Nate Silver's Blog, page 49
March 9, 2020
Politics Podcast: What Are The Political Repercussions Of The Coronavirus?
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The new coronavirus has continued to spread in the United States, and markets reacted negatively on Monday. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew debates the meaning of a poll showing that Americans of different partisan persuasions are reacting to the virus differently. They also discuss the state of the Democratic primary race and preview the upcoming elections.
You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes , the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen .
The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast publishes Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes . Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.
March 6, 2020
Politics Podcast: Why Biden Is Now A Big Favorite
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In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast’s “Model Talk,” Nate Silver explains why the Democratic primary forecast shifted significantly in Biden’s favor this week. He also discusses changes he’s made to the model and why a comeback would be so challenging for the Sanders campaign.
You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes , the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen .
The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast publishes Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes . Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.
After Super Tuesday, Joe Biden Is A Clear Favorite To Win The Nomination
After a huge night on Super Tuesday — and with all his major opponents1 except Sen. Bernie Sanders having dropped out — former Vice President Joe Biden is a strong favorite to win the Democratic nomination, according to the FiveThirtyEight forecast.
We’d encourage you to approach the forecast with a bit of caution for the next few days until we have new polling and a better sense of what the post-Super Tuesday landscape looks like. There are several uncertainties to keep in mind:
Many states, especially California, are not yet done counting their votes. In California, the results could shift significantly based on late-returned mail ballots. Under the state’s rules, ballots only need to have been mailed out by election day, so millions of votes are literally still in the mail.
Two candidates, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, have just dropped out, and while the model makes some educated guesses about where their support will go, it may be wrong about that.
Super Tuesday itself could have a substantial effect on the polls — most likely in the form of a bounce for Biden. The model, again, makes educated guesses about the size of these bounces. But those guesses may not be right: Biden got a much bigger South Carolina bounce than is typical for that state, for example; while Sanders got little, if any, bounce after winning Nevada when the model expected him to get one.
Making matters trickier, it’s also not entirely clear what the race was like prior to Super Tuesday because Biden’s ascent in the polls was quite rapid and there were few national polls during this period.
With that said, even if there’s some uncertainty here — perhaps a bit more of it than the model lets on — things don’t look good for Sanders. He has several compounding problems:
First, he’s already behind by around 70 delegates, according to our estimates, based on returns in each state as currently reported. That deficit could get worse because there are some signs that late-returned mail ballots in California will help Biden — a reflection of the fact that Biden surged in the race in the final few days before Super Tuesday.
As mentioned, Biden will probably get a bounce in the polls as a result of his Super Tuesday wins. The model’s guess (accounting for its projected Super Tuesday bounce for Biden and the effects of Bloomberg and Warren dropping out) is that he’s currently ahead by the equivalent of 6 or 7 points in national polls. So although momentum could shift back toward Sanders later on, it may get worse for him in the short run.
Some of Sanders’s best states (California, Nevada) have already voted, and the upcoming states generally either aren’t good for him or have relatively few delegates. In fact, given how broadly Sanders lost on Super Tuesday — including in northern states such as Minnesota, Massachusetts and Maine — it’s hard to know where his strengths lie, other than among young progressives and Hispanics, who are not large enough groups to constitute a winning coalition in most states. Conversely, it’s easy to identify places where Sanders will likely lose badly to Biden. Our model has Biden winning a net of about 85 delegates over Sanders in Florida on March 17, where Sanders’s polling has been terrible, and a net of about 35 delegates in Georgia, which votes on March 24.
There aren’t that many delegates left after March. Some 38 percent of delegates have already been selected. And by the time Georgia votes in two-and-a-half weeks, 61 percent of delegates will already have been chosen. So even if Sanders did get a big, massive momentum swing late in the race, it might not be enough to allow him to come back, with only about a third of delegates still to be chosen.
Finally, even if Sanders does come back, it might merely be enough to win a plurality rather than a majority of delegates. We project that roughly 150 delegates — or about 4 percent of the total of 3,979 pledged delegates available — belong to candidates who have since dropped out or to Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, even after accounting for the fact that statewide delegates are reallocated to other candidates once a candidate drops out.2 That creates an additional buffer that will make it harder for Sanders to win a majority.
So basically, Sanders has to come back quickly when the momentum is currently against him in a bunch of states that are not very good for him — or it will be too late. It’s not impossible. But the chances are low. The model gives Biden an 88 percent chance of winning a majority of pledged delegates, with most of the remaining outcomes being “no majority” rather than a Sanders majority. It also gives Biden a 94 percent chance of winning a plurality of pledged delegates, and Sanders a 6 percent chance.
Again, that’s not impossible. Any chance that’s 5 percent or higher is within what you might think of as the model’s “margin of error.” The model does not account for other real-world contingencies such as Biden dropping out because of a health problem. (It assumes that the delegate leader never drops out of the race.) But the comeback path is not going to be easy for the senator from Vermont.
The one potential opening for Sanders is that the recent volatility in the polls could imply further volatility in the days and weeks ahead. This is one thing we looked at while the model was “off” over the past couple of days: Is recent polling volatility predictive of future volatility?
I’m skipping a bunch of steps here, but the basic answer is “yes.” There are short-run spikes of volatility in the polls, just as there are short-run spikes of volatility in the stock market. We’ve now implemented code reflecting this in the model, which slightly improves Sanders’s chances relative to what they would have been otherwise.
Note that the volatility could run in either direction, however. It could mean that Biden completely runs away with the race and wins Michigan by 25 points or something next week.
But since Sanders is a substantial underdog in the race, the more volatility the better for him. He’ll take his share of 25-point losses if he can get his share of upset wins. And the model does reflect the substantial uncertainty in Michigan, a state where polls have historically not been very good, giving Sanders a 21 percent chance of winning there. Even a win in Michigan would just be the first step in a long journey back to front-runner status for Sanders — but every comeback has to start somewhere.
March 5, 2020
Emergency Politics Podcast: Warren Drops Out Of The Democratic Primary
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In an emergency installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew reacts to the news that Sen. Elizabeth Warren is suspending her campaign for president. They discuss why she wasn’t able to form a winning coalition and how her exit affects the rest of the race.
https://abcnews.go.com/video/69416321
You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes , the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen .
The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast publishes Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes . Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.
March 3, 2020
Five Scenarios For How Super Tuesday Could Go
Earlier today, my colleague Nathaniel Rakich and I wrote about the final FiveThirtyEight forecast before Super Tuesday. There are basically two big themes there. First, yes, the model has shifted strongly to former Vice President Joe Biden in recent days because of his big win in South Carolina and a major bounce for him in polls of Super Tuesday states. But second, there’s a lot of uncertainty, both in terms of what happens tonight and for the rest of the race. The most likely outcome is still that there’s no pledged delegate majority on June 6, once all states and territories have finished voting.
I’m going to focus more on the uncertainty in this story. Let’s stress test the model and see how its Super Tuesday projections might change if various candidates perform better or worse than our projections expect. (If you want to do your own version of this, you can! Please see our Super Tuesday scenarios interactive here.)
Scenario 1: The model is all-knowing
First, let’s establish a baseline case. Here’s how delegates would be allocated tonight under the DNC’s rules if our forecast is exactly right in every state and Congressional district. If this happens (it will not), I’m going to buy myself a really nice steak dinner tomorrow night. (Also, it will probably mean we’re living in a simulation, so this is not necessarily something to root for.)
Scenario 1: If Our Projections Are *Exactly* Right
Super Tuesday delegate projections based on final FiveThirtyEight forecast
State
Biden
Sanders
Bloomberg
Warren
Klobuchar
California
120
155
77
63
0
Texas
83
81
55
9
0
North Carolina
52
32
24
2
0
Virginia
52
27
17
3
0
Massachusetts
21
28
17
25
0
Minnesota
19
20
9
13
14
Colorado
17
22
14
14
0
Tennessee
26
19
14
5
0
Alabama
27
13
11
1
0
Oklahoma
13
9
8
7
0
Arkansas
14
7
9
1
0
Utah
9
9
6
5
0
Maine
6
8
6
4
0
Vermont
0
13
0
3
0
American Samoa
2
2
2
0
0
Total
461
445
269
155
14
In the base case, we have Biden finishing just slightly ahead of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, with 461 delegates (34 percent of the total possible tonight) to Bernie’s 445 (33 percent). But our baseline projections also have Michael Bloomberg and Elizabeth Warren picking up decent numbers of delegates. Heck, they even have Amy Klobuchar staying just above 15 percent of the vote in Minnesota and thereby getting delegates there, even though she dropped out. So basically, the base case for tonight is that one-third of the delegates go to Biden, one-third go to Sanders and one-third go to “other,” which is why we could be headed to a no majority (and possibly contested convention) outcome.
Scenario 2: Biden overperforms
Let’s say, though, that Biden has a really good night — even better than our forecast shows. That’s certainly possible; as aggressive as the model has been in trying to account for his bounce, he keeps moving up in the model every time we feed it new polling data. Even the latest, freshest polls may not sufficiently account for Pete Buttigeg and Klobuchar dropping out and endorsing Biden, which is one way he could beat his forecast, for instance.
To do this, let’s add 6 percentage points to our Biden forecast in every state and district. We’ll take those 6 points evenly from the other major candidates — so Biden gets 2 points each from Sanders, Warren and Bloomberg.
Scenario 2: A Big Night For Biden
Super Tuesday delegate projections based on final FiveThirtyEight forecast, adding 6 points to Biden while subtracting 2 from Sanders, Bloomberg and Warren
State
Biden
Sanders
Bloomberg
Warren
Klobuchar
California
178
159
61
17
0
Texas
103
76
45
4
0
North Carolina
62
31
17
0
0
Virginia
61
24
13
1
0
Massachusetts
30
27
14
20
0
Minnesota
30
26
2
1
16
Colorado
23
21
13
10
0
Tennessee
32
18
14
0
0
Alabama
29
12
11
0
0
Oklahoma
23
12
2
0
0
Arkansas
15
7
9
0
0
Utah
11
9
8
1
0
Maine
9
10
5
0
0
Vermont
5
11
0
0
0
American Samoa
3
2
1
0
0
Total
614
445
215
54
16
In this case, Biden would finish 169 delegates ahead of Sanders. That’s hardly an insurmountable lead in a race with 3,979 pledged delegates total. But, the narrative of the evening would be quite poor for Sanders, perhaps leading to further Biden gains in subsequent states. That’s because, in this scenario, Sanders’s wins would be limited to Maine and Vermont, with Biden pulling off upsets in Massachusetts, Utah, Colorado and — most importantly, and only by the slimmest of margins — California.
Again, this is a dream scenario for Biden and very much not the base case. But the point is that Biden is surging so much that we can’t rule outcomes like this out. Even in states like California, Sanders’s lead has slipped into the high single digits, to the best we can determine based on the few polls available.
As a slight silver lining for Sanders, note that he actually wins exactly as many delegates here (445) as in the base case. That’s because Biden’s gains would take away votes from Bloomberg and Warren, knocking them below the 15 percent threshold in many districts, leaving Biden and Sanders more delegates to divvy up for themselves. Still, I’m sure Sanders would prefer to avoid this outcome.
Scenario 3: Sanders overperforms
But what if things go really well for Sanders instead? Here’s what the delegates look like if Sanders beats our forecast by 6 points across the board, taken equally from Biden, Bloomberg and Warren.
Scenario 3: Sanders Beats His Polls And Holds His Ground
Super Tuesday delegate projections based on final FiveThirtyEight forecast, adding 6 points to Sanders while subtracting 2 from Biden, Bloomberg and Warren
State
Biden
Sanders
Bloomberg
Warren
Klobuchar
California
136
203
60
16
0
Texas
78
101
45
4
0
North Carolina
51
42
17
0
0
Virginia
49
36
13
1
0
Massachusetts
21
31
14
25
0
Minnesota
22
35
2
1
15
Colorado
16
25
13
13
0
Tennessee
22
28
14
0
0
Alabama
24
17
11
0
0
Oklahoma
18
17
2
0
0
Arkansas
13
10
8
0
0
Utah
9
13
6
1
0
Maine
8
10
6
0
0
Vermont
0
16
0
0
0
American Samoa
2
3
1
0
0
Total
469
587
212
61
15
This scenario has Sanders beating Biden by 118 delegates tonight. A few days ago, this might have seemed like an above-average outcome for Biden — one that left Sanders favored but Biden still in the running.
Now, it might seem like a big moment for Sanders instead. Biden’s wins would be limited to North Carolina, Virginia, Alabama, Oklahoma and Arkasnas — not nothing, but he’d yet to have proven he could win anywhere outside of the South. Meanwhile, Sanders would penetrate into Biden’s territory by winning two southern states, Texas and Tennessee.
Scenario 4: Voters decide it’s Biden vs. Sanders
Next up is a scenario that intuitively seems plausible to me. Let’s imagine voters take the hint that it’s a two-candidate race and gravitate further toward both Biden and Sanders at the expense of the rest of the field. If you add 3 points to both Biden and Sanders’s numbers in every district and subtract 3 points from both Bloomberg and Warren, here’s what you get:
Scenario 4: Biden and Sanders Pull Away From The Pack
Super Tuesday delegate projections based on final FiveThirtyEight forecast, adding 3 points to Biden and Sanders while subtracting 3 from Bloomberg and Warren
State
Biden
Sanders
Bloomberg
Warren
Klobuchar
California
173
212
19
11
0
Texas
95
94
39
0
0
North Carolina
64
42
4
0
0
Virginia
60
34
4
1
0
Massachusetts
29
30
12
20
0
Minnesota
27
32
0
0
16
Colorado
23
30
11
3
0
Tennessee
28
22
14
0
0
Alabama
28
14
10
0
0
Oklahoma
22
15
0
0
0
Arkansas
14
10
7
0
0
Utah
9
14
6
0
0
Maine
9
10
5
0
0
Vermont
3
13
0
0
0
American Samoa
2
2
2
0
0
Total
586
574
133
35
16
Note that the overall margin between Biden and Sanders has barely changed — but their proportions have improved relative to the field. Biden gets 44 percent of Super Tuesday delegates instead of 34 percent as in Scenario 1, and Sanders gets 43 percent instead of 33 percent. This type of outcome would greatly reduce — though not entirely eliminate — the chance of “no majority” or contested convention. It would also undoubtedly put a lot of pressure on Bloomberg and Warren to exit the race.
Scenario 5: Bloomberg and Warren overperform
Finally, suppose just the opposite happens and Warren and Bloomberg each beat their projections. I don’t necessarily see this happening but who knows! Maybe Warren’s voters are tired of their candidate being discounted and dig in their heels. And maybe Bloomberg’s expensive Super Tuesday ground game has a bigger effect than polls are showing. In accounting for uncertainty in a forecast, it’s important to be prepared for the forecast to be wrong in all directions — not just the directions you intuitively expect.
Scenario 5: ChAoS!
Super Tuesday delegate projections based on final FiveThirtyEight forecast, adding 3 points to Bloomberg and Warren while subtracting 3 from Biden and Sanders
State
Biden
Sanders
Bloomberg
Warren
Klobuchar
California
102
138
87
88
0
Texas
70
68
52
38
0
North Carolina
44
24
26
16
0
Virginia
43
21
21
14
0
Massachusetts
18
26
20
27
0
Minnesota
15
18
15
15
12
Colorado
14
22
17
14
0
Tennessee
22
16
15
11
0
Alabama
25
9
12
6
0
Oklahoma
13
9
8
7
0
Arkansas
9
7
9
6
0
Utah
6
9
9
5
0
Maine
6
8
6
4
0
Vermont
0
11
0
5
0
American Samoa
2
2
1
1
0
Total
389
388
298
257
12
This would take us far down the path toward a contested convention. Biden and Sanders would essentially tie on the evening with 389 and 388 delegates respectively, but Bloomberg (298 delegates) and Warren (257 delegates) wouldn’t be that far behind. (Note that, because Warren is in danger of failing to meet the 15 percent threshold in more places than Bloomberg is, slightly overperforming her forecasts would be a bigger deal for her than for him.) Nobody would have more than 30 percent of the total delegates.
The tricky part for Warren and Bloomberg is that, although it isn’t that hard for them to accumulate quite a few delegates tonight, winning states is another story. Even in this optimistic scenario, Warren’s only win would come in Massachusetts, her home state. And the best Bloomberg would do would be to tie for the pledged delegates win in a rather odd pairing of states, Arkansas and Utah. I honestly have no idea how such an outcome would be interpreted by voters, the media and the candidates. But it would mean that we were probably in store for a very long and bumpy race.
Our Final Forecast For Super Tuesday Shows Biden’s Surge — And Lots Of Uncertainty
Former Vice President Joe Biden has gotten a lot of good news over the past few days. A huge, almost 30-point win in South Carolina. A series of impressive endorsements. Other candidates in the moderate lane — namely, former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who were among those endorsers — dropping out.
But one thing we haven’t had a lot of since South Carolina was hard data. That changed late last night with a flurry of new polls — we now have at least two polls conducted since South Carolina in every single Super Tuesday state. So by the time we froze the FiveThirtyEight forecast at 9:30 a.m. on Tuesday,1 the Super Tuesday picture was a lot clearer — and overall, things look good for Biden.
Biden is now about twice as likely as Sanders to win a plurality of pledged delegates, according to our primary model, which gives him a 65 percent chance of doing so compared with a 34 percent chance for Sanders. This represents the culmination of a trend that has been underway in the model for about a week; it started to shift toward Biden once polls showed the potential for him to win big in South Carolina — and it anticipated a polling bounce in the Super Tuesday states if he did win big there. Still, even after South Carolina, Biden’s plurality chances had risen only to 32 percent, compared with 64 percent for Sanders. That means the polling bounce from the events of the past few days has been bigger than the model anticipated.
To be clear, however, there is still a lot of uncertainty. We’ve been talking about delegate pluralities, which obscures the fact that the most likely outcome in the model is still that no one wins a majority of pledged delegates. And we should note that the lack of a majority does not necessarily imply a contested convention. For instance, if Biden enters the convention with 46 percent of delegates and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg with 10 percent, they could strike a deal where Bloomberg delegates vote for Biden on the first ballot.
Still, in the overnight polling, the numbers for Bloomberg — and to a slightly lesser extent, Sen. Elizabeth Warren — held up better than you might have expected. The model has Bloomberg projected to finish with at least 15 percent of the vote in most states, which is the threshold required to receive delegates allocated at the state and district levels — and it has Warren projected to do so in most states outside of the South. While to our eye, the model’s numbers look a little optimistic for Bloomberg, the whole point of a model is to rely on objective data. And that says Bloomberg could still accumulate plenty of delegates, even though he isn’t a favorite in any state. Keep in mind that both Bloomberg and Warren also benefit from Buttigieg and Klobuchar dropping out — it’s easier to get 15 percent in a four-way race than a six-way one.2
Overall, the model has “no majority” happening 61 percent of the time, a Biden majority 31 percent of the time and a Sanders majority 8 percent of the time. Anyone else winning a majority would require a minor miracle.
In delegate terms, Biden is projected to finish about 375 delegates ahead of Sanders in the average simulation — but keep in mind that the average obscures a huge amount of variation. Still, this provides for a helpful benchmark. Bloomberg is projected to finish with an average of 555 delegates and Warren with 283 delegates — so their combined delegate tally projects to be more than twice as large as the projected margin separating Biden and Sanders. That’s why the model tends to land on “no majority” outcomes. If Bloomberg, Warren and other candidates are keeping 15 or 20 percent of the overall pledged delegate haul for themselves, then either Sanders or Biden needs to beat the other one by quite a bit to get an overall majority.
Below are our final forecasts for the 15 states and territories that will finish voting today. As you can see, Biden is favored to win in the seven Southern states, although he is anywhere from a very slight front-runner in Texas to a solid favorite in Virginia. And Sanders is favored in the seven remaining states across the Northeast, Midwest and West; his lead is most tenuous in Massachusetts and safest in Vermont. The model isn’t really sure what’s going to happen in American Samoa, where it gives Biden, Sanders and Bloomberg all decent chances.
Biden is favored in the South, Sanders in the North and West
Percent chance each top Democratic presidential candidate has of winning each Super Tuesday contest, according to the FiveThirtyEight primary forecast as of 9:30 a.m. Eastern on March 3
Contest
Biden
Bloomberg
Sanders
Warren
California
22%
1%
76%
0%
Texas
55
2
43
0
North Carolina
95
0
4
0
Virginia
98
0
2
0
Massachusetts
20
4
51
25
Minnesota
19
2
53
2
Colorado
20
6
69
5
Tennessee
68
5
25
1
Alabama
92
3
5
0
Oklahoma
78
2
18
2
Arkansas
69
17
12
1
Utah
28
11
59
3
Maine
23
7
68
3
Vermont
0
0
100
0
American Samoa
36
20
36
8
That regional divide in who wins what states has been clear for a while, but to repeat, the real prize of Super Tuesday is pledged delegates to the Democratic National Convention. And our forecast now says that Biden (484) will get more delegates, on average, out of Super Tuesday than Sanders (463) will. That’s a big shift from as recently as Sunday, when we were forecasting Sanders to get an average of 540 delegates on Super Tuesday and Biden to get an average of 395.
Biden and Sanders are neck and neck in delegates
Average number of pledged delegates each top Democratic presidential candidate is forecasted to receive from Super Tuesday contests, according to the FiveThirtyEight primary forecast as of 9:30 a.m. Eastern on March 3
Contest
Biden
Bloomberg
Sanders
Warren
California
133
63
164
55
Texas
84
43
81
21
North Carolina
54
17
31
7
Virginia
52
14
26
7
Massachusetts
23
15
29
24
Minnesota
20
9
26
9
Colorado
18
13
24
11
Tennessee
26
12
20
6
Alabama
28
9
11
4
Oklahoma
16
5
11
5
Arkansas
12
8
7
3
Utah
8
7
10
4
Maine
7
5
9
3
Vermont
2
1
12
2
American Samoa
2
1
2
1
Total
484
222
463
162
Why this sudden turn in Biden’s favor? As we said, it’s mostly about the polling showing an even bigger bounce for Biden than the model expected. On Monday night and Tuesday morning, we got our first glimpse of polls in which a significant number of interviews were conducted after Buttigieg’s and Klobuchar’s withdrawals from the race, and several were startlingly good for Biden. For instance, we got four polls3 in rapid succession of Virginia, a state that had looked like a tossup before South Carolina — and all four gave Biden a lead of at least 14 points. He is now virtually certain to win the state as a result. In the same way, North Carolina is now firmly in Biden’s camp with the release of three new polls4 that gave Biden an average lead of 16 points in the Tar Heel State.
Biden had already been gaining ground in our California polling average, but new Swayable and Data for Progress polls caused Biden to improve further in our forecast for the state. Although Sanders still has a lead there and is the likely winner, Biden has cut his projected margin to the single digits — and both Bloomberg and Warren project to get at least 15 percent of the vote in California, meaning they’ll get delegates of their own and prevent Sanders from running up the score. On the flip side, if Sanders overperforms in California and keeps Warren and Bloomberg from getting 15 percent there, he has some upside relative to our projections.
Granted, other new polls showed less dramatic movement. Swayable and Data for Progress released polls of Texas confirming what our forecast already thought: that Sanders and Biden are neck and neck in the Lone Star State, in what is probably the most interesting contest of the evening. Other polls featured results that looked a little flukish, like Bloomberg leading in Maine and Utah, per two Swayable polls. (This still hurt Sanders’s chances, though, especially in Utah, which was previously expected to be an easy win for him.) But few new polls (outside those of his home state of Vermont) were unambiguously good for Sanders.
We should keep in mind that none of these new polls are traditional, live-caller telephone polls; there just wouldn’t have been enough time to conduct many of them anyway after South Carolina. So that increases the uncertainty — although our model accounts for a lot of uncertainty. For example, in California, we think Sanders could get anywhere from 26 to 39 percent of the vote, while Biden could get anywhere from 21 percent to 32 percent. And those are merely 80-percent confidence intervals; vote shares will fall outside of those ranges 20 percent of the time.
But Biden sure seems to have a lot of upside in today’s contests, especially when you consider that even the polls above aren’t even pricing in the full impact of the last 72 hours. Most of them still included Buttigieg and Klobuchar as options, even though some respondents answered them knowing that they had dropped out. Perhaps Biden’s rally in Texas last night and endorsement from former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke could help him there; that’s also too recent to be reflected in any of the polling.
On the other hand, millions of early votes have already been cast by mail-in states like California and Colorado, where Sanders has been (and remains) strong. When watching the results tonight, you should be careful; early ballots are counted first in some states (though not all) and they may not match election-night returns. Early voters can also skew older than younger ones, which can be a disadvantage for candidates such as Sanders who rely on young voters.
And in terms of delegates, it’s possible for either Biden or Sanders to walk away from Super Tuesday with a big lead. Our model thinks Biden could get as many as 639 delegates or as few as 341, and Sanders could get as few as 325 or as many as 608. We’ll only know after all today’s votes have been counted — which, thanks to those mail-in ballots in the West, could take several days.
March 2, 2020
Politics Podcast: What’s At Stake On Super Tuesday
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The biggest day of the primary cycle is upon us! In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew previews what is at stake as 14 states, American Samoa and Democrats Abroad cast their ballots on Super Tuesday. They also debate how former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s exit from the race could shape the results. The team recorded the podcast before the news broke that Sen. Amy Klobuchar would also drop out and planned to endorse former Vice President Joe Biden.
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Pick Your Own Super Tuesday Winners And Watch The Race Change
We’re letting you be the boss of our Democratic primary forecast. Decide what happens in these 15 contests and see how candidates’ odds change.
2020 Democratic primary forecastHow our primary forecast works
By Nate Silver, Aaron Bycoffe, Ella Koeze and Julia Wolfe
March 1, 2020
Election Update: Buttigieg Dropping Out Isn’t Good For Sanders
Pete Buttigieg’s decision to drop out of the race two days before Super Tuesday has hurt Sen. Bernie Sanders in our primary forecast. Sanders’s chances of winning a majority of pledged delegates fell from 28 percent to 23 percent. And the likelihood that no candidate gets a majority rose slightly from 59 to 64 percent. Former Vice President Joe Biden’s majority chances were unchanged.
Sanders is still the favorite to win a plurality of delegates, but those chances dropped slightly too, from 63 percent to 60 percent, while Biden’s plurality chances increased from 34 to 36 percent.
Buttigieg himself had almost no chance of getting a delegate plurality or majority, according to the model, so these changes purely reflect the effects that his dropping out has on the other candidates.
At first glance, this might seem counterintuitive. How does a candidate dropping out increase the likelihood of no majority? Shouldn’t it clear the field up and make it easier to achieve a majority?
The key is in how the Democrats’ delegate math works. The rules require candidates to receive at least 15 percent of the vote, typically, to win delegates statewide or at the district-level.
Buttigieg was projected to get under 15 percent in the vast majority of states and districts on Super Tuesday. Thus, his votes were essentially wasted. Redistributing his votes to other candidates will help them to meet the 15 percent threshold, however. In particular, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg were both close to the 15 percent line in many states or districts. So even an extra percentage point or two would help them get over that line in more places. For instance, both Bloomberg and Warren were projected to finish with an average of 14 percent of the vote in California before Buttigieg’s dropout. Now, they’re forecasted for 16 percent instead.
Biden was also projected to finish under 15 percent in some states and districts — so Buttigieg’s dropout helps him out also in a few places. Biden went from a projected 14 percent of the vote to 16 percent in Minnesota, for example.
Conversely, Sanders was already projected to get 15 percent almost everywhere. So although he will pick up a few Buttigieg voters, they don’t necessarily translate to more delegates.
How does our model decide where to assign Buttigieg’s voters? As described here, we use a series of priors based on the positioning of the candidates on ideological and other dimensions. These are not purely based on left-right ideology either. For instance, the model recognizes that both Buttigieg and Warren tend to appeal to college-educated voters, and thus they share some voters despite their ideological differences.
The model also considers the overall popularity of each candidate. So because Sanders is currently the most popular Democrat in the field, he’s likely to pick up some of Buttigeg’s support too.
Overall, the model has Buttigieg’s support being divided relatively evenly between Warren, Biden, Bloomberg, Sanders and — in the places where she’s strong — Sen. Amy Klobuchar. That seems broadly in line with polls, which are somewhat inconsistent about where Buttigeg’s support will go.
Of course, neither the model nor previous polling of the race consider the context in which Buttigieg dropped out, which comes amidst an increasing effort by moderate Democratic voters and party leaders to get behind Biden. If his voters take Buttigeg’s dropout as a signal that they should switch to Biden, there’s more upside for BIden than our model implies.
And overall, Buttigieg’s dropout contributes to the uncertainty surrounding what will happen on Super Tuesday. There were already a lot of challenges in assessing the current state of the race following Biden’s dramatic surge in South Carolina — but this adds yet another complication. Although the model may point in broadly the right direction — this is not great news for Sanders — this is one of those times when we mostly just have to wait and see what happens.
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