Nate Silver's Blog, page 52

What Are The X-Factors That Could Shake Up New Hampshire?

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

sarahf (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): It’s hard to believe that last Monday was the Iowa caucuses and now, it’s time for New Hampshire to vote for a Democratic nominee tomorrow. Obviously, we missed the big X factor of the Iowa caucuses — no results that Monday and still no declared winner because of data issues — but we’re done with Iowa; it’s time to talk New Hampshire.

What’s going on in the Granite State? Bernie Sanders sits atop nearly all of the recent New Hampshire polls we have, and has a 68 percent chance of winning the most votes there, according to our primary forecast, but Pete Buttigieg isn’t too far behind Sanders in our polling average and he even led in one recent Suffolk New Hampshire poll. How would you describe the state of the race? And what factors should we be looking at that could affect who wins on Tuesday?

geoffrey.skelley (Geoffrey Skelley, elections analyst): I guess a major question is whether voters will strategically funnel toward the two leading candidates — Sanders and Buttigieg — which would hurt someone like Warren (whose voters maybe move to Sanders) as well as Biden or Klobuchar (whose voters possibly move to Buttigieg).

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, elections analyst): +1 to that, Geoffrey. Strategic voting can make primaries unpredictable. Since New Hampshire looks like a two-man race, that can cause a stampede of support from the lower-polling candidates to whichever of the two front-runners they prefer.

geoffrey.skelley: Perhaps that’s part of why Biden went all in on that video attacking Buttigieg, to stall a continued rise?

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief):I think our model likely has a fairly good handle on New Hampshire. We have Bernie with a 68 percent chance to win and Buttigieg at 27 percent, which leaves 5 percent with a miracle upset by Warren, Biden or Klobuchar. That all sounds about right to me.

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): It feels like Sanders is the favorite, but Buttigieg could still win. Warren and Biden seem likely to be vying for third and fourth. Klobuchar seems likely to finish fifth, as she doesn’t seem as strong as she was in Iowa.

sarahf: I’ve wondered Perry, if maybe given what happened in Iowa, it’s Biden who finishes fourth or fifth. New Hampshire is just another state that’s really hard for him demographically.

And after Iowa, a Biden finish in the high single digits wouldn’t totally shock me. His footprint and enthusiasm in the state just seems much smaller (I know, reader, crowd sizes are not the best proxy for a candidate’s enthusiasm). His campaign is already lowering expectations in New Hampshire, but I wonder how that would shake up the race going forward.

nrakich: I would caution against any overinterpretation by the media or others if someone like Biden finishes fifth. If that happens, it would probably only be by a point or two, which really isn’t significant.

Similarly, the collapse of Biden or Warren in New Hampshire opens the door for someone like Klobuchar or Gabbard to finish third, which would surely grab some headlines. But if it’s a third-place finish with 10 percent, that’s really not all that impressive.

natesilver: I mean, it’s not clear to me that the Biden campaign would rather have Buttigieg win New Hampshire than Sanders. If Buttigieg wins New Hampshire, it’s an extremely wide-open race, and a win by Biden in South Carolina could be more impactful.

It’s also not clear to me whether that ad will be effective. It might be! Reporters on Twitter seem to think it’s smart! But, Buttigieg is also using his lack of Washington experience as an asset, and it seems a bit mean-spirited in a state where voters sort of like civility.

sarahf: Right, mayors … are supposed to revitalize sidewalks?

geoffrey.skelley: I agree, it’s unclear if that ad will have its intended effect. Voters have likely already factored in Buttigieg’s lack of big-time experience at this point.

nrakich: Yeah, Sarah, I found that ad ineffective. It felt like it was belittling the important, if not world-changing, work that local government does every day.

However, Geoffrey, I’m not sure voters have fully priced in Buttigieg’s lack of experience. He hasn’t really had a scrutiny cycle this election the way that, say, Warren has.

And only 73 percent of Democrats knew enough about him to have an opinion, according to an average of polls taken from Dec. 19 to Jan. 15. So there is room for more people to learn about him in a negative way.

natesilver: I’m not sure I totally agree that Buttigieg hasn’t faced scrutiny? He’s gotten a LOT of media attention, as this is really the third different period of the campaign in which he’s perceived to have surged.

nrakich: But very little of that media attention has been negative. I think this cycle has shown candidates need to do a bit better than Buttigieg has done so far before they really start to get negative attention. Look at Warren — she rose in the polls for months, to more than 20 percent, before the narrative really turned against her.

natesilver: I don’t know, Rakich, I probably spent too much time on Twitter, where Buttigieg isn’t super popular.

(I definitely spend too much time on Twitter.)

sarahf: What do you all think about turnout here in New Hampshire? Does that have the potential to be an X-factor? It surprised me that turnout was lower in Iowa just given everything around 2018 and record turnout for a midterm.

geoffrey.skelley: New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner — whose main job seems to be protecting New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation presidential primary — predicted 420,000 voters would turn out for the combined Democratic and Republican primaries. He very specifically predicted — how is unclear — 292,000 Democratic votes and 128,000 GOP ones. If the Democrats reach that mark, it would basically match the Republican turnout mark of 288,000 in the 2016 Republican primary. (Democrats had a little over 250,000 votes last time around.)

sarahf: And so if Gardner’s predictions are accurate, Geoffrey, that would mean pretty high turnout for Democrats, right?

geoffrey.skelley: Yeah, that would slightly outpace the 288,000 or so who voted in the 2008 Democratic primary. Of course, it’s important to remember that cycle had two competitive contests going on, whereas the Republican contest this time around isn’t competitive — sorry, Bill Weld. That could influence how unaffiliated voters choose to behave, as they can vote in either party’s primary.

sarahf: I was just going to ask about that. How much do we think it matters that New Hampshire’s primary isn’t closed, meaning independents and those not registered as Democrats can still participate? Do you think it makes New Hampshire a good general election bellwether test?

And what does it mean, if anything, for this year’s candidates? Does that help Sanders? Buttigieg?

natesilver: I’m not sure whether it makes New Hampshire a good bellwether. But independents are a bit more unpredictable and it’s one of the things that makes polling harder.

geoffrey.skelley: Well, New Hampshire’s turnout as a share of the voting-eligible population in the 2016 primary was 52 percent for the two parties combined. It’s general election turnout was around 72 percent. While that’s a very high presidential primary turnout — New Hampshire tends to have the highest or nearly the highest every cycle — I’m not really sure it tells you much about the general election.

perry: Because Buttigieg (anti-Trump Republicans) and Sanders (kind of disaffected voters more broadly) are both arguing they can appeal outside of traditional Democratic blocs, it will be interesting to see if one or both of them are successful in doing so. Neither of those candidates are likely to dismiss the role of independents and unaffiliated voters — they are appealing to them as part of their strategy.

natesilver: Independents seem to like both Buttigieg and Sanders here. But they’re different types of independents. The Sanders folks are people whose views are probably liberal, or at least eccentric but averaging out to liberal, but who just don’t really like the Democratic Party as a concept. The Buttigieg folks are more your classic crossover independents and moderate Republicans. There is SOME feeling on the ground here that Buttigieg is prepared to do well with these sorts of independents outside of metro areas, and if he beats his polling here, that might be a reason why.

sarahf: You’ve looked into this a little, Geoffrey. But aren’t candidates like Tulsi Gabbard and Andrew Yang largely the ones doing well with independents or more conservative voters here in New Hampshire? In which case, I’m not sure how much New Hampshire’s independent streak has an opportunity to be a wild card here.

natesilver: I think they (Gabbard, Yang) may be doing well in a RELATIVE sense. That’s why Gabbard might get like 5 or 6 percent of the vote here instead of 2 or 3 percent. But not in an ABSOLUTE sense. Sanders and Buttigieg have the highest share of the vote among independents.

geoffrey.skelley: Right, Gabbard’s overall support in polls has mostly come from people who identify as independents or even Republican. So that might help her at the margins, but that isn’t going to make her competitive.

It’s kind of important to win over Democrats in a Democratic primary — just ask Sanders about his 2016 performance. One reason he couldn’t beat Clinton was that he rarely won more support from Democrats than her.

nrakich: Here’s a potentially fun X-factor: What if we get a national poll on Monday that says something dramatic? Like Biden still has a commanding national lead, or Buttigieg now has 20 percent. Could that affect New Hampshirites’ strategic voting, or the media’s expectations?

natesilver: It’ll affect our model! Our model is going to react quite strongly in one direction or another to the next few national polls, and maybe also fairly strongly to Nevada and South Carolina polls. I don’t know that it’ll affect coverage here though.

It might affect Biden’s strategy though. Like, if they think they’re still strong in Nevada/South Carolina, that would have some impact.

sarahf: On that note, we still haven’t had a horse race poll conducted entirely after Friday’s debate. Do you think there were any last-minute surprises there that the polls might be late to pick up on going into Tuesday?

Much of pundit-land seems to have thought Amy Klobuchar knocked it out of the park, for instance. But I wonder if that’s enough to help her here in New Hampshire. Because does a third-place finish vs. a fourth-place finish matter really matter if you’re Klobuchar?

natesilver: Two of the three tracking polls showed a rise for Klobuchar at the expense of Buttigieg. These are small sample sizes, so one needs to be a little bit careful — and I’d note that our post-debate poll with Ipsos (of national voters, not New Hampshire) showed both Buttigieg and Klobuchar doing well. But, a mini Klobu-surge that hurts Buttigieg and helps Sanders is certainly a plausible story.

nrakich: Yeah, our polling with Ipsos seemed to show a status-quo-preserving debate. Sanders and Buttigieg, who were already the candidates doing best in New Hampshire, got high marks from viewers. So did Klobuchar, but she’s had strong debates before, and while they probably have helped her get to where she is, I don’t see any reason why this one would produce a more sudden surge for her.

geoffrey.skelley: The challenge for Klobuchar is, if she finishes at like 9 percent or something, does she really go on? Nevada and South Carolina do not look good for her at all — she’s at 3 percent and 2 percent in our polling averages, respectively — and I’m not sure you can spin a performance like that in New Hampshire into more support in the next set of contests. Buttigieg might be able to gain support from winning or nearly winning, but for someone further down the list, that’ll be harder.

Then again, she may just want to make it to Super Tuesday [March 3] to run in her home state of Minnesota — though losing your home state is not a great look. …

natesilver: I think she’ll go on if she beats Biden. Maybe not otherwise.

But who knows! If it feels like a wide-open race, maybe she stays in as she’s sort of a plausible compromise candidate down the line. And as Geoffrey said, Minnesota votes on Super Tuesday.

sarahf: This is probably getting a little ahead of ourselves, because it’s not about New Hampshire specifically. But people usually drop out after Iowa — except given the mess that was Iowa this year, that didn’t happen. But there’s usually a second wave after New Hampshire. Do we think that will hold true? Or is this field so fractured and splintered that most candidates are going to cling on?

nrakich: Yeah, I think Michael Bennet and maybe Deval Patrick drop out after New Hampshire.

geoffrey.skelley: It’s been clear that Bennet wanted to keep going at least up to New Hampshire. So after he wins like 1 percent on Tuesday, that will presumably be the end of the line for him.

Patrick, however, probably wants to hang on until South Carolina. A Super PAC running ads on his behalf is dropping a fair amount of money there, for what it’s worth.

sarahf: OK, let’s end on one or two final X-factors you think could throw a curveball in New Hampshire’s primary — and don’t say, “We don’t get any votes.” That would just be cruel and unusual punishment after Iowa.

geoffrey.skelley: I don’t think we have to worry about that! New Hampshire’s primary is state-run, not party-run, so it’ll use the normal voting apparatus.

In terms of curveballs, Warren doing better than expected could be a twist. The new CBS News/YouGov poll that came out on Sunday had her in a clear third at 17 percent. We’ve heard anecdotally that she has a great ground game here, so maybe she will end up holding onto support better than some polls suggest. That could help Buttigieg if Warren supporters aren’t moving to Sanders.

nrakich: I guess I am just looking for whether Buttigieg’s momentum — which has been clear in the day-by-day polls — continues over the final stretch and is enough for him to overtake Sanders. But any disruption in the narrative, from the debate to a national poll to a well-timed attack from another candidate, could in turn disrupt that momentum.

perry: Biden basically conceded in the debate that he wouldn’t win New Hampshire. Probably not ideal (at least for winning, perhaps smart in terms of expectations setting.) He released a buzzy video attacking Buttigieg. I don’t know how that plays. But Biden is the person I’m most interested in — I feel like he could get 19 percent or 9.

geoffrey.skelley: Perry, 19 percent would be a W for Biden, so that would be a curveball!

nrakich: Geoffrey, you’re just playing into the expectations game!!

geoffrey.skelley: I’m just reading into what the media would say about Biden getting 19 percent. It would be taken as a win.

nrakich: Just a couple weeks ago, Biden was forecasted to get 20 percent of the vote, on average, in our model. If he gets 19 percent and that’s perceived as a win, his strategy of lowering expectations will have been very successful.

geoffrey.skelley: Sure, but in the aftermath of a rough performance in Iowa, and the downplaying of expectations by Biden, I’m pretty sure the press would enthusiastically latch onto a Biden comeback narrative.

nrakich: I think that’s probably right. But people need to take a step back and realize that the right interpretation of that would probably be, “Iowa was a weird hiccup for Biden,” not “Biden’s campaign was on the brink of death, and then he recovered masterfully!”

sarahf: Anyone other than Sanders finishing first, though, would be a pretty big deal. I could see Sanders’s margin only being one or two points, but given the polls we do have, I still think he should win New Hampshire. But Nathaniel is right in that there’s still room for a last-minute surge to take hold. And yeah, understanding how Biden will do remains a bit of a mystery to me.

natesilver: I don’t know how people (by which I mean the media) would react to like a 2-point Sanders win, which is one of the more plausible scenarios.

nrakich: Oh, I guess I’m also looking to see how many candidates finish about 15 percent and therefore qualify for delegates. The more candidates who get delegates, the more chance we have of a ~~ CoNtEsTeD cOnVeNtIoN !!! ~~

Election Update: There’s A New Face In Our Forecast. (It’s Bloomberg.)

As of Friday, you’ll see a shiny new face in our Democratic primary forecast: former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. We’re now featuring Bloomberg more prominently in our forecast interactive and in our polling averages; he joins four other candidates (Sen. Bernie Sanders; former Vice President Joe Biden; former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg; and Sen. Elizabeth Warren) who get their own color in the forecast (in Bloomberg’s case, gold). Bloomberg has always been in the underlying calculations and the detailed output behind the model,1 but he was lumped in with “all others” on many of the charts, making him hard to find.

Bloomberg is a tricky candidate to forecast, given that his strategy of essentially skipping the first four states but then spending enormous amounts of money on the race is fairly unprecedented. Although Bloomberg is at only 11 percent in national polls right now — below the 15 percent threshold required to pick up delegates in states and congressional districts — he’s getting close enough to the threshold that the model actually has him picking up a decent number of delegates in its average simulation.

On the other hand, the model thinks it’s quite unlikely that Bloomberg can get a majority of delegates because he’s getting off to a late start. It’s not that skipping out on Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina is itself all that costly; those states have relatively few delegates. Rather, it’s that Bloomberg is unlikely to have a huge surge before Super Tuesday.

Here’s why that matters. Bloomberg could certainly do reasonably well on Super Tuesday and get a surge in later states. But at that point, 38 percent of delegates will already have been chosen. Say Bloomberg wins 30 percent of the delegates on Super Tuesday; that would certainly get him some attention, probably make him a real contender, and perhaps knock other moderate candidates out of the race. Bloomberg, however, would need to get 64 percent of the delegates in all the states beyond Super Tuesday to earn a majority of pledged delegates, which is an awfully high bar to clear.

Bloomberg getting a plurality of pledged delegates, on the other hand, is more likely. (There’s a 1 in 40 chance of that, or about 3 percent, according to our model — as compared to a roughly 1 in 100 chance he gets a majority.) More likely still is that Bloomberg appears to be the strongest candidate at the end of the process, even though he doesn’t necessarily have a plurality. There’s a 5 percent chance that Bloomberg will be leading in national polls at the end of the race, our model estimates.2 Being able to point to indicators like that could be helpful to Bloomberg in the not-at-all-unlikely event of a contested convention.

These distinctions matter because – it seems like I can’t emphasize this enough, as I see people misquoting our forecast all the time — we are not actually forecasting the identity of the nominee. Rather, we are forecasting the chance of each candidate getting a majority of pledged delegates (or a plurality) after the Virgin Islands casts the final votes of the primary season on June 6. Bloomberg could easily become the nominee at a contested convention — and a contested convention is a reasonably likely possibility — but our model does not try to predict how a contested convention would turn out.

We’ve also made two subtle changes that should slightly help the model’s handling of Bloomberg, although they make little difference to the top line forecast.3 First, in the state-by-state regression analysis that we conduct to help forecast states with little polling, we are no longer using Bloomberg’s Iowa results as an input for him. In the regressions, the model doesn’t use a candidate’s performance from states in which they weren’t on the ballot. Iowa technically didn’t have a ballot, however. (Indeed, Bloomberg won a very small number of votes there.) But since he never set foot in the state after launching his campaign (his last visit there was in December 2018) nor made any other effort to compete there, the regression will ignore his performance in Iowa.

The other small change is in how we calculate what we call the “fundamentals,” which are a combination of indicators based on a candidate’s fundraising, endorsements and level of experience in elected office. (See Step 3 in our methodology guide for more about this.) We find that candidates who are strong in these areas tend to see their polling improve on average, and candidates who are weak tend to see their polling get worse. However, their effects are quite subtle and plenty of candidates defy the trends (see also: President Trump). The model now randomizes how much weight it puts on these categories in each simulation, instead of always treating them as equally important. Likewise, it randomizes the amount of weight it puts on the three categories of fundraising we track (small-donor contributions, all individual contributions, and all contributions from any source including self-funding). Thus, in some simulations, the model treats Bloomberg’s enormous spending as a relatively important factor in the race, and in other simulations, it gives it very little weight. This reflects the fact that the evidence is quite mixed on how self-financed candidates do as compared with candidates who raise money from individual donors.

There’s certainly a lot to think about here, so I may do some longer stories about Bloomberg after New Hampshire. But we’ll leave it there for now. Suffice it to say that I think there’s sometimes a lack of rigor when analyzing Bloomberg’s chances. The more you try to run through specific, realistic scenarios for exactly how Bloomberg wins the race — which is what our model is doing in trying to simulate all the possibilities — the harder you’ll find it is for him to get a majority of pledged delegates. It isn’t necessarily so hard to conceive of him accumulating a lot of delegates and winning the race via a delegate plurality or at a contested convention, however, and the model is more agnostic about those possibilities.

The Calendar Isn’t Helping Biden, But His Iowa Performance Points To Bigger Problems

Iowa has given us more questions than answers. And perhaps the most important question is whether former Vice President Joe Biden’s poor performance there — with results still not quite finalized, he’s in fourth place with just 14.9 percent of the first-alignment vote1 — can be chalked up to Iowa-specific factors or is instead symptomatic of larger problems for his campaign.

Here’s one way to provide some perspective. Our primary model, although it mostly relies on polling, also uses a regression-based method to forecast the outcome in states where there is little or no polling. The regression tries to impute each candidate’s demographic strengths and weaknesses based on states where we do have polling. It also adjusts for the home states and regions of the candidates — so, for instance, Sen. Bernie Sanders gets a big boost in Vermont at the expense of other candidates. (You can read more about the regression method in our methodology primer.)

Here, then, is what the regression method had forecasted for Biden in each state as of our final update on Monday before the Iowa caucus. (Note the values below includes a slight adjustment to account for the fact that former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is not on the ballot in New Hampshire, Nevada or South Carolina, but is in other states.2)

Biden’s best and worst states by the “fundamentals”

Biden’s projected vote share based on demographics and geography, per FiveThirtyEight’s last forecast before the Iowa caucuses

Rank
State
Projected vote share




1
Delaware
59.2%


2
Mississippi
38.1


3
Pennsylvania
37.8


4
Louisiana
36.6


5
Maryland
36.3


6
South Carolina*
35.5


7
Alabama
35.4


8
Georgia
34.7


9
Florida
33.8


10
Tennessee
33.6


11
Arkansas
33.2


12
North Carolina
33.2


13
New Jersey
33.1


14
West Virginia
31.8


15
Virginia
31.3


16
Texas
31.1


17
Kentucky
30.5


18
Ohio
29.8


19
Missouri
29.4


20
New Mexico
29.2


21
New York
28.9


22
Michigan
28.1


23
Idaho
28.0


24
South Dakota
27.8


25
Oklahoma
27.6


26
Illinois
27.5


27
Montana
27.4


28
Arizona
27.4


29
Connecticut
27.2


30
Nevada*
26.8


31
Kansas
26.6


32
Rhode Island
26.5


33
Maine
26.2


34
Wyoming
26.2


35
Nebraska
26.1


36
Alaska
25.8


37
California
25.7


38
Wisconsin
25.4


39
Utah
25.1


40
North Dakota
24.9


41
Iowa
24.7


42
Washington
24.7


43
Oregon
24.7


44
Colorado
24.3


45
Hawaii
23.2


46
New Hampshire*
23.1


47
Indiana
22.7


48
Minnesota
21.0


49
Massachusetts
20.0


50
Vermont
17.1

* Projections for Nevada, New Hampshire and South Carolina are adjusted to reflect the fact that Michael Bloomberg is not on the ballot there, when he is in other states.

Iowa ranks as Biden’s 41st best state out of 50. The fact that its caucus electorate is fairly liberal — and extremely white — is not favorable for Biden, whose support is concentrated among older, moderate whites and African Americans. On the other hand, Iowa is fairly middle-class, which ought to be helpful for Biden. But it’s a well-below-average state for him on balance.

Still, Iowa is not so below-average for Biden that one can excuse his performance there. Our regression “thinks” that Biden should have gotten about 25 percent of the vote in Iowa. Instead, as I said, he got only about 15 percent in the first-alignment vote.

One explanation for Biden’s numbers in Iowa was the relatively strong performance of former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, candidates who compete with Biden for the moderate “lane.” In fact, Buttigieg overperformed his regression-based forecast by around 8 percentage points in Iowa, while Klobuchar beat hers by 5 percentage points. (Keep in mind that the regression already accounts for the fact that Buttigieg and Klobuchar are from the Midwest, which means they overperformed more than their regional advantage would suggest.) But if you were to take a couple of points from Buttigieg and a couple more from Klobuchar, Biden’s Iowa performance would look a lot more respectable.

How Iowa results compare to demographic projections

Projected vote share for each candidate based on “fundamentals” in FiveThirtyEight’s final Democratic primary forecast before the Iowa caucuses vs. their actual first-alignment vote share

Candidate
PROJECTED vote share
actual vote share




Biden
24.7%
14.9%


Sanders
23.4
24.7


Warren
15.8
18.5


Buttigieg
13.4
21.2


Klobuchar
7.9
12.7


Bloomberg
4.8
0.1


Yang
4.2
5.0


Steyer
3.6
1.7


Gabbard
1.3
0.2


Patrick
0.5
0.0


Bennet
0.4
0.1

source: IOWA DEMOCRATIC PARTY

But an explanation is not the same thing as an excuse. Buttigieg and Klobuchar may have done well in Iowa in part because Biden failed to give older, more moderate voters a candidate they were entirely happy about.

Of course, there are other factors that make Iowa unique. Retail campaigning takes on far more importance in the state, since candidates spend so much time there. And the ground game matters a lot given all the unusual rules in the caucuses. Neither of these are Biden strengths, necessarily. In addition, a caucus is not a secret ballot — caucusgoers can see what their neighbors are doing at all stages of the process. Mild weakness for Biden in a certain precinct could snowball if voters in the room thought Biden didn’t have a lot of support and they preemptively joined other groups.

The problem for Biden is that the next state on tap, New Hampshire, doesn’t look any better for him. In fact, the regression model has it as being an even tougher state — the 46th best state in the nation for Biden, ahead of only Massachusetts, Minnesota, Vermont and Indiana, which are all home states for one of the other major candidates.

Furthermore, even though the regression model has only modest expectations for Biden in New Hampshire (23 percent), he’s still underperforming the regression forecast in polls there, where he has just 14 percent of the vote, on average.

Nevada, more racially diverse than Iowa or New Hampshire and fairly working-class, figures to be more of a fair fight for Biden. Before Iowa, it ranked in the middle of the pack for Biden — the 30th best state out of 50. However, Nevada is another caucus state, and after Iowa, one wonders whether Biden is prone to systematically underperform in caucuses. Fortunately for Biden, there are far fewer caucuses in the schedule this year if he’s able to survive beyond Nevada.

South Carolina, on the other hand, is certainly a good state for Biden — the sixth best state of 50. And if he loses both New Hampshire and Nevada, expectations for Biden might be so low by the time South Carolina votes that he could actually get some credit (and a bit of a polling bounce) for winning it. For right now, though, a primary on Feb. 29 is an eternity away.

This analysis is not meant to be entirely unsympathetic to Biden. Iowa and New Hampshire generally get a lot more media coverage than Nevada and South Carolina, and so candidates who are well-suited to those states are at an advantage. Even if Iowa had gone first, in the hypothetical world where South Carolina and New Hampshire switched places on the calendar and South Carolina went second, Biden might be poised for a big comeback next week instead of what is likely to be another loss. But that isn’t the world we’re living in, and Biden’s Iowa performance was poor enough that he probably can’t blame the calendar alone.

The Biggest Surprises Of The NBA Trade Deadline

sara.ziegler (Sara Ziegler, sports editor): The deals took a while to ramp up ahead of this year’s Thursday afternoon NBA trade deadline, but things finished with a flurry, with 13 total trades announced in the 39 hours leading up to the 3 p.m. ET deadline.

Let’s start with the one that made the biggest splash: D’Angelo Russell is leaving his brief home in Golden State for Minnesota, which is sending off star Andrew Wiggins. What did you all think of that move?

chris.herring (Chris Herring, senior sportswriter): “Star Andrew Wiggins”

tchow (Tony Chow, video producer): “Star Andrew Wiggins.” Nice, Sara.

sara.ziegler: LOL, guys.

chris.herring: It’s maybe the most interesting move of the day. Right up there with Miami’s move for Andre Iguodala.

neil (Neil Paine, senior sportswriter): Hey, now. Somehow I am the biggest Wiggins backer here, smh.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): Andrew Wiggins was good for like five games at the start of the year. I’m just going to choose to remember him that way.

sara.ziegler:

neil: Is it crazy to think he could play more to his potential after a change in scenery?

chris.herring: If you’re Golden State, you’re banking on a number of things to make it work. The idea that he might give you some defense (which you aren’t getting from Russell) and the idea that he might flourish in a situation where he’s not your first or second fiddle.

But I think you’re also banking pretty heavily on the future first-round pick — which isn’t heavily protected — you’re getting from Minnesota.

Keep in mind that the Warriors are awful this season and are very likely to get a top-five pick. The potential of that and next year’s pick from Minnesota could be packaged for something nice, on top of getting them under the luxury tax.

The Timberwolves are gambling here, too, to some extent. That pick might have really good value if they turn out to suck next season. And while Russell and Karl-Anthony Towns are reportedly friends, and should score a ton, their defense will be hard to watch. Every opponent’s pick and roll will be a land of opportunity.

natesilver: It has to be banking on that first-round pick.

Because Russell is a better, higher-upside version of the same player.

chris.herring: Yep. A year younger than Wiggins.3

neil: That’s true, Nate. Here are the breakdowns in RAPTOR, our new NBA metric, this year:

Russell: +3.9 offense/-4.3 defense/-0.5 overall

Wiggins: +0.9 offense/-2.7 defense/-1.9 overall

chris.herring: I am at least slightly intrigued by what Wiggins could be with a solid group of seasoned, championship-winning players. Even if I’m skeptical for now.

natesilver: The thing about Wiggins, though, is that … it’s not like the nonscoring parts of his game are very good either.

As you can see, he actually has been an above-average contributor on offense this year. But he doesn’t pass well, he doesn’t rebound well, and he certainly doesn’t defend well. So I’m not sure how much you get from a change in his offensive role.

chris.herring: What, if anything, did you all see as the deal that moves the title-odds needle the most?

The Clippers’ deal for Marcus Morris certainly is up there. Philly did some things to fortify its bench, though they also dealt away James Ennis to Orlando, which wasn’t my favorite thing.

natesilver: I don’t think there was anything that hugely moved the needle, but the Clippers’ move for Morris was probably the closest.

Then again, RAPTOR thinks Morris is just a league-average player, and it doesn’t think that Moe Harkless is terrible. So it’s a relatively marginal upgrade.

It actually thought the Sixers’ moves were a step backward.

neil: Morris was the best player in terms of WAR this season (2.8) moved at the deadline outside that mammoth 12-player, four-team trade, for what it’s worth.

Clint Capela (3.9) and Robert Covington (3.2) were 1-2. (And that was also the biggest NBA trade since 2000, in terms of total players moved!)

natesilver: But Morris is also 30 years old. It’s very unlikely that he was having a true breakout season — and more likely that he was having something of a career year (or career first half of the year).

So actually, I’m going to change my answer. I think the Covington trade for Houston was the most consequential deal, title-wise.

chris.herring: The Covington deal — or should we deem it the Clint Capela deal? — was really interesting. I don’t think I’ve seen a team go all-in like that on a style of play midseason.

Like, the Rockets don’t have any truly legit centers right now.

neil: Legit centers???? They barely have any power forwards.

sara.ziegler: LOL

tchow: But Tyson Chandler!

sara.ziegler: Tyson is averaging less than nine minutes a game! Houston is choosing to be short.

chris.herring: P.J. Tucker’s knees may be dust by the end of the season.

natesilver: That’s why I say it’s the most consequential, Chris. RAPTOR actually likes Covington and Capela about equally well. (It likes both players a lot.) But what they’re doing in Houston feels like a real David vs. Goliath strategy. There’s wider variance with Covington on the roster instead of Capela, and you want high variance when you want to win an NBA title and you’re maybe the fourth or fifth best team on paper.

Also, I do wonder if Houston can add a league-average center as a buyout guy. There are usually a lot of those guys floating around.

chris.herring: Yeah, seems like they almost have to.

I’ve seen the arguments: They’re 10-1 without Capela. He’s looked brutal in the playoffs at times. But man: What if they get the Lakers in a playoff series? Against Anthony Davis, Dwight Howard and JaVale McGee? Or the Nuggets, with Nikola Jokić?

neil: I find it interesting that one of the arguments for trading Capela was their rapid abandonment of the pick-n-roll game.

They’ve gone to even more of an extreme iso-ball approach. And Capela loses a good deal of his offensive value outside the PnR.

chris.herring: Very true.

neil: (Of course, RAPTOR thinks he is a strong defender as well, with a rating of +4.3.)

natesilver: And he’s a good offensive rebounder.

neil: Between the Russell Westbrook experiment and now the extreme smallball lineups and this Capela trade, they’re really throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks.

chris.herring: Can I just talk about the deal that stunned me the most? Andre Drummond heading to Cleveland for little more than a future second-round pick?

sara.ziegler: What are John Henson and Brandon Knight, chopped liver?

neil: Not often does arguably the worst team in the NBA buy a quasi-star at the deadline.

chris.herring: Exactly, Neil.

Also, is there a delicacy that’s worse than chopped liver?

neil: LOL

sara.ziegler: Hahaha

tchow: I like Henson. I think he’s a solid addition to any squad.

neil: (A take that has nothing to do with Tony’s UNC fandom, I’m sure, LOL.)

tchow: 1.5 WAR according to RAPTOR, Neil!

neil: (That’s fair!)

chris.herring: Not only was it interesting to see the Cavs step forward as a buyer there, but also, they bought him for almost nothing at all. I never was under the impression the Pistons were going to get an enormous haul for him. But the fact that he fetched only a second-rounder plus spare parts says a lot about the size of his salary next year (if he opts in), and how dinosaur-like centers — even ones with a defined skill or two — really don’t move the needle.

tchow: Seriously though, what ARE the Cavs doing here?

natesilver: I’m a weirdo in that I think Drummond could have a lot of value to a contender.

sara.ziegler: It’s interesting that he was rumored to be going to the Hawks for so long … another noncontender.

chris.herring: He’s a pretty solid pick-and-roll big. But I think that’s the thing: To contenders, I don’t think he had a ton of appeal.

natesilver: If you have a few high-usage bigs, it’s also nice to have a guy who can focus a lot on offensive rebounding.

It’s one of the ways you can contribute value “off the ball,” so to speak. And he’s decently athletic, so it’s not like he’s a plodding guy that’s going to eff with your pace.

chris.herring: But like you said, Sara, the teams you heard rumored for him (Atlanta, New York, Cleveland now) were all teams out of the race. Although I do think Dallas was rumored at one point, too, before Dwight Powell’s season-ending injury prompted them to trade for Willie Cauley-Stein.

So, Clippers and Heat aside, I think the other story of this deadline is how little the teams near the top did to alter their rosters.

neil: Yeah, that stood out to me too, Chris.

chris.herring: The Bucks and Raptors stood pat. The Lakers stood pat for the first time in Rob Pelinka’s tenure.

neil: Why do you think that was?

chris.herring: I have no clue. I guess I’m not terribly surprised the Bucks and Lakers didn’t change anything. They’ve been great, and don’t have a ton of holes, if any. (Lakers were trying to get something done for Morris, apparently.)

I think we may see them do due diligence in the buyout market, like the Lakers getting someone like Darren Collison. But for the other clubs, I was a little surprised more didn’t happen.

natesilver: There might be a little bit of an arms-race component to it. If no one else makes a big move, maybe you don’t need to, either.

sara.ziegler: This is why Miami’s situation is the most interesting to me. This is a fun, surprising squad, and they really seem to be going all in.

chris.herring: Pat Riley has a little Rich Homie Quan to him: He’ll Never Stop Going In.

I can’t remember seeing a deal like Iguodala’s before. A guy sat out the whole season so far, without being injured, and got moved for relatively solid pieces. An older guy, at that.

neil: Although that was basically the road map for him all season long.

chris.herring: It was, but I think most people assumed he was going to be bought out — not dealt for anything close to what he was. Miami is really going for it as best they can. And there were reports that they wanted Danilo Gallinari from Oklahoma City, too.

natesilver: They were a little too far back from the front-runners, though, and I’m not sure the guys they added will help all that much. Plus, they subtracted some pieces, too.

neil: I was sad they were unable to swing the deal for Gallinari.

chris.herring: I think they tried to add guys they thought could capably guard Giannis Antetokounmpo, honestly. I don’t know that it will realistically be enough. But if Milwaukee is the only team that looks head and shoulders above everyone else, you might as well take a shot. The Heat could be an injury away from things really getting interesting. And they’ve already been so much better than I expected.

Memphis’s approach in that deal was pretty interesting, too. They add a young player like Justise Winslow, who fits their timeline with Ja Morant and Jaren Jackson Jr., and then also Dion Waiters.

neil: Yeah, I’m interested to watch that team develop over the next few years. Brandon Clarke is another young guy who has been surprisingly good for them this year.

chris.herring: They ate into a decent amount of their cap space for this summer by making the deal. But at the same time, this free-agent class is nothing special, and Memphis isn’t exactly a hot free-agent destination.

natesilver: If you were ranking the franchises from 1 to 30 in terms of how you feel about them long term, Memphis has to have shot up from like No. 24 to No. 8 or something this year. Really more than anyone in the league, I think.

chris.herring: They are so much damn fun. And they still have a shot at the No. 8 seed, even if we don’t expect that of them.

tchow: No player is an island, but Memphis now is home to Winslow Island AND Waiters Island. Fans with property on both are feeling so smug right now.

neil: I just have a timeshare on Revis Island still.

Politics Podcast: What We Know About The Democratic Primary After Iowa

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












 












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The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast crew considers how the results — so far — of the Iowa caucuses will affect the Democratic primary. The team also checks in on the campaigning underway in New Hampshire and debates the meaning of the Senate’s vote to acquit President Trump.

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.

Our Post-Iowa Primary Forecast Is Up, And Biden’s Chances Are Down

Now that we finally have some clarity on Iowa’s results — with 86 percent of precincts reporting — we’ve turned our primary model back on, including its estimates of the potential fallout from Iowa.

The model shows former Vice President Joe Biden’s chances of winning a majority of pledged delegates being halved — from 43 percent before Iowa to 21 percent now.

Who gains from Biden’s decline? Well, a little bit of everyone. The model thinks Iowa was more good news than bad news for Sen. Bernie Sanders, although it was a somewhat close call. His chances have advanced to 37 percent, from 31 percent before Iowa, making him the most likely person to achieve that majority.

Pete Buttigieg’s chances are also up, to 6 percent from 4 percent before, but even after getting most of the credit for winning Iowa in the model (more about that in a moment), they haven’t improved by as much as you think. That’s because, as I explained in Wednesday night’s post, Buttigieg still has his work cut out for him in building a broader coalition; it’s going to require a big bounce in states and among demographic groups where the former mayor is not currently strong. With that said, Buttigieg is potentially quite competitive in New Hampshire, where our model gives him a 20 percent chance of winning, and that could give him a further boost.

Buttigieg has a 9 percent chance of winning the plurality of pledged delegates. The gap between his plurality and the majority odds reflects how he might be poised to benefit from the field remaining divided between several candidates.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s majority chances are also slightly up, according to our model, having improved to 10 percent from 5 percent before. That’s because in a more chaotic field, with at least one of the front-runners (Biden) potentially falling back into the pack, her roughly 15 percent of the vote in national polls could eventually give her some opportunities, even though none of the next three states look especially promising for her.

But the big winner is … nobody. The chance of there being no delegate majority has increased substantially, to 27 percent from 17 percent before Iowa. For reasons we’ve explained previously, the no-majority scenario isn’t quite the same thing as a contested convention, but the two concepts are closely related.

In running the model, we’re relying on Iowa results as currently reported (as of 5:15 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday afternoon) plus estimates from our friends at The Upshot on the probability that each candidate eventually wins the various vote measures that Iowa tracks. The Upshot now gives Buttigieg about a 98 percent chance of winning the most state delegate equivalents (SDEs) — the measure that the media has traditionally used to declare Iowa winners (and the only measure that Iowa has reported before this year), although it creates a bias toward candidates who perform well in rural areas.

Meanwhile, The Upshot gives Sanders a greater than 99 percent chance to win the first alignment vote — the candidate that voters initially lined up with when they entered their caucus sites. They regard the final alignment popular vote — the candidate that voters wound up with after supporters of nonviable candidates were allowed to realign — as a tossup between Buttigieg and Sanders.

As I explained on Wednesday, we hadn’t totally thought through how to handle the case where different candidates won by different metrics in Iowa. We were slightly surprised, however, at how much emphasis the media put on SDEs as opposed to the popular vote metrics. Since post-primary bounces are largely the result of media coverage, we decided that our formula for predicting bounces should reflect that.

So we looked at how media outlets that are designated as Democratic National Committee debate poll sponsors — a list that includes most of the biggest newspapers, wire services and TV networks — were covering the Iowa results and whether they were emphasizing SDEs, the popular vote measures, or some mix of both. More specifically, we looked at the first few paragraphs1 of the most prominently featured article about the Iowa results on each outlet’s website as of 1 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon.

We found that seven news organizations (The Washington Post, Associated Press, CNN, ABC News, the Des Moines Register, Reuters and USA Today) gave very high or almost exclusive billing to state delegate equivalents.
Four news outlets (The New York Times, CBS News, NBC News and The Wall Street Journal) gave roughly coequal billing to SDEs and the popular vote measures.
Two outlets (Fox News and NPR) were roughly halfway in between, treating SDEs as the main measure but prominently mentioning the popular vote as an alternative.2
No outlets gave more billing to the popular vote
And we ignored one outlet, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, because its most prominent story about Iowa results was an AP story, and the AP was already covered elsewhere.

If you do the math, this works out to roughly 80 percent of the media emphasis being on SDEs and 20 percent on the popular vote. Thus, in calculating the bonus for who won Iowa, we’ll give 80 percent of the bonus to the SDE winner and 10 percent to the winner of each of the popular vote metrics. Overall, given the Upshot’s current probabilities in Iowa, this works out to Buttigieg getting about 85 percent of the credit for winning Iowa, and Sanders getting about 15 percent.

Keep in mind, though, that all of the wackiness around Iowa makes forecasting post-Iowa bounces much harder than usual. So our model might be wrong — and as new polling comes in, it well replace those assumptions, potentially creating big swings in our numbers. We’ll also update our model as results from the state are finalized.

Buttigieg And/Or Sanders Are Going To Win Iowa. What Happens Next?

Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders each led at least one of the three metrics that Iowa Democrats finally released on Tuesday, reflecting the various ways that Iowa counts its caucus votes. State delegate equivalents, the measure that has gotten by far the most attention from the media because it’s traditionally the way that Iowa has counted its vote, showed Buttigieg ahead 27 to 25 percent, with 62 percent of precincts reporting. But Sanders narrowly led in two measures of the popular vote, taken before and after voters were given the opportunity to realign to a new candidate if their original choice was deemed not viable.

If the split verdict holds, it will be an appropriately weird outcome for a weird-as-hell Iowa caucus. But it also comes at a rather awkward time for our forecast model, which tries to anticipate how polls could change after Iowa. The weirdness makes it harder to guess in which direction polls will change and by how much. (For the time being, the model is still frozen until we get more complete Iowa results.)

The basic way the model works once a state finishes voting is this: It makes educated guesses about how each candidate’s standing in national polls and in subsequent states will improve or decline based on how well they did, accounting for both their share of the vote and whether or not they won the state. This performance is then measured relative to “expectations,” which the model defines as national polls, adjusted by regional factors. The fact that Buttigieg did much better in Iowa (27 percent of state delegate equivalents so far) than his national polls might imply (he’s at only 7 percent nationally) would suggest the possibility for a fairly large bounce, for instance — although the model slightly discounts Buttigieg’s performance since Iowa is a Midwestern state and Buttigieg is from the Midwest.

Our research also finds that much (though not all) of the bounce after major states vote is binary, meaning that who wins the state matters a lot. It isn’t necessarily a continuum. So when there are multiple potential definitions of the winner, that creates a problem.

Before I discuss this further, some good news: None of this is going to matter in a few days. That’s because, once we get a few post-Iowa polls, the model will just use those to measure the bounce and discard whatever assumptions we made initially.

In the interim, however our assumptions matter quite a bit. In part, that’s because Buttigieg needs all the bounce that he can get to have a shot at winning the most pledged delegates. Based on pre-Iowa polls of New Hampshire, he trailed Sanders 25 to12 there (and was in fourth place, also behind Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren). While 13 points isn’t a crazy amount to overcome, especially in a state where polls can be as volatile as they are in New Hampshire, it isn’t easy either — especially when Sanders also performed well in Iowa and could also gain more in New Hampshire polls.

And Buttigieg probably needs to win New Hampshire — or come very close to doing so — because the states that follow aren’t good for him. He’s polling at just 6 percent in Nevada and only 4 percent in South Carolina. In other words, it’s highly unlikely, even if Buttigieg does get a big Iowa bounce, that he can win those states (especially South Carolina, given his poor standing with black voters). So he needs to build up enough momentum that he can afford to take losses there — and still remain in a reasonably good position for Super Tuesday.

To get an early read on all of this, we ran through 2,500 simulations of each of the following three scenarios on Tuesday night:

Scenario 1: Iowa results remain exactly as they were initially reported on Tuesday afternoon. In this scenario, we split the winner bonus 50/50 between Sanders and Buttigieg to reflect the competing claims to victory there.
Scenario 2: Sanders slightly improves his position after the rest of the vote is counted, enough that he wins all three measures and gets 100 percent of the winner bonus.
Scenario 3: Buttigieg slightly improves his position after the rest of the vote is counted, winning all three measures and getting 100 percent of the winner bonus.

Here are the chances of each candidate winning New Hampshire under each scenario:

How will Iowa’s final results impact New Hampshire?

Chances of winning the majority of votes in the New Hampshire primary based on three possible scenarios in Iowa, according to 2,500 simulations of the FiveThirtyEight primary forecast

Candidate
Scenario 1: Split Verdict in Iowa
Scenario 2: Sanders wins Iowa
Scenario 3: Buttigieg Wins Iowa




Sanders
74%
89%
57%


Buttigieg
14
4
30


Warren
7
4
7


Biden
5
3
6


Other

As you can see, Sanders is a favorite to win New Hampshire no matter what. It’s really convenient for Sanders that one of his best states in the primary is coming up next. If he’s the unambiguous winner of Iowa he’d be an 89 percent favorite in the model, whereas if Buttigieg wins there, he’d be a 57 percent favorite. Meanwhile, Buttigieg’s chances of winning New Hampshire would be just 4 percent if Sanders is declared the winner in Iowa but would shoot up to 30 percent if he wins Iowa unambiguously.

To be honest, that’s probably too wide a spread. Given how long it’s taken to count Iowa’s vote, many media narratives about the race have already set in. Heck, there might not even be much of an Iowa bounce at all if the caucus results get drowned out of the news cycle. Voters may instead simply have a vague sense that both Buttigieg and Sanders did well, and that sense might not change very much depending on who eventually winds up winning each vote count. This is a pretty annoying edge case.

That said, here’s how each of those three scenarios in Iowa outcome could affect the overall chances a candidate has of winning the majority of pledged delegates:

How will Iowa’s final results impact the overall race?

Chances of winning the majority of pledged delegates based on three possible scenarios in Iowa, according to 2,500 simulations of the FiveThirtyEight primary forecast

Candidate
Scenario 1: Split Verdict in Iowa
Scenario 2: Sanders wins Iowa
Scenario 3: Buttigieg Wins Iowa




Sanders
48%
64%
36%


No Majority
23
16
26


Biden
17
14
21


Buttigieg
5
1
10


Warren
7
6
7


Other

Sanders chances would be 64 percent if he’s deemed the winner of Iowa, but only 36 percent if Buttigieg is instead. Buttigieg’s majority chances on the other hand would be 10 percent if he wins Iowa — again, keep in mind how much ground he has to make up in more diverse states — but just 1 percent if Sanders wins outright. Again, that’s probably too wide a gap, given the realities of the situation in Iowa and the lack of clear headlines there. And keep in mind that we’re talking about the chance of winning a majority of pledged delegates — and there’s an increasing chance that nobody wins one. If Buttigieg wins Iowa, the chances of no candidate winning a majority of pledged delegates shoots up to 26 percent (they were 17 percent before Iowa). They’d also be at 21 percent with a split verdict.

To recap, our process for updating the model will be as follows:

Once we feel we can characterize Iowa with a high degree of confidence, we’ll plug the results into the model and turn it back on. If there are still split winners, then both Sanders and Buttigieg will each get at least some credit for winning the state, although we’re still debating internally exactly what that split should look like.1
At that point, you’ll see the model swing in one of the directions you see above, depending on which scenario we wind up with. It will also react to all the other new data — new endorsements, polls, and so forth — that have been bottlenecked since we turned off the model on Monday afternoon. Note that no matter what, Biden is going to have a big downward swing in his chances.
Finally, once we get post-Iowa polls, the model may react quite strongly to them. We’re expecting Biden to decline in national polls, for instance — if that doesn’t happen, he’ll bounce back to somewhere around where he was before in the forecast (he had a 43 percent chance of a delegate majority before Iowa voted). Maybe Buttigieg shows much more improvement than the model is expecting in Nevada and South Carolina polls. Maybe Sanders, whom the model is expecting to see improve his standing, will decline instead.

Any of this is possible — the range of possibilities is always fairly wide after Iowa, and it’s considerably wider than normal because of all the ambiguities there. So you should expect a lot of turbulence in the forecast over the next few days.

Politics Podcast: Chaos In Iowa

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












 












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In this late-night installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew discusses why the results of the Democratic Iowa caucuses had still not been reported by early Tuesday morning. They also debate what the repercussions could be for Iowa’s first-in-the-nation status and the Democratic primary overall. After we recorded the podcast, the Iowa Democratic Party released further details about what went wrong in reporting the results of the caucuses.

You can also watch the podcast here:

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.

Iowa Might Have Screwed Up The Whole Nomination Process

In trying to build a forecast model of the Democratic primaries, we literally had to think about the entire process from start (Iowa) to finish (the Virgin Islands on June 6). Actually, we had to do more than that. Since the nomination process is sequential — states vote one at a time rather than all at once — we had to determine, empirically, how much the results of one state can affect the rest.

The answer in the case of Iowa is that it matters a lot. Despite its demographic non-representativeness, and the quirks of the caucuses process, the amount of media coverage the state gets makes it far more valuable a prize than you’d assume from the fact that it only accounts for 41 of the Democrats’ 3,979 pledged delegates.

More specifically, we estimate — based on testing how much the results in various states have historically changed the candidates’ position in national polls — that Iowa was the second most-important date on the calendar this year, trailing only Super Tuesday. It was worth the equivalent of almost 800 delegates, about 20 times its actual number.

Which states will produce the biggest bounces?

Expected bounce magnitude according to FiveThirtyEight’s primary model

Relative bounce magnitude


Date
States
Based on delegates
Early state bonus
Combined




Feb. 3
Iowa
3
20
23


Feb. 11
New Hampshire
2
10
12


Feb. 22
Nevada
3
5
8


Feb. 29
South Carolina
3
5
8


Mar. 3
Colorado, Alabama, Utah, Oklahoma, Vermont, Texas, Tennessee, Maine, Virginia, North Carolina, California, American Samoa, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Arkansas
30

30


Mar. 10
Mississippi, Michigan, North Dakota, Washington, Missouri, Idaho, Democrats Abroad
12

12


Mar. 14
Northern Marianas
1

1


Mar. 17
Ohio, Arizona, Florida, Illinois
16

16


Mar. 24
Georgia
5

5


Mar. 29
Puerto Rico
3

3


Apr. 4
Alaska, Hawaii, Wyoming, Louisiana
5

5


Apr. 7
Wisconsin
4

4


Apr. 28
Rhode Island, New York, Delaware, Maryland, Connecticut, Pennsylvania
18

18


May 2
Guam, Kansas
3

3


May 5
Indiana
4

4


May 12
Nebraska, West Virginia
3

3


May 19
Kentucky, Oregon
5

5


June 2
New Mexico, New Jersey, South Dakota, Montana, District of Columbia
8

8


June 6
Virgin Islands
1

1

Everything was a little weird in Iowa this year, however. And there were already some signs that the Iowa bounce — which essentially results from all the favorable media coverage that winning candidates get — might be smaller than normal. Iowa was bracketed by an extremely busy news calendar: President Trump’s impeachment trial both before and after the caucuses, the Super Bowl on Sunday, the State of the Union address on Tuesday. There was not the usual climactic uptick in media coverage around Iowa. From initial indications — to the extent any information at all is reliable at this point — Democratic turnout there wound up being fairly low.

But we weren’t prepared for what actually happened, which is that — as I’m writing this at 3:15 a.m. on Tuesday — the Iowa Democratic Party literally hasn’t released any results from its caucuses. I’m not going to predict what those numbers will eventually be, although early indications are that Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg and perhaps Elizabeth Warren had good results. The point is that the lead story around the 2020 Iowa Democratic caucuses is now — and will forever be — the colossal shitshow around the failure to release results in a timely fashion.

Maybe there will eventually be a decent-sized Iowa bounce despite all of this. But there’s a good chance that the candidates who did well in Iowa get screwed, and the candidates who did poorly there get a mulligan. To repeat: There’s very little importance in a mathematical sense to who wins 41 delegates. Iowa is all about the media narrative it produces and all about momentum, and that momentum, whoever wins, is likely to have been blunted.

Who might this help? Let’s pretend for a moment we don’t have any hints about how the results might have turned out. In fact, let’s pretend that Iowa didn’t happen at all. I reran our forecast model as though the Iowa caucuses were canceled.2 Here’s how that changed each candidate’s chances of getting a delegate majority:

How Iowa’s presence affected Democrats’ odds

Chances of winning a majority of pledged delegates per FiveThirtyEight forecast model on Feb. 3 (pre-Iowa), compared with a version of the model that skips the Iowa caucuses

Candidate
As of our final PRE-IOWA SIMULATIONS ON Monday night
In A HYPOTHETICAL SIMULATION WHERE Iowa didn’t exist




Biden
43%
50%


Sanders
31
24


Warren
5
5


Buttigieg
4



Other




No one
17
20

The presence of Iowa was helpful to Sanders, whose chances of winning a national delegate majority would have been 24 percent without Iowa — as compared to the 31 percent chance that he had with Iowa, as of Monday afternoon. Iowa hurt Biden, however, whose chances of a delegate majority would have been 50 percent without it, rather than 43 percent with it.

And Iowa was extremely helpful to Buttigieg, whose chances of winning the delegate majority were fairly low even with Iowa — keep in mind that he had slipped to third in polls of Iowa and fifth in national polls — but would have been virtually nonexistent (less than 1 percent) without it.

By giving the winning candidates a boost, the presence of Iowa also reduced the chance of an unstructured race and a potential brokered convention. The chance of there being no delegate majority was 17 percent without Iowa, but would have been 20 percent with it.

Granted, none of those changes — say, 24 percent versus 31 percent — are necessarily that large. But that’s partly because, as of Monday afternoon, four or five candidates appeared to have a shot at winning Iowa. For the candidate who actually won Iowa, it would have been a much bigger deal. We estimate that Sanders’s chances of a majority would have shot up to from 31 percent to 58 percent with an Iowa win, Warren’s from 5 percent to 32 percent, and Buttigieg’s from 4 percent to 22 percent.

And in some ways that still discounts Iowa’s impact, because several of the campaigns — for better or worse — built their entire strategy around the state. Would Buttigieg have been a major player in the race without Iowa? Considering his lack of support among black voters, probably not. Would candidates such as Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Julian Castro have dropped out so soon? That’s a harder call, since Harris, Booker and Castro weren’t polling particularly well anywhere. But the Democratic field might have remained a little more diverse.

So we’ve arrived at a point of some ambivalence. On the one hand, candidates such as Buttigieg, who seemingly did well there, are liable to be injured by the muddled storylines in Iowa following the results-reporting disaster on Monday night. On the other hand, it’s not clear why Iowa was afforded so much importance in the first place, and Buttigieg possibly owed his entire presence in the campaign to this quirk in the nomination process. Nonetheless, these were the rules of the game as every candidate understood them. So if Iowa turns out not to matter very much because of the results-reporting snafu, they have every right to be upset.

To be even more blunt: The Iowa Democratic Party’s colossal screw-up in reporting results will potentially have direct effects on the outcome of the nomination process. The failure to report results will almost certainly help Biden, assuming that indications that he performed poorly in Iowa are correct, as they won’t get nearly as much media coverage. And they’ll hurt whichever candidate wins the state — most likely Sanders or Buttigieg. (Although if Sanders winds up finishing in second place or lower, he also might not mind a reduction in the importance of Iowa, especially with one of his best states, New Hampshire, coming up next.)

Furthermore, Iowa is typically a state that winnows the field. But with every candidate either having performed well there, potentially having an excuse for a disappointing finish there, or somewhere in between, it might not do that. Delaying the winnowing process would tangibly increase the chance of a contested convention.

It’s not a good situation for the Democratic Party. And it’s already too late for the damage to be entirely undone, even if Iowa eventually gets its act together.

CORRECTION (Feb. 4, 2020, 8:47 a.m.): An earlier version of this article inaccurately said that Democrats have 3,990 pledged delegates this primary cycle. They have 3,979. Therefore, if Iowa’s delegates were discounted, the remaining total would be 3,938, not 3,949.

89 Different Scenarios For What Things Could Look Like After Iowa

Maybe you’ve seen articles elsewhere detailing the three or four most likely post-Iowa scenarios, full of elegantly-constructed narratives about how the race might unfold.

This article … is not going to be like that. Rather, it’s just going to be a bunch of rather detailed tables generated by our forecast model, outlining what the Democratic nomination race could look like given the order candidates finish in Iowa and the margins of victory. We hope they’re useful for detail-oriented readers over the course of the evening.

First up: Here’s a table showing the post-Iowa odds a candidate has of winning a national delegate majority given who won Iowa and his or her margin of victory. Specifically, 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. We haven’t listed scenarios if they occurred less than 0.5 percent of the time (at least 50 out of 10,000 simulations) in our final model run. Keep in mind that there is some noise in these numbers; we’ll run a full set of simulations late Monday night or Tuesday morning once we have the caucus results.

How Iowa’s results will affect the nomination odds, Part I

Based on winner and margin of victory

chance of winning the majority of delegates overall


Winner▲▼


Margin▲▼


Biden▲▼


Sanders▲▼


Warren▲▼


Buttigieg▲▼


Other▲▼


None▲▼






Biden
large
84%
6%
2%
0%
0%
7%


Biden
medium
75
11
2
1
0
11


Biden
narrow
71
13
2
1
0
12


Buttigieg
large
25
12
1
34
0
28


Buttigieg
medium
33
14
5
20
0
28


Buttigieg
narrow
36
20
4
15
0
25


Klobuchar
medium
38
21
3
2
11
24


Klobuchar
narrow
36
28
7
1
7
21


Sanders
large
17
67
2
0
0
14


Sanders
medium
25
55
2
0
0
17


Sanders
narrow
32
46
2
1
0
18


Warren
large
19
9
43
1
0
29


Warren
medium
32
9
33
1
0
24


Warren
narrow
32
16
24
2
0
26

Specifically, 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 an 0.5 percent chance of occurring.

The most definitive outcome of the night — albeit a somewhat unlikely one — would be a Joe Biden landslide, which would put his majority chances at 84 percent. Even a narrow Biden win would leave his opponents in fairly bad shape, though.

For a Bernie Sanders win, the margin matters a bit more. A medium-to-large Sanders win could boost his chances of winning the delegate majority to above 50 percent. A narrow win might leave him as the front-runner, but would keep things more competitive.

Wins by candidates other than Biden or Sanders — meaning, Elizbeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg or Amy Klobuchar — would scramble the picture, significantly increasing the chance of no one winning a delegate majority, possibly meaning a contested convention. Of course, any of these candidates winning Iowa would also massively improve their own chances overall. But they’re far enough behind in other states that they’d still have some work to do. For instance, a medium-sized Warren win would give her about a 1-in-3 chance of winning the majority, with Biden also at 1-in-3 and Sanders’s chances significantly diminished but not hopeless.

To add a layer of complication, here’s what you get if you specify the margin of victory and also who the second-place candidate is:

How Iowa’s results will affect the nomination odds, Part II

Based on winner, margin of victory and second-place candidate

chance of winning the majority of delegates overall


winner▲▼


margin▲▼


2nd▲▼


Biden▲▼


Sanders▲▼


Warren▲▼


Buttigieg▲▼


Other▲▼


None▲▼






Biden
large
Buttigieg
87%
6%
1%
0%
0%
6%


Biden
large
Klobuchar
80
8
2
0
0
11


Biden
large
Sanders
84
6
2
1
0
7


Biden
large
Warren
82
4
5
0
0
8


Biden
medium
Buttigieg
78
8
2
2
0
11


Biden
medium
Klobuchar
77
13
3
2
0
5


Biden
medium
Sanders
75
14
1
0
0
10


Biden
medium
Warren
74
6
4
0
0
16


Biden
narrow
Buttigieg
74
8
2
4
0
13


Biden
narrow
Sanders
72
16
1
0
0
10


Biden
narrow
Warren
66
8
8
0
0
18


Buttigieg
large
Biden
34
8
1
30
0
27


Buttigieg
large
Sanders
17
16
2
34
1
31


Buttigieg
large
Warren
24
10
0
37
0
29


Buttigieg
medium
Biden
41
9
4
17
0
28


Buttigieg
medium
Sanders
30
19
3
19
0
29


Buttigieg
medium
Warren
30
10
9
26
0
25


Buttigieg
narrow
Biden
51
13
2
15
0
20


Buttigieg
narrow
Sanders
27
28
4
15
1
26


Buttigieg
narrow
Warren
21
16
12
18
0
33


Sanders
large
Biden
21
64
2
1
0
13


Sanders
large
Buttigieg
15
71
1
0
0
13


Sanders
large
Klobuchar
11
69
0
0
1
19


Sanders
large
Warren
11
69
3
0
0
17


Sanders
medium
Biden
29
53
2
0
0
14


Sanders
medium
Buttigieg
20
59
1
1
0
20


Sanders
medium
Klobuchar
20
59
0
0
0
20


Sanders
medium
Warren
23
50
5
0
0
22


Sanders
narrow
Biden
37
44
2
0
0
17


Sanders
narrow
Buttigieg
26
48
1
3
0
21


Sanders
narrow
Klobuchar
34
48
0
0
0
17


Sanders
narrow
Warren
24
51
6
0
0
19


Warren
large
Biden
25
4
48
1
0
22


Warren
large
Sanders
12
16
40
0
0
32


Warren
medium
Biden
40
7
31
1
0
21


Warren
medium
Buttigieg
15
8
43
4
0
30


Warren
medium
Sanders
33
10
31
1
0
24


Warren
narrow
Biden
44
11
21
0
0
24


Warren
narrow
Buttigieg
30
10
23
8
0
28


Warren
narrow
Sanders
25
24
24
1
0
26

Specifically, 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 an 0.5 percent chance of occurring.

You can see that Sanders and Biden generally wouldn’t mind if Buttigieg or Klobuchar finished in second place, as they are the furthest behind in national polls.

Another fun scenario from the table is what happens if the polls are exactly right, resulting in a narrow Sanders victory with Biden in second place. That would make Sanders the front-runner overall, but not by much, with a 44 percent chance versus 37 percent for Biden.

Buttigieg and Warren finishing first and second in some order would produce the most chaotic outcomes, with at least four candidates still having a plausible shot at the nomination and the “no majority” scenario also still very possible.

Finally, here is a chart showing post-Iowa outcomes based on the order of finish of the top three candidates. I’m going to drop the margin of victory criteria for this one since that produces too many scenarios to keep track of.

How Iowa’s results will affect the nomination odds, Part III

Based on winner, second and third place candidate

chance of winning the majority of delegates overall


winner▲▼


2nd▲▼


3rd▲▼


Biden▲▼


sanders▲▼


warren▲▼


buttigieg▲▼


Other▲▼


None▲▼






Biden
Buttigieg
Klobuchar
83%
5%
0%
1%
0%
11%


Biden
Buttigieg
Sanders
80
9
1
2
0
9


Biden
Buttigieg
Warren
79
4
3
2
0
12


Biden
Klobuchar
Sanders
72
10
3
1
0
14


Biden
Sanders
Buttigieg
77
13
1
1
0
8


Biden
Sanders
Klobuchar
73
15
0
0
1
9


Biden
Sanders
Warren
78
9
2
0
0
10


Biden
Warren
Buttigieg
77
4
6
1
0
12


Biden
Warren
Klobuchar
76
4
4
0
0
16


Biden
Warren
Sanders
73
6
6
0
0
14


Buttigieg
Biden
Sanders
43
11
2
18
0
26


Buttigieg
Biden
Warren
42
10
4
19
0
25


Buttigieg
Sanders
Biden
30
20
2
19
1
28


Buttigieg
Sanders
Klobuchar
19
19
4
28
0
30


Buttigieg
Sanders
Warren
17
24
5
26
0
29


Buttigieg
Warren
Biden
24
7
12
30
0
28


Buttigieg
Warren
Sanders
28
16
5
21
0
30


Sanders
Biden
Buttigieg
30
54
1
1
0
14


Sanders
Biden
Klobuchar
26
56
2
1
1
15


Sanders
Biden
Warren
27
56
2
0
0
14


Sanders
Buttigieg
Biden
23
59
1
2
0
16


Sanders
Buttigieg
Klobuchar
13
67
0
1
0
19


Sanders
Buttigieg
Warren
16
64
2
0
0
19


Sanders
Klobuchar
Biden
21
62
0
0
1
17


Sanders
Klobuchar
Buttigieg
19
66
0
0
0
14


Sanders
Klobuchar
Warren
16
54
0
0
0
30


Sanders
Warren
Biden
20
58
4
1
0
17


Sanders
Warren
Buttigieg
15
57
5
0
0
23


Sanders
Warren
Klobuchar
17
62
5
0
0
16


Warren
Biden
Buttigieg
42
5
31
1
0
21


Warren
Biden
Sanders
37
9
31
0
0
22


Warren
Buttigieg
Biden
27
9
30
3
0
30


Warren
Buttigieg
Sanders
14
10
43
5
0
29


Warren
Sanders
Biden
25
15
32
0
0
28


Warren
Sanders
Buttigieg
27
19
28
1
0
26

Scenarios are only listed if they had at least an 0.5 percent chance of occurring.

This isn’t uncovering too much that you couldn’t have gleaned from the other charts, but note that Biden’s chances could fall to as low as 13 percent in some scenarios if he finishes outside the top 3.

Also note that the model thinks Buttigieg and Klobuchar really need a win outright, as they remain far behind the front-runners in national polls. Finishing a solid second in Iowa might leave open some possibility of their winning the nomination after a long slog, perhaps at a contested convention. But it would make winning via the majority route hard. Warren is slightly more viable with second-place finishes, however, especially if Buttigieg is the winner.