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Politics Podcast: How Biden Made A Comeback In South Carolina

By Galen Druke, Micah Cohen and Nate Silver, Galen Druke, Micah Cohen and Nate Silver and Galen Druke, Micah Cohen and Nate Silver












 












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Former Vice President Joe Biden won big in South Carolina on Saturday, besting Sen. Bernie Sanders by nearly 30 points. In a late-night installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew discusses how Biden pulled ahead in what looked to be a competitive race just two weeks ago. They also debate what it means for the Democratic primary going forward and whether it’s now a two-person race.

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.

What Biden’s Big South Carolina Win Might Mean For Sanders

Saturday was Joe Biden’s first-ever win in a presidential primary or caucus. It was an awfully big one: Biden won South Carolina by nearly 30 percentage points over Bernie Sanders. And it made for one heck of a comeback: Biden’s lead over Sanders had fallen to as little as 2 to 3 percentage points in our South Carolina polling average in the immediate aftermath of New Hampshire.

What explains the big swing back to Biden in South Carolina? And what does it mean for the rest of the race — and in particular for Sanders, who had entered this weekend as the frontrunner?

Here are five possible explanations — ranging from the most benign for Sanders to the most troubling for his campaign.

Hypothesis No. 1: This was a “ dead cat bounce ” for Biden because voters were sympathetic to him in one of his best states. It may have been a one-off occurrence.

Remember Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire in 2008? Left for dead by the national media after she lost Iowa to Barack Obama in 2008, she overcame a big polling deficit for an upset win in the Granite State. It didn’t do her much good, though; she won Nevada the next week but badly lost South Carolina two weeks later, eventually losing the nomination to Obama.

There are some similarities to Biden’s position in South Carolina. Like Clinton before New Hampshire, the media all but counted him out of the running after Iowa. Like Clinton in New Hampshire, Biden had a strong debate a few days before the primary along with some emotional moments on the campaign trail. Furthermore, some of the reporting from South Carolina suggests that certain South Carolina voters — especially older whites and African-Americans — felt deep loyalty toward Biden and wanted to keep him in the running.

Degree of concern for Sanders if this hypothesis is true: Low to moderate. If this were truly just a one-off sympathy bounce, then Sanders can live with it. Sure, Bernie missed an opportunity to put the race away with a win — or perhaps even a close second — in South Carolina. But voters rarely just hand the nomination to you without creating a little bit of friction. But if voters in other Super Tuesday states feel the same way that South Carolinians did, the sympathetic moment for Biden may not be over yet.

Hypothesis No. 2: The disparate results so far are simply reflective of the geographic and demographic strengths and weaknesses of the candidates. The notion of “momentum” is mostly a mirage.

If this is the case, you could wind up with a very regionally-driven primary, with Biden doing well in the South but perhaps not so well everywhere else. This is more or less what our model expects to happen, for what it’s worth; it now has Biden favored in every Southern Super Tuesday state except Texas, and he’s an underdog everywhere outside of the South.

The counter to this: Biden clearly did much better in South Carolina counties and precincts that weren’t as emblematic of his base than he had in those kinds of districts in other states. The counter to the counter: Geographic factors pick up a lot of information that demographics alone miss. So his strong performance in certain parts of South Carolina may bode well for how he’ll do in Alabama or North Carolina or Georgia. It may not say much about his performance in Michigan or California, however.

Degree of concern for Sanders if this hypothesis is true: Low to moderate. Sanders led Biden by about 12 points in national polls heading into South Carolina. Moreover, our model — which uses demographics in its forecast — has Sanders ahead. So although Biden has some strong groups and regions, Sanders’s coalition looks as though it’s slightly bigger and broader overall — although a post-South Carolina bounce for Biden or swoon for Sanders could eat into that advantage.

Hypothesis No. 3: The party is finally getting behind Biden. It may or may not work.

Almost half of South Carolina primary voters said that Rep. James Clyburn’s endorsement of Biden was a big factor in their decision. There are some questions about the cause and effect: It may be that Biden voters were pleased with the endorsement and said it was a major factor, even though they were planning to vote for Biden already. Still, Biden did get a big, late surge in the polls following the debate and the endorsement.

Clyburn is also one of the few party bigwigs to have endorsed a candidate. While lots of U.S. representatives, mayors, lieutenant governors and so on have endorsed, not many senators, governors or party leaders have. That leaves open the possibility there could be a surge of endorsements for Biden in the coming days. He’s already scored several major endorsements in Virginia, for instance, which is a Super Tuesday state.

Degree of concern for Sanders if this hypothesis is true: Moderate. The “Party Decides” view of the race treats endorsements and other cues from party leaders as being highly predictive and important. And a surge of endorsements for Biden seems reasonably likely. This could reverse a longstanding period of seeming indifference by party leaders toward Biden as they hoped for Michael Bloomberg or some other alternative to emerge.

But it’s not clear how effective an endorsement surge would be, as few legislators command the respect in their states that Clyburn does. Moreover, although we’re not going to cover it at length here, there’s plenty of room to question how empirically accurate the “Party Decides” is. Meanwhile, endorsements aren’t necessarily what Biden needs; an influx of cash would do him more good.

Hypothesis No. 4: Voters are behaving tactically. Biden was the only real alternative to Sanders in South Carolina, and he may be the only real alternative going forward.

Tactical voting is something you hear a lot about in multi-party systems like the United Kingdom’s, where voters are trying to find the most viable candidate from a number of similar alternatives (for example, from among the various parties that opposed Brexit). The same dynamics potentially hold in multi-candidate presidential primaries, and we’ve already seen evidence of it. In New Hampshire, voters flocked to Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar in the closing days of the campaign and away from Biden and Elizabeth Warren. In South Carolina, tactical voting may have worked in Biden’s favor, instead. Biden was fairly clearly the most viable alternative to Sanders, so voters for candidates like Tom Steyer and Buttigieg may have gravitated toward him in the closing days of the campaign.

Degree of concern for Sanders if this hypothesis is true: High. First, if voters are actively looking for alternatives to Sanders — but just can’t settle on which one is best — that can’t be good news for him, and gives some credence to the “lanes” theory of the race in which the moderate vote could eventually consolidate behind one alternative to Sanders. The South Carolina exit poll had Sanders’s favorability rating at just 51 percent, which is some of the stronger evidence for a ceiling on his support so far.

Moreover, Biden’s strong finish in South Carolina, along with improved debate performances, endorsements, and increasingly favorable media coverage, could make it clear to voters that Biden is the best alternative to Sanders after all, possibly with some exceptions where there are home-state alternatives (Klobuchar in Minnesota and Warren in Massachusetts). If Biden picks up support from tactical voters who had previously backed candidates such as Bloomberg and Buttigieg in polls, that could lead to a larger-than-usual South Carolina bounce.

Hypothesis No. 5: There has already been a national surge toward Biden that is not fully reflected in the polls.

It didn’t get much notice, but polling outside of South Carolina was also pretty favorable to Biden toward the end of last week, including polls that showed sharp improvements for him in states such as Florida and North Carolina. He’s also gotten better results in some national polls lately — climbing back into the low 20s — along with other, not-so-great ones.

The data isn’t comprehensive enough to know for sure. Between the dense cluster of events on the campaign trail (primaries, debates, etc.) and the different races that pollsters are surveying (South Carolina, Super Tuesday, national polls), everything is getting sliced pretty thin. But we do know that Biden made big improvements since the debate in South Carolina polling, the one state where we did have enough data to detect robust trendlines.

Degree of concern for Sanders if this hypothesis is true: High. Suppose that Biden gained 5 or 6 percentage points across the board nationally and in Super Tuesday states as a result of this week’s debate (or other recent factors such as voters’ reaction to coronavirus), but it’s gone largely undetected because there hasn’t been enough polling. If that’s the case, then Biden may already be in a considerably better position than current polling averages and models imply — and then he could get a further bounce from winning South Carolina on top of it. This is a scary possibility for Sanders, and although there isn’t enough data to prove it, there also isn’t much that would rule it out.

What The Race Looks Like If Biden Wins — Or Wins Big, Or Loses — In South Carolina

Joe Biden didn’t get off to the start his campaign was hoping for in Iowa and New Hampshire. But the news has been better for him lately. He finished a (distant) second place in Nevada behind Bernie Sanders, his best performance of the campaign so far. And his polling in South Carolina has held up well, potentially positioning him for his first win.

As of early Wednesday afternoon, Biden is at 31.1 percent in our South Carolina polling average, giving him roughly a 10-point lead over Sanders, who is second with 21.4 percent. Tom Steyer is third at 14.6 percent, with everyone else in the single digits. If Sanders was hoping for a post-Nevada bounce, it doesn’t seem to be happening in the Palmetto State. The most recent polls for Biden, which conducted all or some of their interviews after Nevada, actually show him with a larger lead over Sanders than the ones before Nevada. And none of the polls yet account for House Majority Whip James Clyburn’s endorsement of Biden.

Still, 10-point polling leads in the primary are not entirely safe, especially with several days left to go until a state votes. So let’s look at how our forecast model views three plausible scenarios: a big Biden win (by 10 percentage points or more), a modest Biden win (by less than 10 points) and a Sanders win (no margin specified). As of Wednesday afternoon, the chance of these outcomes happening according to the model was 41 percent (big Biden win), 33 percent (small Biden win) and 23 percent (Sanders win), respectively. We won’t consider the outside possibility (3 percent) of a Steyer win.

In the model, performing strongly in states helps candidates for several reasons. For example, since the outcome in each state is partially correlated, if Biden does well in South Carolina, that would also be a favorable sign for him in other Southern states, a number of which vote on Super Tuesday.

But the most important mechanism is a polling bounce. That is, after you win a state, it tends to produce favorable media coverage and improve voter confidence in your chances, usually producing a rise in the polls. The model does not necessarily expect South Carolina bounces to be especially large; South Carolina doesn’t receive nearly as much media coverage as Iowa or New Hampshire. But even a modest bounce for Biden could make a fairly big difference in the overall picture of the race. And an emphatic Biden win in South Carolina would leave open the possibility of a bigger bounce. Let’s talk about that case first.

A big Biden win could reorder the race

Rather than project all the way through the end of the primaries — we’ll save that for later — I’m going to restrict our focus to what happens on Super Tuesday depending on these three South Carolina scenarios. Here, according to our model, is what the post-Super Tuesday delegate count could look like following a big Biden win in South Carolina. Keep in mind that these represent the average of thousands of simulations; individual outcomes will vary based on factors such as Biden’s margin of victory in South Carolina, whether anyone drops out before Super Tuesday, and so on.

Scenario 1: Super Tuesday after a big Biden win in S.C.

Average number of delegates candidates win (or have won) in each state based on an average of 4,100 simulations of the FiveThirtyEight primary model as of Feb. 26 at 2 p.m.

State
Sanders
Biden
Bloomberg
Warren
Buttigieg
Klobuchar




Iowa
12
6
0
8
14
1


N.H.
9
0
0
0
9
6


Nev.
24
9
0
0
3
0


S.C.
14
31
0
1
1
0


Calif.
207
102
37
49
19
2


Texas
76
84
40
19
7
1


N.C.
32
42
26
6
3
1


Va.
31
33
25
3
6
1


Mass.
32
16
8
25
8
1


Minn.
26
8
1
8
3
29


Colo.
32
14
8
9
4
0


Tenn.
17
25
15
5
2
0


Ala.
10
27
12
2
1
0


Okla.
9
12
10
3
2
0


Ark.
8
10
8
1
3
0


Utah
16
4
4
4
1
0


Maine
10
4
4
3
3
0


Vt.
13
1
1
1
1
0


A.S.
2
2
1
1
0
0


Total
578
430
200
148
92
44


Pct dels
39%
29%
13%
10%
6%
3%

We’re defining a “big” Biden win as 10 percentage points or more. Tom Steyer and Tulsi Gabbard are not listed as they are projected to receive a negligible amount of delegates.

An outcome like the one in the table wouldn’t be a disaster for Sanders, by any means. He’d still be projected to end up with 578 delegates, on average after Super Tuesday, counting both delegates won before Super Tuesday and on Super Tuesday itself. In other words, Sanders would still pick up 39 percent of the total delegates awarded so far. Biden would be next with 430 delegates (29 percent), with Michael Bloombeg in third with 200 delegates (13 percent).

But you can also see how momentum could start to turn against Sanders. By “momentum,” I don’t mean something ineffable, but rather the shifts in the polls that could occur as the result of Super Tuesday, as well as decisions by other candidates to stay in the race or drop out.1

In the scenario above — after a big South Carolina win — Biden would be the plurality favorite in every Southern state on Super Tuesday, namely: Texas, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Alabama, Oklahoma and Arkansas. While Sanders would remain the favorite in every non-Southern state2 except Minnesota3 including — critically — California, where he has a huge polling lead and where 415 pledged delegates are at stake.

But even if Sanders racks up big margins in California, this isn’t a great outcome for him from a delegate standpoint. He’d only be about 150 delegates ahead of Biden out of a total of 3,979 pledged delegates eventually to be awarded.

And from a narrative standpoint — and the polling bounce that results from it — it could be fairly bad for him. Sanders might not get very many wins in the Eastern and Central time zone states that the media will cover heavily early in the evening. And the wins Sanders would get would mostly be in white, liberal states where he was expected to win — until California reports its results, but that creates its own problems for Sanders.

What’s wrong with California? Well, nothing, nothing at all. But California takes a long time — days and sometimes even weeks! — to count its votes since mail ballots there only need to be postmarked by Election Day. Moreover, those late returns often shift the margins toward candidates such as Sanders who do well among younger voters, since younger voters are typically slower to send in their ballots. Thus, the Super Tuesday media narrative could already be written by the time California reports reliable results, and the initial returns in California might underestimate Sanders’s eventual vote share there.

Moreover, in this scenario, commentators could rightly point out that Biden and Bloomberg had more combined delegates (630) than Sanders (578). Furthermore, the broader moderate lane — Biden, Bloomberg, Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar — would have more combined delegates (766) than Sanders and Warren (726). That could give credence to the theory that the majority of Democrats did not want a nominee as progressive as Sanders.

Furthermore, those theories about “lanes” could finally be put to the test because other candidates might finally drop out after Super Tuesday. In this scenario, Biden would be a rather clear No. 2 to Sanders and nobody apart from Sanders and Biden would have an obviously viable path to the nomination. So Biden could gain further ground from Bloomberg, Buttigieg and Klobuchar voters joining his camp if those candidates quit the race.

What’s more, the rest of the March calendar contains a lot of states that look pretty decent for Biden (Florida, Georgia, Missouri, Mississippi) or at least highly competitive between he and Sanders (Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Arizona). You’d still probably rather be Sanders than Biden. But it would turn the nomination into a highly competitive race.

A narrow Biden win would leave him with some work to do

What if Biden wins South Carolina, but by a narrower margin? On the surface, it’s not that different from the scenario above. But a slightly smaller Biden bounce as opposed to a slightly larger one would allow Sanders to breathe a lot easier.

Scenario 2: Super Tuesday after a modest Biden win in S.C.

Average number of delegates candidates win (or have won) in each state based on an average of 3,300 simulations of the FiveThirtyEight primary model as of Feb. 26 at 2 p.m.

State
Sanders
Biden
Bloomberg
Warren
Buttigieg
Klobuchar




Iowa
12
6
0
8
14
1


N.H.
9
0
0
0
9
6


Nev.
24
9
0
0
3
0


S.C.
18
24
0
2
1
0


Calif.
219
87
39
48
20
2


Texas
84
74
42
19
7
2


N.C.
37
35
27
6
4
1


Va.
34
28
26
3
7
1


Mass.
34
14
9
24
9
1


Minn.
28
6
1
8
3
29


Colo.
33
11
8
9
4
0


Tenn.
20
21
15
5
2
0


Ala.
13
22
13
3
2
0


Okla.
11
10
11
3
2
0


Ark.
9
8
9
2
4
0


Utah
17
3
4
3
1
0


Maine
10
4
4
3
3
0


Vt.
13
0
1
1
1
0


A.S.
2
2
1
1
0
0


Total
628
364
210
146
96
45


Pct dels
42%
24%
14%
10%
6%
3%

We’re defining a “modest” Biden win as less than 10 percentage points. Tom Steyer and Tulsi Gabbard are not listed as they are projected to receive a negligible amount of delegates.

Rather than trailing Sanders by about 150 delegates after Super Tuesday as in the first scenario, Biden would trail by around 260 delegates in this one. And Sanders would remain the favorite — although a narrow favorite — in Texas, North Carolina and Virginia, instead of having become an underdog in those states. Furthermore, the combined moderate lane delegate counts would longer exceed the progressive lane counts (Sanders and Warren together would have 52 percent of delegates to the moderates’ 47 percent), depriving Biden of that talking point.

What this leads to, most likely: Biden would be viable, but he would need some other breaks, namely (i) the other moderates to drop out and (ii) a really strong performance in the remaining March contests. And his goal would probably be to secure a plurality of delegates — or to at least get to a contested convention — with a majority being more of a long shot.

If Sanders wins South Carolina, he’ll be in great shape

Finally, what if Sanders wins South Carolina? Well, we’ll run through this quickly, because it’s exactly what you’d think: GREAT NEWS FOR BERNIE.

Scenario 3: Super Tuesday after a Sanders win in S.C.

Average number of delegates candidates win (or have won) in each state based on an average of 2,300 simulations of the FiveThirtyEight primary model as of Feb. 26 at 2 p.m.

State
Sanders
Biden
Bloomberg
Warren
Buttigieg
Klobuchar




Iowa
12
6
0
8
14
1


N.H.
9
0
0
0
9
6


Nev.
24
9
0
0
3
0


S.C.
26
18
0
1
2
0


Calif.
254
50
44
43
21
3


Texas
105
50
47
17
8
2


N.C.
49
22
29
5
4
1


Va.
44
17
27
2
7
1


Mass.
41
7
10
22
9
1


Minn.
33
2
2
6
3
28


Colo.
39
6
9
8
5
0


Tenn.
28
13
16
4
2
0


Ala.
19
15
13
2
2
0


Okla.
14
6
11
2
2
0


Ark.
13
4
9
1
4
0


Utah
18
1
4
3
1
1


Maine
12
2
4
3
3
0


Vt.
13
0
1
1
1
0


A.S.
3
1
1
1
0
0


Total
757
230
228
131
99
46


% of Dels.
50%
15%
15%
9%
7%
3%

In a Sanders’s South Carolina win, no margin is specified. Steyer and Gabbard are not listed as they are projected to receive a negligible amount of delegates.

After winning South Carolina, Sanders would be projected to end up with just slightly more than half of all the pledged delegates after Super Tuesday. Moreover, there would be no clear alternative to him. Biden would be devastated by the South Carolina loss and might drop out. (Although with only three days between South Carolina and Super Tuesday, that might make it less likely than it would be otherwise.) But Bloomberg would also enter Super Tuesday in a challenging position. And Buttigieg and Warren don’t have a lot of obvious strengths on Super Tuesday, either.

Of course, anything is possible. Sanders could win South Carolina on Saturday and then some scandal could emerge from out-of-the-blue on Sunday. But in all likelihood, Sanders winning South Carolina — one of more difficult states on the map for him — would put him well on his way to the nomination.

Confidence Interval: “I Think The Biden Campaign Is Doing Just Fine”

 

What The Race Looks Like If Biden Wins — Or Doesn’t Win — South Carolina

Joe Biden didn’t get off to the start his campaign was hoping for in Iowa and New Hampshire. But the news has been better for him lately. He finished a (distant) second place in Nevada behind Bernie Sanders, his best performance of the campaign so far. And his polling in South Carolina has held up well, potentially positioning him for his first win.

As of early Wednesday afternoon, Biden is at 31.1 percent in our South Carolina polling average, giving him roughly a 10-point lead over Sanders, who is second with 21.4 percent. Tom Steyer is third at 14.6 percent, with everyone else in the single digits. If Sanders was hoping for a post-Nevada bounce, it doesn’t seem to be happening in the Palmetto State. The most recent polls for Biden, which conducted all or some of their interviews after Nevada, actually show him with a larger lead over Sanders than the ones before Nevada. And none of the polls yet account for House Majority Whip James Clyburn’s endorsement of Biden.

Still, 10-point polling leads in the primary are not entirely safe, especially with several days left to go until a state votes. So let’s look at how our forecast model views three plausible scenarios: a big Biden win (by 10 percentage points or more), a modest Biden win (by less than 10 points) and a Sanders win (no margin specified). As of Wednesday afternoon, the chance of these outcomes happening according to the model was 41 percent (big Biden win), 33 percent (small Biden win) and 23 percent (Sanders win), respectively. We won’t consider the outside possibility (3 percent) of a Steyer win.

In the model, performing strongly in states helps candidates for several reasons. For example, since the outcome in each state is partially correlated, if Biden does well in South Carolina, that would also be a favorable sign for him in other Southern states, a number of which vote on Super Tuesday.

But the most important mechanism is a polling bounce. That is, after you win a state, it tends to produce favorable media coverage and improve voter confidence in your chances, usually producing a rise in the polls. The model does not necessarily expect South Carolina bounces to be especially large; South Carolina doesn’t receive nearly as much media coverage as Iowa or New Hampshire. But even a modest bounce for Biden could make a fairly big difference in the overall picture of the race. And an emphatic Biden win in South Carolina would leave open the possibility of a bigger bounce. Let’s talk about that case first.

A big Biden win could reorder the race

Rather than project all the way through the end of the primaries — we’ll save that for later — I’m going to restrict our focus to what happens on Super Tuesday depending on these three South Carolina scenarios. Here, according to our model, is what the post-Super Tuesday delegate count could look like following a big Biden win in South Carolina. Keep in mind that these represent the average of thousands of simulations; individual outcomes will vary based on factors such as Biden’s margin of victory in South Carolina, whether anyone drops out before Super Tuesday, and so on.

Scenario 1: Super Tuesday after a big Biden win in S.C.

Average number of delegates candidates win (or have won) in each state based on an average of 4,100 simulations of the FiveThirtyEight primary model as of Feb. 26 at 2 p.m.

State
Sanders
Biden
Bloomberg
Warren
Buttigieg
Klobuchar




Iowa
12
6
0
8
14
1


N.H.
9
0
0
0
9
6


Nev.
24
9
0
0
3
0


S.C.
14
31
0
1
1
0


Calif.
207
102
37
49
19
2


Texas
76
84
40
19
7
1


N.C.
32
42
26
6
3
1


Va.
31
33
25
3
6
1


Mass.
32
16
8
25
8
1


Minn.
26
8
1
8
3
29


Colo.
32
14
8
9
4
0


Tenn.
17
25
15
5
2
0


Ala.
10
27
12
2
1
0


Okla.
9
12
10
3
2
0


Ark.
8
10
8
1
3
0


Utah
16
4
4
4
1
0


Maine
10
4
4
3
3
0


Vt.
13
1
1
1
1
0


A.S.
2
2
1
1
0
0


Total
578
430
200
148
92
44


Pct dels
39%
29%
13%
10%
6%
3%

We’re defining a “big” Biden win as 10 percentage points or more. Tom Steyer and Tulsi Gabbard are not listed as they are projected to receive a negligible amount of delegates.

An outcome like the one in the table wouldn’t be a disaster for Sanders, by any means. He’d still be projected to end up with 578 delegates, on average after Super Tuesday, counting both delegates won before Super Tuesday and on Super Tuesday itself. In other words, Sanders would still pick up 39 percent of the total delegates awarded so far. Biden would be next with 430 delegates (29 percent), with Michael Bloombeg in third with 200 delegates (13 percent).

But you can also see how momentum could start to turn against Sanders. By “momentum,” I don’t mean something ineffable, but rather the shifts in the polls that could occur as the result of Super Tuesday, as well as decisions by other candidates to stay in the race or drop out.1

In the scenario above — after a big South Carolina win — Biden would be the plurality favorite in every Southern state on Super Tuesday, namely: Texas, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Alabama, Oklahoma and Arkansas. While Sanders would remain the favorite in every non-Southern state2 except Minnesota3 including — critically — California, where he has a huge polling lead and where 415 pledged delegates are at stake.

But even if Sanders racks up big margins in California, this isn’t a great outcome for him from a delegate standpoint. He’d only be about 150 delegates ahead of Biden out of a total of 3,979 pledged delegates eventually to be awarded.

And from a narrative standpoint — and the polling bounce that results from it — it could be fairly bad for him. Sanders might not get very many wins in the Eastern and Central time zone states that the media will cover heavily early in the evening. And the wins Sanders would get would mostly be in white, liberal states where he was expected to win — until California reports its results, but that creates its own problems for Sanders.

What’s wrong with California? Well, nothing, nothing at all. But California takes a long time — days and sometimes even weeks! — to count its votes since mail ballots there only need to be postmarked by Election Day. Moreover, those late returns often shift the margins toward candidates such as Sanders who do well among younger voters, since younger voters are typically slower to send in their ballots. Thus, the Super Tuesday media narrative could already be written by the time California reports reliable results, and the initial returns in California might underestimate Sanders’s eventual vote share there.

Moreover, in this scenario, commentators could rightly point out that Biden and Bloomberg had more combined delegates (630) than Sanders (578). Furthermore, the broader moderate lane — Biden, Bloomberg, Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar — would have more combined delegates (766) than Sanders and Warren (726). That could give credence to the theory that the majority of Democrats did not want a nominee as progressive as Sanders.

Furthermore, those theories about “lanes” could finally be put to the test because other candidates might finally drop out after Super Tuesday. In this scenario, Biden would be a rather clear No. 2 to Sanders and nobody apart from Sanders and Biden would have an obviously viable path to the nomination. So Biden could gain further ground from Bloomberg, Buttigieg and Klobuchar voters joining his camp if those candidates quit the race.

What’s more, the rest of the March calendar contains a lot of states that look pretty decent for Biden (Florida, Georgia, Missouri, Mississippi) or at least highly competitive between he and Sanders (Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Arizona). You’d still probably rather be Sanders than Biden. But it would turn the nomination into a highly competitive race.

A narrow Biden win would leave him with some work to do

What if Biden wins South Carolina, but by a narrower margin? On the surface, it’s not that different from the scenario above. But a slightly smaller Biden bounce as opposed to a slightly larger one would allow Sanders to breathe a lot easier.

Scenario 2: Super Tuesday after a modest Biden win in S.C.

Average number of delegates candidates win (or have won) in each state based on an average of 3,300 simulations of the FiveThirtyEight primary model as of Feb. 26 at 2 p.m.

State
Sanders
Biden
Bloomberg
Warren
Buttigieg
Klobuchar




Iowa
12
6
0
8
14
1


N.H.
9
0
0
0
9
6


Nev.
24
9
0
0
3
0


S.C.
18
24
0
2
1
0


Calif.
219
87
39
48
20
2


Texas
84
74
42
19
7
2


N.C.
37
35
27
6
4
1


Va.
34
28
26
3
7
1


Mass.
34
14
9
24
9
1


Minn.
28
6
1
8
3
29


Colo.
33
11
8
9
4
0


Tenn.
20
21
15
5
2
0


Ala.
13
22
13
3
2
0


Okla.
11
10
11
3
2
0


Ark.
9
8
9
2
4
0


Utah
17
3
4
3
1
0


Maine
10
4
4
3
3
0


Vt.
13
0
1
1
1
0


A.S.
2
2
1
1
0
0


Total
628
364
210
146
96
45


Pct dels
42%
24%
14%
10%
6%
3%

We’re defining a “modest” Biden win as less than 10 percentage points. Tom Steyer and Tulsi Gabbard are not listed as they are projected to receive a negligible amount of delegates.

Rather than trailing Sanders by about 150 delegates after Super Tuesday as in the first scenario, Biden would trail by around 260 delegates in this one. And Sanders would remain the favorite — although a narrow favorite — in Texas, North Carolina and Virginia, instead of having become an underdog in those states. Furthermore, the combined moderate lane delegate counts would longer exceed the progressive lane counts (Sanders and Warren together would have 52 percent of delegates to the moderates’ 47 percent), depriving Biden of that talking point.

What this leads to, most likely: Biden would be viable, but he would need some other breaks, namely (i) the other moderates to drop out and (ii) a really strong performance in the remaining March contests. And his goal would probably be to secure a plurality of delegates — or to at least get to a contested convention — with a majority being more of a long shot.

If Sanders wins South Carolina, he’ll be in great shape

Finally, what if Sanders wins South Carolina? Well, we’ll run through this quickly, because it’s exactly what you’d think: GREAT NEWS FOR BERNIE.

Scenario 3: Super Tuesday after a Sanders win in S.C.

Average number of delegates candidates win (or have won) in each state based on an average of 2,300 simulations of the FiveThirtyEight primary model as of Feb. 26 at 2 p.m.

State
Sanders
Biden
Bloomberg
Warren
Buttigieg
Klobuchar




Iowa
12
6
0
8
14
1


N.H.
9
0
0
0
9
6


Nev.
24
9
0
0
3
0


S.C.
26
18
0
1
2
0


Calif.
254
50
44
43
21
3


Texas
105
50
47
17
8
2


N.C.
49
22
29
5
4
1


Va.
44
17
27
2
7
1


Mass.
41
7
10
22
9
1


Minn.
33
2
2
6
3
28


Colo.
39
6
9
8
5
0


Tenn.
28
13
16
4
2
0


Ala.
19
15
13
2
2
0


Okla.
14
6
11
2
2
0


Ark.
13
4
9
1
4
0


Utah
18
1
4
3
1
1


Maine
12
2
4
3
3
0


Vt.
13
0
1
1
1
0


A.S.
3
1
1
1
0
0


Total
757
230
228
131
99
46


% of Dels.
50%
15%
15%
9%
7%
3%

In a Sanders’s South Carolina win, no margin is specified. Steyer and Gabbard are not listed as they are projected to receive a negligible amount of delegates.

After winning South Carolina, Sanders would be projected to end up with just slightly more than half of all the pledged delegates after Super Tuesday. Moreover, there would be no clear alternative to him. Biden would be devastated by the South Carolina loss and might drop out. (Although with only three days between South Carolina and Super Tuesday, that might make it less likely than it would be otherwise.) But Bloomberg would also enter Super Tuesday in a challenging position. And Buttigieg and Warren don’t have a lot of obvious strengths on Super Tuesday, either.

Of course, anything is possible. Sanders could win South Carolina on Saturday and then some scandal could emerge from out-of-the-blue on Sunday. But in all likelihood, Sanders winning South Carolina — one of more difficult states on the map for him — would put him well on his way to the nomination.

Politics Podcast: Biden Fights For A Win In The South Carolina Debate

By Galen Druke, Clare Malone, Micah Cohen and Nate Silver, Galen Druke, Clare Malone, Micah Cohen and Nate Silver, Galen Druke, Clare Malone, Micah Cohen and Nate Silver and Galen Druke, Clare Malone, Micah Cohen and Nate Silver












 












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In a late-night installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew reacts to the South Carolina Democratic primary debate. Sen. Bernie Sanders and former mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg took the brunt of the attacks, while former Vice President Joe Biden fought for a win in South Carolina.

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.

Will The South Carolina Debate Be All About Stopping Sanders?

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s weekly politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

sarahf (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): This is usually the point in the primary season where the field has started to winnow — candidates who’ve had poor performances in Iowa or New Hampshire drop out. But no such luck this year. The debate stage tomorrow is actually getting larger, not smaller, if you can believe it.

But even though the field remains crowded, there’s an increasingly clear front-runner: Sen. Bernie Sanders. Sanders won, and he won pretty handily — he won the final, realigned popular vote by 21.6 points, so Sanders’s odds are pretty good in our model: He’s got a 45 percent shot of winning the majority of pledged delegates.

[Our Latest Forecast: Who Will Win The 2020 Democratic Primary?]

However, South Carolina, which is where the primary moves next, could be a bit of a curveball for Sanders, as it’s Biden — not Sanders — who is in the lead there. Things are really close, though, so it’s probably best thought of as a tie. But it also means the stakes at tomorrow’s debate are pretty high. Biden is banking on a strong performance and winning South Carolina, while other candidates like former Mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Sen. Amy Klobuchar need to demonstrate that they’re can build diverse coalitions, something they struggled to do in Nevada.

So what are you looking for going into tonight? Will the candidates finally attack Sanders as the front-runner?

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): Buttigieg’s post-Nevada speech was basically a series of attacks on Sanders. Biden’s had some elements of that, too. Former Mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg is coming after Sanders. Tom Steyer, too. Yes, I think this debate will have several people going hard after Sanders, looking really toward Super Tuesday.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): I think this whole week is gonna be CAN ANYONE STOP BERNIE SANDERS?!?!?!?!?!?!? week and that theme is likely to feature heavily at the debate.

The thing about Sanders is that he’s a pretty steady (if not always spectacular) debater and not the easiest guy to knock off-kilter.

And if it seems like everyone is attacking him, well, that plays into his message in certain ways.

sarahf: Yeah, and to Perry’s point, Buttigieg really didn’t mince words on Saturday when he told supporters that Sanders is waging an “inflexible ideological revolution that leaves out most Democrats.” But I’m struggling to wrap my head around how accurate that claim is. Buttigieg came in third in Nevada — significantly behind Sanders. So is Sanders’s “revolution” really leaving out most Democrats? Seems like a fair share of Democrats have been happy to vote for Sanders so far!

Buttigieg and the other moderates need to come up with something better, no?

geoffrey.skelley (Geoffrey Skelley, elections analyst): It’s possible they need something better, but things might look different if a couple of the more moderate candidates got out of the way. Sanders might still lead the field — recent national polls suggest he would — but if a few folks dropped out, it would make it a lot clearer who the alternative to Sanders is. At the moment, there isn’t really one obvious answer to that question. Yet, there’s plenty of evidence that points to the idea that many Democrats might not want Sanders as the nominee. After all, Sanders only won between 25 to 34 percent of the initial popular vote in Iowa and Nevada (so before realignment), and just 26 percent overall in New Hampshire — not exactly an overwhelming share of support.

natesilver: I don’t know … a lot of Democrats do want a more moderate nominee, at least in the abstract. And many associate moderation with electability.

Calling Bernie out as being uncompromising is maybe not a bad line of attack either, since Democrats tend to like compromise.

perry: Ten days of sustained attacks on Sanders could dip his numbers. It would help if the other candidates maybe moved away from Medicare for All, which seems likely it’s decently popular among Democratic primary voters, and found ways to attack him on different issues, though.

natesilver: I do think there’s something about sustained vs. sporadic attacks that matters here.

Like, few things in politics are truly new. Bernie has been around for a while. But there’s always been some shinier object that was rising in the polls — Harris! Warren! Buttigieg! Bloomberg! — that was always more the center of attention, but now that’s changed with Sanders being truly at the center.

perry: Also, a big part of the next 10 days or so is the other candidates working to keep Sanders in the 25-to-33 percent range. But if Democratic voters start falling in line and accepting Sanders as the inevitable nominee, and he gets closer to 40 percent in some states, that would be bad for the others.

natesilver: Yeah, it sorta feels like part of what candidates may be hoping to do is to prevent him from rising further, rather than actually lowering his numbers.

Because he’s likely to get a bounce from Nevada, so even if he has a mediocre debate/the scrutiny hurts him a bit, it might just cancel that out — not actually make his numbers negative relative to where he stood, pre-Nevada.

geoffrey.skelley: I do wonder if the fact that the stage will be even more crowded plays into that to some extent, Nate. Because Steyer has made this debate, there’ll be seven participants this time around, so if you’re trying to stand out as the No.1 alternative to Sanders, that might be even harder. Especially because I assume Bloomberg will still get a lot of attention, even though his standing may have taken a hit after the last debate.

natesilver: It’s kind of a big moment for Sanders, Bloomberg AND Biden, since Biden clearly needs to win South Carolina.

But I do think we’re at the point now where it’s in the mutual interest of every other candidate for Sanders to struggle. There are no longer tactical considerations that outweigh that.

If Sanders gets say, 26 percent of the vote on Super Tuesday instead of 34 percent, that’s a big deal and makes it much more likely that someone else wins.

perry: What was useful last week, in attacking Bloomberg, was that the candidates said interesting stuff — like Warren demanding on stage that Bloomberg release women who were former employees of his company from non-disclosure agreements. So a smart approach from at least one of the non-Sanders candidates would be to attack him in a way that goes beyond questions of electability and Medicare For All, etc.

sarahf: Is it enough for Biden to win South Carolina at this point if the margin between him and Sanders is really close, though? Or does Biden really need it to be as decisive as, say, Nevada was for Sanders?

natesilver: Our model says that the margin matters at the margins, but it’s mostly winning that counts.

Now, if Biden wins by 20 points, maybe we’re in a situation where “it’s not clear who’s the favorite anymore” vs. if he wins by 2 points, the story is, “at least this is still interesting, but Sanders is still in the best position.”

If he LOSES by 2 points, though, it’s hard to see his campaign recovering, and it puts Sanders in a very, very good position.

perry: It would be ideal for Biden to win South Carolina and be the clear second-place finisher on Super Tuesday, so as to flush out the other candidates and get it down to a two-person race. But if come next Wednesday, Biden has won South Carolina and Alabama (two states that vote in the next 10 days that have large black Democratic electorates) but finished say, third or worse in California and Texas, that is not ideal for him — or the people who want Sanders to be defeated.

geoffrey.skelley: Obviously, an unexpectedly large margin would be good for Biden, and the media might be quite open to a comeback narrative, but it’s hard to know at this point how strong Biden’s lead is there.

One potential bit of good news for the Biden camp is that longtime South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn, who is the highest ranking African American in Congress, may endorse Biden on Wednesday. This endorsement could be huge for Biden and would signal either that more black voters are ready to line up behind Biden, or it’d be enough to push some undecided black voters into Biden’s camp.

perry: Yeah, the CBS/YouGov poll released on Sunday suggested a fairly close race in South Carolina: Biden at 28 percent, Sanders 23 percent, and Steyer 18 percent.

But maybe a big push by black, pro-Biden officials like Clyburn and a sustained week of attacks on Sanders makes it less close. There is no big early voting drive in South Carolina like there was in Nevada, so the events of this week will matter.

natesilver: It’s a little hard to figure out where the conventional wisdom is on South Carolina. Do people see it as a toss-up? Or still as Biden’s state to win?

The polls are closer to a toss-up, although they slightly tilt toward Biden. It’s important to note, though, that we don’t have any post-Nevada polling yet.

I would also note that there’s a tendency for the polls in South Carolina to underrate the candidate who has more black support — namely Obama in 2008 and Clinton in 2016. Anecdotally, there seems to be some evidence that black voters are more likely to tell pollsters they’re undecided, and that seems to be true in South Carolina as well. In the Marist poll, for instance, 13 percent of black voters said they were undecided vs. 5 percent of whites.

geoffrey.skelley: Yeah, Nate, I realize this is anecdotal, but when I was down in South Carolina a week ago at a Biden event at a historically black church, a couple of voters told me they weren’t sure about supporting Biden, but they also didn’t really have another person they were considering.

perry: Sanders released his campaign schedule for this week, and at least as of right now, he is in Virginia on Saturday and South Carolina on Friday. On the other hand, Biden is in South Carolina both days. Sanders was also in Texas for the Nevada caucuses.

His team is super-focused on Super Tuesday, which is smart. But it also tells me that while they want to win South Carolina, they are not necessarily expecting a win, nor are they going to kill themselves to get one.

natesilver: According to the FiveThirtyEight primary forecast, that strategy might be short-sighted, i.e., they’d be better off going for the kill in South Carolina because that makes it so hard for Biden to come back.

But maybe they aren’t super confident about their prospects in South Carolina and want to lower expectations. There’s this tendency to look at African American voters as a monolith when the ones in South Carolina are liable to be far more conservative than the ones in, say, Nevada, among whom Bernie did fairly well.

perry: The other weird thing about South Carolina is Steyer. I tend to think he will decline in the polls as the week goes forward, and that he will be closer to polling in the low teens than the high teens. But I also don’t know who his support would go to. But maybe I’m wrong, and he does really well. He has spent a lot of time in the state, particularly in courting black voters.

sarahf: Where does South Carolina leave the other candidate who aren’t Biden or Sanders, though? As we’ve said, it’s important Biden wins there because he’s made so much of his campaign about his ability to win black voters. But what if Buttigieg, Klobuchar and Warren all finish in the single digits again?

Do they power through to Super Tuesday, even though this will now be the second state where they’ve failed to build strong, diverse coalitions?

natesilver: Our model doesn’t think Buttigieg has much of a path, although it’s worth noting that he’s had pretty good results so far (1st/2nd/3rd or 2nd/2nd/3rd if you prefer) so it seems a little much for people to be asking that he should drop out. His problem is that there aren’t any Midwestern states on Super Tuesday except for Minnesota, where Klobuchar is a big problem for him. But he’s closed strongly relative to his polling averages in most states so, I dunno, I guess he’s just hoping to do so again.

Warren has a — somewhat good! — excuse to continue based on her post-debate polling looking stronger.

I don’t get what Klobuchar is doing. Or Steyer, frankly.

geoffrey.skelley: Warren remains not that far behind Biden and Bloomberg in national polls. Whereas, yeah, Klobuchar is at about 5 percent in our national polling average, and Steyer is at 2 percent. Even if Steyer gets a strong third in South Carolina, I don’t see a path opening up for him in Super Tuesday states.

perry: Buttigieg, Klobuchar and Warren should be in South Carolina some this week to prevent being cast as ignoring black voters. But they should try to do as little as possible there. Super Tuesday just has better opportunities for them than a state in the South where the majority of the electorate is black. Not to mention, Steyer has camped there for weeks.

natesilver: Having Super Tuesday SO close to South Carolina is sort of an important wrinkle in the scheduling.

And probably a flaw, I’d say.

sarahf: Wait, why a flaw, Nate?

natesilver: Because it doesn’t really give voters and the candidates time to react to South Carolina? Or, conversely, maybe you get a fleeting reaction that isn’t durable?

perry: I agree with Nate. The first state with a lot of black voters is scheduled when the candidates also have a lot of incentive to focus on Super Tuesday, and it’s just difficult to manage.

sarahf: It seems as if campaigning in the Super Tuesday states has been really hard across the board, and only Sanders and Bloomberg have done an OK job of it, especially in California and Texas, which are delegate-rich.

natesilver: Well, maybe more advertising than campaigning in Bloomberg’s case. There’s been some of the latter but a lot of the former, obviously.

And if Bloomberg continues to slump in the polls, we could be looking at a case where he finishes just UNDER 15 percent in most places, and therefore, receives few delegates of his own, but nonetheless takes away 13 to 14 percent of the vote from other moderates. That would be very, very, very helpful to Sanders.

Conversely, if Bloomberg gets 20 percent, he would at least win some delegates and lower Sanders’s total, which isn’t as good for Bernie.

geoffrey.skelley: With that in mind, I wonder if we see a lot of Bloomberg bashing again in this debate and maybe not quite as much Sanders bashing as you’d expect. Pushing Bloomberg down probably helps someone like Biden a fair bit, and obviously in the last debate he was the chief target of criticism.

sarahf: That’s a good point, Geoff. But some of what happens next seems to hinge on Biden actually pulling off a strong victory in South Carolina. With the field still so crowded it’s hard for me to understand how the “moderates” mount a credible threat to Sanders at this point, when they’re all still in the process of competing with each other. It seems like the kind of chaos that Sanders mainly benefits from. Is that fair?

natesilver: For what it’s worth, I don’t think whether the chaos benefits Sanders is as clear as people assume.

If you have so much chaos that you wind up with a contested convention, that doesn’t necessarily benefit Sanders!

And he isn’t necessarily an underdog if the race comes down to 1-on-1. He might be a favorite, in fact, in several of the matchups. Would you rather bet on Sanders or Mayor Pete head-to-head, for instance? I’d take Bernie.

You could also wind up with a scenario — if last week’s debate had a big impact — where the three most viable candidates going forward are Sanders, Warren and Biden, which is a “chaotic” scenario that is not so great for Sanders.

geoffrey.skelley: Sanders may be aided by a crowded field in that, many candidates won’t crack the 15 percent delegate mark statewide or in most districts. That means, if say, Sanders wins 30 percent statewide and in most districts while another candidate wins 15 percent exactly, with the rest splitting the vote and finishing under 15 percent, then Sanders ends up with about two-thirds of the delegates that state has to offer. In a place like California, that works out pretty well for him!

perry: I think the lane stuff is both relevant and not perfect. Do I think it would help Biden or Buttigieg if either were the only candidate against Sanders? Probably. But I absolutely do not think that Sanders would keep just his current 25 to 30 percent and Biden would get the other 70 percent. The reasons this field is so fractured and Sanders keeps winning are: 1) Sanders is pretty popular among Democrats, and 2) The center-left candidates all have some flaws (Buttigieg’s weak numbers among black and Latino voters, for example).

Politics Podcast: What Sanders’s Big Nevada Win Means For The Rest Of The Race

By Galen Druke and Nate Silver and Galen Druke and Nate Silver












 












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Sen. Bernie Sanders won a decisive victory in the Nevada caucuses over the weekend. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Jon Ralston, editor of The Nevada Independent, joins Nate Silver and Galen Druke to break down the voting patterns that helped Sanders win and what they mean going forward.

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.

Bernie Sanders Wins Nevada — Putting Him In The Driver’s Seat To Win The Nomination

Bernie Sanders has won the Nevada caucuses, and it looks like he’s going to win them by a big, perhaps even landslide margin.

We don’t know exactly how big. As I’m writing this just before 7 p.m. Las Vegas time, only a relatively small percentage of precincts have officially reported results. Nor do we know who’s going to wind up in second place, although it will probably be either Joe Biden or Pete Buttigieg.

Unless the final margin unexpectedly tightens, though, I don’t think the details are going to matter that much. This was a big, impressive win for Sanders, and it should be even clearer now that Sanders is easily the most likely Democrat to win the nomination.

Unlike in Iowa and New Hampshire, there aren’t really any qualifications or caveats about Sanders’s victory here. Nevada is a diverse state, and Sanders did well among a broad array of demographic groups, including winning 53 percent of Hispanics and 27 percent of African Americans, according to the entrance poll. This is a pretty good electorate for Sanders: young, working-class, unionized, heavily Hispanic. But he’s also worked hard to cultivate support from those groups of voters — Hispanic voters weren’t a major strength of his in 2016 for example. Perhaps fortunately for him, there are also plenty of these types of voters in the two biggest delegate prizes on Super Tuesday, California and Texas.

In addition to being the most likely winner overall, Sanders is by far the most likely Democrat to win the nomination with a majority of pledged delegates. Other candidates are mostly hoping for a messy outcome in which they win the nomination by plurality — potentially at a contested convention.

We don’t have enough results as of this writing to officially update our forecast model, but the first two of these prebaked scenarios we built should give you a rough idea of what it will say:

How Nevada could affect the nomination odds

Chances of winning a majority of all pledged delegates based on winner, margin of victory and second-place finisher in Nevada, according to FiveThirtyEight’s forecast

CHANCE OF WINNING MAJORITY OF DELEGATES


Winner
NV margin
2nd
Sanders
Biden
Bloom.
Buttig.
Warren
None




Sanders
large
Biden
45%
9%
8%


37%


Sanders
large
Buttigieg
47
6
8
1

38

We’re defining a “narrow” win as anything less than 4 percentage points over the second-place candidate, a “medium” win as 4 to 12 percentage points, and a “large” win as more than 12 percentage points. Scenarios are only listed if they had at least a 1 percent chance of occurring.

That is, Sanders will probably be somewhere in the vicinity of an even-money bet to win the nomination with a delegate majority. He will presumably also be the nominee by plurality at least some of the time that nobody wins a majority. (The model will likely show around a 35 or 40 percent chance of there being no majority.) That means Sanders is probably more likely than not to be the nominee, whether by majority or plurality, although note that our model doesn’t try to forecast what would happen in the event of a contested convention.

After Sanders, the candidate with the next-best puncher’s chance at winning via the majority route is probably Biden. Nevada is his best result so far which — yes — is extremely damning Biden with faint praise after a 4th place finish in Iowa and a 5th place finish in New Hampshire. But it looks like Biden at least found a bottom and will match or slightly exceed his polls in Nevada, unlike in the first two states. He also did win some key groups in the entrance poll, such as African-Americans and seniors.

Obviously, Biden would need to win South Carolina for a comeback to be a real possibility. (With a South Carolina win, his majority chances would likely improve to somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 percent in the model.) Biden does still lead in the polls in South Carolina, but it’s a narrow lead, and the question is whether any further bounce that Sanders gets from winning Nevada will be enough to propel him into first place. There are a lot of other contingencies in South Carolina, also, including a debate next week, and what Tom Steyer will do after a poor finish in Nevada. It’s still possible that we wind up with a Sanders-Biden faceoff for the nomination, though — albeit one where Sanders probably has the advantage.

So what about everyone else?

Buttigieg has been the second-best performer in the first three states, after Sanders. But neither his (disputed) win in Iowa nor his strong second-place finish in New Hampshire produced much of a polling bounce, so there’s no particular reason to expect a distant second or third place finish in Nevada to do so either. And Buttigeg needs a bounce, because he’s at best flirting with the 15 percent viability threshold in South Carolina and in Super Tuesday states, and often polling below it. That’s not to say Buttigieg is out of the running, but his wins largely involve the long, protracted plurality and/or contested convention route, and not winning by majority.

Meanwhile, Michael Bloomberg still looms over Super Tuesday, although maybe he doesn’t loom so large after this week’s debate. The model still gives him an outside chance at a majority and decent chances of a plurality. But there’s been little post debate polling and his position may decline as more of it comes in; initial results should be a bit concerning for Bloomberg.

Elizabeth Warren’s finish was disappointing tonight — but her campaign will undoubtedly claim they were done in by early voting, which took place before last week’s debate. As of this writing, we don’t really have enough data in to comprehensively evaluate that claim, although she did win 17 percent of late-deciding voters in the entrance poll, somewhat stronger than her overall finish.

Finally, there’s no particular reason to think that Amy Klobuchar or Steyer have a way forward. And Steyer’s poor finish, likely to be in the single digits after investing millions of dollars in advertising and other resources in Nevada, is an inauspicious omen for Bloomberg.

We’ll let you know once we have enough data to turn the model back on. In the meantime, though, the headline is pretty simple: This was a great day for Sanders.

The Debate Exposed Bloomberg’s Downside — But It Was There All Along

On Wednesday, I was working on a story about how our primary forecast was handling former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg when other things got in the way. Truth be told, I’m glad I got distracted, because a mildly bearish case on Bloomberg — roughly how I’d describe our model’s current position on him — is a lot easier to explain after Bloomberg’s difficult debate performance last night.

That’s not to say the model has handled Bloomberg perfectly. His odds of winning a majority or plurality of pledged delegates1 were probably too low initially because Bloomberg is an unusual case. But those odds have also improved a lot in recent days. As of Thursday afternoon — before any post-debate polling was in — he had a 9 percent chance of winning a majority of pledged delegates and an 18 percent chance of getting a plurality of delegates in our forecast.

At the same time, the hype about Bloomberg — a candidate who had yet to compete in any states, to participate in any debates, or to face sustained scrutiny from the media and other candidates — had probably gotten out of hand. Prediction markets have his chances cut almost in half as a result of the debate, from about 30 percent before the debate on Wednesday to only around 15 percent as of early Thursday afternoon. That’s an awfully big correction after a single debate for which we don’t yet have any polling. It may reflect the fact that these markets — and by extension the conventional wisdom generally — had overestimated Bloomberg’s chances to begin with.

So let me advance a few interrelated propositions about Bloomberg:

Bloomberg is unusual because of his money — but also his late start. That makes him hard to predict.

There has understandably been a lot of attention paid to the unprecedented amount of money that Bloomberg has spent on his campaign, especially on television advertising. And even if the evidence is mostly on the side of self-funded candidates not performing well, Bloomberg is spending so much money that he tests the boundaries of any potential equation involving campaign spending.

But Bloomberg is also unusual for his very late start to his campaign, which he launched on Nov. 24, as well as for his skipping the first four states. (He was actually eligible to receive votes in Iowa, but he didn’t campaign there.) In general, starting late has been a bearish indicator for presidential candidates — think about actor and former Sen. Fred Thompson, who flamed out after a lot of hype in 2008, or about former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, who also entered the race in November but who quit last week after getting 0.4 percent of the vote in New Hampshire. “Not competing” in early states has also been bearish — think about former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani skipping Iowa in 2008 and how that turned out. Often, “not competing” has just been an excuse that candidates offer to lower expectations in states that they figure they’re going to lose.

Somehow, though, the combination of these factors allowed Bloomberg to continue gaining in the polls despite not contending in the early states. Both his paid media and his “earned” media — cable news and social media love talking about him (see point No. 2 below) — kept him in the conversation even when he wasn’t on the ballot. So when former Vice President Joe Biden cratered in the polls after Iowa, the biggest gainer was Bloomberg — not one of the candidates who had actually performed well in Iowa, namely former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Bloomberg’s recent polling surge is at least partially driven by news coverage. That opens him up to a “discovery, scrutiny, decline” cycle.

Bloomberg had risen slowly but somewhat steadily in the polls since his campaign launch, climbing from 3.6 percent in our national polling average on Dec. 12 to 8.8 percent on Feb. 3. That isn’t bad — a 5.2 percentage-point gain in 64 days — although it was short of the pace he’d need to be seriously competitive on Super Tuesday. If you had extrapolated out Bloomberg’s rate of increase — decidedly not a safe assumption! (see point No. 3) — he would have reached 11.2 percent in the polls by Super Tuesday, short of the usually 15 percent threshold that Democrats require a candidate to clear in order to receive state or district delegates.

Instead, Bloomberg had an abrupt, nonlinear surge in our polling average, climbing from 8.8 percent on Feb. 3 to 15.4 percent on Feb. 13, just 10 days later. He has since somewhat stalled out, for what it’s worth, having risen only to 16.1 percent as of Thursday afternoon.

This increase also happened to coincide with a big spike in news coverage of Bloomberg. I looked at how often candidates’ names appeared3 in headlines at Memeorandum, a site that aggregates which political stories are gaining the most traction, and found that from the Iowa caucuses on Feb. 3 through Thursday afternoon (Feb. 20), Bloomberg was the subject of 80 headlines at Memorandum, slightly trailing Sanders (84) but well ahead of Biden (53), Buttigieg (32), Sen. Amy Klobuchar (19) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (15).

Now, not all of these headlines have been positive for Bloomberg, especially in recent days. But that’s sort of the point. It’s not uncommon for candidates to undergo what political scientists Lynn Vavreck and John Sides call a “discovery, scrutiny, decline” pattern in the polls, where an initial spark triggers a surge in media attention and a rise in the polls, but storylines turn more negative as the candidate gets more scrutiny and their actual performance doesn’t match the newfound hype. Candidates such as businessman Herman Cain and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich underwent this cycle in 2012. Sen. Kamala Harris and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke did so this year.

Be wary of assuming there’s momentum in polls. Bloomberg may keep rising, or he may have already peaked.

Let’s pause for breath here. There’s no evidence yet that Bloomberg is about to enter the decline phase of a discovery-scrutiny-decline cycle. And even if he does, he may have a higher floor than other candidates because he’s running so many ads.

Still, it’s a huge mistake to assume that just because a candidate is rising in polls now, he or she will continue to do so. Empirically, polls come much closer to what statisticians call a “random walk” than to, say, an object in flight that gains or loses momentum. That is to say, if a candidate rises from say 9 percent to 16 percent, that candidate is about as likely to revert back to basically where they were before (to, say, 11 percent) as they are to continue rising (to, say, 21 percent). Or their numbers could flatten out.

There are some qualifications to this. Candidates can gain momentum from winning states, and candidates who fall in the polls are at risk of dropping out. But to a first approximation, political observers vastly overrate the importance of momentum in the polls. There are plenty of examples of that this year, involving not only Harris and O’Rourke but also Warren, whose summerlong rise in the polls abruptly turned into a decline in November, and Buttigieg, who has had several rises and falls in national polls.

Bloomberg needs to improve his position by Super Tuesday to be a front-runner for the nomination. That’s possible, but it’s not a great bet.

But suppose Bloomberg doesn’t decline in the polls. Instead, he holds steady. After the reviews his debate got last night, his campaign might be happy to take that.

The problem is that merely holding steady in the polls through Super Tuesday would result in Bloomberg treading water in the delegate count. Here, as of early Thursday, are our model’s projected delegate counts after Super Tuesday, along with a high (90th percentile) and low (10th percentile) range for each candidate. Note, again, that these numbers don’t yet reflect any post-debate polling.

Sanders leads in projected delegates after Super Tuesday

Projected delegate averages and those delegate totals as a percentage of delegates awarded through Super Tuesday, according to FiveThirtyEight’s forecast as of Feb. 20

Projected delegates after Super Tuesday


Candidate
Average
Pct.
Low
Pct
High
Pct.




Sanders
590
39%
313
21%
856
57%


Biden
296
20
15
1
584
39


Bloomberg
287
19
56
4
521
35


Buttigieg
138
9
27
2
324
22


Warren
115
8
9
1
292
19


Klobuchar
59
4
10
1
118
8


Steyer
14
1
0
0
29
2


Gabbard
0
0
0
0
0
0

“Average” reflects the mean of 10,000 simulations. The “low” and “high” columns reflect the 10th and 90th percentile outcomes for each candidate, respectively.

If everyone exactly hits their averages, then after Super Tuesday, Sanders would have won about 40 percent of the delegates that had been awarded to that point, Biden and Bloomberg would have about 20 percent each, and the rest would be scattered between the remaining candidates (mostly Buttigieg and Warren).

Of course, we probably won’t wind up with those exact results. Candidates may rise and fall in the polls as a result of last night’s debate, or as a result of the voting outcomes in Nevada and South Carolina. One or more candidates could even drop out by then.

Still, 38 percent of all pledged delegates will have been handed out after Super Tuesday, so having only about a fifth of the delegates awarded to that point would make it nearly impossible for Bloomberg to get a majority of delegates later on. And it would be highly difficult for Bloomberg to even get a plurality with Sanders having about twice as many delegates as the former mayor. His chances at that point would probably depend on a contested convention.

But Bloomberg’s 90th percentile scenario, in which he winds up with about 35 percent of the delegates who had been handed out through Super Tuesday, would leave him in a much better position. He’d certainly have a good shot at winning the plurality of pledged delegates, for instance. A majority would require some more work, though it could be plausible depending on which of his opponents dropped out and how much he gained in the polls as a result of his Super Tuesday performance.

And pending that post-debate polling, those upside scenarios are still on the table. By definition, there’s a 1 in 10 chance that Bloomberg hits or improves on his 90th percentile forecast. Far more unlikely things have happened.

But the downside cases are equally likely. And as the debate exposed, if Bloomberg has some unique strengths as a candidate — his money, a smart team behind him, and a slightly Trumpian ability to command media attention — he also has some unique weaknesses. These include: his lack of polish as debater and public speaker, his past as a Republican, his status as a billionaire in the age of Sanders and Warren, his lack of practice as a candidate because of his campaign’s late start, New York’s use of the stop-and-frisk policy during his time as mayor and his relationship to black voters, his age (78), and the lewd comments he has allegedly made toward and about women. On top of that, we don’t know anything yet about how Bloomberg’s support in polls will translate into actual votes; as compared with most other Democrats, his voters are more likely to say they haven’t firmly committed to a candidate.

These are some big liabilities, and ones the media should have paid more attention to amidst the hype surrounding Bloomberg’s rise but for now we’ll just have to wait and see what the post-debate polls say.

Politics Podcast: Just How Bad Was That Debate For Bloomberg?

By Galen Druke, Nate Silver and Clare Malone, Galen Druke, Nate Silver and Clare Malone and Galen Druke, Nate Silver and Clare Malone












 












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In a late-night installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew assesses the candidates’ performances in the Nevada debate. The candidates were more adversarial than in past debates, and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg struggled while fielding attacks from Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

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.