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Election Update: Why Warren Needs To Play To Win — And That Includes Beating Sanders

We’ve officially entered silly season in the Democratic primary, which means we’re at the point where you can get pretty far by just stating the obvious. So here are a few rather obvious truths about the Democratic primary:

Only one candidate can be nominated.
Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, two of the more likely people to be nominated, have heavily overlapping bases of support.
But Warren narrowly trails Sanders in the national polls (both candidates trail Joe Biden) and Sanders is perceived as having momentum.
There are less than three weeks to go until Iowa.

What might you expect to happen under circumstances like these? Well, you’d probably expect the Warren campaign to become less risk-averse. If, for example, it had a damaging piece of opposition research on Sanders, now might be the ideal time to drop it. You’d disrupt the current, good-for-Sanders-and-not-so-great-for-you news cycle and shake things up a bit. But there would also be just enough time to pivot to a more positive message in the final week or so before Iowa.

Of course going negative can be risky, for any number of reasons. But campaigns have to assess risk and reward — and campaigns in third place have to take more risks. Virtually all campaigns show some ability to throw a few elbows when needed, combined with also driving an affirmative message. In primaries, the positive messages mostly prevail — after all, everybody’s in the same party. But primaries can also get really nasty, and this one has been relatively tame by comparison.

So some of the assessments of Warren’s recent strategy toward Sanders have seemed off-kilter to me. For instance, people on Twitter — where both candidates have lots of support — seem shocked that Warren would escalate conflict against Sanders, first over the relatively minor matter of a script that Sanders volunteers were using that described Warren as a candidate of the “elite,” and later, over the more serious accusation that Sanders allegedly told Warren that a woman couldn’t be elected president.1

In fact, this is all pretty normal at this point in a presidential campaign — especially for a candidate in Warren’s situation. And there’s even some initial evidence that her strategy is working! Voters in our post-debate poll with Ipsos gave Warren the highest grade of any candidate for her debate performance — which mostly featured a positive, policy-oriented message along with a couple of chilly moments between her and Sanders. Meanwhile perceptions of Warren’s electability improved among voters in the poll after the debate, while Sanders’s favorability ratings worsened.

More nuanced analyses of the Sanders-Warren conflict suggest that maintaining a nonaggression pact would be mutually beneficial because otherwise Biden could run away with the nomination. But the word “mutually” is debatable. I’d argue nonaggression toward Warren is pretty clearly in the best interest of Sanders, who was in the stronger position than Warren heading into the debate and who would probably prefer to focus on Biden. But it’s probably not beneficial to Warren. Any scenario that doesn’t involve Warren winning Iowa will leave her in a fairly rough position — and winning Iowa means beating Sanders there.

Let’s take a look at the results of 10,000 simulations from Wednesday night’s run of our forecast model, which accounts for the effects that Iowa could have on subsequent states. Below are the results of simulations showing all the possible ways the top four candidates in Iowa — Biden, Sanders, Warren, and Pete Buttigieg — could finish, and the subsequent effect this would have on Warren’s chances of eventually winning the majority or plurality of pledged delegates. (You can read more about how the model works here; we’ve put in a lot of thought about how to measure bounces, as well as how the various candidates’ bases of support overlap with one another. Note that for purposes of this article, I ignored candidates beyond the top four, although some of them — most notably Amy Klobuchar — have outside chances in Iowa.)

Warren’s best- and worst-case Iowa scenarios

How the top four national candidates could finish in Iowa, according to FiveThirtyEight’s primary forecast, as of Jan. 15, 2020

Order of finish*
Warren’s chances of a delegate…


Warren
Sanders
Biden
Buttigieg
Majority
Plurality




1
3
4
2
63%
67%


1
4
2
3
55
59


1
3
2
4
54
59


1
4
3
2
52
58


1
2
4
3
50
61


1
2
3
4
50
56


2
4
3
1
17
21


2
3
4
1
16
20


3
2
4
1
8
12


2
1
3
4
8
11


3
4
2
1
8
11


2
4
1
3
8
10


2
3
1
4
6
8


3
1
4
2
6
7


2
1
4
3
5
10


3
2
1
4
4
5


3
1
2
4
3
5


4
3
2
1
3
5


4
1
3
2
3
5


3
4
1
2
2
3


4
2
3
1
2
3


4
3
1
2
1
2


4
1
2
3
1
2


4
2
1
3

* Does not consider other candidates, who may finish in the top 4 in some simulations.

No surprise, but by far the most important consideration for Warren is that she wins Iowa herself. Case in point: The worst winning scenario for Warren — where the order of finish is Warren-Sanders-Biden-Buttigieg — is still about three times better for her in terms of her chances of eventually winning a delegate majority than the best losing scenario, which is Buttigieg-Warren-Biden-Sanders.

The next-most-important consideration for Warren — although it’s an order of magnitude less important than whether Warren herself wins — is whether Buttigieg wins Iowa if she doesn’t. Because he’s the weakest of the four front-runners in polling in states beyond Iowa, a Buttigieg win would be easiest for Warren (or Sanders or Biden) to tolerate.

But if Warren had to choose between Biden and Sanders winning Iowa, it’s not clear which she’d prefer. On the one hand, Biden is in a stronger position nationally than Sanders, so giving him any kind of running start in Iowa would make him harder to beat. On the other hand, lanes do matter to some degree, and our model assumes (with plenty of evidence in the polling data) that a lot of the gains that Sanders might realize in his Iowa bounce could come at Warren’s expense; he’d essentially have won the progressive semifinal.

If you look at the scenarios in detail, a lot of fairly nuanced questions involving the exact order of the top four finishers come into play. (To take a subtle example: While Warren might not mind Buttigieg winning Iowa, she also might not mind him doing really badly there, badly enough that he dropped out, since Buttigieg voters often have Warren ranked relatively highly as a second choice option.) That said, when looking at the table, keep in mind that the sample sizes are fairly small for some of the scenarios, so in some instances, there’s a fair bit of noise in the data.

Bottom line: Warren’s job is to figure out how to win Iowa, or failing that, to finish second to Buttigieg there. That inherently involves beating Sanders — and Biden. Whether she’s pursuing the right strategy to achieve that goal is another question and beyond the scope of the model.

As for our overall forecast, it remains largely unchanged from previous days. Biden is the most likely winner, with a 41 percent chance of a delegate majority, followed by Sanders at 23 percent, Warren at 13 percent and Buttigieg at 8 percent, with a 15 percent chance no one wins a majority.

The forecast doesn’t yet include any post-debate polling — the poll I mentioned earlier that we conducted with Ipsos did not include any horse-race questions and so does not factor into the model. The model will be relatively aggressive about accounting for post-debate polling once we get some, however, so stay tuned.

Politics Podcast: The Candidates Took On Electability In Their Final Pre-Iowa Debate

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












 












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In a late-night installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew reacts to the final Democratic primary debate before the Iowa caucuses. The candidates spent time debating foreign policy and whether a woman can beat President Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

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.

Election Update: Two New Polls Show Biden’s Upside Scenario

With a mix of relatively strong and relatively weak polls for each of the major candidates, the top line of our 2020 Democratic primary forecast has been roughly unchanged over the past several days.

In a race without a clear favorite, former Vice President Joe Biden remains the front-runner, with a 39 percent chance of winning a majority of pledged delegates. He’s followed by Sen. Bernie Sanders with a 23 percent chance, Sen. Elizabeth Warren with a 13 percent chance and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg with a 10 percent chance. The chance that no one will win a majority of pledged delegates is 14 percent. All of those figures are within 1 percentage point of when I last wrote about the forecast on Saturday.

The twist, though, is that this time Biden’s strongest new polls — at least, in terms of how much they helped or hurt him in the model — were in Iowa and New Hampshire, whereas he got middling numbers in new polls of Nevada and California (along with a not-particularly-great set of national numbers).

In a Monmouth University poll of Iowa released on Monday, Biden led the pack with 24 percent of the vote, followed by 18 percent for Sanders, 17 percent for Buttigieg and 15 percent for Warren. Meanwhile, an RKM Research and Communications poll of New Hampshire, conducted for Franklin Pierce University and the Boston Herald, had Biden ahead with 26 percent of the vote there, leading Sanders at 22, Warren at 18 and Buttigieg at 7.

None of that puts Biden in a spectacular position. But the conventional wisdom (at least as espoused by prediction markets) seems to assume that Sanders is considerably more likely than Biden to win in Iowa and New Hampshire. That isn’t really true based on the polls in each state, however. Of the three most recent Iowa polls, for instance, Biden was tied for the lead in one and led outright in another, the same as Sanders. Our model essentially regards Biden and Sanders as co-favorites in each of the first two states, with Warren and Buttigieg also having decent chances.

And if Biden does win the first two states, he’d be in a very strong position, with a 92 percent chance of winning a majority of pledged delegates and a 95 percent chance of winning a plurality.1 On average in such scenarios, Biden would win 2,747 of the possible 3,979 pledged delegates and 50 of the 57 nominating contests.

So as much as we like to emphasize the uncertainty in the outlook, scenarios that involve Biden winning do come up more often than those for other candidates. And some of those scenarios involve Biden winning the nomination easily.

Others could involve a split outcome in the first two states. What if Biden wins either Iowa or New Hampshire but not both? He’d be the favorite overall, but that could lead to a reasonably close race. If he won Iowa but lost New Hampshire, Biden would have a 56 percent chance of a pledged delegate majority and a 67 percent chance of a plurality. The reverse scenario — where Biden loses Iowa but wins New Hampshire — would be slightly better for him, giving him a 66 percent chance of a majority and a 76 percent chance of a plurality.

Make sure to check out FiveThirtyEight’s Democratic primary forecast in full; you can also see all the 2020 primary polls we’ve collected, including national polls , Iowa polls , New Hampshire polls , Nevada polls and South Carolina polls .

Will The Last Debate Before Iowa Shake Up The 2020 Race?

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

sarahf (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): This is the first debate of 2020 and the last debate before the voting starts in Iowa in less than three weeks. There are six candidates (the smallest debate stage yet), and we’ve finally published our primary forecast (!!!), which shows the field (especially in Iowa) is pretty wide open.

So how are you thinking about tonight’s debate? Do you think it has the potential to really shake things up?

clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): I think the big story on Monday — and potentially the big story of the debate — is what’s going on with the rivalry between Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. First, there is the Sanders campaign’s talking points that reportedly had volunteers paint Warren as “the candidate of the elite.” And then a story leaked on Monday that’s pretty damn unflattering to Sanders, claiming he told Warren he didn’t think a woman could win the presidency. So … I would say there’s some jostling on the progressive end of the spectrum that could play out tonight!

ameliatd (Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, senior writer): Definitely. One thing I’ll be watching for is whether some of the tacit alliances we’ve seen between the candidates start to break down. That story really did not reflect well on Sanders. On the other hand, it’s generally risky for women to go on the offensive in debates like these, so it might be a little tricky for Warren to turn that to her advantage.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): Yeah, it seems like the theme of this debate is somewhat inevitably going to be SANDERS-WARREN BATTLE. Unless they really do decide to turn the other cheek.

clare.malone: I mean, I do think the Warren people have been savvier about dropping opposition research like this.

natesilver: That’s a pretty serious oppo drop.

clare.malone: Sanders’s defense is generally “the mainstream media is stirring up conflict.”

Which is true, partially, in the sense that the media is the one publishing this stuff, but there are, indeed, real tensions between those two campaigns!

natesilver: Like, 95 percent of these oppo drops are dumb as fuck, concerning things that ordinarily voters couldn’t possibly care about. But this would be a big deal if it’s somehow confirmed or if Warren repeats the accusation herself.

sarahf: Yeah, it’s amazing how fast the news cycle moves, I had thought the situation with Iran would be the dominant thread of conversation tonight, but agree that between the Selzer & Co. Iowa poll that put Sanders in first in Iowa, and now the breakdown of Warren and Sanders’s truce to not attack each other, that will be a big part of tonight’s debate. And going in, it doesn’t seem great for Sanders …

ameliatd: Warren could really benefit from getting some more support from lefty Democrats who might be undecided or mostly seem to be sticking with Sanders. But if this accusation comes off as a cheap shot from Warren, I think that could hurt her. Or at least, not endear her further to those on the left.

clare.malone: Sanders’s support is pretty sticky, though, so it’s hard for me to see her winning over any of his supporters. Honestly, at this point, I think she has to worry about losing her supporters to Sanders or Pete Buttigieg — or even Joe Biden.

natesilver: Part of the dynamic is that Sanders hasn’t really been considered a front-runner. But now the media is covering him like one, even though it’s not really clear how much has actually changed in his candidacy. (If you look at the odds in our primary model — where we ran older forecasts retroactively before we launched — Sanders’s chances of winning the majority of pledged delegates have been pretty steady since November.)

sarahf: So let’s say tonight is the Sanders “wine cave” edition, where he’s at the center of attacks like Buttigieg was in the December debate. That debate seemed to have actually dampened some enthusiasm for Buttigieg — for instance, he fell pretty substantially in that Selzer poll from where he was in November. Do we see Sanders as the candidate tonight who has the most at stake? What about Biden? He is after all, the front-runner in our model even if he’s not the clear favorite to win; i.e., he’s still an underdog relative to the rest of the field.

natesilver: So on the one hand, I agree that Sanders’s support is likely to be pretty sticky, as Clare puts it. There’s evidence from polls that his supporters are the most firmly committed to any one candidate. But on the other hand, he hasn’t really gotten the same front-runner-type scrutiny that Warren DID get at some points this fall. So whether he holds up, once that level of scrutiny is applied, is very much up in the air.

ameliatd: And it’s not a low-stakes debate for Warren either, because she’s been actively trying to revitalize her campaign. When I was in Iowa on a reporting trip a few weeks ago, she was kind of trying to hit the “reset” button by hammering her core message on corruption and the economy. And of course, she’s now campaigning with Julián Castro.

clare.malone: I mean, we’ll just have to wait and see what the attacks are. I’m not entirely sure Warren, for instance, would go for “Bernie is sexist” on stage. That just doesn’t seem like her temperament. I would expect more of an attack on Sanders from Warren to be like, “his plans are implausible and therefore, bad for the general election.” But then again, he could also push back (as he’s been doing on the campaign trail), saying that HE is actually the most electable in a general. And there’s some truth to it, especially in comparison to Warren. Our polling with Ipsos shows the same thing — voters generally rate Sanders next after Biden in terms of his ability to defeat Trump.

Also, Sanders benefits from everyone kinda knowing what his thing is — socialism, baby! — which takes some of the sting out of “he’s too far out there!!” attacks. The brand is strong, as the kids say.

sarahf: Right, but to Amelia’s point, tonight could be a big night for Warren. She was only 3 points behind Sanders in that Selzer poll, which is a good sign for her considering her national numbers had dipped in late November and through December. And you can already see the slightest of upticks already in our national polling average:

geoffrey.skelley (Geoffrey Skelley, elections analyst): Yeah, that Selzer poll had Sanders in the lead in Iowa as we’ve discussed, but then that Monmouth poll out on Monday showed Biden in the lead with 24 percent in Iowa and Sanders in second at 18 percent, suggesting that Iowa is very wide open and very difficult to predict.

clare.malone: Like the state itself!

sarahf: Right, Biden is either in first or fourth, depending on which poll you look at.

geoffrey.skelley: So far, the debates haven’t seemed to have affected the polls all that much, at least not since Sen. Kamala Harris’s surge after the June debate.

The first Democratic debate shifted polls the most

Average change* in national polls and the candidates who moved the most after the first four Democratic primary debates

Debate
Avg. Change
Biggest gainer

Biggest loser





June 26-27
+/- 2.4
Harris
+8.3
Biden
-6.5


July 30-31
0.9
Warren
+3.0
Harris
-3.0


Sept. 12
1.1
Warren
+4.4
Sanders
-2.0


Oct. 15
1.0
Buttigieg
+1.6
Warren
-3.5

*Average change in national polls evaluates the average absolute change in polling averages before and after each debate across the 10 candidates with the highest post-debate polling average. Polling averages were calculated using national polls conducted during the two weeks before and two weeks after each debate.

Source: Polls

Although I haven’t run the numbers the same way for the November and December debates, one look at the polls suggests there wasn’t a dramatic shakeup after those events, either. Now, tonight’s debate could be different since there are fewer candidates and voting is right around the corner. But then again, maybe not.

clare.malone: My spidey sense is that this debate will matter, especially to Iowans. These people are tuned in to a deranged degree!

natesilver: And polls also find that a high proportion of Iowans haven’t yet made their final decision.

clare.malone: Right.

sarahf: So if many Iowans haven’t made their final decision … how many do you think are actively considering Amy Klobuchar or Tom Steyer?

Klobuchar didn’t do as well in that Selzer poll as I thought she might, given how respondents in our poll with Ipsos rated her December debate performance. Granted, a lot of time has passed since Dec. 19, but there also haven’t been that many polls.

And then Steyer had a kind of weird surge in South Carolina and Nevada? It’s too soon to really make sense of what’s happening there (although he has spent a ton of money on TV ads).

natesilver: Klobuchar is actually in a pretty weird place. She’s at 6.6 percent in our Iowa polling average, but usually candidates either rise up to at least ~15 percent in Iowa — which matters, given how the caucus process itself works — or fall back into the low single digits.

clare.malone: The Steyer stuff is interesting in the sense that yes, he’s doing well in polls, probably because of advertising in those two states that have fewer ads in general than, say, Iowa or New Hampshire. But other candidates are going to start to get into that media-market scrum. Let’s see how much those numbers stick for him.

What I will say, though, is that the ads themselves cannily talk about the economy, not impeachment or climate change, subjects with which Steyer is more closely associated.

ameliatd: Steyer has been kind of defensive, too, about the fact that he made the debate at all — the implication being that he’s only there because he spent a ton of money on ads. That makes him a potential target, particularly for someone like Sanders or Warren. But attacking him also runs the risk of making him look like a more serious threat, so it’s somewhat complicated.

clare.malone: I think he won’t really be a big factor, tbh.

natesilver: I just don’t think Steyer is very interesting.

ameliatd: Right, maybe the other candidates won’t think it’s worth their time to question why he’s even there.

natesilver: So long as he’s at 3 percent in Iowa and New Hampshire, I don’t really care where he is in Nevada and South Carolina.

clare.malone: I mean, I don’t think he’s half bad in debates! I just think the scrum will go a little more the Sanders/Warren and the Buttigieg/Klobuchar.

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): We touched on this a bit earlier, but Biden is currently winning the race for the nomination. And I think, as a result, you are seeing blunter criticism of him. Buttigieg and Sanders have both taken Biden to task for his vote for the Iraq War, and Sanders has also criticized Biden’s record on issues of racial justice.

I’m not sure his rivals will attack Biden on Tuesday, but that’s the thing I’m watching most closely: Does anyone decide this is the last real chance to take on the person mostly likely to win? I have been confused by how much Warren’s allies are attacking Buttigieg, and now it seems like Warren is attacking Sanders — but Biden is winning!

It feels like 2016 a bit — Christie attacking Rubio instead of Trump — what is the point?

natesilver: If somehow Biden gets through the debate, and all the focus is on Sanders vs. Warren, Buttigieg, etc. — that seems like a very fortunate outcome for the former vice president.

ameliatd: Yes, Biden clearly benefited from being able to float above the fray in the December debate. And the other candidates mostly let him do that, which was a little weird.

natesilver: Biden does have a tendency to cause trouble for himself, of course.

It’s also probably worth noting that his relatively smooth debate in December has been followed up by quite a few endorsements, etc. Party elites seem to have fewer concerns than they once did about his steadiness as a candidate.

perry: Harris was kind of limited in taking on Biden, in my view, since she will be high on the VP list. But I don’t think Biden is going to pick Buttigieg, Warren or Sanders for VP, so they have very little incentive to hold back. Buttigieg, in particular, has been very good at attacking people — it would be interesting to see if one was the one to push the Iraq issue, because Biden seems, at times, unwilling to concede he voted for the war.

clare.malone: Yeah, I gotta say, that whole thing is really weird.

John Kerry, a Biden surrogate, was trying to say that other candidates were misrepresenting his record, but it’s clear as day that Biden voted for the Iraq War. If you want to complicate the narrative and say it was a mistake, and you were misled — fine. But that whole talking point is weak sauce, in my opinion.

sarahf: OK, this is our last debate before the voting starts in Iowa, and as I said at the outset of the chat — it’s pretty much a four-way race with Biden, Sanders, Warren and Buttigieg all projected to get some delegates. Biden is in the lead in our forecast, but as we’ve said in our chat, a lot of Iowans are still on the fence. What will you be keeping a close eye on tonight to see if it moves the needle at all?

perry: Biden seems poised to win the nomination — perhaps even Iowa. I’ll be watching to see whether any of the other top three really take him on — and if they do, on what issues?

ameliatd: I will be interested to see, as Perry mentioned, if Biden’s Iraq war vote — and his strange unwillingness to admit to it — gets turned against him, or if he can turn the general foreign policy conversation/discussion of what’s happening with Iran in his favor. Because in general, that’s an issue where he has a clear advantage over the other candidates.

clare.malone: I mean, it’s trite, but I’ll be curious to see what Warren and Sanders do on stage, given the conflict they’ve had. And I’ll be curious to see if Sanders, in particular, challenges Biden on a general-election electability front.

natesilver: Repeating myself a bit, but it feels to me like Sanders is liable to play a central role in this debate with perceptions that he’s now a front-runner, and those sorts of debates tend to be pretty high stakes.

ameliatd: Basically, tonight comes down to who’s taking the gloves off, and who are they going after?

Politics Podcast: A Four-Way Pileup 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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The latest polling in Iowa shows a tight, four-way race just three weeks away from caucus day. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew updates their thinking about who is likely to win there, and about how a win in Iowa could affect the rest of the primary. They also discuss Sen. Cory Booker’s decision to drop out of the Democratic primary and recent polling showing Tom Steyer gaining significantly in Nevada and 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.

Election Update: Sanders Now Leads A Wide-Open Iowa Race

Welcome to your first FiveThirtyEight Election Update of the 2020 primary cycle! This is a column in which we’ll talk about the primary race through the lens of our forecast model, which we released earlier this week. Sometimes it will be rather brief, and we’ll quickly run through the latest data — while other times, we’ll go into a deep dive on upcoming states or some aspect of how the model works.

We don’t necessarily plan to publish an Election Update as a result of each single new poll, but Friday’s Selzer & Co. poll of the Iowa caucuses, published by the Des Moines Register and CNN, warrants an exception and did have a somewhat material effect on the model.

Why is it worth focusing on this one individual poll — something that we’d usually advise against?

Selzer & Co. is a very good pollster, one of the best in the business.
There haven’t been a lot of polls of Iowa recently.
Iowa is pretty darn important, at least in terms of how our model thinks about the race, with the potential to produce fairly large bounces that will affect the rest of the calendar.

The poll showed Bernie Sanders ahead with 20 percent of the vote, followed by Elizabeth Warren at 17 percent, Pete Buttigieg at 16 percent and Joe Biden at 15 percent. This is a reasonably big shift from the previous Selzer & Co. poll, in November, which had shown Buttigieg ahead with 25 percent of the vote. (Although, for reasons I’ll get to in a moment, the model views the latest poll as more neutral than negative for Buttigieg.) Amy Klobuchar was next in the poll at 6 percent, but that was unchanged from November despite a couple of debate performances since November that voters rated strongly in our polling with Ipsos. Andrew Yang was sixth at 5 percent.

So then, how did the new poll affect our model? Here’s what our current national numbers look like:

Biden remains the most likely candidate to get a delegate majority, with a 38 percent chance, followed by Sanders at 24 percent, Warren at 13 percent, and Buttigieg at 10 percent. There’s also a 14 percent chance that no one wins a majority, which could potentially lead to a contested convention.

But those numbers do represent an improvement for Sanders and Warren and a decline for Biden. Here’s a before-and-after comparison:

How a new Iowa poll affected our numbers

Candidates’ before-and-after chances of winning a majority of pledged delegates following the Selzer & Co. Iowa Poll on Jan. 10, according to FiveThirtyEight’s primary forecast

Candidate
Last model run before Selzer & Co. poll
Current forecast




Biden
41%
38%


Sanders
22
24


Warren
11
13


Buttigieg
10
10


No majority
14
14

Current forecast as of Jan. 11 at 12 p.m. ET

Biden’s majority chances fell by 3 percentage points, from 41 percent to 38 percent, while those of Sanders and Warren each gained 2 percentage points. Buttigieg’s chances were unchanged.

I really like having a model at times like this because it allows for a fairly rigorous and objective answer to the question: How much should I update my priors as a result of this new piece of information? If you’re just winging it, it’s super easy to screw that up in either direction, either dismissing new data as being “an outlier,” etc. — or claiming that the new data has massively inverted the trajectory of the race when it probably hasn’t. (The latter is usually the more common mistake in media coverage of the campaigns since it makes for more dramatic headlines.)

In FiveThirtyEight model terms, swings of this magnitude — Biden falling from 41 percent to 38 percent — are a relatively big deal. They will likely be on the high end of the shifts you see as a result of a single state poll, with the possible exception of final polls conducted on the eve of a primary or caucus. (Let me back up with a caveat: I think that this will be on the high end of poll-induced swings based on what we’ve seen in our past general-election models, but since the primary model is a new product for us, I’m not quite sure.)

At the same time, if this poll has completely upended your view of the race, then — I’m trying to put this constructively — you need to go back and add a little more rigor to your mental model of the primaries. Iowa still has four highly plausible winners; that was true both before and after the poll. Our model has Sanders (with a 29 percent chance) and Biden (also with a 29 percent chance) as being a bit more likely than the others to win, but it’s not really much of an edge. (We have Buttigieg’s chances at 22 percent and Warren’s at 16 percent.) Perhaps the candidate who had the most reason to be disappointed by the new poll was Klobuchar. Making a very late surge to win Iowa is not completely out of the question — Rick Santorum did it in 2012 — but we have her chances down to 2 percent.

Biden remains the most likely overall winner of the delegate race, meanwhile, with Sanders in the next-best position. That’s because Biden, leading in national polls, would be awfully hard to catch if he won Iowa. For the other three candidates, there would be the question of whether the Iowa bounce would be enough to propel them past Biden, with Sanders being in the best position to do so because he’s second in national polls and because his polling is also relatively strong in both New Hampshire and Nevada.

It’s also worth keeping in mind that we do have some other recent information about Iowa apart from this poll. A YouGov poll of Iowa released last weekend showed a three-way tie between Biden, Sanders and Buttigieg. And our model also makes inferences about candidates’ standing in Iowa based on trends in national polls. That’s the reason the model didn’t have Buttigieg’s chances falling as a result of this poll; it had already anticipated that his numbers would decline as a result of his slump in national polls. Conversely, even though the numbers didn’t seem that terrific for Warren on the surface — her 17 percent in the new Selzer & Co. poll is only a 1-point improvement from her 16 percent in November — it comes during a period when she’d been declining in national polls. So it’s a bullish sign for her campaign that she’s still one of the front-runners in Iowa.

By the way, “one of the front-runners” is about as precise as it’s possible to realistically be in Iowa. Our forecast will get a bit more accurate as more polls come in and as the Feb. 3 caucuses approach, but the model assumes that caucuses are awfully hard to poll, which means there are high margins of error.

That’s especially so in Iowa given some of the quirks of the caucus process, the most important of which is that in each precinct, voters for candidates who don’t have at least 15 percent of the vote must “realign” themselves to candidates who do. Iowa will also release three different ways of counting its vote. More about that stuff in future Election Updates. And although I’m not going to get into it today, some of the data from the poll that the model doesn’t use — like favorability ratings and second-choice preferences and how many voters have firmly decided on a candidate (not many, although Sanders supporters are something of an exception) — should contribute to the sense that the race is open-ended.

All of that is a long-winded way of saying there’s a lot of ambiguity about what will happen in Iowa. Through that fog, our model picked up some good news for Sanders and Warren and some bad news for Biden in this poll. But the fog is pretty dense.

Politics Podcast: The Primary Forecast Is Live, And ‘Model Talk’ Returns

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












 












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Our 2020 Democratic primary forecast is live! In a new installment of “Model Talk,” FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast’s check-in with our forecast, Nate Silver discusses the state of the race according to the forecast and what went into creating it.

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.

Biden Is The Front-Runner, But There’s No Clear Favorite

Joe Biden is the most likely person to win a majority of pledged Democratic delegates, according to the FiveThirtyEight primary model, which we launched on Thursday morning. This is our first-ever full-fledged model of the primaries and we’re pretty excited about it — to read more about how the model works, see here.

But saying the former vice president is the front-runner doesn’t really tell the whole story. He may be the most likely nominee, but he’s still a slight underdog relative to the field, with a 40 percent chance of winning a majority of pledged delegates1 by the time of the last scheduled Democratic contest — the Virgin Islands caucus on June 6. If one lowers the threshold to a plurality of delegates, rather than a majority, then Biden’s chances are almost 50-50, but not quite — he has a 45 percent chance of a delegate plurality, per our forecast.

I want to emphasize that there’s still a lot of room for another candidate to surge because nobody has voted yet, the primaries are a complex process, and frankly here at FiveThirtyEight, we’re a little self-conscious about how people interpret — or sometimes misinterpret — our probabilistic forecasts. The Democratic primary still features 14 candidates, and while most of them have little to no shot, there are still several fairly realistic possibilities:

So while Biden’s in a reasonably strong and perhaps even slightly underrated position, it’s slightly more likely than not that Biden won’t be the nominee. Sen. Bernie Sanders has the next-best shot, with a 22 percent chance at a majority, followed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren at 12 percent and former Mayor Pete Buttigieg at 10 percent. There’s also a 14 percent chance — about 1 in 7 — that no one will win a majority of pledged delegates by June 6, which could lead to a contested convention.

The model works by simulating the nomination race thousands of times, accounting for the bounces that candidates may receive by winning or losing states, along with other contingencies — such as candidates dropping out and polls moving in response to debates and news events. Like all of our models, it’s empirically driven, built using data from the 15 competitive nomination races since 1980.2

Since the primaries themselves are fairly complex process, the model is fairly complex also — which we mean as a warning as much as a brag. Models with more complexity are easier to screw up and can be more sensitive to initial assumptions — so we’d encourage you to read more about how our model works.

As an illustration of how one race can affect the following ones in our model, here are each of the leading candidates’ chances of winning a plurality or majority of delegates conditional on winning or losing Iowa:

Iowa matters … a lot

How candidates’ chances of winning a majority or plurality of delegates changes if they win Iowa, according to FiveThirtyEight’s primary forecast

With an Iowa win
With an Iowa loss


Candidate
Majority Chance
Plurality Chance
Majority Chance
Plurality Chance




Biden
80%
84%
20%
26%


Buttigieg
37
42
2
3


Sanders
61
67
8
10


Warren
55
60
5
7

As of 8 a.m., Jan. 10, 2020

Biden, for instance, would be a heavy favorite if he wins Iowa, with an 80 percent chance of a delegate majority and an 84 percent chance of a plurality. His majority chances would fall to 20 percent following an Iowa loss, however. Sanders would be a slight favorite to win a majority after an Iowa win, with a 61 percent chance, but his majority chances would fall to 8 percent with a loss there. Warren would also be a slight favorite to win a delegate majority after an Iowa win, but Buttigieg would not be (although his position would be substantially strengthened).

These scenarios account for Iowa wins of all shapes and sizes — big, emphatic wins and narrow, perhaps even disputed ones. With a landslide win in Iowa, Sanders might be a fairly heavy overall favorite for the nomination. If Iowa were a four-way pileup instead — with Sanders narrowly winning and Biden in a strong second place, for instance — Sanders’s projected bounce might not be enough to help him overtake Biden in national polls and the nomination could remain fairly open-ended.

Speaking of open-ended, the first three states all have highly uncertain outcomes. Biden is the nominal favorite to win Iowa, but has just a 33 percent chance of doing so.3 In New Hampshire, Sanders has a 31 percent chance and Biden is at 27 percent. And in Nevada, Biden has a 35 chance, with Sanders at 31 percent. Biden is a clearer front-runner in South Carolina — although even that lead might not be safe if he performed poorly in the first three states.

Who’s favored in the first four states?

Candidates’ chances of winning the early states, according to FiveThirtyEight’s primary forecast

State
Biden
Sanders
Warren
Buttigieg
Other




Iowa
33%
27%
14%
22%
4%


New Hampshire
27
31
15
23
3


Nevada
35
31
16
13
4


South Carolina
54
20
10
9
7

As of 8 a.m., Jan. 10, 2020.

The model also plays out the rest of the primaries on Super Tuesday and beyond — although they’re subject to more uncertainty, both because they come later in the process and because they have less polling. In states with little or no polling, our model infers odds based on demographic and geographic factors — see the methodology primer for more.

For a flavor of how this works, here are the states and territories that the model thinks each of the four leading candidates is the most likely to win.

Where each front-runner is most likely to win, in one table

The top four candidates’ chances of winning the primaries or caucuses where their position is strongest, per FiveThirtyEight’s primary forecast

Biden
Sanders


Primary/caucus
chances
Primary/caucus
chances




Alabama
61%
Vermont
62%


Mississippi
58
Utah
33


Delaware
55
Washington
32


South Carolina
54
California
32


North Carolina
53
Colorado
32


Louisiana
51
New Hampshire
31




Warren
Buttigieg


Primary/caucus
chances
Primary/caucus
chances




Massachusetts
28%
New Hampshire
23%


Maine
20
Iowa
22


Colorado
19
Indiana
20


Democrats Abroad
19
Democrats Abroad
16


Oklahoma
18
North Dakota
15


Minnesota
18
Minnesota
15

As of 8 a.m., Jan. 10, 2020.

Biden’s strengths are concentrated in the South, among states with large numbers of black voters. Sanders and Warren are expected to perform well in New England and in western states such as Colorado and California, where the Democratic electorate tends to be pretty liberal. Buttigieg’s strongest states figure to be largely white states in the Midwest and otherwise in the northern part of the country.

We’ll have a lot more to say about the forecast in the weeks and months ahead. But let me conclude by briefly considering the forecast from each of the major candidates’ perspectives, tackling each one in 100 words or less.

Biden. The optimistic case for Biden is fairly simple. He’s ahead in national polls. He’s also ahead in our “fundamentals” calculation. (Although Biden hasn’t raised all that much money, he has by far the most endorsements.) His strength among black voters will help him in the South, where none of the other candidates look particularly strong. So a win in Iowa would put Biden in a commanding position. And a loss there could be more survivable than it would be for another candidate. Still, Iowa is more likely to hurt him than help him, according to our model.

Sanders. Sanders’s early-state polling is fairly robust. He probably wouldn’t have any problem parlaying an Iowa win into a sequel in New Hampshire, and our model likes his position reasonably well in Nevada also. California is another potential strength for Sanders on Super Tuesday, as a source of both delegates and momentum. All that said, perhaps the biggest question about Sanders — namely, how would the establishment and voters react if he appeared to be on the verge of winning the nomination — remains unanswered, and it’s not necessarily something our model can answer by itself.

Warren. The conventional wisdom about Sanders is fairly bullish, while being fairly bearish on Warren. But it’s worth keeping in mind that there are only a few points separating them in the polls, nationally and in the early states. They’re an important few points — in part because they coincide with the 15 percent threshold that Democratic rules require candidates clear to win delegates. That’s part of why our model gives Sanders roughly double Warren’s chances of securing a delegate majority. But even a small-ish burst of momentum for Warren could restore her to a highly competitive position.

Buttigieg. Buttigieg can win Iowa — but he also runs the risk of stalling out afterward. The problem isn’t in New Hampshire, where his position is nearly as strong. But Buttigieg is weak among nonwhite voters, especially black voters, which makes Nevada and South Carolina uphill battles for him. With that said, Buttigieg is the sort of candidate who the model figures could get a relatively large bounce from wins in Iowa and New Hampshire. In general, the lower a candidate’s standing in national polls, the bigger the bounce they get from early-state success.

What about … Klobuchar? Sen. Amy Klobuchar has picked up a percentage point or two in the polls since the December debate. But if that’s all she gets, it’s probably a case of too little, too late. Her position is not hopeless — the model does have her as the fifth most likely winner. But the model simply thinks it will take a lot to leapfrog four other candidates. With that said, there’s been little polling recently, and a single strong poll in Iowa could change the equation for Klobuchar.

What about … Bloomberg? If you’re a Michael Bloomberg optimist, you could point toward the 14 percent chance that no candidate wins a delegate majority as a bullish sign. The former New York mayor’s plan clearly involves hoping for a murky outcome in the early states and playing the long game. But there are many, many questions here. The first four states probably will produce a clear front-runner or two, and even if they don’t, it’s not clear why Bloomberg would emerge as the alternative. Still, his unconventional strategy is difficult to model.

What about … Steyer? Billionaire Tom Steyer has risen in recent polls of Nevada and South Carolina after a monthslong advertising barrage there. It’s not quite clear what that gets him, though. On the one hand, his position will be weaker in those states by the time they get around to voting if he hasn’t also performed well in Iowa and New Hampshire. On the other hand, he hasn’t invested in Super Tuesday states (as Bloomberg has) to follow up on any potential success in Nevada and South Carolina. He’s worth watching, but the model doesn’t see a clear path for him.

Enjoy the weekend — and the CNN/Selzer/Des Moines Register poll that is scheduled to come out on Friday night — and we’ll be back at you with more updates soon.

Politics Podcast: How The Iran Conflict Could Affect The 2020 Election

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












 












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Late Thursday, the Pentagon announced that the United States killed Iran’s Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, “at the direction of the President” in an airstrike in Iraq. Iran has since vowed retaliation. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew discusses how the current conflict or any further escalation could reshape the dynamics of the 2020 election.

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.

Politics Podcast: Biggest Political Moments Of 2019. Key Questions For 2020.

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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As the year comes to close, the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast team looks back on the most significant political moments of 2019 and previews the most pressing questions of 2020. They also discuss the Democrats’ debate over health care and the events that led the House to impeach 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 Monday evenings, with additional episodes throughout the week. 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.