Nate Silver's Blog, page 65

Model Talk: Why The Raptors Have A Real Chance

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Toronto surprised some sports fans by winning the Eastern Conference over the Milwaukee Bucks — but the FiveThirtyEight NBA predictions model had given the Raptors the edge in that series. As of our taping, our model also had the Raptors as favorites to win the NBA Finals over the defending champions, the Golden State Warriors. By contrast, most analysts — and the Vegas betting markets — are heavily favoring the Warriors. Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight’s editor in chief, sits down with the Hot Takedown team for the pod’s first edition of Model Talk! Why does our model seem to love the Raptors, and how much are injuries affecting the projections?

Another championship taking place this week is the Champions League final between Liverpool and Tottenham. We’ll unpack Tottenham’s statistically improbable path to the final and whether its underdog status might be a good luck charm after all. Then our Rabbit Hole launches into the forgotten world of Starting Lineup figurines.

What we’re looking at this week:

Obviously, all eyes are on our NBA predictions.
In advance of the Champions League final, Simon Gleave of Gracenote walks us through some of the most statistically dramatic twists and turns of the tournament.
Nostalgic for those Starting Lineup figurines? Your best answer might be eBay.

Politics Podcast: Is Pelosi’s Trump Strategy Working?

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Last week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi amped up criticism of President Trump while tamping down calls for impeachment from within her own caucus. The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast crew debates the efficacy of her reportedly intentional strategy. The team also weighs the usefulness of a poll that matches Joe Biden up against his high-profile Democratic presidential opponents and considers the effects of the Democratic National Committee’s debate rules.

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.

Silver Bulletpoints: Are More Moderate Democrats More Electable?

I have a dilemma for you, dear reader. I have a righteous little bulletpoint-sized rant to make about ill-informed media coverage of polling in the recent Australian election. But this column, Silver Bulletpoints, promises to give you three items about the 2020 Democratic primary in 300 words or less. And while I’m sure Pete Buttigieg speaks fluent Guugu Yimithirr or something, the Democratic primary doesn’t really have much to do with Australia. So instead of using up one of this week’s bulletpoints on Australia, we’re including a bonus Australia-related bulletpoint at the end of this week’s column. For now, though, let’s stick with the Democrats …

Bulletpoint No. 1: Actually, maybe the moderate Democrats are more popular with swing voters

Be careful with general election polls for candidates who aren’t well-known.

At Vox this week, Ezra Klein — I’m usually a fan — points out that Bernie Sanders is doing second-best among Democrats in head-to-head polls against President Trump (worse than Joe Biden but better than everyone else). This is true as far it goes, at least if you ignore a couple of outlier-ish polls for Beto O’Rourke.

This challenges the theory, Ezra says, that “Americans are ideological moderates who punish political parties for nominating candidates too far to the left or right.”

The problem is that none of the other Democrats have the near-universal name recognition that Sanders and Biden enjoy. And people are reluctant to say they’ll vote for candidates who they don’t know much about. For instance, Trump gets about 44 percent in polls against both the well-known Sanders and the relatively unknown Buttigieg. Sanders is ahead by a larger margin — but it’s because he gets 49 percent whereas Buttigieg gets 44 percent with a lot more undecideds, probably including a lot of people who would vote for Buttigieg if they knew who he was.

An alternative is to look at candidates’ favorability ratings among the general electorate, which give voters the option of saying they don’t know enough to have an opinion about a candidate. Here’s an average of those polls since Biden entered the race:

Biden, Buttigieg have most positive favorability ratings

Average of favorability ratings in polls conducted wholly or partly since Biden entered the race

Candidate
Favorable
Unfavorable
Net




Joe Biden
50.4%
39.8%
10.6


Pete Buttigieg
28.3
24.5
3.8


Julián Castro
20.7
20.3
0.3


Bernie Sanders
45.3
45.5
-0.3


Marianne Williamson
11.7
12.3
-0.7


Tim Ryan
15.0
15.8
-0.8


Jay Inslee
13.7
14.7
-1.0


Kamala Harris
34.2
36.2
-2.0


Andrew Yang
14.3
17.0
-2.7


Michael Bennet
12.0
15.0
-3.0


Amy Klobuchar
21.0
24.3
-3.3


Cory Booker
28.0
31.5
-3.5


Steve Bullock
9.5
13.5
-4.0


John Delaney
10.3
14.7
-4.3


John Hickenlooper
13.3
18.3
-5.0


Beto O’Rourke
28.5
33.8
-5.3


Eric Swalwell
12.3
17.5
-5.3


Seth Moulton
7.3
12.8
-5.5


Elizabeth Warren
35.2
40.8
-5.6


Kirsten Gillibrand
21.5
28.5
-7.0


Tulsi Gabbard
13.0
20.7
-7.7


Bill de Blasio
13.5
45.5
-32.0

Polls are included if they were still in the field when Biden entered the race on April 25. If a pollster asked about a candidate multiple times, only the most recent poll was used. Polls included in the average include YouGov (registered voters), CNN/SSRS (registered voters), Gallup (adults), Rasmussen Reports (likely voters), HarrisX / Harris Interactive (registered voters) and Quinnipiac (registered voters). Not all pollsters asked about all of the candidates, but each candidate was included in at least 2 polls.

Source: polls

Sanders’s numbers are decent — but in general moderate candidates have slightly better favorables. Buttigeg’s net-favorable ratings are a little better than Sanders, for instance, and Biden, Buttigieg and Julián Castro are the only Democrats with net-positive ratings. The worst ratings belong to liberal candidates such as Kirsten Gillibrand (who has opposed Trump more often than any other senator) and, especially, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Bulletpoint No. 2: High-information voters love Elizabeth Warren — and not Bernie Sanders

In a previous Silver Bulletpoints, I asked whether candidates who are popular among high-education voters, such as Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren, are also popular among high-information voters. There’s no particular advantage to overperforming with college-educated voters; almost 65 percent of voters in the 2016 Democratic primaries did not have a four-year college degree. But doing well with high-information voters is usually a bullish sign. These voters are more likely to judge the candidates on factors beyond name recognition, and so may be leading indicators for how other voters will view the race once they’ve acquired more information. Moreover, high-information voters are more likely to eventually turn out to vote.

Quinnipiac addressed this in their most recent poll, asking Democrats how much attention they’ve been paying to the campaign and breaking out their topline results on that basis. Among voters paying a lot of attention to the campaign, Warren got 15 percent of the vote, and Sanders got just 8 percent. Among voters who are paying little or no attention, however, Warren got just 5 percent of the vote against Sanders’s 28 percent.

Warren, Biden gain ground among high-information voters

Share of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters who supported each candidate, by how much attention they’ve been paying to the election campaign for president

Attention being paid to election


Candidate
Overall
A lot
Some
Little / none




Biden
35%
42%
33%
23%


Warren
13
15
16
5


Harris
8
9
8
5


Buttigieg
5
9
3
1


Sanders
16
8
19
28


O’Rourke
2
3
1
2


Booker
3
2
2
4


de Blasio
—
1
1
—


Klobuchar
2
1
1
6


Gillibrand
—
1
—
—


Gabbard
1
1
—
2


Yang
1
—
2
1


Hickenlooper
—
—
1
—


Bennett
—
—
1
—


Bullock
—
—
1
—


Castro
1
—
1
1


Inslee
—
—
—
—


Delaney
—
—
—
—


Williamson
—
—
—
—


Messam
—
—
—
—


Swalwell
—
—
—
—


Ryan
—
—
—
—


Moulton
—
—
—
—

Poll dates from May 16-20, 2019

Source: Quinnipiac

Some of this is age-related — younger voters aren’t paying as much attention yet — but It’s hard not to see it as a bearish indicator for Sanders. Voters have a lot more alternatives than four years ago, and former Sanders voters who have started their shopping process already have often come home with candidates like Warren or Buttigieg instead. That includes voters in Sanders’s core constituency, very liberal voters, who preferred Warren over Sanders 30-22 in the Quinnipiac poll.

Does something similar hold for Biden? Actually not. To my surprise, Biden did a little better with high-information voters than with the electorate overall in this poll. Maybe it’s Sanders, and not Biden, whose support has been propped up by name recognition.

Bulletpoint No. 3: I’m adding Bill de Blasio to my presidential tiers — he’s in the very bottom tier

It’s not clear that anything major has changed since Biden entered the race a month ago. Biden’s post-announcement polling bounce has probably faded a bit, but polling bounces usually do. Warren has continued to gain ground a point or so at a time, but it’s been a slow burn. Whatever happened over the past few weeks will probably pale in comparison to the polling movement after the debates, which begin next month. So while I’ve been looking for excuses to update my presidential tiers, I can’t really find any.

Three additional candidates — Bill de Blasio, Steve Bullock and Michael Bennet — have entered since Biden, however. Of these, I’d probably consider Bullock the most viable because he can make a fairly strong electability argument, having been elected to two terms as Montana’s governor. But I’m not going to stake much on that until he breaks out of the asterisk range in polls.

Nate’s not-to-be-taken-too-seriously presidential tiers

For the Democratic nomination, as revised on May 23, 2019

Tier
Sub-tier
Candidates




1
a
Biden



b
[this row intentionally left blank]



c
Harris, Sanders, Warren, Buttigieg


2
a
O’Rourke



b
Booker, Klobuchar, Abrams*


3
a
Yang, Castro, Gillibrand, Inslee



b
Bullock, Hickenlooper, Ryan, de Blasio ↑, Bennet, Gabbard

* Candidate is not yet officially running but may still do so.

So the only change I’m making is to add de Blasio to the list, but only in the very bottom tier. (That does put him ahead of the likes of Eric Swalwell, Seth Moulton, Marianne Williamson and John Delaney, who aren’t listed.) As we discussed on this week’s podcast, de Blasio has a fairly interesting resume. Being mayor of New York City is no small thing, and he has some progressive accomplishments and was re-elected by 39 points in 2017. Some job candidates make a bad first impression no matter how good their resumes, however. Judging by those favorability ratings, de Blasio — with no help from the New York-based media, with whom he has an adversarial relationship — is one of them.

Bonus bulletpoint: Something is rotten down under, and it isn’t the polls

So what was that about Australia? Stop me if this one sounds familiar.

Polls showed the conservative-led coalition trailing the Australian Labor Party approximately 51-49 in the two-party preferred vote. Instead, the conservatives won 51-49. That’s a relatively small miss: The conservatives trailed by 2 points in the polls, and instead they won by 2, making for a 4-point error. The miss was right in line with the average error from past Australian elections, which has averaged about 5 points. Given that track record, the conservatives had somewhere around a 1 in 3 chance of winning.

So the Australian media took this in stride, right? Of course not. Instead, the election was characterized as a “massive polling failure” and a “shock result”.

When journalists say stuff like that in an election after polls were so close, they’re telling on themselves. They’re revealing, like their American counterparts after 2016, that they aren’t particularly numerate and didn’t really understand what the polls said in the first place. They may also be signaling, as in the case of Brexit in 2016, their cosmopolitan bias; the Australian election, which emphasized climate change, had a strong urban-rural split.

Dig in deeper, and you can find things to criticize in the polls. In particular, they showed signs of herding: all the polls showed almost exactly the same result in a way that’s statistically implausible. If Labor was ahead by only 2 points, a few polls should have shown conservatives winning just by chance alone because of sampling error.

Still, some of the headlines in the Australian media are idiotic and embarrassing. When polls show a race within a couple of percentage points, nobody — least of all journalists, who are paid to be informed about this stuff — should be shocked when the trailing side wins.

Are More Moderate Democrats More Electable?

I have a dilemma for you, dear reader. I have a righteous little bulletpoint-sized rant to make about ill-informed media coverage of polling in the recent Australian election. But this column, Silver Bulletpoints, promises to give you three items about the 2020 Democratic primary in 300 words or less. And while I’m sure Pete Buttigieg speaks fluent Guugu Yimithirr or something, the Democratic primary doesn’t really have much to do with Australia. So instead of using up one of this week’s bulletpoints on Australia, we’re including a bonus Australia-related bulletpoint at the end of this week’s column. For now, though, let’s stick with the Democrats …

Bulletpoint No. 1: Actually, maybe the moderate Democrats are more popular with swing voters

Be careful with general election polls for candidates who aren’t well-known.

At Vox this week, Ezra Klein — I’m usually a fan — points out that Bernie Sanders is doing second-best among Democrats in head-to-head polls against President Trump (worse than Joe Biden but better than everyone else). This is true as far it goes, at least if you ignore a couple of outlier-ish polls for Beto O’Rourke.

This challenges the theory, Ezra says, that “Americans are ideological moderates who punish political parties for nominating candidates too far to the left or right.”

The problem is that none of the other Democrats have the near-universal name recognition that Sanders and Biden enjoy. And people are reluctant to say they’ll vote for candidates who they don’t know much about. For instance, Trump gets about 44 percent in polls against both the well-known Sanders and the relatively unknown Buttigieg. Sanders is ahead by a larger margin — but it’s because he gets 49 percent whereas Buttigieg gets 44 percent with a lot more undecideds, probably including a lot of people who would vote for Buttigieg if they knew who he was.

An alternative is to look at candidates’ favorability ratings among the general electorate, which give voters the option of saying they don’t know enough to have an opinion about a candidate. Here’s an average of those polls since Biden entered the race:

Biden, Buttigieg have most positive favorability ratings

Average of favorability ratings in polls conducted wholly or partly since Biden entered the race

Candidate
Favorable
Unfavorable
Net




Joe Biden
50.4%
39.8%
10.6


Pete Buttigieg
28.3
24.5
3.8


Julián Castro
20.7
20.3
0.3


Bernie Sanders
45.3
45.5
-0.3


Marianne Williamson
11.7
12.3
-0.7


Tim Ryan
15.0
15.8
-0.8


Jay Inslee
13.7
14.7
-1.0


Kamala Harris
34.2
36.2
-2.0


Andrew Yang
14.3
17.0
-2.7


Michael Bennet
12.0
15.0
-3.0


Amy Klobuchar
21.0
24.3
-3.3


Cory Booker
28.0
31.5
-3.5


Steve Bullock
9.5
13.5
-4.0


John Delaney
10.3
14.7
-4.3


John Hickenlooper
13.3
18.3
-5.0


Beto O’Rourke
28.5
33.8
-5.3


Eric Swalwell
12.3
17.5
-5.3


Seth Moulton
7.3
12.8
-5.5


Elizabeth Warren
35.2
40.8
-5.6


Kirsten Gillibrand
21.5
28.5
-7.0


Tulsi Gabbard
13.0
20.7
-7.7


Bill de Blasio
13.5
45.5
-32.0

Polls are included if they were still in the field when Biden entered the race on April 25. If a pollster asked about a candidate multiple times, only the most recent poll was used. Polls included in the average include YouGov (registered voters), CNN/SSRS (registered voters), Gallup (adults), Rasmussen Reports (likely voters), HarrisX / Harris Interactive (registered voters) and Quinnipiac (registered voters). Not all pollsters asked about all of the candidates, but each candidate was included in at least 2 polls.

Source: polls

Sanders’s numbers are decent — but in general moderate candidates have slightly better favorables. Buttigeg’s net-favorable ratings are a little better than Sanders, for instance, and Biden, Buttigieg and Julián Castro are the only Democrats with net-positive ratings. The worst ratings belong to liberal candidates such as Kirsten Gillibrand (who has opposed Trump more often than any other senator) and, especially, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Bulletpoint No. 2: High-information voters love Elizabeth Warren — and not Bernie Sanders

In a previous Silver Bulletpoints, I asked whether candidates who are popular among high-education voters, such as Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren, are also popular among high-information voters. There’s no particular advantage to overperforming with college-educated voters; almost 65 percent of voters in the 2016 Democratic primaries did not have a four-year college degree. But doing well with high-information voters is usually a bullish sign. These voters are more likely to judge the candidates on factors beyond name recognition, and so may be leading indicators for how other voters will view the race once they’ve acquired more information. Moreover, high-information voters are more likely to eventually turn out to vote.

Quinnipiac addressed this in their most recent poll, asking Democrats how much attention they’ve been paying to the campaign and breaking out their topline results on that basis. Among voters paying a lot of attention to the campaign, Warren got 15 percent of the vote, and Sanders got just 8 percent. Among voters who are paying little or no attention, however, Warren got just 5 percent of the vote against Sanders’s 28 percent.

Warren, Biden gain ground among high-information voters

Share of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters who supported each candidate, by how much attention they’ve been paying to the election campaign for president

Attention being paid to election


Candidate
Overall
A lot
Some
Little / none




Biden
35%
42%
33%
23%


Warren
13
15
16
5


Harris
8
9
8
5


Buttigieg
5
9
3
1


Sanders
16
8
19
28


O’Rourke
2
3
1
2


Booker
3
2
2
4


de Blasio
—
1
1
—


Klobuchar
2
1
1
6


Gillibrand
—
1
—
—


Gabbard
1
1
—
2


Yang
1
—
2
1


Hickenlooper
—
—
1
—


Bennett
—
—
1
—


Bullock
—
—
1
—


Castro
1
—
1
1


Inslee
—
—
—
—


Delaney
—
—
—
—


Williamson
—
—
—
—


Messam
—
—
—
—


Swalwell
—
—
—
—


Ryan
—
—
—
—


Moulton
—
—
—
—

Poll dates from May 16-20, 2019

Source: Quinnipiac

Some of this is age-related — younger voters aren’t paying as much attention yet — but It’s hard not to see it as a bearish indicator for Sanders. Voters have a lot more alternatives than four years ago, and former Sanders voters who have started their shopping process already have often come home with candidates like Warren or Buttigieg instead. That includes voters in Sanders’s core constituency, very liberal voters, who preferred Warren over Sanders 30-22 in the Quinnipiac poll.

Does something similar hold for Biden? Actually not. To my surprise, Biden did a little better with high-information voters than with the electorate overall in this poll. Maybe it’s Sanders, and not Biden, whose support has been propped up by name recognition.

Bulletpoint No. 3: I’m adding Bill de Blasio to my presidential tiers — he’s in the very bottom tier

It’s not clear that anything major has changed since Biden entered the race a month ago. Biden’s post-announcement polling bounce has probably faded a bit, but polling bounces usually do. Warren has continued to gain ground a point or so at a time, but it’s been a slow burn. Whatever happened over the past few weeks will probably pale in comparison to the polling movement after the debates, which begin next month. So while I’ve been looking for excuses to update my presidential tiers, I can’t really find any.

Three additional candidates — Bill de Blasio, Steve Bullock and Michael Bennet — have entered since Biden, however. Of these, I’d probably consider Bullock the most viable because he can make a fairly strong electability argument, having been elected to two terms as Montana’s governor. But I’m not going to stake much on that until he breaks out of the asterisk range in polls.

Nate’s not-to-be-taken-too-seriously presidential tiers

For the Democratic nomination, as revised on May 23, 2019

Tier
Sub-tier
Candidates




1
a
Biden



b
[this row intentionally left blank]



c
Harris, Sanders, Warren, Buttigieg


2
a
O’Rourke



b
Booker, Klobuchar, Abrams*


3
a
Yang, Castro, Gillibrand, Inslee



b
Bullock, Hickenlooper, Ryan, de Blasio ↑, Bennet, Gabbard

* Candidate is not yet officially running but is may still do so.

So the only change I’m making is to add de Blasio to the list, but only in the very bottom tier. (That does put him ahead of the likes of Eric Swalwell, Seth Moulton, Marianne Williamson and John Delaney, who aren’t listed.) As we discussed on this week’s podcast, de Blasio has a fairly interesting resume. Being mayor of New York City is no small thing, and he has some progressive accomplishments and was re-elected by 39 points in 2017. Some job candidates make a bad first impression no matter how good their resumes, however. Judging by those favorability ratings, de Blasio — with no help from the New York-based media, with whom he has an adversarial relationship — is one of them.

Bonus bulletpoint: Something is rotten down under, and it isn’t the polls

So what was that about Australia? Stop me if this one sounds familiar.

Polls showed the conservative-led coalition trailing the Australian Labor Party approximately 51-49 in the two-party preferred vote. Instead, the conservatives won 51-49. That’s a relatively small miss: The conservatives trailed by 2 points in the polls, and instead they won by 2, making for a 4-point error. The miss was right in line with the average error from past Australian elections, which has averaged about 5 points. Given that track record, the conservatives had somewhere around a 1 in 3 chance of winning.

So the Australian media took this in stride, right? Of course not. Instead, the election was characterized as a “massive polling failure” and a “shock result”.

When journalists say stuff like that in an election after polls were so close, they’re telling on themselves. They’re revealing, like their American counterparts after 2016, that they aren’t particularly numerate and didn’t really understand what the polls said in the first place. They may also be signaling, as in the case of Brexit in 2016, their cosmopolitan bias; the Australian election, which emphasized climate change, had a strong urban-rural split.

Dig in deeper, and you can find things to criticize in the polls. In particular, they showed signs of herding: all the polls showed almost exactly the same result in a way that’s statistically implausible. If Labor was ahead by only 2 points, a few polls should have shown conservatives winning just by chance alone because of sampling error.

Still, some of the headlines in the Australian media are idiotic and embarrassing. When polls show a race within a couple of percentage points, nobody — least of all journalists, who are paid to be informed about this stuff — should be shocked when the trailing side wins.

Are The Democratic Debates Already A Mess?

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

sarahf (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): Republicans struggled with setting debate criteria during the 2016 presidential election because of their large and unwieldy field, and Democrats seem as though they’ll have their own issues in 2020. We already count 20 candidates who have qualified for the first two debates via one of the two criteria the Democratic National Committee has set up: receiving at least 1 percent in at least three qualifying polls or having 65,000 people donate to their campaign, with at least 200 donors in 20 different states.

The DNC has said that it will cap participation at 20 candidates, so the next candidate who qualifies, via one of the two criteria for entry, will trigger the tiebreaker rules. Those get complicated fast, but the topline is: If more than 20 candidates qualify, then meeting both the polling and donor requirements will be paramount for candidates — those who do will get first dibs on debate lecterns.

But why is it so hard to figure out a fair metric for inclusion? Is there a better way to determine who makes the debate stage?

julia_azari (Julia Azari, political science professor at Marquette University and FiveThirtyEight contributor): It’s difficult to figure out a fair metric for inclusion because the whole process is weird. Ideally, it’s both inclusive and efficient (i.e., it narrows options for a nominee relatively quickly), but it’s not really possible to do both at the same time.

geoffrey.skelley (Geoffrey Skelley, elections analyst): Right, and in the aftermath of the 2016 Democratic nomination, when the DNC was criticized for “rigging” the debates for Hillary Clinton, the DNC really wants to seem transparent and inclusive.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): So, 1) It’s good to have objective criteria, 2) as objective criteria go, fundraising and high-quality polling is perfectly fine, but 3) the DNC set the bar too low. Getting donations from 65,000 people is not that hard. And polling at 1 percent in any of three polls out of the many, many polls out there is even easier, probably.

sarahf: Although, to be clear, the DNC is not counting all polls from all pollsters. It has said, however, that it’ll consider both national and early-state polls, and qualifying polls can come from 18 different organizations).

geoffrey.skelley: Yeah, it’s still pretty easy to qualify via three polls at 1 percent or more — 19 Democrats have already done that. However, if the DNC had set the threshold at 2 percent or more, just eight candidates would meet that mark.

Only 8 candidates are polling at 2 percent or more

Democratic presidential candidates by whether they have received at least 1 percent or 2 percent support in at least three polls that would qualify them for the first Democratic presidential debates, as of May 21, 2019

IN at least 3 DEBATE-QUALIFYING POLLS, HAS SUPPORT OF …


Candidate
1 percent or more
2 percent or more




Joe Biden
✓
✓


Cory Booker
✓
✓


Pete Buttigieg
✓
✓


Kamala Harris
✓
✓


Amy Klobuchar
✓
✓


Beto O’Rourke
✓
✓


Bernie Sanders
✓
✓


Elizabeth Warren
✓
✓


Steve Bullock
✓



Julian Castro
✓



Bill de Blasio
✓



John Delaney
✓



Tulsi Gabbard
✓



Kirsten Gillibrand
✓



John Hickenlooper
✓



Jay Inslee
✓



Tim Ryan
✓



Eric Swalwell
✓



Andrew Yang
✓



Michael Bennet




Seth Moulton




Marianne Williamson

For candidates deemed “major” by FiveThirtyEight.

Sources: Polls, Media reports

natesilver: Yeah, hitting 1 percent is soooooooooo easy. Like people can literally just pick your name at random almost.

The DNC is spending too much time trying to avoid mistakes they think were made in the previous Democratic nomination process when there are probably more lessons to be learned from the Republican nomination process.

geoffrey.skelley: Well, part of what the DNC wanted to avoid was the mistakes the Republicans made in the 2016 cycle with prime time and undercard debates.

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, elections analyst): I think the Democrats have already done a better job than Republicans did in 2016. The DNC has said that they’ll randomly distribute candidates across the nights, rather than hold “varsity” and “junior varsity” debates. I think that’s a good move.

natesilver: Oh, I’m not sure I agree with that, Nathaniel.

nrakich: How is a junior varsity debate better, Nate? My problem with splitting the candidates up by tier is that it requires splitting hairs between a candidate who gets, say, 3 percent in a poll and a candidate who gets 4 percent. (Margins of error are real!) I guess it’s fine to argue that you think the threshold should be higher and there should be only one main debate, but if you are going to split the candidates into two debates, I think randomly doing it is the only good way.

natesilver: Well, if you wind up stuck in the JV debate because you poll at 2 percent rather than at 3 percent, I don’t have much sympathy for you, even though that’s a minor difference.

nrakich: But the debates are candidates’ chance to raise their polling numbers up from that 2 or 3 percent.

Debates should start off inclusive but probably get less inclusive as we get closer to voting.

Like, the New Hampshire debate three days before the primary should probably only have the candidates with a serious chance of winning that primary.

nrakich: My beef with using polling averages as a debate criterion is that they assume that candidates can be precisely ranked by their standing in the polls. But in reality, polls are imprecise instruments, and you can’t do much more than lump candidates into rough categories (and even those have fuzzy boundaries). For example, all candidates polling between 0 and 5 percent are basically in the same spot.

julia_azari: I agree with Nathaniel here. I would also add that these differences don’t, in my mind, clearly differentiate candidates. And does it really matter if it’s 20 or 22 candidates on the stage? Either isolate the top-tier candidates or let everyone in.

sarahf: Julia, the number of evenings we have to devote to watching the debates is at stake!

julia_azari: If other people haven’t blocked off all of 2019 and 2020 to watch debates, that’s not my problem. People want an open nomination process. This is where that goes.

nrakich: Some pollsters have also said that they are uncomfortable with their work influencing elections. Their role is as measurers, not active participants.

natesilver: Meh, the pollsters complain too much.

If you believe in the quality of your poll, you shouldn’t have any problem with it being used as an objective metric.

I think they should literally have tiers on stage based on where you’re polling.

nrakich: Nate

Politics Podcast: Can Democrats Win The Senate In 2020?

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The 2020 Democratic field continues to grow, most recently with New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s entry into the race. The team looks at his theory of the case — how he could win and why he likely won’t. The crew also discusses the spate of restrictive abortion bills at the state level, and where Americans stand on the issue. Finally, we looked at the non-presidential battleground in 2020, and whether the U.S. Senate or House could flip.

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.

It Turns Out The Vintage Warriors Are Still Pretty Good At Basketball

sara.ziegler (Sara Ziegler, assistant sports editor): The NBA conference finals are just three games old, but we’ve already seen two of the most entertaining games of the entire playoffs.

After Golden State easily dispatched Portland in Game 1 in the West, Milwaukee needed a furious comeback to take down Toronto in the East’s first game. And then came Thursday night, when the Trail Blazers led the Warriors by as many as 17 points in the third quarter, but Golden State used a 27-8 run to get back into the game. The teams traded leads down the stretch, but the Warriors prevailed.

Let’s start with the Golden State-Portland series. What have you made of these first two games?

tchow (Tony Chow, video producer): The “Warriors are better without Kevin Durant” crowd has gotten REALLY loud.

I’m not stupid enough to say they’re better without KD, but I can see the argument being made that they might be more fun to watch?

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): Tony, that feels like a way to rationalize the idea that KD will feel dejected or something by the Warriors because they can win without him so he’ll have to come to the Knicks.

sara.ziegler: LOL

tchow: I’m still auditioning for my Knicks GM job, Nate.

chris.herring (Chris Herring, senior sportswriter): I think they are more fun to watch this way, for sure. It’s a good reminder of what they were before Durant ever signed with them. The up-tempo, heavy ball-movement, “we can be down by 15, but still come back to beat you” Warriors.

I think Portland losing on Thursday was pretty brutal. It’s sounding more and more like Durant won’t be back in the conference finals, and a win would have gone a long way toward making this a series again. It’s hard to imagine them winning four of the next five.

tchow: You’re not kidding about the heavy ball movement, Chris. Per Second Spectrum, the Warriors have averaged 42 more passes per 100 possessions when KD was not on the floor during these playoffs.

natesilver: I guess the question is whether the Warriors could win grind-it-out, slower-paced, half-court-type games at the same rate without KD.

chris.herring: And that’s the thing. When the Warriors play that way, it’s changing the pace of the game. If you have a game with fewer possessions, I’d venture to guess it leaves things to random chance more often and helps the underdog.

Kind of why Virginia was seen as vulnerable in the NCAA Tournament for so long. ( helps with that, too.)

natesilver: Beating Portland twice at home is just not all that rigorous a test, however.

tchow: That’s important to keep in mind. All the Warriors did was hold home court.

chris.herring: It may not be. But the Blazers played really well on Thursday, and then that third quarter happened. I just think we’re used to these sorts of onslaughts at this point.

tchow: Yeah, even with that scoreline at halftime, after the first three minutes of the third quarter, I think all of us kinda went, “Oh, the Warriors are winning this.”

natesilver: The Game 6 closeout against Houston, in a game where the Rockets played pretty well, was impressive. But I’m still not sure I really have a great sense for how Golden State is going to match up with Milwaukee or Toronto, with or without KD.

sara.ziegler: A Portland win would have completely changed the tone of this series. And it was close to happening — even after the Warriors stormed back!

natesilver: “Were the Blazers actually close to winning or was it all just an illusion” is a fun epistemological question. I mean, obviously, a win probability model or whatever would have them ahead for a lot of the game. But the Warriors have made SO many third-quarter comebacks over the years that I just don’t really know.

sara.ziegler: When the Blazers were up 8 with 4:28 left, I thought they could really win it.

Silly me.

chris.herring: I grow somewhat tired of the Curry vs. Curry storyline at times. But it was pretty awesome to see Seth play so well last night, and to try to get into his brother’s head at one point.

Crazy to think that, if Pau Gasol were healthy, there would be two sets of brothers playing against each other this round.

tchow: That’s very interesting. I’m kinda loving the Curry vs. Curry storyline. It’s pretty cool IMO to have siblings play against each other at such high stakes.

I found myself pingponging between “Where’s Steph? OK, where’s Seth now?” when they were both on the court.

chris.herring: I like the storyline. I just think it’s being milked pretty heavily in terms of showing their parents in the crowd, that’s all. But Seth was huge last night.

I think the challenge for Portland is that there’s a lot of “your turn, my turn” from Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum. McCollum owned the first half, and then Dame got hot in the second half.

And it kind of feels like they may need more of a balance, or another huge bench performance from someone, to get over this hump.

natesilver: What if Seth Curry woke up one day and had Steph Curry’s skills, and vice versa? That feels like a weird/bad movie plot.

tchow: “Freaky Friday 2”

natesilver: Would the Blazers play McCollum at the 3 or something? It would be a really weird team.

chris.herring: I already feel like it’s a weird team as is.

Credit to them for adjusting heavily after how bad Game 1 was.

tchow: You knew they had to do something about that pick-and-roll defense.

chris.herring: Enes Kanter was back at the free-throw line in Game 1 and then moved much farther up to contain their pick and rolls in Game 2. That made Golden State’s looks far more challenging, which you almost have to do in order to have a chance.

sara.ziegler: The Blazers didn’t get much on offense from Kanter on Thursday, though. What was going on there?

chris.herring: His impact is going to be a bit less on a night where they shoot as well as they did from three. Because he doesn’t get any offensive rebounds that way.

But also, when he’s playing so much higher up on D, it probably wears him down a bit.

Not to mention the fact that he’s fasting during daylight hours, which seems like such a tough thing to do during such a high-stakes series.

sara.ziegler: That does seem brutal.

chris.herring: Now THAT storyline I find fascinating.

sara.ziegler: I can barely edit when I’m hungry. Can’t imagine trying to play basketball at the highest level!

natesilver: If I fasted during daylight hours, I don’t think I could even do a Slack chat, let alone play in an NBA game.

sara.ziegler: Haha

tchow: Muslim soccer players do it all the time! (during Ramadan)

It is pretty cool the Blazers have three Muslim players on the roster (Kanter, Jusuf Nurkic and Al-Farouq Aminu).

chris.herring: Hakeem Olajuwon did it as well, and apparently Kanter reached out to him to figure out what all he did to maintain his game during that stretch of the postseason.

natesilver: I didn’t realize that the dates of Ramadan shift around a lot from year to year. It doesn’t always coincide with the playoffs.

sara.ziegler: What, if anything, can the Blazers do to turn the tide as the series heads back to Portland?

chris.herring: I think it goes without saying that they did enough to win Thursday.

You’d imagine they can control the tempo better at home than they did at Oracle, where the Warriors play extremely fast and in transition during those ridiculous comebacks. I think maybe Terry Stotts would call timeout when he feels one of those runs coming on. And they need to clean up some mistakes, in terms of fouling and taking care of the ball. Andre Iguodala made a great steal on Lillard on the final play, and Lillard had that pretty brutal foul on Steph while he was shooting a three late.

tchow: I’m actually not sure what else they can do. They played well on Thursday and still lost. I feel for Portland fans, I really do. But our predictions give them a 6 percent chance of making it to the finals which seems … high?

chris.herring: Realistically, unless Golden State has another major injury, that was probably it. I don’t see a whole lot of adjustments for a scenario where you were in control most of the game. You just have to finish the game. Period.

natesilver: I guess the one piece of good news for Portland is that it’s not obvious that KD’s going to play any time soon.

tchow: Chris mentioned that they needed another huge bench performance to have a chance, but both Rodney Hood and Seth Curry had pretty decent games. I don’t know where else it could come from. Zach Collins?

sara.ziegler: Meyers Leonard! He had a pretty good game.

chris.herring: Collins had five fouls in eight minutes yesterday, somehow. Leonard was impactful, though.

tchow: Yeah, some of those Collins fouls were bad fouls, too.

chris.herring: That’s why it’s hard to see Portland doing this: Everything seems really scattered right now.

Also, props to Draymond Green for raising his game to a ridiculous level lately. You can’t mention the Warriors looking like the Warriors of old without talking about how incredible he’s been on both ends.

natesilver: Maybe Draymond secretly hates KD and so ups his effort level when KD is out?

sara.ziegler: LOL. I kind of want that to be true. Since the NBA is just a soap opera, at its core.

tchow: “The Plays of Our Lives”

I’m sorry.

sara.ziegler: OMG, yes.

Moving on to the East: Chris, you wrote after Game 1 that the Raptors would likely be kicking themselves for letting that get away from them. How important was that outcome to the series?

chris.herring: Not nearly as much of a killer as Game 2 for Portland. But still potentially big.

There’s that saying that a series hasn’t begun until a road team wins a game. And on some level, that may be true. I just think that if you’re going to beat Milwaukee, it makes sense to grab the winnable game when it’s there. And the Bucks played really poorly in some regards, yet they still won. They are a complete team, whereas the Raptors look very stilted on offense at times.

And it’s part of why I continue to like Milwaukee’s chances of winning this whole thing.

tchow: It’s been really impressive seeing how well the Bucks have continued to play when Giannis Antetokounmpo is not on the floor.

natesilver: The thing I’d hate if I were a Raptors fan is that I felt like my team played pretty well in Game 1, and it still wasn’t enough. Obviously, not everything was perfect — the cold shooting in the fourth quarter — but it felt like a relatively fair contest.

chris.herring: Yeah. I guess there are two ways to view it:

1) Lowry is probably never going to shoot like that again.

2) There’s probably no way they’ll ever get less of a contribution from the rest of the team than they did in Game 1.

tchow: 3) Brook Lopez will not have a game like that again.

sara.ziegler: Lopez was EVERYWHERE.

chris.herring: I’m not completely sure about No. 3! If Toronto doesn’t go smaller, the Raptors are going to have to sacrifice something defensively. I don’t know that he’ll have almost 30 again, but the Raps are going to dare Brook and guys like him to prove they can make that shot as opposed to letting Giannis run wild in the paint.

That’s the risk.

sara.ziegler: To your second point, Chris, you can’t imagine a scenario happening again where no Raptor aside from Lowry makes a single shot in an entire quarter.

chris.herring: Yeah, those stats — 0 for 15 aside from Lowry in the fourth, and 1 for 23 in the second half outside of Lowry and Leonard — were some of the more insane ones I’ve ever seen.

And the one second-half basket that someone else made was a buzzer-beating 3 by Pascal Siakam in the third! One he wouldn’t have even taken if not for how much time was left.

tchow: The last time Lopez had a double-double while scoring more than 20 points was … one second, I’m still scrolling up on Basketball-Reference.

sara.ziegler: LOL

chris.herring: That part is true. But him scoring a bunch wouldn’t shock me based on how they’re defending him. Brook isn’t the biggest rebounder, in part because he’s more concerned with boxing out and making sure a teammate collects the miss. (But also, their minutes are longer in the playoffs, meaning he’ll have more chances.)

tchow: Found it! Nov. 3, 2017, when he was on the Lakers. And it was the Lopez revenge game because they played the Nets.

chris.herring: Remember: Milwaukee was 11 of 44 from three! That’s 25 percent. So the Bucks left a ton of points on the table. And many of them were wide-open shots.

As I was saying, I think Toronto may want to consider playing a little smaller. That would potentially crank up the tempo to a level Lopez isn’t comfortable with, and potentially give him more defensive responsibility, to where he has to come out farther to defend.

natesilver: I dunno, I feel weird about slicing-and-dicing the Raptors’ shooting stats into so many little pieces. Overall, they shot 15 of 42 on threes, which is pretty average/good.

chris.herring: Lowry was 7 of 9 by himself!

natesilver: They didn’t shoot great on twos, but a lot of teams don’t do that well against MIlwaukee. They made 85 percent of their free throws.

chris.herring: The other Raptors will likely shoot better. But Milwaukee did plenty to make Kawhi Leonard get his points. This team is really great at pushing star scorers to drive with their weaker hand.

tchow: Sixers should take note. Too soon?

sara.ziegler: LOL

chris.herring: The statistics illustrated that in Game 1. Leonard drove 15 times, and 11 of them were to his left. During the season, he drove to his right a little more than 57 percent of the time.

sara.ziegler: That seems to be a huge focus for the Bucks — and it looks like it’s paying off. But again, the Raptors almost stole Game 1. It would be huge for them to get Game 2 tonight.

chris.herring: Agreed.

While I still think Milwaukee is clearly the stronger team in this matchup, I wouldn’t be foolish enough to say that Toronto is out of this, regardless of what happens tonight. This is a more evenly matched set of opponents than with Portland and Golden State, clearly.

sara.ziegler: So let’s end on some soft predictions. How long will each series go?

tchow: I’m predicting a gentleman’s sweep for the Western Conference finals.

natesilver: Yeah, five games seems like the smartest bet.

sara.ziegler: It would be only fair to the Curry parents.

tchow: I believe Dame and CJ can do enough to get at least one win in Portland.

chris.herring: Agreed on the West.

In the East, I’ll go six, with the Bucks winning. Though if Milwaukee wins tonight, I wouldn’t be shocked if they closed it in five.

natesilver: I’m going to go seven games for the East. Despite what I said earlier about Game 1 being a bearish indicator for Toronto, I still think they’re a liiiiiiittttle underrated, and Nick Nurse probably has more ways to make adjustments than Mike Budenholzer does.

tchow: I think it’ll be Bucks in six, too.

natesilver: I have a hot take.

sara.ziegler:

Silver Bulletpoints: Why Did All The White Guys Stampede Into The Race So Late?

Today is Thursday, May 16, 2019, which means we have 538 days1 worth of #content to bring you until the 2020 presidential election. In today’s edition of Silver Bulletpoints, we’ll ask the age-old question: Why are so many mediocre white guys running for president?

Bulletpoint No. 1: Why did all the white guys wait so long to run?

On Feb. 10, when Amy Klobuchar launched her presidential campaign, the Democratic field appeared remarkably diverse, at least by the low bar set by previous presidential campaigns. Of the 11 major candidates at that time,2 there were more women than men, two black candidates, one Hispanic, two Asian Americans,3 one Samoan American, and the first openly gay candidate with a serious shot to win a major-party nomination. Only one Democrat, former Maryland Rep. , was a straight white man.

Since then, 11 additional candidates have declared. All of them are straight white men:

The Democratic field is full of white dudes after all

Campaign launch dates for major Democratic candidates

Date
Candidate
Straight white guy?




7/28/17
John Delaney
✓


2/10/18
Andrew Yang



12/31/18
Elizabeth Warren



1/11/19
Tulsi Gabbard



1/12/19
Julian Castro



1/15/19
Kirsten Gillibrand



1/21/19
Kamala Harris



1/23/19
Pete Buttigieg



1/28/19
Marianne Williamson



2/1/19
Cory Booker



2/10/19
Amy Klobuchar



2/19/19
Bernie Sanders
✓


3/1/19
Jay Inslee
✓


3/4/19
John Hickenlooper
✓


3/14/19
Beto O’Rourke
✓


4/4/19
Tim Ryan
✓


4/8/19
Eric Swalwell
✓


4/22/19
Seth Moulton
✓


4/25/19
Joe Biden
✓


5/2/19
Michael Bennet
✓


5/14/19
Steve Bullock
✓


5/16/19
Bill de Blasio
✓

In this analysis, formulating an exploratory committee counts as launching one’s campaign.

Source: News Reports

As you can probably infer, this timing is unlikely to be merely coincidental; whether a candidate is a straight white man is a highly statistically significant predictor of the order4 in which they declared.

I’ll leave the longer explanation of this to others, but it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that there’s a certain type of privilege in all these white guys thinking they can just drop into the race at the last minute after everyone else has been working their butts off for months.

Bulletpoint No. 2: Live on social media, die on social media

Nor is it as though many of the late-entering white guys — other than Joe Biden and to some extent Bernie Sanders — are really doing all that well. One candidate who’s had a particularly rough go lately is Beto O’Rourke, who’s fallen to 4 percent in the RealClearPolitics polling average after having peaked at almost 10 percent after his announcement.

We discussed O’Rourke at length in our Austin podcast last week. (My view: He’s fallen out of the top tier, but his money and retail-politics skills give him some advantages as compared with the rest of the also-rans.) One theme I forgot to talk about in Austin, however, is the extent to which the left was ahead of the curve in voicing skepticism about both O’Rourke’s chances and his desirability as a nominee. This stands in sharp contrast to Biden, whom both the left and the mainstream media underestimated and who has surged in the polls despite a million anti-Biden hot takes.

What’s the difference? It may largely be that O’Rourke — unlike Biden — is swimming in the same media pond as the left and as the media elites. His campaign has been heavily reliant on Instagram, for instance, where he has almost 1 million followers. His supporters tend to be younger. Twitter certainly isn’t the Democratic electorate, but it does contain the sorts of voters that O’Rourke is competing for: According to a Morning Consult analysis this week, Twitter-using Democrats are almost twice as likely to support Beto as non-users.

Maybe that’s why O’Rourke is engaged in a reboot of his campaign which involves, among other things, doing lots of television. Although old habits die hard: O’Rourke livestreamed his haircut on Wednesday afternoon.

Bulletpoint No. 3: Is Steve Bullock costing Democrats a Senate seat? Probably not.

Last week, my colleague Geoffrey Skelley wrote about large number of red-state Democrats who are opting out of Senate bids to run for president instead.

As Geoff pointed out, a lot of those candidates — such as Montana Gov. Steve Bullock — would be facing uphill battles. Let’s add more specificity to that. Suppose we think of candidates like Bullock as strong candidates who could significantly outperform a “generic” Democrat. Is that enough to win in red states like Montana?

As O’Rourke’s and Stacey Abrams’s losses last year demonstrated, probably not. This is quick-and-dirty, but I ran a regression analysis wherein I sought to explain the outcome of last year’s Senate races based on a state’s partisan lean and which party had an incumbent running. As a twist, I also included a subjective estimate of how strong the candidates were on a 1-to-5 scale; for instance, Joe Manchin was a 5, and Corey Stewart was a 1. I tried to base the estimate on how strong the candidate appeared going into the race, rather than after the fact. I also adjusted for the national environment, which leaned Democratic by 7 or 8 points last year.

If you apply that analysis to this year’s races, you find that a strong Democratic candidate — a 4.5 on the 5-point scale — still needs a lot of breaks to win in a red state. In Montana, for instance, I estimate that even if the national environment is about as good for Democrats as last year, then even a candidate as good as Bullock would still only have a 25 or 30 percent chance of winning. In a neutral environment, he’d have almost no shot.

Even in sunny weather, Democrats face gloomy Senate odds

Chance of winning in 2020 for hypothetical average and great Democratic Senate candidates, according to a rough regression analysis*

STRONGLY Dem. (D 7) Nat. ENVIRONMENT
Neutral (D 0) Nat. ENVIRONMENT


State
GOP candidate
Avg. candidate
Great Candidate
Avg. candidate
Great Candidate




Alaska
Sullivan
18%
60%
1%
12%


Arizona
McSally
37
80
4
28


Arkansas
Cotton

3




Colorado
Gardner
87
99
38
80


Georgia
Perdue
11
47

7


Idaho
Risch






Iowa
Ernst
37
80
4
28


Kansas
(open, TBD)
2
19

1


Kentucky
McConnell
4
29

2


Louisiana
Cassidy
2
20

1


Maine
Collins
71
96
19
61


Mississippi
Hyde-Smith
45
85
6
35


Montana
Daines
4
28

2


Nebraska
Sasse

7




N. Carolina
Tillis
58
92
11
48


Oklahoma
Inhofe

1




S. Carolina
Graham
11
48

7


S. Dakota
Rounds






Tennessee
(open, TBD)

5




Texas
Cornyn
5
33

3


W. Virginia
Capito

1




Wyoming
(open, TBD)

* Estimates are based on a regression analysis of 2018 U.S. Senate races and account for a subjective measure of candidate strength on a 1-5 scale based on approval ratings and other factors. Republican candidate strength is rated as follows: 4.5 points: Collins; 3.5 points: McSally, Cotton, Perdue, Ernst, Cassidy, Rounds; 2.5 points: Sullivan, Risch, Graham; 2 points: McConnell, Inhofe; 1.5 points: Hyde-Smith. All other candidates, including in open-seat races where the candidate has not yet been determined, are rated as average (3 points).

Note that Democrats are having little trouble recruiting candidates in states like Arizona and Colorado where their chances are stronger.

How The Draft Lottery Reshaped The NBA Landscape

neil (Neil Paine, senior sportswriter): So we just witnessed what our friend Zach Lowe called the “wildest lottery ever.” The Zion-Williamson-to-the-Knicks (or its less-heralded cousin, Zion-to-the-Lakers) hype train gained a ton of steam when both teams were revealed to be in the Top 4 … and then it crashed and burned on live TV as the Lakers ended up at No. 4 and the Knicks at No. 3.

Guys, take me through each of your experiences and emotions as you saw what unfolded.

chris.herring (Chris Herring, senior sportswriter): I think we saw right away how crazy this new lottery system has the potential to be. By flattening out the worst teams’ odds of winning, you get a higher probability of something like last night playing out. It was insane at the actual lottery here in Chicago. There were these enormous gasps when they announced that the Bulls were going to pick seventh, the Suns were going to pick sixth, and the Cavs were going to choose fifth.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): I was at a fairly nice Italian restaurant with a friend who doesn’t really like basketball, and I made him pull out his phone along with my phone just so we could see who had the faster livestream. Unfortunately, this restaurant had a lot of wood paneling or something that was causing the signal to be pretty weak. Anyway, the livestream cut out right when it looked like the Knicks might be shut out of the Top 4 entirely, then it came back on and they were in the Top 4, and then right after that they got the No. 3 pick. As dumb as it sounds, the experience of having my expectations lowered made the No. 3 pick seem a lot better as a quasi-Knicks fan.

Also, we ordered pasta for dessert, which people should try.

tchow (Tony Chow, video producer): My fingers and toes were crossed from the time Boston’s 14th pick was announced. I started jumping up and down on my couch and screaming sometime between Phoenix’s sixth pick reveal and Cleveland’s fifth. There was a moment during that window that I thought 14 percent really meant something like 98 percent, and I was ready to buy my Zion Knicks jersey.

chris.herring: Hahahahaha. Brutal.

neil: Our colleague Chad Matlin had a great experience as well that he granted me permission to share:

“a small anecdote from brooklyn last night: I’m walking home from dinner down Flatbush Ave and a man appears half a block behind me and starts violently screaming something, but I can’t quite make out what. he keeps screaming. I only catch snippets. “FUCKING!!!” “ALL!!!” “LOSING!“”” this goes on for 90 seconds as he crosses street aimlessly, screaming the same thing over and over. I finally piece it together: “ALL THAT FUCKING LOSING FOR NOTHING!!”

And that’s when I found out the Knicks didn’t win the lottery.”

Suffice to say, emotions were running high here in New York.

chris.herring: LMAO

natesilver: I had run the numbers beforehand, and the No. 3 pick — in a draft where there’s a clear drop-off between Nos. 3 and 4 — is slightly above the expected value for the Knicks pick. Even if you think Zion is going to be reaaaaaaaaaaaly good, a 14 percent chance just isn’t that high.

chris.herring: On some level, the lottery process and unveiling is really, really challenging for the average person — even for me — to follow along with if you aren’t focused on a single team and where they’re ending up.

tchow: Yeah, Chris, in the hysteria last night, the graphics on TV really played a trick on me: They had the Top 4 picks in individual blocks on top, while 5 through 14 were listed below as they were revealing the picks. As the blocks were getting filled in, you saw the Lakers, then the Grizzlies and then the Pelicans, and I went, “Holy shit, we got No. 1!”

chris.herring: One team being slotted lower than you expect is useful information, but it’s hard to know exactly who it benefits until there are only two or three teams left.

Rachel Nichols was explaining it in real time, but it still takes a hot second or two to register what it all means, because of the pick swaps and protections, etc.

neil: It’s kind of incredible that so many of us devote time to watching the unveiling of the results of pingpong balls based on probabilities, which each have obscure caveats (protections, etc), and it actually makes for compelling TV. The NBA is amazing.

natesilver: Maybe they should reveal it one pick per day at a time over the course of the playoffs, sort of like an advent calendar.

Think of all the opportunities for #content.

chris.herring: I’m still kind of shocked that New Orleans ended up getting it. Makes a huge difference for them going forward. All this time, analysts were suggesting that they make a deal with the team that wins the lottery for Anthony Davis. Now they have the No. 1 pick AND Anthony Davis.

neil: And David Griffin said their big priority is convincing AD to stay now. Is that feasible?

chris.herring: It doesn’t seem the most feasible to me. You’d love for him to change his tune on that, but reports suggest that he won’t. It’s incredibly risky to gamble on the hunch that he will.

natesilver: I think Zion might make it more likely that AD is traded, if anything

Because now the franchise has something to play for and sell hope/tickets for, even without AD. So any scenario where they’re just being super stubborn and desperate is probably off the table.

chris.herring: You don’t know whether Zion alone would be enough for them to make a huge jump in the next year, which is what you’d need to feel better about letting Davis test free agency.

natesilver: New Orleans was one of just three teams to win the lottery that was neither undeserving, nor boring, nor annoying. So that was a win in my book.

tchow: Nate, I disagree with so much of that Venn diagram.

natesilver: Haha

neil: As an Atlantan who also once worked for the Hawks, I guess I’ll take “basically OK.”

chris.herring: Neil, I’m sure die-hard Hawks fans were disappointed last night. Basketball people seem to universally feel that would’ve been his best fit.

Did you all see the video of Williamson hitting the Hawks logo twice before the lottery began?

Zion double tapped the Hawks logo

Is Trump An Aberration?

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

sarahf (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): From the launch of his campaign to stump speeches on the trail, former Vice President Joe Biden is running on the idea that President Trump and his administration are an aberration. “This is not the Republican Party,” Biden recently told a crowd in Iowa. But some pundits, party operatives and other 2020 candidates think Biden’s stance is shortsighted and argue that Trump’s presidency is a symptom of a much bigger problem in the GOP.

So how much of an aberration is Trump? He has challenged norms and democratic values while in office, but Republicans have largely declined to break rank. Does this mean that Trump’s candidacy was just a reflection of the direction the party was already headed in?

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): Can you draw a through-line between Trump and the Republicans that came before him? Sure, yeah. I’m not sure it’s a particularly linear through-line, though.

Something can be in line with a trend but still be an outlier. Home runs are way up in baseball this year, but if someone winds up finishing the season with 83 home runs, that’s still an outlier. Climate change makes heat extremes much more likely, but if it’s 105 degrees in Boston in May, that’s still an outlier.

matt.grossmann (Matt Grossmann, political science professor at Michigan State University and FiveThirtyEight contributor): And the tendency for Republicans to get behind their president is actually one area of continuity. Republicans trust government consistently more under Republican presidents, often dramatically reversing course after a Democratic president.

julia_azari (Julia Azari, political science professor at Marquette University and FiveThirtyEight contributor): But at what point does it make sense to characterize something as an outlier? For example, people often point to the “Access Hollywood” tape or Trump’s remarks about the appearance of women, or his statements about immigrants as instances of norm violation. If you look at American history, racism and sexism aren’t unfamiliar themes, but it is unusual, especially in the modern era, for them to be so front and center.

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, elections analyst): Some Republican politicians were proto-Trumps. Think former Maine Gov. Paul LePage or Iowa Rep. Steve King. The rise of the tea party foregrounded a lot of Republicans who were saying outrageous things. And I don’t know if we want to count dog whistles, like the Willie Horton ad.

julia_azari: I would count those dog whistles and point out that Democrats were not immune to the temptations of making these kinds of appeals in that era either.

natesilver: Well, you can’t really characterize it as an outlier until you see where the next couple of data points line up, Julia. Which is why my basic meta-argument is that people are way too confident about this question, in either direction.

But that’s why I like the baseball or climate change analogy. Boston might be many times more likely to have a 105-degree day now than it was 50 years ago. That doesn’t mean it’s the new normal, however.

julia_azari: Of course we can’t know if Trump is the new normal yet. But I am not satisfied with this answer. I think we can and should have some sort of metric for whether his presidency is truly out of step with trends or historical patterns.

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer):

In New Hampshire, Joe Biden predicts that once President Trump is out of office, Republicans will have “an epiphany” and work with Democrats toward consensus.

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) May 14, 2019

So this is the core question to me.

Does Biden actually believe this? Or is he just saying it because swing voters might like it?

sarahf: Right. On the question of whether Trump is an aberration, a lot of what we’re asking, I think, is whether a “return to normalcy” is even possible. Within the Democratic Party, there is a perception that former President Barack Obama spent years trying to compromise with congressional Republicans and that those efforts often fell flat — Merrick Garland’s thwarted nomination to the Supreme Court is an example these folks point to. And so now it’s a question of whether Democratic voters actually think bipartisanship can still work. Biden is clearly running on a platform that he thinks it can.

julia_azari: The normalcy Biden describes was never a thing.

perry: Do you think Biden is being sincere? Biden’s comment was almost exactly what Obama said in 2012 about how his victory would break the fever of GOP opposition, and Obama was totally wrong, of course. I was shocked that Biden said something that seemed so obviously clueless, but it might fit with his electoral strategy.

natesilver: I think Biden is being sincere, for what it’s worth. He came up in an era of relatively high comity and bipartisanship in the Senate.

nrakich: And Biden is friends with many Republicans in the Senate, like Lindsey Graham. It makes sense that he thinks he can woo them to his side.

But also a President Biden would probably need to get buy-in from only a few Republican senators in order to pass his agenda and get this “bipartisanship” thing to work.

I don’t think even Biden thinks he will convince a majority of the GOP caucus to vote for his policies.

matt.grossmann: Biden was the primary Democrat involved in cutting three separate budget deals with Mitch McConnell under Obama (going in wildly different directions), so he may have little reason to believe it can’t still be done. Believe it or not, most new laws are still bipartisan, and majority parties are getting no better at enacting their agenda.

sarahf: The McConnell whisperer!

julia_azari: Ha. From a strategic perspective, maybe it makes sense. It could be that people in the primary electorate are thinking more “I would like to get something done, and maybe Biden can do it” than “fuck the other party.” I’m not sure how any of the other Democratic presidential candidates think they will get their big policy ideas through a GOP-controlled Senate.

nrakich: I do think Biden has the best chance of striking deals with a GOP Senate. It’s just that people are overestimating how big of a difference he would make. Biden might be able to convince three GOP senators to vote with him. A President Tulsi Gabbard might be able to convince zero.

natesilver: TuLsI GaBBaRd hAs BiPaRtIsAn FrIeNdS ToO, Rakich, such as former Illinois Rep. Aaron Schock.

nrakich: Ha. That’s actually true — lots of Republicans are outspoken about how much they like Gabbard, so maybe she was a bad example.

But FWIW, according to a March poll from Quinnipiac University, Democrats said 52 percent to 39 percent that they would prefer a candidate who mostly works with Republicans rather than one who mostly stands up to them.

julia_azari: I just wonder if people want compromise in practice as much as in theory — and how having a divisive Republican president like Trump may have changed that.

sarahf: So, Julia, you’re saying that there might be a larger appetite now for a more combative Democratic president who is less willing to compromise?

I buy that, and I think we’re seeing that reflected in the messaging of several candidates.

julia_azari: Yeah, I think that’s a possibility. There is still this idea about building a new national consensus (at least on the Left). People think that there will be an election like 1964 or 1980 (at least, the narrative of 1980 as a landslide — Reagan won only 50.7 percent of the popular vote) and that there will be a 55 percent to 60 percent majority for a general approach to governance. But I think that’s a steep climb no matter how many rallies in the heartland or Amtrak trips through Scranton one takes.

matt.grossmann: 100 percent agree.

natesilver: I do think we have to ask how Republicans would react to Trump being defeated, by Biden or someone else.

Let’s say it’s pretty bad, for instance. The GOP loses the popular vote by 6 points, and all the major swing states go to the Democrat. Republicans lose another 15 House seats. And Democrats eke out a 51-49 Senate majority.

It’s been a while since we’ve had a one-term president, and that president (George H.W. Bush) came after Reagan had held two terms, so Republicans couldn’t feel too upset. Trump being a one-termer would be different, more analogous to Jimmy Carter.

nrakich: I’m not sure they would react that much, Nate? I feel like McConnell is just doing his thing, Trump or no.

matt.grossmann: Republicans would act like they usually do — a big backlash against the new Democratic president.

sarahf: You don’t think it matters to Republicans who the Democratic candidate is because party trumps everything?

nrakich: Sarah, I think some Republicans would prefer Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders because they’re easier to demonize (in the same way that some Democrats preferred having Trump as the GOP nominee in 2016), and some would prefer Biden because they think the country would be less ruined under a more moderate president.

natesilver: But if Trump loses, we’d be looking at the Republican nominee having lost the popular vote for the presidency in seven out of eight election cycles.

And all of this happening despite a pretty good economy.

I don’t know. I think the party might react a lot differently than in 2008 when John McCain losing was more or less inevitable.

nrakich: Maybe Republicans would come out with an autopsy report again, like they did after the 2012 election, for how they can return to relevance — and then ignore it again in 2024, like they did in 2016.

matt.grossmann: But isn’t a backlash against the new Democratic president the best way to deal with that?

julia_azari: In the past, it has mattered somewhat whether the defeat was expected, but otherwise, losing parties have reacted by building up institutions, thinking about innovation, etc. My research on election interpretation and what we have seen with 2016 and 2018 suggest to me that Republicans would try to put forth an election narrative to serve their ends. For example, after 2012, some conservative commentators on Twitter advanced this “it’s hard to compete with Santa Claus” narrative, suggesting that Democrats’ victories were because they had promised unrealistic benefits to voters, rather than that they had won based on the strength of the campaign or the ideas.

nrakich: I’m sure there would be hand-wringing, but I just don’t know if it will change Republican behavior.

McConnell will still try to make the new Democratic president impotent, and the party’s new presidential hopefuls — the Tom Cottons and Mike Pences and Nikki Haleys of the world — will still go to Iowa talking about how unfairly Trump was treated.

natesilver: I’m reallllly not sure about that, Rakich. I think a lot of Republicans would be happy to throw Trump under the bus.

nrakich: You don’t think GOP voters (as opposed to elites) would still be loyal to Trump?

And therefore that the path to the 2024 nomination for Republican hopefuls would be cozying up to him?

If Trump loses, he will certainly remain a major force in the party. He’ll keep tweeting stuff to his base, and he might even run again in 2024! The GOP might be stuck with Trump as long as he’s still alive.

natesilver: I think you’re forgetting how much presidents are treated as losers once they lose.

Hillary Clinton has become relatively unpopular among Democrats, for instance, even though there might be a lot of reasons to feel sympathetic toward her.

matt.grossmann: And would it be that hard for Pence or Haley to thread the needle? They can offer a very different style of leadership but still say they believe Trump protected America and brought about economic recovery.

julia_azari: Yeah. I think it’s possible you will see Trumpism without Trump. In my opinion, the party has moved in a Trump-y direction (although I know Matt disagrees somewhat at least on the direction).

natesilver: “Trumpism without Trump” reminds me of “Garfield minus Garfield”:

nrakich: If it’s a close election, how many Republicans will think Trump lost fair and square, though?

natesilver: Well, I’m stipulating that it won’t be a close election.

nrakich: That’s true.

natesilver: (Stipulating, not predicting, for the case of this hypothetical.)

julia_azari: Even if it’s not, I think there will be narrative delegitimizing it.

matt.grossmann: Did we ever answer the question of whether calling Trump an aberration was a good strategy for Biden? It’s very similar to what Clinton and Obama said in 2016, but it may have been an ineffective strategy then; some Democratic-leaning voters decided it meant that Trump was less conservative than the Republican Party.

julia_azari: I’ve been thinking of the question as: “Will reaching out to anti-Trump Republicans in the electorate in this way convince them to vote for the Democratic candidate?”

But as Rakich said earlier, I think the conventional wisdom might overestimate the difference between having Biden in this position relative to any of the other candidates.

natesilver: Liberals on Twitter don’t seem to like Biden’s strategy, which is a strong sign that it’s a good strategy.

I think his comments about Republicans magically deciding to compromise were dumb, but overall the “Trump is an aberration” message is liable to be fairly well-received.

After all, Democrats spend a whole ton of time talking about how Trump is historically, unprecedentedly terrible and must be curbed, impeached, etc.

julia_azari: But Democratic primary voters might see it as a signal of less animosity toward Republicans, and my rather depressing read of a rather depressing political science literature suggests that may not be all that strategic.

natesilver: I think a lot of Biden’s messages are things that will do “just fine” with primary voters but are fairly good general election messages.

matt.grossmann: “I will be able to reach out to disaffected Obama-Trump supporters” is a good argument. “We have to get things done and I’m the one to do it” is a good argument. “I will get us past this horrible era” is even a good argument. But saying positive things about Republicans might not be necessary or even helpful.

nrakich: Remember that Biden has paired his “This is not the Republican Party” with a healthy dose of “Trump is a terrible human being and the worst thing to ever happen to America and someone who should be punched in the mouth,” which probably will appeal to primary voters.

natesilver: Also, keep in mind that Biden specifically rests his case on electability.

So if, hypothetically, independents like him because he seems more reasonable and that helps to prop him up in the polls, that could make primary voters more likely to stay with him.

julia_azari: Put that way, it comes down to whether Democratic primary voters hate Trump or Republicans more.

nrakich: (I think the answer is Trump.)

natesilver: Democratic primary voters hate Trump more than the Republican Party, right?

matt.grossmann: They do, but they dislike both.

natesilver: Or maybe it’s pretty close, actually. Only 10 percent of Democrats have a favorable view of the GOP.

nrakich: So maybe they don’t think of Trump as an aberration. Maybe they don’t overthink it. Maybe they just think the Republican Party is whatever it is in the moment.

natesilver: The fact that George W. Bush’s image has been rehabilitated quite a bit is interesting. And maybe suggests that Biden is right (strategy-wise) to treat Trump as an aberration. Bush left office with a very, very low approval rating, and now a lot of people feel nostalgic for him.

nrakich: Yeah, 61 percent of Americans said they viewed Bush favorably in this 2018 poll, including 54 percent of Democrats.

matt.grossmann: Trump was perceived differently than the Republican Party in early 2016, which is often what happens in a presidential contest. Opinions of Bush became less aligned with opinions of Republicans once Trump came along. But I don’t think it will be an issue in the same way this time around: Trump is now a known quantity and opinions won’t likely change until Republicans have another nominee.