.

harry: So to give you an idea, 36 percent of voters in the 2012 South Carolina Republican primary identified as “very conservative.” In Iowa last night, it was 40 percent. The key difference? Moderates/liberals were 32 percent in 2012 in South Carolina, while they were just 15 percent in Iowa last night.

natesilver: One thing about South Carolina and certain other southern states is that the moderate voters in them tend to identify as Republican rather than Democratic. And some of them vote in the Republican primaries too.

harry: Yes, remember John McCain won South Carolina in 2008, and he got over 40 percent of the vote in 2000. But it’s still overwhelmingly religious. It was 65 percent born-again/evangelical Christian in 2012. That’s pretty much what Iowa was last night.

natesilver: South Carolina’s not the worst approximation for the GOP electorate overall, which is part of what makes it interesting. Prior to last night, the polls there were a pretty good match for the national numbers.

clare.malone: So, the fact that Cruz has the, what was it, Santobee momentum (?) is certainly interesting, and yes, he’s smart, but doesn’t he also have this fundamental element of unlikability that’s going to hurt him in more and more places as the calendar year goes by? I guess I see his campaign as a savvy one, but does he alienate all the moderates while turning out a base?

harry: Cruz came in third place among “somewhat conservatives” last night, so it wasn’t just moderates. He’s got to do better among mainstream conservatives.

natesilver: I’ll admit to finding Cruz’s delivery a little grating personally. But his favorability ratings are reasonably good with GOP voters.

clare.malone: But part of me wonders if that’s just because he’s being compared to Trump, and looks better for it.

natesilver: Here’s the thing, though. Cruz will probably never be a consensus candidate. A lot of GOP elites vehemently oppose him (although some factions support him). He’s not going to make a lot of friends along the way. But he’s a guy who might get 50 percent + 1 of the delegates.

clare.malone: What if Trump media attention eases off and people start getting more familiar with the Cruz that everyone in the Senate knows and hates?

harry: To me, Cruz needs this to be a three-way race for as long as possible. Once it’s a two-way race the heat will be on Cruz.

natesilver: Cruz reminds me of Gary Hart 1984 in a lot of ways. Another guy who had a reputation for tactical brilliance, and not getting along all that well with his colleagues. Unlike Hart, Cruz doesn’t get a lot of mainstream media adoration, although maybe that’s not a terrible thing with GOP primary voters.

micah: Yeah, to what extent do we think Cruz’s chances of winning the nomination are out of his hands? Who does he want to do well and who does he want to disappear? Who does he want in that three-way race, Harry?

harry: I mean he wants Trump in there. It’s tough to come off as obnoxious with Trump still in it.

clare.malone: I think he really loves having Jeb in the race because Jeb has such a Rubio fixation that Cruz doesn’t have to worry all that much about attacking Rubio hard. And yeah, Cruz likes drafting off Trump in the sense that I think Trump makes Cruz look very reasonable to the average GOP voter.

natesilver: I’m not so sure Cruz wants Trump in the race. Cruz’s best chance might be to win lots of delegates in the South, overperform in caucus states and just get to 50 percent + 1 against Rubio. I’m sure Cruz already has an elaborate strategy for how to win a contested convention. But that’s usually not what you’re aiming for. And that really could be a possibility if all three of Cruz, Trump and Rubio stay strong.

harry: As soon as it’s a two-way against Rubio, Cruz will have almost all the national party actors turn against him. He’ll also become the “very conservative” candidate. Rubio is more conservative than 50 percent of the party, but the moderates/mainstream conservatives will rally to him because he’s more moderate than Cruz. Trump, however, was able to win over some of those moderate voters.

What Cruz needs in my mind is for this to remain a three-way race when we get to the winner-take-all states. If he gets into a one-on-one with Rubio in the North, Rubio is going to start pulling massive delegate totals. That’s especially the case because a lot of these northern states are winner-take-all.

natesilver: Hmm, maybe this is trickier for Cruz than I thought once you start to game it out. I’d still stand by the conclusion, though, that forest-for-the-trees, assigning him only a 13 percent chance of the nomination is way too low.

harry: That I agree with.

http://c.espnradio.com/s:5L8r1/audio/2670303/fivethirtyeightelections_2016-02-02-090203.64k.mp3

Quick reaction to the Iowa results from our elections podcast team. Listen above, or subscribe on iTunes.

Donald Trump Comes Out Of Iowa Looking Like Pat Buchanan

On Monday, Iowa voters did something that Republican “party elites” had failed to do for more than seven months: They rejected Donald Trump.

Trump received 24 percent of the vote in the Iowa caucuses, placing him closer to the third-place candidate, Marco Rubio (23 percent), than to the winner, Ted Cruz (28 percent). Trump underperformed his polls, which had him winning Iowa with 29 percent of the vote, while Cruz and Rubio outperformed theirs.

It’s not uncommon for the polls to be off in Iowa and other early-voting states, but the manner in which Trump underachieved is revealing. It turns out that few late-deciding voters went for him. According to entrance polls in Iowa, Trump won 39 percent of the vote among Iowans who decided on their candidate more than a month ago. But he took just 13 percent of voters who had decided in the last few days, with Rubio instead winning the plurality of those voters.

WHEN DECISION TO SUPPORT WAS MADETRUMPCRUZRUBIOJust today15%22%28%In the last few days132731Sometime last week133627In the last month233227Before that392613

Source: Iowa Republican Entrance Poll

Could this have been a reaction to Trump’s failure to show up for last week’s GOP debate? It’s plausible. Trump, who seemed uncharacteristically chastened in his brief concession speech on Monday, might think twice before skipping a debate again. But there was no decline in his polls in New Hampshire or nationally after the missed debate, which suggests that something else might have been at work in Iowa.

Could it have been his lack of a ground game in Iowa? That’s possible, too. If so, it has interesting implications for the rest of Trump’s campaign. On the one hand, it’s hard to build a field operation on short notice, so if Trump had a poor one in Iowa he may face similar challenges in the remaining 49 states. On the other hand, a field operation potentially matters less in primary states than in caucus states like Iowa.

But there’s good reason to think that the ground game wasn’t the only reason for Trump’s defeat. Republican turnout in Iowa was extremely high by historical standards and beat most projections. Furthermore, Trump won the plurality of first-time caucus-goers.

There may have been a more basic reason for Trump’s loss: The dude just ain’t all that popular. Even among Republicans.

The final Des Moines Register poll before Monday’s vote showed Trump with a favorability rating of only 50 percent favorable against an unfavorable rating of 47 percent among Republican voters. (By contrast, Cruz had a favorable rating of 65 percent, and Rubio was at 70 percent.) It’s almost unprecedented for a candidate to win a caucus or a primary when he has break-even favorables within his own party.

Still, Trump had seemed poised to do it, in part because of the intensity of his support. He’s highly differentiated from the rest of the field — a strategic advantage in such a crowded race — and the voters who like Trump like him an awful lot. The disproportionate media coverage of Trump played a large role too, though. Most Republican voters like several candidates. How does a Republican voter who likes (for example) Trump, Cruz and Chris Christie choose among them? The answer seems to have a lot to do with which candidate is getting the most news coverage.

In Iowa, however, the media environment wasn’t as lopsided in Trump’s favor. Voters were blanketed with ads from all the candidates. And they sought out information on their own before settling on their vote. There was a late spike in Google searches for Cruz and Rubio in the state Monday, bringing them almost even with Trump, even as Trump continued to dominate in search traffic nationally.

What about those national polls showing Trump with support in the mid- to high 30s? They might also be a mirage, reflecting a combination of the Trump base (24 percent is nothing to sneeze at, but also well short of a winning coalition), plus a few other bandwagon-jumpers who come along for the ride but who may peel off as they research the candidates more deeply.

I wrote in August about “Donald Trump’s Six Stages Of Doom” and noted that this might be a problem for Trump. Several past factional candidates, including Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson and Ron Paul,1 received somewhere around 25 percent of the vote in Iowa. Under some circumstances, 25 percent can be good enough to win an early state. But it leaves you well short of the majority you need to win a nomination.

What might Pat Buchanan plus obsessive, round-the-clock media coverage look like? Well, possibly a lot like Donald Trump. Iowa voters made Trump appear to be much more of a factional candidate along the lines of Buchanan, who received 23 percent of Iowa’s vote in 1996, than the juggernaut he’s been billed as. We’ll know a lot more after New Hampshire weighs in next week.

Hey, you should sign up for our weekly 2016 newsletter, “What I Thought About Over The Weekend.”

http://c.espnradio.com/s:5L8r1/audio/2670303/fivethirtyeightelections_2016-02-02-090203.64k.mp3

Quick reaction to the Iowa results from our elections podcast team. Listen above, or subscribe on iTunes.