Nate Silver's Blog, page 144

How We’re Forecasting The Primaries*

Forecasting primaries and caucuses is challenging, much more so than general elections. Polls shift rapidly and often prove to be fairly inaccurate, even on the eve of the election. Non-polling factors, particularly endorsements, can provide some additional guidance, but none of them is a magic bullet. And races with several viable candidates, like the one the Republicans are contesting this year, are especially hard to predict.

Nonetheless, we’ve developed a pair of relatively simple statistical models that we hope can shed some light on the upcoming primaries. These models don’t claim to have a lot of precision, sometimes showing very wide potential ranges of results for each candidate. (For a variety of reasons, the ranges are especially wide for the Iowa Republican caucuses. Ted Cruz’s most likely range spans all the way from about 14 percent to 41 percent of the vote, for example. There’s more on the forecast in Iowa and New Hampshire here.)

But we do think our models do a reasonable job of laying odds and accounting for the uncertainty involved in the races. How safe is a 15-percentage-point lead in the polls with three weeks to go? How likely is a candidate in fourth place to jump to first? How should you weigh endorsements against polls? Our forecasts can answer questions like these.

As I mentioned, we’re running two separate (although related) forecasts this year that we call polls-only and polls-plus:

The polls-only model is based only on polls from a particular state;1 for example, only polls of New Hampshire are used in the New Hampshire forecast.The polls-plus model is based on state polls, national polls and endorsements. (National polls are used in a slightly unusual way; they’re a contrarian indicator. More about that later.) The polls-plus model also seeks to account for how the projected results in Iowa could affect the results in New Hampshire and how the results in those states could affect the results in subsequent contests.

In theory, the polls-plus model should be more accurate than the polls-only model, but it’s a pretty small difference; in our backtesting, polls-plus was more accurate at predicting a candidate’s actual result 57 percent of the time, while polls-only was more accurate 43 percent of the time. That’s something, but there are plenty of times when the polls-only model will give the more accurate answer. Therefore, we think the models are more useful when looked at together.

You’ll also notice that in some states — Nevada is one example — we list a weighted polling average for each candidate, but not a polls-only or polls-plus forecast. This is a compromise of sorts. The polls-only and polls-plus models are trained on past elections when there was quite a bit of polling data in the final 60 days of the campaign. So if polling data is sparse in a state this year, or if voting is still a long way away there, we won’t run a forecast. But we may list a polling average, which you can think of as a FiveThirtyEight version of the polling averages published at RealClearPolitics and Huffington Post Pollster.

Maybe you’re the type of reader who’s interested in the fine print? What follows is a more detailed, step-by-step guide to how the models make their forecasts.

Step 1: Calculate polling averages

We start by calculating a weighted polling average for each candidate in each state.2 The weights reflect the quality of each survey as determined by FiveThirtyEight’s pollster ratings, which grades polls based on their past accuracy and methodological standards. The poll weights also adjust for a poll’s sample size and how recently it was conducted. All polls are included in the weighted average unless they were internal polls released by a candidate or a candidate’s super PAC or if we have good reason to suspect that the poll faked its data or committed other gross ethical violations.

This process of weighting polls is highly similar to the one FiveThirtyEight uses for its general election forecasts. An important difference, however, is that public opinion shifts much more quickly in the primaries, so recency is at more of a premium when calculating a polling average. Thus, a poll of middling quality that’s hot off the presses will sometimes receive more weight than a top-quality one that’s a week old. (We wish it weren’t that way, but our research is pretty emphatic on the value of preferring newer polling data.)3

House effects

The models do have a defense mechanism against potential outlier polls, however. Namely, polls are adjusted for house effects, which is a tendency for a pollster to consistently show different results for a candidate than the average of other polls.4 If a certain pollster consistently has Hillary Clinton polling 3 percentage points higher than other polls conducted in the same states at about the same times, for example, the model will subtract a fraction of that 3-point house effect from Clinton’s numbers whenever that pollster issues a new poll for her.5 The house effects adjustment is designed such that higher-quality polls (as rated by our pollster ratings) have more say in calibrating the polling averages. Thus, it partially corrects for low-quality polls that might “flood the zone” with frequent releases of questionable data.

Step 2: Polls-only forecast

What’s the difference between the weighted polling average in a state, as described in Step 1, and the polls-only forecast? In fact, the differences are pretty minor.

First, undecided voters are allocated to the candidates in the polls-only forecast. The allocation is a combination of proportional6 and equal.

Second, the polls-only forecast incorporates an estimate of the probability that a candidate will drop out before the primary. (This is described in Step 3.)

Third, the polls-only forecast accounts for uncertainty by calculating a range of possible outcomes and uses this range to estimate the candidate’s chance of winning the primary. (This is described in Step 4.)

Step 3: Polls-plus forecast

In designing the polls-plus forecast, we considered an array of possible predictors, including: endorsements, state and national fundraising totals, favorability ratings, ideology ratings and national polls. Just about all of these have some positive correlation with primary and caucus outcomes: Candidates with higher favorability ratings are more likely to see their ballot-test numbers go up than down, for example. And candidates who are good ideological “fits” for their states overperform their polls more often than not.

In the end, however, we opted for a relatively simple three-variable model, rather than a “kitchen sink” approach. The variables are state polls, endorsements and national polls. The model also considers how the projected results in Iowa might affect New Hampshire and how the results in those states might affect subsequent states. I’ve already described the process by which state polls are used, so I’ll focus on the other factors now.

Endorsements

As described in the book “The Party Decides,” party elites play an important role in the nomination process, and their endorsements are historically a leading indicator of success in the primaries. The media often puts a lot of emphasis on these endorsements during the early, “invisible primary” phase of the campaign but forgets about them once voting is underway. Our research suggests, however, that endorsements have historically remained a leading indicator of popular support throughout the nomination process.7 Even when party elites have failed to come to a consensus on a candidate before Iowa and New Hampshire — as seems to be the case on the Republican side this year — they’ve rallied behind a choice after the first few states voted, perhaps greasing the skids for his or her eventual victory. For instance, party leaders rallied behind John McCain in 2008, John Kerry in 2004 and Michael Dukakis in 1988 after their success in the early states, and nomination processes that once looked divisive turned out to be fairly smooth.

We measure endorsements by endorsement points, which assign a candidate 10 points for each endorsement by a current governor from his or her party, 5 for each endorsement by a U.S. senator, and one for each endorsement by a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. More recent endorsements are weighted more heavily. So, for example, while Jeb Bush narrowly leads Marco Rubio in overall endorsement points among Republicans, Rubio gets more credit in the model because he’s received many more endorsements than Bush recently.

National polls

As my colleague Harry Enten discovered, national polls have some predictive power in helping forecast the outcome in individual states — but not in the way you might expect. Instead, they have negative predictive power. For example, if you take two candidates polling at 15 percent in New Hampshire, the one polling at 10 percent in national polls is more likely to finish higher in the Granite State than the one polling at 20 percent in national polls.

How to explain this? There are a few plausible explanations, but the most intuitive one is as follows. The gap between state and national polls is a good proxy for how well-suited the candidate is to a particular state. Maybe a candidate with strong evangelical roots is polling well in Iowa, for example, or a candidate who has spent months building a great ground game in New Hampshire is doing well there. Once these advantages begin to show up in the state polls, they tend to expand over time. Momentum of various kinds — a candidate who is beating expectations in a state will usually get favorable press coverage for it and may double-down on the resources he’s investing there — may contribute to the process.

Does that mean a candidate will be hurt in our model if his standing rises in national polls? Not exactly. When new national polling data comes out, our model waits until there’s fresh data from the state to figure out what to make of it. If a candidate gains in both state and national polls, he’ll be helped in the model. But if a candidate gains in the national polls and his state polls don’t improve at all, that can be a bearish indicator.8

Also, note that as the election approaches in each state, the polls-only and polls-plus forecasts will tend to converge. The model is set up such that the weight given to endorsements is set to zero by Election Day in each state, while the weight given to national polls is reduced.

Accounting for Iowa and New Hampshire

The polls-plus model also includes an adjustment for the projected results in Iowa and New Hampshire. The process takes place in two phases:

Until Iowa votes, 20 percent of a candidate’s New Hampshire forecast is made up of his Iowa forecast. And until New Hampshire votes, 20 percent of his forecast in states subsequent to New Hampshire is made up of his New Hampshire forecast.Once Iowa and New Hampshire vote, the projected results are replaced by the actual results of the voting in those states. This effect fades to zero once new polling from the subsequent states comes in and we know the actual effect on the polls instead of having to guess at it.9

Overall, this is a relatively conservative way to account for the results in Iowa and New Hampshire, which often prove to be extremely influential on the rest of the race. However, their influence can be hard to predict. Often, whether a candidate beats his polls is as important as his absolute finish in determining the media-driven momentum he gets out of these states.

Will a candidate drop out?

Both the polls-only and polls-plus forecasts attempt to project the likelihood that the candidate will drop out before the state votes. What factors predict when candidates drop out? The most important considerations in the model, based on an analysis of when candidates have dropped out in the past, are as follows:

Candidates rarely drop out immediately before a major primary or caucus. If they’ve made it to within a couple of days of voting, they’ll usually play out the string, even if their position looks hopeless.The field usually winnows significantly after Iowa and New Hampshire.A candidate’s decision to drop out is influenced both by his absolute standing and his trajectory in the polls in upcoming primaries and caucuses. Candidates with negative momentum in the polls are at risk of dropping out, while those with favorable momentum rarely drop out.National polls and endorsements have only minor effects on a candidate’s likelihood of dropping out. Instead, a candidate’s decision is influenced mostly by his position in the next couple of states scheduled to vote.10

Why go through all this trouble to calculate a candidate’s dropout probability? It’s important from a technical standpoint because it can make a candidate’s range of possible outcomes irregularly shaped. A candidate polling at 20 percent in some state might ordinarily have a confidence interval that runs between 14 percent and 27 percent of the vote, for instance. But depending on other factors, there may be some chance he’ll drop out, in which case he could get close to zero percent of the vote instead.

Step 4: Determine probability distributions and estimate chance of winning

In our interactive, you’ll see a bunch of funky-looking curves like the ones below for each candidate; they represent the model’s estimate of the possible distribution of his vote share. The red part of the curve represents a candidate’s 80 percent confidence interval. If the model is calibrated correctly, then he should finish within this range 80 percent of the time, above it 10 percent of the time, and below it 10 percent of the time.

But how are these curves calculated? First, the model recognizes that the uncertainty is higher under certain circumstances. In particular, it considers the following:

The uncertainty is higher the further removed you are from Election Day.The uncertainty is higher when a candidate has a larger projected share of the vote. (There’s not much uncertainty about where a candidate polling at 1 percent is likely to finish, in other words.)The uncertainty is higher in caucuses than in primaries.The uncertainty is higher when you have less polling data. (The benefit of additional polling data is greatly diminishing, though, perhaps because of herding.)The uncertainty is higher earlier in the primary calendar than later on (perhaps because pollsters learn how to correct their mistakes from earlier in the process).The uncertainty is higher when there are more candidates in the race.The uncertainty is higher when there’s a wider gap between the polls-only and polls-plus forecasts. In other words, candidates who have some favorable indicators and some unfavorable ones face more uncertainty in their forecast than those for whom everything is seemingly in alignment. (This means that an unusual candidate like Donald Trump tends to have especially uncertain forecasts, for example.)

Note that almost all these factors align to create a highly uncertain outcome in the first couple of Republican contests; there is an unprecedented number of candidates remaining, and endorsements, state polls and national polls are not in terribly strong alignment.

You’ll also notice that the probability distributions are asymmetrical; typically, they have a longer right tail than left tail. (If you’re wondering, they’re calculated using a probit transformation.) In fact, this is a mathematical necessity for candidates with a small projected share of the vote. A candidate currently polling at 5 percent has some chance of gaining 10 points and finishing at 15 percent instead but no chance of losing 10 points and finishing with -5 percent. Accounting for a candidate’s probability of dropping out can add to the asymmetry.

Going from probability distributions to win probabilities

Given how we’ve calculated these ranges, we could theoretically just draw a random outcome from each candidate’s distribution and award the primary to whichever candidate finishes with the highest number. Except, it’s not quite that simple because every percent of the vote a candidate gains must come from some other candidate; if Bernie Sanders finishes toward the high end of his range, that means Clinton has probably finished toward the lower end of hers, for instance. The models use a fairly simple technique to estimate these effects and then run 10,000 simulations to estimate each candidate’s chances of winning.

There’s also an awful lot our models don’t consider. For instance, they don’t do much to consider the interrelationships in the vote between different types of candidates. For example, if John Kasich gains a vote in New Hampshire, it’s probably more likely to come from a similar candidate like Bush than a dissimilar candidate like Ben Carson. Still, we hope they can form a reasonable benchmark for following the upcoming primaries, even if they’re almost certain to get a few races wrong.

2016 Primary Forecast

Three Theories Of Donald Trump’s Rise

“HOW TRUMP WON” blares the headline on this week’s Time magazine cover in 80-point Duplicate Ionic. “Now he just needs the votes,” whispers the small subheadline underneath.

Oh, just that little detail? Trump actually needs people to vote for him? I’ve been encountering a lot of this lately: Coverage implying that Trump’s lead atop the Republican polls (which he’s held since mid-July) is a watershed event, perhaps even tantamount to his having won an election.

These headlines, needless to say, are presumptuous. National polls, even with barely more than three weeks to go until the Iowa caucuses, aren’t highly predictive of the eventual outcome of nomination races. I know, I know: You’ve heard this spiel from us (and others) before. In fact, if you read this website regularly, you’ve been hearing it for nearly as long as Trump has been atop the polls.

To our credit — and perhaps to our ultimate detriment — we’ve at least been fairly consistent about this. If you’re not convinced about the empirical validity of national primary polls in the first place, having more of them doesn’t necessarily persuade you, any more than someone with a shellfish allergy is poised to take advantage of Red Lobster’s Endless Shrimp promotion.

But if Trump’s polls don’t quite mean what the headlines imply, what do they mean exactly? And even if you take them with a dose of skepticism, could he win the nomination anyway? (Spoiler alert: Yes, although I continue to think Trump’s chances are lower than where betting markets put them.1)

Before we all decamp for Des Moines next week,2 let’s take one more theoretical look at the Republican race. In fact, we’ll take three of them. As far as I can tell, there are three main theories about the rise of Trump; respectively, they pin the credit (or blame) for Trump on Republican voters, Republican elites and the news media. Each theory interprets his polls differently and comes to different conclusions about how much staying power he might have in the new year.

Theory 1: Trump’s support reflects a Republican populist revolt

In a nutshell: Trump is extremely popular among Republican voters, who are attracted to his combination of populism, nativism and anti-elite resentment.

What it makes of the polls: It loves the polls, almost as much as The Donald himself does! It takes them enough at face value to assert that Trump is the leading candidate for the Republican nomination. Furthermore, it treats Trump’s persistence in the polls as evidence that his popularity is authentic and not just a passing fancy.

Where you’re hearing the theory: You’re hearing it everywhere — this view underlies most of the mainstream coverage of Trump’s campaign. (It’s almost never stated as a theory; instead, it’s usually taken to be self-evident that Trump’s polls are evidence of his profound popularity among Republicans.) This view is also popular among left-leaning media outlets, which usually take an unsympathetic view toward Republican voters and often attribute Trump’s popularity to economic and racial resentment among working-class white Republicans.

Strengths of the theory: For one thing, it’s the simplest explanation of Trump’s polling; there’s often a lot to be said for parsimonious explanations as compared with more complicated ones. For another, it can invoke data about how a number of Trump’s positions — for instance, his proposed ban on Muslims entering the United States — are fairly popular among Republican voters. It can cite evidence about how Republicans want an “outsider” nominee, and can cite numerous instances from gubernatorial, Senate and House primaries over the past six years when insurgent candidates knocked off establishment alternatives. And it can point toward some evidence of Trump’s popularity apart from polls, such as crowd sizes and the unprecedented ratings for televised Republican debates.

Weaknesses of the theory: This theory is a lot like that Red Lobster menu, seeming to present an endless array of options, but most of them are just the same limited palette of cheap ingredients reconstituted in different ways. In particular, the theory puts a tremendous amount of stock in the national polls3 despite their historical lack of reliability. What about those huge crowds and ratings that Trump is drawing? Clearly there’s a lot of interest and curiosity about Trump, but this theory tends to take for granted that this curiosity is associated with wanting to vote for Trump; that isn’t necessarily clear.

What the theory implies for 2016: It takes Trump’s persistence in the polls thus far as evidence that he’ll have a lot of staying power. “Trump’s voters have, for most part, been with him for months,” as The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman puts it. “Caucusing is one thing but why wouldn’t they vote in primaries?”

How Trump could still lose, even if the theory is right: It’s possible to split the difference, tending to see the polls as valid and meaningful measures of public support but not necessarily as perfectly predictive. Furthermore, even if the polls are taken at face value, Trump’s position in the polls is good but not great: he seems to be trailing Ted Cruz in Iowa, and is potentially vulnerable in New Hampshire.4 Finally, his questionable ground game could prevent him from capitalizing on a theoretically high level of support.

Theory 2: Trump’s support reflects a Republican Party power vacuum

In a nutshell: Party elites and insiders usually have a tremendous amount of influence on the identity of the nominee, with Republican voters eventually falling in line behind one of their preferred choices. The fact that Trump is leading now reflects a lack of consensus among those party elites. However, these elites will rally behind whichever establishment-approved choice performs best in Iowa and New Hampshire, elevating that candidate to the frontrunner’s position.

What it makes of the polls: It treats them as provisional, pointing out that candidate preferences often shift considerably at the last minute.

Where you’re likely to hear the theory: From political scientists; this is a rearticulation of “The Party Decides” view of the nomination race. You’ve also read a lot about it at FiveThirtyEight: Our August article “Donald Trump’s Six Stages of Doom” was an exploration of the various barriers Trump would face in converting support in early polls into a party nomination. Finally, in-depth reporting, like this Washington Post article about Republicans making contingency plans for a contested convention, often speaks to this theory.

Strengths of the theory: It’s the most empirically grounded of the three, explaining most party nomination races since 1980 reasonably well. In past cycles, a number of nontraditional or insurgent candidates have performed well in the polls in the year before the election, but (hello, Howard Dean) failed to turn that support into votes or (howdy, Pat Buchanan, Rick Santorum and Jesse Jackson) had a ceiling on their support, winning an important constituency within their party without approaching a majority.

Weaknesses of the theory: Like any theory built around historical election data, it’s limited by its sample size — and in this case, the sample size is not all that large, because the current nomination process is fairly new and because presidential elections take place only once every four years. Furthermore, the theory has a mixed track record of success since first being published in 2008: It was very helpful in predicting Mitt Romney’s victory in the Republican race four years ago, for instance, but less so in anticipating Barack Obama’s upset over Hillary Clinton. What’s more, there are reasons to think that Trump could be an outlier,5 defying the premises of the theory even if the theory is generally sound. Finally, the theory suffers from a bit of an underwear gnomes problem, implying that Trump and other insurgent candidates will be stopped by party elites but not necessarily identifying the mechanism by which that occurs.

What the theory implies for 2016: It remains highly skeptical of Trump’s ability to win the nomination. It also implies that it’s still pretty early. Under our “Six Stages of Doom” interpretation, Trump has overcome only his first hurdle while the remaining five still await.6 Because he’d be such a disastrous nominee, according to the theory, party elites will be fighting Trump at every step, possibly including preferring a contested convention to conceding the race to him.

How Trump could still win, even if the theory is right: It’s possible that party elites could fail to identify a successful strategy to stop Trump even if they have a lot of desire to do so. It’s also possible that the Republican party establishment is in disarray and lacks the power it once did.

Theory 3: Trump’s support reflects a media bubble

In a nutshell: Trump’s standing in the polls substantially reflects the disproportionate amount of media coverage he’s receiving; it’s not that remarkable for a candidate to poll at 35 percent when he’s recently been getting 70 percent of the media coverage of the Republican race. That makes Trump’s position vulnerable if media coverage eventually evens out, or as the election approaches in each state as voters learn more about the candidates on their own and less through the lens of the national media.

What it makes of the polls: See above.

Where you’re likely to hear the theory: From media critics, who recognize how much difficulty the press has had in understanding the Trump phenomenon. From supporters of other Republican candidates who are exasperated with how much coverage Trump has received. And from FiveThirtyEight: The first substantial piece I wrote about Trump this cycle, “Donald Trump Is The World’s Greatest Troll,” explored the relationship between Trump and the media and how his media coverage could become a self-perpetuating cycle.

Strengths of the theory: Of the three theories, it seems to do the best job of explaining the movement in the polls to date. So far, the number of voters who list a candidate as their first choice has had a had a relatively low correlation with each candidate’s favorability ratings, but a strong correlation with the volume of media coverage the candidate is receiving at a given time. Any penalty Trump might suffer from controversial remarks like those about John McCain or Vladimir Putin are offset by an increase in media coverage, for example.7 The theory is also resonant with evidence suggesting that better-informed voters are less likely to support Trump and perhaps explains why Trump is underperforming in Iowa and New Hampshire (where voters are deeper into their information-gathering process) relative to other states. Finally, the theory is helpful in explaining the boom-and-bust cycles of past nomination races, as media coverage can perpetuate feedback loops in a candidate’s polling.

Weaknesses of the theory: It has a lot of trouble in differentiating cause and effect. Is Trump’s standing in the polls the result of intensive media coverage, or is the relationship the other way around? Relatedly, it can sometimes be guilty of treating media coverage as an exogenous variable (something which “happens” to a candidate) when in fact it may reflect a candidate’s skill in manipulating the media and drawing attention to himself — a skill that a showman like Trump has in spades. Also, while the theory can explain some of Trump’s rise in the polling, it can’t explain all of it: Even if you ignore those first-choice numbers, his national favorability ratings have also tended to increase over the course of the cycle.8

What the theory implies for 2016: Media coverage will probably even out as the field is winnowed; furthermore, voters will become less reliant on the national media as they prepare to vote in their respective states. Both those things could hurt Trump. Under this theory, the momentum that candidates receive from early states is liable to be especially important; Trump could fade out quickly after losses in Iowa or New Hampshire, or blow up into an even bigger story with wins there.

How Trump could still win, even if the theory is right: Even if Trump’s support is something of a media bubble, it’s plausible it won’t burst until many states have voted. Also, further “surprise” events in the news cycle, like terrorist attacks in the United States or Europe, could work to Trump’s benefit.

So where does all of this leave us? In FiveThirtyEight’s coverage of Trump, we’ve tended to focus mostly on the second and third theories. But that’s largely because the coverage you’re reading elsewhere is so dominated by the first one. That doesn’t mean I’d dismiss out of hand the idea that Trump is authentically popular with the Republican base.

Instead, I try to take a mental average of the three theories. I think Trump’s more likely than not to underachieve his national polls once people get around to voting in the early states, but I don’t expect his numbers to fade to zero. Perhaps he has Buchanan’s constituency of 15 to 20 percent of the Republican electorate, plus another 15 to 20 percent of bandwagon voters that will join him or leave him at any given time. Those momentum-driven voters — plus how quickly the rest of the field consolidates — will determine how many wins he notches in the early going.

No matter how well Trump performs in the early states, Republican elites will do as much as they can to constrain him. But he could win the nomination if they fail to develop a good alternative to him, or if he rides a tidal wave of media-driven momentum after early victories — momentum is a more short-lived, but also potentially more powerful force than the gravity the party exerts.

Whichever theory of Trump you prefer, it’s votes and delegates in 2016 — not what the polls said in 2015 — that will be the real test of it.

Is The GOP Establishment Blowing Its Anti-Trump Campaign?

In this week’s 2016 Slack chat, we wonder what’s going on with the Republican establishment. As always, the transcript below has been lightly edited.

micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): It’s our first 2016 Slack Chat of 2016! And here’s the question I want to start the year with: WTF is the Republican establishment doing?

Politico reported today:

In Washington and elsewhere, meanwhile, Republicans are on the hunt for a political entity that can be used to stop Trump. In recent weeks, Alex Castellanos, a veteran TV ad man who was a top adviser to George W. Bush and [Mitt] Romney, has been meeting with top GOP operatives and donors to gauge interest in launching an anti-Trump vehicle that would pummel the Manhattan businessman on the television airwaves.

But if Republicans are scheming to stop Trump, I don’t see any tangible signs that they’ve made progress on that front — or even much evidence they’re doing anything. So … WTF are they doing?

clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): They’re rolling in the deep.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): Aren’t they a little late for that? From what I’ve read everywhere else, Trump already won the 2015 election.

clare.malone: I think it comes down to no one wanting to address an irrational actor in the political scene. Everyone guesses that he’s probably going to go after them, and no one quite knows when voters will reach their limit with Trump.

So, basically, no one in the establishment has … sacked up? Is there a more decorous way to say that?

natesilver: Clare, that comment about Trump being an irrational actor reminds me of this excellent piece I read by Dan McLaughlin a few weeks ago. He argues that Trump isn’t necessarily irrational but definitely presents a very different set of tactics and strategies than what his opponents are used to. And that’s creating a lot of problems for them — almost making them disoriented.

clare.malone: That’s fair—not irrational, just working from a totally different playbook that politicos aren’t used to.

harry (Harry Enten, senior political writer): It reminds me of the wildcat offense in the NFL. That is, it was something imported from another game (the college game), and it played tricks on the pros. But once they figured it out, it was done for.

The question of course is whether they figure it out in time.

natesilver: Yeah, gadget plays and gimmick offenses work brilliantly for a time … until opponents figure out how to adapt.

But one question here is: When does it become “too late” for the establishment to stop Trump?

micah: One of the main reasons I’ve been skeptical of Trump’s chances of winning the nomination is that the GOP establishment hates him, which is different from simply not liking him. So not only will they not support Trump, they’ll do everything in their power to prevent him from winning. Or, that’s at least what I thought. If they stay as feckless as they’ve been, I think the chances of Trump winning go up appreciably.

To answer your question, Nate, I could argue they should make a move before Iowa. What if Trump wins Iowa, New Hampshire AND South Carolina — that’s a real possibility.

clare.malone: In the words of Pete Hornberger, it’s never too late for now, Nate.

harry: Folks, if he wins those three, there’s a better chance than not that he will win the nomination, in my opinion.

natesilver: Interestingly enough, some of the reporting (see Byron York, for example) suggests that one reason the establishment has been sluggish to act is because they still think Trump might implode on his own.

But he probably won’t win all three. He might not win any of them. I don’t want to spoil our primary forecasts, which will be launching soon, but …

harry: Yeah, here’s the dirty little secret that seems not to be discussed much: He’s not winning in Iowa and — though he’s winning there — his poll numbers are no better in New Hampshire.

natesilver: Yeah. He’s already behind in Iowa. And while he’s winning in New Hampshire for now, it’s an extremely wide-open race.

clare.malone: So we think that there’s a chance the establishment is just waiting for a brighter light to be focused on Trump, and then the voters will see his flaws once and for all? Aren’t people a little more reactive than that, especially people in politics? It actually surprises me a lot that there hasn’t been someone backing Alex Castellanos’s plan.

micah: Me too!

clare.malone: Romney was mentioned in the Politico reporting as someone who’s been privately complaining about Trump, but not a peep from him publically. I just think they’re all a little shocked at Jeb Bush’s treatment by Trump, and they’re gun shy.

natesilver: I think the problem is that the “the establishment” is an abstraction. What we call “the establishment” is really an array of people and organizations with some goals in common, but some differences, too, and also real disagreements over strategy.

harry: You mean they don’t all meet on Tuesdays at 7 p.m. at Arby’s?

natesilver: Do they serve merlot at Arby’s?

micah: But that diversity — in goals and priorities — is even more reason to think someone would have made a move by now.

natesilver: Indeed. It’s true that candidates like Trump haven’t done very well in the past. But part of the reason they haven’t done well is because there have been some organized efforts to stop them. They haven’t necessarily imploded of their own volition. Well, maybe some have (say, Herman Cain), but others haven’t.

clare.malone: So we’re basically waiting to see when a vast, right-wing conspiracy will develop? Or should history not be our guide here vis-à-vis organized efforts? Maybe he just becomes a strong third-party candidate, despite his claims of not wanting to do that?

harry: But is it really about bringing Trump down? He’s already down in Iowa. His level of support in New Hampshire is low enough that’s it’s really about coalescing enough around another candidate in my mind.

natesilver: Maybe you can give Republican insiders some credit for looking at the state polls instead of the national polls and keeping some perspective rather than panicking. That’s probably a sounder take on the race than what you’re getting from the pundits. But still, it’s not like this is a new problem. From the get-go, they haven’t seemed to have any plan at all for how to deal with Trump.

harry: Truth. It seems quite possible that they haven’t done anything because they don’t know how to do anything, even if they want to do something. Time will tell if this actually hurts them.

natesilver: What if a big advertising campaign against him turns out to backfire, for instance? If you’d found that out last October, say, that would have been pretty useful information and you can move on to the next tactic. But if you find that out now, and Trump wins Iowa or New Hampshire before you can move on to Plan B? Bigger problem.

clare.malone: I feel like there is soooo much stuff to make a good negative ad on Trump, though: Allegations of spousal abuse, bankruptcies, etc. Television is a powerful medium — sure it could backfire, I guess, but the fact that no one has spun all those things together, just to try it out, remains surprising.

natesilver: But Trump is such a target-rich environment that it’s a bit like an airplane spewing out chaff. Becomes hard to know what you’re really aiming for.

micah: The paradox of choice.

natesilver: In the long run, nominations tend to reflect a negotiation between two goals:

Picking a candidate who reflects your values and policy goals;Picking a candidate who can win.

It can be hard to hit candidates on electability — until they actually start losing. But you could certainly hit Trump on the fact that he’s not a very reliable conservative. Run a campaign around how he’s an opportunist and “just another politician” who will say anything to get elected. How he’s not a true conservative — in fact, not any kind of conservative at all.

harry: What is ideology? We often talk about it on a left to right spectrum, but it’s often just as much about insider vs. outsider. No one cares about Trump’s conservative record or lack thereof. What you want to hit him on is being politics as usual, if you want to defeat him.

His support right now is actually weakest among the most conservative voters.

clare.malone: Right, maybe that’s why the establishment has been holding back its attacks. The low-hanging fruit on Trump that makes him such a turnoff to moderates and Democrats, i.e., the affairs/celeb factor, doesn’t turn off conservative Trump supporters since he’s such a bearer of the non-PC flag. So you’ve got to find just the right calibration of “he’s not a coherent conservative” to start to get them to turn. His ideology is “against the prevailing culture!” He adheres to no “ism.”

micah: That all seems right to me, but I still haven’t heard a good explanation for why Republican office-holders and party officials haven’t gotten their act together. Maybe they’re just choking. Or maybe they’re thinking, “Let’s see how Iowa and New Hampshire play out.”

clare.malone: Too many candidate teams they’re divided between? The people/PACs/allies of Bush/Rubio/Kasich, etc. are not coming together behind the scenes.

micah: But waiting until after Iowa and New Hampshire seems like a big gamble to me.

natesilver: This nomination race looks very different if Rubio or Christie or someone is ahead of Trump in New Hampshire, in addition to Cruz being ahead of him in Iowa. All of a sudden, it starts to look like a pretty conventional contest, in fact.

And we’re not that far removed from that universe. Cruz is already winning, narrowly, in Iowa. And the combined percentage for Rubio + Christie + Bush + Kasich is a ways ahead of Trump in New Hampshire. But they’re dividing that moderate/establishment vote four or (if you count Fiorina) five ways right now.

micah: But then you’re basically counting on the Trump-skeptic view proving true. Instead, maybe Trump overperforms in Iowa and turns out a lot of Reagan Democrats. Then he gets a bounce in New Hampshire.

natesilver: Even just a straight-up reading of the polls — without discounting Trump’s numbers much — suggests a lot of vulnerability for him in the early states.

micah: I guess my argument is that even if that’s right, and Trump’s chances of winning the nomination are say 10-15 percent, the risk to the party of a Trump nomination is great enough that I would have expected the establishment to have done more. Akin to Cheney’s 1 percent doctrine.

harry: I think I’m in agreement with Micah Cohen (a fine suburban Philadelphia kid). I think it’ll probably work out for the party actors, but they’ve left too much in their pockets. They’re taking a big risk.

natesilver: Maybe they really are in disarray!

harry: Maybe you need to stop plugging your own articles!

natesilver: Just trying to meet our recirculation goals.

clare.malone: The Republican establishment is engaging in risky behavior by not taking action, but it could all work out for them. There’s a lesson for the kids.

harry: Look, having unprotected sex probably won’t result in pregnancy, but why take the risk?

micah: The establishment could also be saving its fire for the last week(s) before Iowa and New Hampshire. Maybe some super PAC will blanket the airwaves in the final days.

natesilver: For now, I’m more interested in whether there’s any apparent surge in support for Rubio or another establishment candidate.

harry: You mean Chris Christie?

natesilver: For a while, we were reading reporting about how Rubio seemed to have some endorsements in his back-pocket. But the biggest name he’s gotten recently is Trey Gowdy. Does he have a John McCain or a Nikki Haley sitting around waiting for him? Or a Romney? If so, everyone’s back from vacation, Rubio’s “momentum” (as measured by the tenor of his media coverage) has been pretty negative lately, and it might be time to announce one of those soon. [Editor’s note: On Tuesday afternoon, Rubio received the endorsement of Chris Chocola, a former congressman who used to run the Club for Growth, and has a following among fiscal conservatives.]

harry: We’ll just have to wait and see what happens.

natesilver: The conclusion of pretty much every FiveThirtyEight Slack chat is: “Yeah, the pundits are probably full of shit, but there’s a chance we’re full of shit too, so let’s wait and see what happens.”

clare.malone: Self-aware hubris. That’s our brand.

Read more:

Why It May Be Better To Poll Worse Nationally

Thousands Of Ted Cruz Supporters Play A Game That Might Win Iowa

http://c.espnradio.com/s:5L8r1/audio/2651331/whatsthepoint_2016-01-04-212931.64k.mp3?ad_params=zones%3DPreroll%2CPreroll2%2CMidroll%2CMidroll2%2CMidroll3%2CMidroll4%2CMidroll5%2CMidroll6%2CPostroll%2CPostroll2%7Cstation_id%3D3138

We’re piloting our election podcast. The proper show will launch in January, before the Iowa caucus, but you can find our pilots in the feed for What’s The Point.

Marco Rubio: Overrated, Underrated Or Properly Rated?

For this week’s 2016 Slack Chat, we check back in on Marco Rubio’s campaign. As always, the transcript below has been lightly edited.

micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): We jumped on the Marco Rubio bandwagon a while ago, and there were a few weeks when the conventional wisdom seemed to hold that Rubio was the front-runner. But he never got much of a bump in the polls. He got some endorsements but never more than a trickle. And now the narrative has flipped — at least a little — and people are wondering why Rubio isn’t doing better. So, our question for today is: Marco Rubio — overrated, underrated, properly rated?

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): He’s either underrated now or was overrated before, because the conventional wisdom has changed a lot more than the underlying facts of the case.

clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): If we are going with my grandmother’s metric of whoever is the best-looking being the best qualified for president, then Rubio, who currently has the best chance of winning according to betting markets, is properly rated. But otherwise, I think he’s overrated. He has endorsements, but I think that his “national” primary campaign tactic might not be panning out as expected.

harry (Harry Enten, senior political writer): Well, let’s look at the facts: Rubio still has fantastic favorable ratings. The best in the field. The problem is that he hasn’t translated those favorable ratings into horse-race numbers. But as I’ve written, the horse-race numbers in Iowa and New Hampshire aren’t necessarily telling at this point. Here’s a chart from the piece:

We played “buy/sell/hold” a few weeks ago, and I had Rubio as the favorite with somewhere around a 35 percent chance of winning the nomination. I see no reason to change my mind on this. Although, I will say that Ted Cruz may be higher than he once was, but Rubio is no lower.

micah: Clare’s point about Rubio’s lack of a ground game is interesting. That storyline seemed to drive a lot of the negative coverage Rubio received recently.

natesilver: For sure. I’ve been a Rubio-bull too, and the reports about his ground game concern me.

harry: (Thank goodness we are all in the same room typing to each other instead of speaking. We are healthy people.)

clare.malone: I think writing is good for the soul, Harry.

natesilver: At the same time, a lot of this is glass-half-full versus glass-half-empty stuff. For instance, it seems like he has a pretty good ground game in Nevada. There’s not a lot of focus on that now because the narrative on Rubio has turned negative.

micah: What is Rubio’s strategy?

natesilver: His strategy is being the top establishment-approved choice remaining after the first few states vote. Or maybe that’s a goal, more than a strategy.

clare.malone: His theory is that there’s not a lot of point to wasting resources on campaign offices, etc. — the traditional apparatus, basically. Rubio’s team thinks they should be investing their money in TV ads/radio, etc. They’re also all about that national media vs. kowtowing to the locals — the idea being that more people are likely to see the senator on “Fox and Friends” than in a Des Moines diner.

The problem with that being, if I am to voice the detractors’ views, that a lot of people in the early states are, say, at work and not watching TV when he’s doing Fox interviews and so the exposure might not be as great as he thinks. And if he’s courting the national media, and Iowa and New Hampshire are primaries that are greatly affected by media spin, it might adversely affect his campaign.

natesilver: My question is how much of this is expectations management by the Rubio campaign.

harry: I feel like a lot of this anti-Rubio stuff is because he hasn’t broken out in the polls, but he’s still at 10 percent or greater everywhere. The leader in New Hampshire is Donald Trump, who hasn’t moved at all over the last four months. Given the increasingly low expectations at this point, it’s not difficult to see Rubio winning New Hampshire by a percentage point or two and taking off.

clare.malone: So, are we all being a little bit ninny-ish, thinking that New Hampshire and Iowa really matter that much?

http://c.espnradio.com/s:5L8r1/audio/2644974/whatsthepoint_2015-12-22-081014.64k.mp3?ad_params=zones%3DPreroll%2CPreroll2%2CMidroll%2CMidroll2%2CMidroll3%2CMidroll4%2CMidroll5%2CMidroll6%2CPostroll%2CPostroll2%7Cstation_id%3D3138

We’re piloting our election podcast. The proper show will launch in January, before the Iowa caucus, but you can find our pilots in the feed for What’s The Point.

micah: Actually, according to HuffPost Pollster, Rubio is the top establishment candidate right now in Iowa, New Hampshire AND South Carolina — Rubio is underrated!

natesilver: Yeah, New Hampshire is one pivot point here. You have several establishment candidates at about 10 percent of the vote. Reminds me of Iowa four years ago when Rick Santorum, Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry all stuck at like 10 percent in Iowa and then Santorum broke out. Similarly, someone from the Rubio/Chris Christie/Jeb Bush/John Kasich group is likely to break out in New Hampshire eventually.

micah: Nate, don’t be such a ninnyhammer.

harry: Right. This is a first-past-the-post primary. Eventually, there tends to be a coalescing of the vote around a particular candidate.

clare.malone: While I might be spouting the conventional wisdom in this chat, I am intro-ing antique words that Micah likes.

natesilver: The fundamental reason we’ve been bullish on Rubio, though, has been by a sort of process of elimination. And that really hasn’t changed.

clare.malone: So, is Christie Rubio’s biggest competition in New Hampshire?

micah: Cue Harry’s pro-Christie stump speech …

harry: It could be Cruz.

clare.malone: You missed your cue. Play for the crowd, Harry!

harry: If Cruz won in Iowa, he could win in New Hampshire. Of course, I haven’t really seen a lot of proof that Cruz has expanded beyond his very conservative/evangelical Christian base.

natesilver: Trump would be a disastrous nominee for the Republican Party on every level. Cruz wouldn’t be as bad, but (i) he’d still probably cost Republicans a few percentage points in November by being “too” conservative, and (ii) he isn’t well-liked by his colleagues. The point is that the stakes are really high and the establishment is not just going to give up the fight. It might lose the fight, but it won’t cease fighting.

harry: I play for no crowd.

micah: Nate, that to me is the key question for how you rate Rubio’s chances …

If you put Cruz firmly in the anti-establishment category and you think the party will do all it can to prevent a Cruz nomination, then Rubio looks to be in a really solid position.

But if you think Trump might scare the establishment into making peace with Cruz, then Rubio’s position doesn’t seem that great to me.

natesilver: Yeah. I realize some of the Rubio case seems a little underwear-gnomish. He seems like a rational nominee for the Republican Party — but we’re not sure how he’ll get there exactly? At the same time, it might be a little early to focus on specific scenarios. At this point 12 years ago, nobody would have expected John Kerry to break out in New Hampshire, for example.

harry: Let me play a little pro-Rubio here, if I can. The belief that Trump is a favorite or a real threat to the nomination is largely built on what have been fairly impressive national numbers coming out. Yet when you look at the data from Iowa and New Hampshire, Trump’s numbers are fine, but not all that amazing. So why should the party actors settle on Cruz?

micah: That’s a fair point.

natesilver: At this point, I think there’s more chance of Cruz winning in a runaway-freight-train scenario than Trump. The recent Emerson College poll had Cruz at 41 percent nationally in a race without Trump and Ben Carson — and while we don’t expect those candidates to disappear instantly, they’re the two whose numbers will probably suffer the most if they don’t win Iowa.

clare.malone: Well, it depends on how much there is a new normal in this election, right? How much has the Trump effect trickled down to make even really conservative guys like Cruz seem like relatively mainstream dudes? I think there’s perhaps a real feeling of radicalism in the Republican base that’s been percolating and might play hugely in this election.

micah: Yeah, and how powerful a force that is remains a big open question. Here’s another: Does Rubio NEED to win in New Hampshire?

harry: NO. But he needs to be very competitive there.

natesilver: He needs to be the top establishment candidate standing. He might also need Cruz to not win New Hampshire. Cruz sweeping Iowa and New Hampshire — and presumably then South Carolina — would make him a real front-runner, obviously. But even so, the establishment isn’t likely to concede the race so easily. And the media will want a long, competitive contest too.

clare.malone: So Rubio coming in third would never be OK for him? (Trump, Cruz finishing ahead in this scenario.) He needs to beat one of those guys?

natesilver: Let me answer that obliquely with one analogy I’ve been thinking about lately, which is sort of a soft version of the “Party Decides” theory. Imagine that the party establishment is the referee in a boxing match. It has one boxer it would prefer to see win. But it can’t rig the match once it’s underway. However, it can choose when to call the fight. So if its preferred boxer — let’s call him Red — is winning early, it can call the fight after a couple of rounds. But if he’s losing, they can let the fight keep going and hope he prevails on the basis of his stamina. And if all else fails, they can hope he’ll deliver a desperate knockout blow at the end.

clare.malone:

natesilver: This boxer is not guaranteed to win by any means. He’s screwed if his opponent leads wire to wire, but he’s getting a lot of second and third chances when his opponent might not. And that makes his overall odds pretty good. He just has to lead at any point and the refs can call the match.

I’m getting sort of abstract here, but I’ve been thinking a lot about what sort of power the party establishment does and does not have. And a lot of it is having some persuasive power to set the rules of engagement and strategically encourage winnowing of the field. Why has no Republican won the nomination before without winning Iowa or New Hampshire? Because in every past nomination race, a candidate who was broadly acceptable to Republican Party elites won at least one of those states. We don’t have any examples really on what happens when an insurgent wins both states.

micah: But now we’re talking about two different questions: Can the establishment prevent an insurgent nominee? And, if so, will the establishment-approved substitute be Rubio?

It’s still not clear to me that — even if the establishment can prevent a Trump or Cruz nomination — Rubio will be the beneficiary, even if that’s the modal scenario.

natesilver: I think (?) we can all agree that Rubio is in trouble if he falls behind Christie or Bush in the establishment pecking order.

micah: We’re only a few weeks away from the Jeb Bush comeback narrative.

clare.malone: Jeb! does have five field offices in New Hampshire.

natesilver: I think Bush is still probably toast. But Christie’s sort of semi-surge in New Hampshire is bad news for Rubio. With all that said, I go back to the managing expectations thing. Rubio hasn’t bowled anyone over with his endorsements, but he’s still received far more than anyone else since Labor Day. He has a couple of big super PAC donors lined up. His favorable ratings remain at or near the top of the field.

micah: I think you’re too confident in toasting Bush.

natesilver: But, Micah, the problem for Bush is that Rubio is close to being a “dominant strategy” over him. Rubio’s more conservative, polls better than Bush head-to-head against Hillary Clinton, and he’s acceptable to a wider array of Republican actors.

harry: Bush had a beautiful -15 percentage point net favorability rating among Republicans in the Quinnipiac poll out today.

natesilver: I could see there being a Bush comeback narrative — and it failing and helping to nominate Trump or (more likely) Cruz instead.

micah: Clare, how would you rank the establishment candidates right now?

clare.malone: Probably Rubio, Christie, Jeb, Kasich.

micah: That’s how I have them too … Nate and Harry?

natesilver: I agree with Clare’s order.

harry: I concur. Of course, I’d probably write it “Rubio, CHRISTIE, Jeb, Kasich.”

micah: OK, how would you rank them in New Hampshire?

clare.malone: Christie and Rubio could flip in my mind in New Hampshire over the next month.

harry: Well, I don’t want to spoil something I’m writing for next week, but I have reason to think Christie could do better in New Hampshire than we think at this point.

natesilver: Here’s the thing, though, and it gets back to glass-half-full, glass-half-empty: Christie has some potential for a surge, I agree, and he’s a plausible winner in New Hampshire, but he also has a lot of baggage. Ideological baggage. Bridge-gate baggage. Loyalty-to-the-party baggage. And he doesn’t have all that much money and seems to have even less of a ground game than Rubio.

So, again, the risk the establishment runs is that it turns to Christie but he proves to be too weak to beat Cruz/Trump when Rubio just maybe could win a war of attrition against him.

harry: Wait, what’s the proof he has less of a ground game in New Hampshire?

natesilver: He has virtually zero ground game beyond New Hampshire. And with Cruz having a LOT of money and a seemingly pretty good ground game, it might be too little too late for Christie to build a competitive one.

harry: OK, I agree with that Nate, but we’re talking New Hampshire here. And the ideological baggage isn’t baggage in a state where moderates grow on trees like wet snow in the early spring.

micah: But here’s my point: Rubio looks great on paper — he has a “dominant strategy” — but there are a lot of scenarios in which he gets beat in Iowa, beat in New Hampshire and beat in South Carolina. At some point, looking good on paper, or being the shiniest establishment-approved loser, isn’t worth much.

natesilver: OK, but let’s work backward instead of forward here. Indulge me for a second.

clare.malone: Boxing metaphor??

natesilver: Suppose Rubio concludes that the establishment really has no other choice than to back him. Or at least no other good choice. Sure, Rubio has flaws, but they’re probably more manageable than Christie’s, Bush’s or Kasich’s. Furthermore, Rubio knows that the calendar becomes pretty good for him in March once you get into some larger, more diverse states.

At that point, it becomes a game of surviving until March. And how do you do that when you’re not inherently a great fit for any of Iowa, New Hampshire or South Carolina? You do it by keeping expectations modest so a few second- and third-place finishes look pretty good.

And maybe by winning Nevada.

micah: But expectations aren’t modest, are they?

natesilver: They’ve become a lot more modest after all the negative stories we’ve seen on Rubio recently!

clare.malone: Managing expectations. The age old tale. So we have come to the ultimate conclusion that he is … swimming along just as he has planned it all along?

micah: How low can his expectations be? Rubio is No.1 in betting markets.

harry: I don’t know. I don’t know. What is Rubio’s base? What is it? I’ve seen a lot of stories about how Bill Clinton didn’t win Iowa or New Hampshire and then won the nomination anyway. But remember, Clinton had the South. Not only that, but he had African-American voters. Who does Rubio have? It’s not like he has the South. (Granted, the South is more establishment-friendly than people give it credit for.)

natesilver: Well, Rubio might benefit from the delegate math. As we’ve written, there are disproportionately many delegates in blue and purple states, relative to the number of Republicans who will turn out.

micah: See, I think Harry’s question gets at the potential problem for Rubio: Good on paper, less impressive when you look at the chess board.

natesilver: Unless he’s playing 13-dimensional chess. [inhales bong hit]

harry: Clearly, you have.

clare.malone: Can I cut through all this, not least because I really have to use the ladies room and it’s much farther away from the debate stage? What we’re all saying here is, “Dunno, could be Rubio! Gotta wait and see how the next month plays out, where the party establishment decides to rest their laurels!”

natesilver: I’ll just say this. Trump is at 23 percent to win the nomination at Predictwise right now, which is a reasonably good approximation of the conventional wisdom. If you think that’s too high, you have some room to redistribute that 23 percent to the rest of the candidates. So you can think Rubio’s chances are underrated but that Cruz’s are underrated too, which is probably about where I’m at these days.

Kristaps Porzingis Is A Freak — And Potentially A Superstar

The New York Knicks’ future once looked very dismal indeed. It looked that way for a very long time, for a great many reasons — but that was before the arrival of the Great Latvian Hope. Kristaps Porzingis, the 7-foot-3 rookie whose selection was resoundingly booed at this summer’s draft, has instead very quickly become the most popular athlete at Madison Square Garden1 after barely more than a month on the job.

Porzingis detonated onto the NBA landscape with a series of putback dunks in his first handful of games; more importantly for Knicks fans, he’s since maintained a level of play that’s ranged between solid and spectacular. On the season, Porzingis is averaging 17.9 points, 11.0 rebounds and 2.4 blocks per 36 minutes and draining threes at a rate that would make fellow Giant Baltic Person Arvydas Sabonis proud.2 No player in NBA history, in fact, has possessed quite this combination of youth, height, quickness and outside shooting skills. Porzingis’s play has been so strong and so dazzling that he’s that rare rookie on whom airy basketball aesthetes and turgid statistical fundamentalists can agree: This kid is the real deal.

The Porzingis projection

So what does his future hold? We have a (probabilistic) basketball-shaped crystal ball called CARMELO,3 our NBA projection system. Before the season began, we ran CARMELO projections for more than 500 players; this included rookie projections for players such as Karl-Anthony Towns, the No. 1 overall pick and Porzingis’s opponent Wednesday night, based on their college statistics. But we didn’t run one for Porzingis or other international draft picks who didn’t play NCAA ball. Let’s fix that!

Below, you’ll see a CARMELO projection for Porzingis based on his first 25 NBA games. It makes one heroic assumption: extrapolating out that 25-game performance to a full 82-game season. In other words, it assumes not only that what Knicks fans have seen from Porzingis so far is about what they’ll get from the rest of the year, but also that he’ll stay healthy.

If those assumptions hold, the Knicks have a hell of a prospect on their hands. The NBA is a tough league for rookies, so merely staying in a team’s rotation at age 20 is often a sign of a bright future. So far, however, Porzingis has not just been a rotation player but an above-average one4 — usually a sign of superstar potential. In fact, Porzingis’s long-term upside score, based on his wins above replacement projection from 2016-17 through 2021-22, is 36.3. That’s very good; at the start of this season, it would have made Porzingis the 17th-most-valuable franchise player in the league, in the same vicinity as Giannis Antetokounmpo, John Wall and Jimmy Butler.

But Porzingis’s projection also involves tremendous uncertainty. In 2018-19, for example, his 90th percentile projection5 is 13.3 WAR, good enough to put him on the fringes of the MVP discussion. Meanwhile, his 10th percentile projection is just 0.0 WAR (exactly replacement level), or roughly the same range as Quincy Acy. The error bars around CARMELO’s forecasts for young players are often wide, but these are especially so.

OK, but is he Dirk?

What gives? Part of it is the problem we alluded to before. CARMELO works by identifying comparable players, and Porzingis is a hard guy for which to find historical precedents. Only one player, Brook Lopez, achieves a similarity score of 50 or higher with Porzingis6 — and if we’re being frank, the Lopez-Porzingis connection doesn’t have the “eye test” appeal that CARMELO comparisons often do.

But faced with unusual players like Porzingis, CARMELO has to make some sacrifices. In the case of Lopez, it ignores the fact that Lopez almost never shoots from behind the arc (although he does have a decent midrange game). In the case of Kevin Love, Porzingis’s No. 4 comparable, it finds another big man with a good outside shot and strong rebounding numbers — but ignores that Love is shaped much differently than Porzingis, 5 inches shorter but quite a bit bulkier, especially in his youth. And since CARMELO relies on metrics that utilize box score stats, it can be difficult to translate calling-card traits like “quick feet in defensive transition” to on-the-stat-sheet comps, which in turn means the model may promote the formal similarity of Porzingis’s defensive numbers to those of Shawn Kemp, when he’s closer to Andrei Kirilenko stylistically.

You can get a fuller sense for the range of possibilities when sorting through Porzingis’s top 50 CARMELO comparables, a list that includes everyone from Shaquille O’Neal to Darko Milicic. There’s also a cameo appearance from Porzingis’s idol, Dirk Nowitzki, who checks in at No. 17. Why doesn’t he rank higher? Because, as Nowitzki correctly points out, Porzingis has been considerably better so far at age 20 than Nowitzki was at the same age. CARMELO “thinks” the Porzingis-Nowitzki comparison is unflattering — to Porzingis.

The 50 NBA players most comparable to PorzingisRANKPLAYERRANKPLAYER1Brook Lopez26Ryan Anderson2Joe Smith27Cliff Robinson3Derrick Favors28Al Jefferson4Kevin Love29Derrick Williams5Anthony Randolph30Tim Thomas6Amar’e Stoudemire31Jonas Valanciunas7Spencer Hawes32Rashard Lewis8Tobias Harris33Tracy McGrady9Yi Jianlian34Serge Ibaka10Shawn Kemp35Zaza Pachulia11Rudy Gay36Darius Miles12Elton Brand37Greg Monroe13DeMarcus Cousins38Andrei Kirilenko14Lamar Odom39Antoine Walker15Kwame Brown40Marvin Williams16Michael Beasley41Jared Sullinger17Dirk Nowitzki42Harrison Barnes18Shareef Abdur-Rahim43Chris Webber19Anthony Davis44Thaddeus Young20Josh Smith45Paul George21Kevin Garnett46Eddy Curry22Tyson Chandler47Shaquille O’Neal23Chris Bosh48Darko Milicic24Luol Deng49Nene25Enes Kanter50Al-Farouq Aminu

But Porzingis’s offensive approach does bear some resemblance to today’s Dirk Nowitzki. Porzingis is frequently compared to Jahlil Okafor and Towns, and that’s unsurprising considering that they play the same position and were all drafted so high. However, Porzingis is the only one in that trio who, like Nowitzki, has 21st-century range. In fact, his basic spatial shooting distribution closely mirrors that of the NBA itself as about a quarter of his shots come from downtown, a third come in the midrange and the rest come near the basket.

The diversity of Porzingis’s scoring portfolio is also an encouraging sign for his development. Although he converts his shots at just average rates from virtually every spot he shoots from, the fact that he can do that as a 20-year-old 7-foot-plusser is remarkable. While the league is full of bigs who can shoot the ball, it’s rare for a rookie to enter the league as such a competent shooter. Shooting was the Achilles heel of young bigs like Anthony Davis and Blake Griffin, who have since developed range out to the 3-point line.

The good news extends to the defensive side of the ball as well; Porzingis is already an effective rim protector. Considering that many were worried that he was “soft” entering the league, these numbers, perhaps more than his offensive ones, should put the doubters to bed. He blocks multiple shots per game, opponents shoot just 47 percent near the basket when he is present, and he is a big part of why the Knicks are among the most efficient rim-protecting teams in the NBA right now. The Knicks!

Then again: The Knicks! A franchise whose glory days are more than 40 years behind it, and which has squandered more than a few good opportunities in the past. What could go wrong this time around?

A strictly limited run?

The one looming issue could be Porzingis’s durability. Among his top 50 comparables, about 20 percent7 played fewer than 1,000 minutes (or were out of the league entirely) by their sixth NBA season. Usually, this is a sign of a serious injury. Furthermore, among his comparables, there was an inverse correlation between height and durability: The tallest players on Porzingis’s list were more injury-prone.

That’s a potential problem because Porzingis isn’t just tall but gigantic: one of only 25 players ever to play in the NBA at 7-foot-3 or taller. That produces some cool factoids — among players 7-foot-3 or taller, Porzingis has already drained the fourth-most 3-pointers in league history (behind Sabonis, Manute Bol and Zydrunas Ilgauskas) — along with some worrying trends. For instance: no player 7-foot-3 or taller has ever made it to his 1,000th NBA game. (Mark Eaton, with 875 career games, came closest.)

Is there really such a thing as being too tall for the NBA, as Phil Jackson asserted when he drafted Porzingis? Well … maybe. The chart below tracks the height distribution of NBA players since the NBA-ABA merger in 1976, weighted by minutes played, and compares it against a normal distribution.

There are some interesting discrepancies: the most conspicuous is that there are far fewer players listed at exactly 6-foot-4 or 6-foot-5 than you’d expect from a normal distribution. That could reflect the fact that such players are “tweeners” — too small to play forward, but not necessarily fleet or agile enough to play guard — or that their heights are exaggerated upward to avoid the tweener label. Charles Barkley, officially listed at 6-foot-6, was probably more like 6-foot-4 or 6-foot-5 instead, for example.

There is also a comparative absence of players listed at 7-foot-1 or taller. Based on the normal distribution, you’d expect about 6 percent of NBA minutes to be played by these supergiant players; instead, about 3 percent of them have been. There are lots of plausible explanations for this — for instance, there may be diminishing returns to height beyond about 7 feet, and some very tall players may actually round their heights down instead of up. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, one of the most durable players in league history, was listed at 7-foot-2, and opponents swore up and down that even that number was missing an inch or two. Still, looking at the broader trends, perhaps there is some reason to be concerned about players carrying such large frames.

But having “some reason to be concerned” is unavoidable in neurotic New York — and a heck of a lot better than the state of absolute despair that preceded it. And the upside is having a player who, like Anthony Davis, has a chance to redefine his position. Porzingis! is the most exciting show to hit the Knicks since Linsanity.

The Fifth Republican Debate Ended In A Nine-Way Draw

The Republican debate in Las Vegas on Tuesday night had the feeling of a soccer match that ended in a nil-nil draw. It was a tactical and defensively minded affair, full of technically competent but predictable performances. The only candidates who broke form were those who didn’t have much to lose.

This is interesting considering that no Republican candidate should feel all that secure about his or her position in the race. Donald Trump is leading in the polls — but no similar candidate has won a party nomination before, and there remain many reasons to wonder whether those polls will translate to sustained success in winning states and delegates. Ted Cruz can feel happy about his improved position in Iowa — but he trails Trump nationally and is almost as detested by the party establishment. Marco Rubio is moving upward in the polls and the endorsement count — but the pace of his growth in these categories has been slow, and his mediocre ground game could prevent him from gaining more support as voting in the early states approaches.

For those of us who watched the debate at FiveThirtyEight, nothing in Las Vegas changed anything much. As in the past, we anonymously submitted grades scoring each candidate’s performance from A to F on the basis of how much we thought they improved their chances of winning the nomination. But the grades came out as a big muddle, with none of the major candidates averaging higher than a B or lower than a C. There also wasn’t much internal agreement about how the candidates did: Rubio, for instance, was graded everywhere from an A- to a D+ among the 14 staffers who voted.

CANDIDATEAVERAGE GRADEHIGH GRADELOW GRADEMarco RubioBA-D+Ted CruzB-B+CChris ChristieB-A-D+Jeb BushB-ACRand PaulC+B+DDonald TrumpCB+DCarly FiorinaC-B+DBen CarsonC-BFJohn KasichC-B-F

Nonetheless, here are a few spare thoughts about the candidates:

If you hadn’t known what polls said ahead of time, you probably would have assumed that Marco Rubio, not Trump, was the polling front-runner. Rubio was the most-attacked candidate among those on stage, negatively mentioned or directly attacked by the other candidates 22 times, compared with 16 times for Trump, 10 times for Cruz and eight times for Jeb Bush.

There seemed to be an asymmetry between Rubio and Ted Cruz, with Cruz more eager to attack Rubio than the other way around. That makes a lot of sense: Rubio would benefit from a universe in which Cruz and Trump ate into each other’s vote and neither was able to achieve critical mass. Cruz, however, would love to force the establishment’s hand by making himself the establishment’s least-worst option in a one-on-one race with Trump.

For my money personally, Chris Christie had the best night of anyone on stage — largely because he benefited from other candidates’ tactical choices. Christie still has a path to the nomination — it runs through New Hampshire — but he’s not quite threatening enough to receive the same scrutiny that Rubio, Cruz or Trump is getting or to be attacked by the other candidates. This is somewhat the same position that John Kerry was in during the 2004 Democratic primary, lying back as candidates such as Howard Dean and Joe Lieberman attacked each other.

I declared (along with lots of other folks) that Jeb Bush was “probably toast” six weeks ago — and that judgment holds even after what was perhaps his most effective debate of the cycle. The problem for Bush — in addition to his near-asterisk-level of support in polls — is that he seems to have fallen behind Rubio in the “invisible primary,” with Rubio having received far more endorsements lately. Furthermore, he’s fallen behind Christie in New Hampshire polls, so if Rubio falters, Christie could get a look before Bush does again. Even if Bush’s campaign has the money to play out the string, that’s quite a long-shot parlay: hope Rubio falters, hope you emerge as the establishment’s backup option instead of Christie, and then hope you beat Cruz and Trump in a year where voters seem to be looking in a different direction.

I’ve written so much about Donald Trump lately that I don’t have much more to say. In the near term, the swings in his polls probably mostly reflect the degree to which he’s monopolizing media coverage. If the debate didn’t disrupt the news cycle much, that could be good news for Trump, since he has dominated news coverage lately. And yet, the conventional wisdom has become so scared of prematurely declaring the “end of Trump” that it sometimes seems to grade him on a curve for answers that would be considered game-changers if uttered by other candidates. Trump hasn’t fared especially well in the polls after previous debates, and it’s at least theoretically possible that voters judge him differently when he’s just one of nine candidates on stage instead of immersed in his own environment.

The other four candidates probably won’t have much of a say in who becomes the Republican nominee. Rand Paul has gradually gotten better as debate season has worn on, but his positions aren’t well-calibrated for a Republican base whose focus is increasingly on national security rather than economic affairs. Ben Carson has slowly but steadily been losing ground in the polls; like Paul, he probably does not benefit from the campaign’s increasing focus on foreign policy. John Kasich has played too much to the pundit class and not enough to his solidly conservative credentials, and it may be too late to reverse that. Carly Fiorina has never found a second act after her good debate performances, and since she doesn’t have much campaign infrastructure or media visibility, there’s no reason to expect this time to reverse the pattern.

The Fifth Republican Debate Ends In A Nine-Way Draw

The Republican debate in Las Vegas on Tuesday night had the feeling of a soccer match that ended in a nil-nil draw. It was a tactical and defensively minded affair, full of technically competent but predictable performances. The only candidates who broke form were those who didn’t have much to lose.

This is interesting considering that no Republican candidate should feel all that secure about his or her position in the race. Donald Trump is leading in the polls — but no similar candidate has won a party nomination before, and there remain many reasons to wonder whether those polls will translate to sustained success in winning states and delegates. Ted Cruz can feel happy about his improved position in Iowa — but he trails Trump nationally and is almost as detested by the party establishment. Marco Rubio is moving upward in the polls and the endorsement count — but the pace of his growth in these categories has been slow, and his mediocre ground game could prevent him from gaining more support as voting in the early states approaches.

For those of us who watched the debate at FiveThirtyEight, nothing in Las Vegas changed anything much. As in the past, we anonymously submitted grades scoring each candidate’s performance from A to F on the basis of how much we thought they improved their chances of winning the nomination. But the grades came out as a big muddle, with none of the major candidates averaging higher than a B or lower than a C. There also wasn’t much internal agreement about how the candidates did: Rubio, for instance, was graded everywhere from an A- to a D+ among the 14 staffers who voted.

CANDIDATEAVERAGE GRADEHIGH GRADELOW GRADEMarco RubioBA-D+Ted CruzB-B+CChris ChristieB-A-D+Jeb BushB-ACRand PaulC+B+DDonald TrumpCB+DCarly FiorinaC-B+DBen CarsonC-BFJohn KasichC-B-F

Nonetheless, here are a few spare thoughts about the candidates:

If you hadn’t known what polls said ahead of time, you probably would have assumed that Marco Rubio, not Trump, was the polling front-runner. Rubio was the most-attacked candidate among those on stage, negatively mentioned or directly attacked by the other candidates 22 times, compared with 16 times for Trump, 10 times for Cruz and eight times for Jeb Bush.

There seemed to be an asymmetry between Rubio and Ted Cruz, with Cruz more eager to attack Rubio than the other way around. That makes a lot of sense: Rubio would benefit from a universe in which Cruz and Trump ate into each other’s vote and neither was able to achieve critical mass. Cruz, however, would love to force the establishment’s hand by making himself the establishment’s least-worst option in a one-on-one race with Trump.

For my money personally, Chris Christie had the best night of anyone on stage — largely because he benefited from other candidates’ tactical choices. Christie still has a path to the nomination — it runs through New Hampshire — but he’s not quite threatening enough to receive the same scrutiny that Rubio, Cruz or Trump is getting or to be attacked by the other candidates. This is somewhat the same position that John Kerry was in during the 2004 Democratic primary, lying back as candidates such as Howard Dean and Joe Lieberman attacked each other.

I declared (along with lots of other folks) that Jeb Bush was “probably toast” six weeks ago — and that judgment holds even after what was perhaps his most effective debate of the cycle. The problem for Bush — in addition to his near-asterisk-level of support in polls — is that he seems to have fallen behind Rubio in the “invisible primary,” with Rubio having received far more endorsements lately. Furthermore, he’s fallen behind Christie in New Hampshire polls, so if Rubio falters, Christie could get a look before Bush does again. Even if Bush’s campaign has the money to play out the string, that’s quite a long-shot parlay: hope Rubio falters, hope you emerge as the establishment’s backup option instead of Christie, and then hope you beat Cruz and Trump in a year where voters seem to be looking in a different direction.

I’ve written so much about Donald Trump lately that I don’t have much more to say. In the near term, the swings in his polls probably mostly reflect the degree to which he’s monopolizing media coverage. If the debate didn’t disrupt the news cycle much, that could be good news for Trump, since he has dominated news coverage lately. And yet, the conventional wisdom has become so scared of prematurely declaring the “end of Trump” that it sometimes seems to grade him on a curve for answers that would be considered game-changers if uttered by other candidates. Trump hasn’t fared especially well in the polls after previous debates, and it’s at least theoretically possible that voters judge him differently when he’s just one of nine candidates on stage instead of immersed in his own environment.

The other four candidates probably won’t have much of a say in who becomes the Republican nominee. Rand Paul has gradually gotten better as debate season has worn on, but his positions aren’t well-calibrated for a Republican base whose focus is increasingly on national security rather than economic affairs. Ben Carson has slowly but steadily been losing ground in the polls; like Paul, he probably does not benefit from the campaign’s increasing focus on foreign policy. John Kasich has played too much to the pundit class and not enough to his solidly conservative credentials, and it may be too late to reverse that. Carly Fiorina has never found a second act after her good debate performances, and since she doesn’t have much campaign infrastructure or media visibility, there’s no reason to expect this time to reverse the pattern.

The Republican Primary Dropout Draft

For this week’s 2016 Slack chat, we introduce a new, fantasy-football-inspired game. As always, the transcript below has been lightly edited.

Check our our live coverage of the Republican debate.

micah (Micah Cohen, deputy editor for politics): All right, with the last Republican presidential debate of 2015 tonight, we’re approaching a period when the Republican primary should really start to get going — when the field should start to consolidate. So to get a sense for how the dominoes may tumble, we’re going to play “Dropout Draft.” Nate, give us the rules.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): Well, this is pretty simple. The rules are this: You get five points if a candidate drops out (or “suspends his campaign”) in December, three points if he does so in January, and one point in February. No points for dropouts after that.

clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): Is there a monetary incentive to this?

natesilver: Yeah. The winner gets bought a six-pack of beer of his or her choosing, or that godforsaken A&W cream soda stuff Harry drinks if he wins somehow.

Also, you can’t pick Jim Gilmore. Because, really.

harry (Harry Enten, senior political writer): Nate is so anti-Gilmore. It’s disgusting.

Revealing thing @NateSilver538 just said in the office: "How do you spell Gilmore?"

— Micah Cohen (@micahcohen) December 15, 2015

natesilver: #feelthegil

clare.malone: It’s a nice little vote of confidence for George Pataki there.

natesilver: We drew cards to determine the draft order, and it’s 1. Harry, 2. Clare, 3. Nate, 4. Micah. And everyone else rejected my proposal for a snake draft, so we’ll just do a straight three-round draft.

So we’re off. With the first pick in the 2016 Republican Dropout Draft, Harry Enten selects….

harry: The junior senator from the Commonwealth of Kentucky: Rand Paul.

His favorable ratings are not good, his poll numbers are so bad that he was nearly left out of tonight’s mainstage debate, he has a re-election campaign to worry about, and unlike the JV debaters this time around, Paul could actually be a player down the line.

micah: Rand is the Jadeveon Clowney of this draft. That’s a solid pick. I thought he would drop out before Thanksgiving.

natesilver: Is this a PPR league? Clare, you have the second pick.

clare.malone: OK, I think I’m going to go with Lindsey Graham.

natesilver: Shit, he was No. 1 on my board.

clare.malone: I think he’s feeling queasy about the current state of the party — he basically said as much a couple of weeks ago, and I think that he might want to get out of the race and start saying stuff to calm everyone the hell down.

micah: Also, it’s not like he has an issue to trumpet. His main cause, an aggressive foreign policy, now comes standard with the other Republican candidates (save Paul).

natesilver: Yeah, and there’s been some solid reporting about how some of the more moderate Republicans are hesitating in endorsing other candidates out of deference to Graham. But if he’s really concerned about the party’s health, he might want to get out of the way.

micah: With the #3 pick, Nate Silver is on the clock …

clare.malone: (Nate is muttering under his breath.)

natesilver: This is tricky. Can’t believe Clare took Graham. But I’ll go with John Kasich.

micah: Interesting! I don’t agree.

harry: I don’t like this pick. I think he’s going to wait until New Hampshire.

clare.malone: Because he has fire in his belly like a 17th-century Boston preacher?

micah: That too.

harry: I think Donald Trump is playing with Nate’s mind, and Nate is now irrational.

micah: Justify yourself, Nate.

natesilver: Look, Kasich doesn’t have a ton of money, he has no sign of momentum, and he’s been a little bit valedictory lately in critiquing Trump and the state of the race. To me, that makes him a poor man’s Lindsey Graham.

harry: He has New Hampshire. HE HAS NEW HAMPSHIRE! Or not. He’ll probably lose New Hampshire to my main man Chris Christie.

natesilver: Yeah, but at least I’m going to get my one point when he drops out after that. Unless he holds on until Ohio. Which he might do, come to think of it, because he’s sort of an egomaniac.

OK, maybe that was a terrible pick.

Micah, you’re up next.

micah: Hmm …

harry: HURRY UP.

micah: George Pataki

natesilver: That’s like drafting a fucking punter in the first round.

micah: He has no chance, and he’s not completely Gilmore-ing it. And there will be pressure among establishment candidates to drop out.

natesilver: But he had no chance to begin with, so what’s gonna compel him to drop out?

micah: See above re: establishment pressure. [Editor’s note: Pataki missed the filing deadline for the Texas primary — not exactly a sign of a serious or well-organized candidate.]

OK, Harry, you have the #5 pick

harry: It pains me to do this because I admired her leadership at HP, but Carly Fiorina.

clare.malone: When you were an employee there at age 8.

micah: I was going back and forth on her.

harry: I’m playing to win.

clare.malone: Cream soda gleaming in the distance…

micah: I think Fiorina has a little “I’m doing this to raise my profile and get a better TV contract” — so I think she’ll stay in as long as she can.

natesilver: Yeah, I think that might be a little early for Fiorina. With a bunch of debates ahead — and she’s pretty good at those — she can still maximize her exposure for future speaking circuit $$$ without embarrassing herself.

clare.malone: Gee whiz, we’re all so cynical.

harry: I just think she’s greeted by half-filled audiences at her appearances. She’s getting closer and closer to falling off the main stage with her poll averages. Do I think she’ll drop out this month? No. But I wouldn’t be shocked if she dropped out in January.

natesilver: Clare, you have the sixth pick.

clare.malone: Oh man, only eight left to choose from

I think I’m going to say Rick Santorum. He’s really putting in the legwork in Iowa, but I just think that once that primary passes, he’s out. He’s just not the evangelical flavor du jour.

micah: That’s a good pick. Post-Iowa, I can see Santorum hanging it up.

natesilver: It’s a good pick for ME because I’m gonna get huge value at No. 7. And I’ve gotta think Santorum is keeping 2012 in the back of his mind, where his surge in Iowa came at the proverbial 11th hour.

My pick. I am thrilled beyond belief that Jeb Bush fell to No. 7. He’s my choice.

clare.malone: Naw, man. I think he waits it out. He doesn’t want to bring shame on the family.

micah: Yeah, I think he’s in through New Hampshire at least. Although, maybe avoiding shame means dropping out before any voting takes place.

clare.malone: I think they’re more face-the-music types. Old New England.

natesilver: Bush has a lot of money — and almost NOTHING else going for him. And he’s a party guy who might have the best interests of the GOP in mind. The resources he commands could be helpful elsewhere: He’s about the only candidate on the Venn diagram who could meaningfully help another establishment candidate to win, and yet who doesn’t have much chance himself.

harry: I gotta agree with Mr. Nathaniel Read Silver here.

Take a listen to our election podcast pilot

http://c.espnradio.com/s:5L8r1/audio/2632960/whatsthepoint_2015-12-15-110700.64k.mp3?ad_params=zones%3DPreroll%2CPreroll2%2CMidroll%2CMidroll2%2CMidroll3%2CMidroll4%2CMidroll5%2CMidroll6%2CPostroll%2CPostroll2%7Cstation_id%3D3138

We’re launching our election podcast in January. For now, take a listen to the pilot in the feed for our podcast What’s The Point.

micah: With the No. 8 pick, I’m going with … Ben Carson. Bam! The doctor has better things to do if his support in the polls drops into mid-single digits.

clare.malone: Back to pondering the grain stores of Egypt.

natesilver: Solid pick, Micah. Not clear how much his heart is in the campaign, and his trajectory in the polls has been steady and downward.

micah: Glad you approve, Nate.

Harry, you’re next.

harry: Folks, I’m going to pick the greatest presidential candidate ever: Donald Trump. I have to do it. Do I think he’ll drop out? No. But of the players left on the board, there really isn’t anything solid. He has the highest upside. As my JV baseball coach said about me, “He’s a diamond in the rough.”

micah: You should have picked Mike Huckabee.

natesilver: YOU TOOK TRUMP WITH HUCKABEE STILL ON THE BOARD?!?!?

clare.malone: Harry is now claiming that he was confused.

micah: DRAFT DAY CONTROVERSY!

natesilver: SANTORUM AND HUCKABEE ARE NOT THE SAME PERSON

clare.malone: Your JV coach’s words are ringing in all of our ears.

harry: To be honest, Nate’s whiteboard is really dirty, and I just didn’t see that Huckabee’s name was still on it.

clare.malone: That is not a metaphor, or a euphemism.

micah: For the record, here’s the white board:

All right, well, you’re stuck with Trump.

clare.malone: My turn???

micah: Clare, you have the #10 pick.

clare.malone: HUCKABEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

micah: Yay!

clare.malone: Like butta. I feel like the reasons are obvious.

micah: Nate, you’re up.

natesilver: Clare’s team is gonna be tough to beat.

natesilver: I guess I’ll complete my establishment triumvirate by adding Chris Christie to Bush and Kasich.

micah: You are bad at this game, Nate.

natesilver: Wait, what?

micah: You should have diversified!

clare.malone: He couldn’t see the board.

harry: Horrible pick.

natesilver: Christie has some momentum now. But not that much. Whoop-de-doo — he’s at 11 percent in one poll of New Hampshire. And he has all sorts of liabilities if he rises to the top of the field again.

micah: Nate’s putting all his chips on the establishment meeting behind the scenes, picking Rubio, and having everyone else exit stage-right.

harry: You know, I’m getting sick of your anti-Christie vibe, Nate. It’s not like he stopped you from crossing the George Washington Bridge.

natesilver: I’m actually slightly bullish on Christie, despite all that! I’m just saying there’s some solid value there for the 11th pick.

micah: So I have the last pick.

clare.malone: Yes

micah: OK — Marco Rubio

clare.malone: President Ted Cruz it is.

micah: Even though i think he is more likely to win than Cruz, I think Rubio is also more likely to drop out. Cruz is in this until the balloons drop in Cleveland.

clare.malone: Best damn balloons in the nation. [Editor’s note: Ohio nativism.]

natesilver: I’m still of the belief, although it’s been wavering lately, that Rubio is the more likely nominee than Cruz. But I like Micah’s pick despite that.

Cruz doesn’t give a damn about annoying anyone. And he might have a higher floor than Rubio, even if he also has less chance of achieving his ceiling.

OK, let’s look at the final “teams”:

Harry: Paul, Fiorina, Trump

Clare: Graham, Santorum, Huckabee

Nate: Kasich, Bush, Christie

Micah: Pataki, Carson, Rubio

micah: That’s an amazing team, Clare!

clare.malone: I’m pretty confident in my dream team.

harry: Let’s allow the game to be played.

clare.malone: You’re just salty, Harry.

micah: Here’s how I would rank the teams: Clare > Harry > Micah > Nate.

harry: Nate is garbage.

natesilver: I’m looking forward to that six-pack, guys.

clare.malone: I expect mine to be Great Lakes Beer.

micah: OK, we’ll check back in on this as people drop out. Enjoy the debate, everyone!

Trump Boom Or Trump Bubble?

The Republican debate on Tuesday night in Las Vegas will offer Republican presidential contenders a rare opportunity: the chance, at least for a couple of hours, to compete on a level stage with Donald Trump, who has dominated coverage of the campaign for months on end.

Understanding the dynamics of the modern media environment is an important skill for a candidate, and it’s a skill that Trump has mastered. But it’s also important to understand the effects that media coverage can have on the campaign and on the polls. By one measure we’ll get to in a moment, Trump has received about the most disproportionate media coverage ever for a primary candidate. The risk to Trump and candidates like him is that polling built on a foundation of media coverage can be subject to a correction when the news environment changes.

The data I’ll cite in this article comes from searches of