Nate Silver's Blog, page 67
April 30, 2019
Does Biden’s Polling Bounce Mean Anything?
Last week, when he launched his presidential campaign, I made the case for why Joe Biden is the front-runner for the Democratic nomination. This week, with the release of several new polls, that case has become clearer.
Four national polls released on Tuesday all showed Biden’s support significantly higher than it was in previous editions of the same surveys. CNN’s poll found Biden at 39 percent — up 11 points from 28 percent in their previous poll in March — and well ahead of Bernie Sanders, who was at 15 percent. Quinnipiac University had Biden at a similar 38 percent, but with Elizabeth Warren nominally in second place at 12 percent of the vote, compared with 11 percent for Sanders and 10 percent for Pete Buttigieg.
Morning Consult also released its weekly tracking poll, and it showed Biden at 36 percent, up from 30 percent last week — an impressive result, especially considering that about half the poll was conducted before Biden officially launched his campaign. In interviews conducted after Biden’s announcement, he was polling closer to 39 percent. A HarrisX poll for ScottRasmussen.com found the smallest bounce, with Biden at 33 percent, up from 29 percent in its poll last month.1 The Morning Consult and HarrisX polls still had Sanders fairly clearly in second place.
New national polls show Biden clearly in front
Democratic primary polls released on April 30, 2019
CNN
HarrisX
Morning Consult
Quinnipiac
Candidate
Latest
Change
Latest
Change
Latest
Change
Latest
Change
Biden
39%
11
33%
4
36%
6
38%
9
Sanders
15
-4
16
-2
22
-2
11
-8
Warren
8
1
6
1
9
2
12
8
Buttigieg
7
6
5
2
8
-1
10
6
Harris
5
-7
5
-1
7
-1
8
0
O’Rourke
6
-7
5
-1
5
-1
5
-7
Booker
2
0
3
-1
3
-1
2
0
Klobuchar
2
-1
1
-1
2
0
1
-1
Castro
1
1
1
0
1
0
1
0
Yang
1
N/A
0
-1
2
0
1
1
Gabbard
2
2
1
1
1
0
0
0
Gravel
N/A
1
N/A
N/A
N/A
Gillibrand
1
0
1
0
1
0
0
0
Hickenlooper
0
0
2
2
1
0
0
-1
Delaney
0
0
1
0
1
1
0
0
Inslee
1
0
0
0
1
0
1
1
Williamson
1
N/A
0
-1
N/A
0
0
Swalwell
1
N/A
1
N/A
N/A
0
N/A
Ryan
0
N/A
0
N/A
1
0
0
N/A
Moulton
0
N/A
1
N/A
0
N/A
0
N/A
Messam
0
N/A
0
N/A
N/A
0
N/A
Source: polls
On average between the four national polls, Biden has gained 8 percentage points. Where did he take that support from? It came from all over the place. Sanders is down 4 points, on average, as is Beto O’Rourke. Kamala Harris is down 2 points; Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar are each down 1 point.
But some other Democrats have also gained ground. Warren is up 3 points, on average, in the new national polls. So is Buttigieg, although that’s a little misleading since the previous HarrisX, Quinnipiac and CNN polls were conducted before his surge had really kicked in. In the poll that offers the most recent basis for comparison, Morning Consult, Buttigieg is actually down 1 point from last week’s edition.
Biden’s support is driven by older Democrats and by nonwhite Democrats — two groups that aren’t always well-represented on social media or in other forums that sometimes dictate the conventional wisdom about the candidates. Biden had 50 percent of nonwhite voters in the CNN poll, well ahead of Sanders’s 14 percent. In Morning Consult’s poll, Biden polled at 43 percent among black Democrats, compared to Sanders’s 20 percent. Biden had 46 percent support from Democrats age 50-64 in CNN’s poll and 50 percent support from those 65 and older.
In addition to the various national polls, Suffolk University also released a poll of New Hampshire on Tuesday, and it can’t leave any of the Democratic contenders feeling especially satisfied. Biden was in first place at 20 percent, with Sanders and Buttigeg tied for second at 12 percent and Warren in fourth place at 8 percent. Suffolk has not previously polled New Hampshire this cycle, but compared with other recent polls of the state, this is clearly a poor result for Sanders, while it’s roughly in line with the previous polling for the other candidates.
The latest New Hamphire poll shows weakness for Sanders
Recent New Hampshire Democratic primary polls as of April 30, 2019
Latest Poll
Earlier Polls in April
Candidate
Suffolk
UNH
Saint Anselm Coll.
Biden
20%
18%
23%
Sanders
12
30
16
Buttigieg
12
15
11
Warren
8
5
9
Harris
6
4
7
O’Rourke
3
3
6
Booker
3
3
4
Klobuchar
1
2
2
Yang
1
2
Gabbard
1
1
1
Ryan
0
2
Gillibrand
0
1
1
Delaney
1
0
1
Messam
0
1
Swalwell
0
1
Hickenlooper
0
0
1
Castro
0
0
Bullock
0
Williamson
0
0
Inslee
0
0
0
Bennet
0
de Blasio
0
Moulton
0
Gravel
0
Source: POLLS
What should we make of all of this? I have roughly four conclusions:
Biden’s bounce will probably fade. Biden’s not the only candidate to have seen his numbers improve following his announcement; Sanders and Harris did too, and so, to a lesser extent, did O’Rourke. All of those candidates have since seen their numbers revert to their previous position, however. Sanders has fallen back to the low 20s in his better polls and the low-to-mid teens in his worse ones, and Harris and O’Rourke are now back to polling in the mid-to-high single digits.
And it’s not clear that much has changed in terms of voters’ underlying attitudes toward the candidates. Biden’s favorability ratings are strong in the Morning Consult poll, but they’re also largely unchanged from earlier editions of the poll, which suggests that some of his new support is fairly soft and consists of people who are suddenly hearing his name a lot more often in the news, and who might switch candidates again once the news cycle moves on.
Nonetheless, the bounce is sorta important. At least in the medium term — basically, from now through the Iowa caucuses — Biden is more likely to lose support than to gain it. Other candidates will become better known, and they will tend to take support from candidates such as Biden and Sanders who already have essentially universal name recognition. Biden is doing very well among black voters for now, but Harris and Booker might have something to say about that later in race. Biden benefits a lot from perceptions that he’s electable, but that could also fade over time as voters grow more comfortable with the rest of the field.
But it’s precisely for that reason that starting from a higher perch is important. If you’re polling at around 28 percent — where Biden was before his announcement — you don’t have much margin for error, given that it usually takes support in at least the low-to-mid 20s to win Iowa and New Hampshire. If you’re at 37 percent, however, you can lose 5 or 10 points and still hold up in the early states against a candidate making a late surge.
In addition, Biden’s bounce comes near an empirical inflection point of when early polling leads tend to hold up and when they don’t. Well-known candidates polling in the mid-30s in the early going2 are about even money to win the nomination, historically. Well-known candidates polling in the mid-to-high 20s have roughly a 1 in 4 shot, conversely.
In some ways, the bounce exposes the weakness of the other candidates — especially Sanders — as much as Biden’s strength. Although previous bounces, such as Harris’s, have faded, that doesn’t necessarily mean the candidates who were hurt by those bounces have regained ground. Instead, it has sometimes opened up an opportunity for yet another candidate to surge instead.
What that means is that it’s time to take stock of the three candidates who have clearly fallen from their peak (so far) in the polls — Sanders, Harris and O’Rourke. You might think that on the basis of his current polling, Sanders remains in a better spot than the other two. However, he’s also much more of a national brand name. And as I wrote last week — and as you can see from the chart — polling at 20 percent is not all that strong a position for a candidate with near-universal name recognition. Sanders, however, polled at just 16 percent in the average of the four national polls released on Tuesday. And he was at only 12 percent in New Hampshire, which should be one of his strongest states. Sanders can win — he’ll raise a lot of money, he came from way far back last time, and he’d likely benefit from scenarios where the field remains divided. But given his name recognition, those polling numbers put him right at the divide between someone whose campaign is going well and someone whose campaign is going poorly.
Harris and O’Rourke are not as widely known as Sanders, and they still have reasonably good favorability ratings and plenty of cash on hand, which suggest that they have upward potential if and when the media’s attention turns to them again. But it’s become harder to make the case that they’re on the lead lap with Biden, especially for O’Rourke, who is competing against a field that’s overstatured with white male candidates and whose polling has fallen further than Harris’s.
Buttigieg doesn’t have any reason to be unhappy; given his low name recognition, polling in the mid-to-high single digits — sometimes higher than that, especially in polls of Iowa and New Hampshire — is a pretty decent position. But if you were expecting a further immediate surge into the teens or beyond — and I sort of was — it isn’t as clear now whether that’s coming. Instead, Buttigieg will need to work to expand his support beyond his initial coalition of highly educated white voters and survive media coverage that’s both less plentiful and more skeptical than it was initially.
But Warren is in an intriguing position. Warren’s the candidate who we thought might have the least overlap with Biden and therefore would be least hurt by his entry into the race — and the polling seems to bear that out. Although both candidates are broadly within the Democratic mainstream, she’s toward the left half and he’s toward the moderate half. She’s a woman and he’s a man, obviously. His case rests heavily on electability and big, abstract, meat-and-potatoes themes; she appeals to voters on the basis of her highly detailed policy proposals. Her base is college-educated whites; his is non-college-educated white voters and black voters. Biden and Warren have directly clashed over issues such as bankruptcy laws.
In short, Biden and Warren make pretty good foils for one another, probably better foils than Biden and Sanders make, as both are old white men who aren’t especially well-liked by party activists. A showdown between Biden and Buttigieg, or Biden and O’Rourke, could also leave big segments of the party unhappy, including parts of the left and many women and nonwhite voters.3
So in the scenario where the nomination comes down to a battle between Biden and one other Democrat — not the only way the race could unfold, but one plausible path — Warren could turn out to be that Democrat. Together, they capture most of the major Democratic constituencies. I’m less convinced that you could have a Biden-versus-Sanders showdown. I think a lot of voters, and certain parts of the Democratic establishment, would go shopping for a third candidate in that eventuality.
But Warren could also become a major player in the race in other ways. Independently of Biden’s entry to the race, she seems to be gaining ground from the candidates who are fading, including gathering some of Sanders’s support on the left, some of O’Rourke’s college-educated whites, and perhaps some of Harris’s support among women.
With that in mind, it’s time for one more rendition of my not-to-be-taken-too-seriously presidential tiers. I’d already had Biden as the front-runner — note that doesn’t mean I think he has a better-than-50-percent chance to win (I don’t), just that I think he’s more likely to win than anyone else. But we probably need to create an additional half-step between Biden and everyone else. That means I’m demoting Harris, Sanders and Buttigieg from tier 1b (which we’ll leave empty for the moment) into tier 1c. However, I’m moving Warren up to tier 1c from tier 2. Harris, Sanders, Buttigieg and Warren can all make interesting arguments for why they’re the next-best-positioned candidate after Biden, and I really have no idea whose argument is best, so it makes sense to group them together.
Nate’s not-to-be-taken-too-seriously presidential tiers
For the Democratic nomination, as revised on April 30, 2019
Tier
Sub-tier
Candidates
1
a
Biden
b
[this row intentionally left blank]
c
Harris ↓, Sanders ↓, Buttigieg ↓, Warren ↑
2
a
O’Rourke
b
Booker, Klobuchar, Abrams*
3
a
Yang, Castro, Gillibrand, Inslee
b
Hickenlooper, Bennet*, Ryan, Bullock*, Gabbard ↑
* Candidate is not yet officially running but is reasonably likely to do so.
Beyond that, O’Rourke, Klobuchar and Booker probably belong in the next tier down. But the safest conclusion right now is that this is a race with one frontrunner — Biden, who has both some clear weaknesses and some overlooked strengths — and no clear No. 2.
Check out our 2020 polls tracker .
Biden Is Way Out In Front. Second Place Is Anyone’s Guess.
Last week, when he launched his presidential campaign, I made the case for why Joe Biden is the front-runner for the Democratic nomination. This week, with the release of several new polls, that case has become clearer.
Four national polls released on Tuesday all showed Biden’s support significantly higher than it was in previous editions of the same surveys. CNN’s poll found Biden at 39 percent — up 11 points from 28 percent in their previous poll in March — and well ahead of Bernie Sanders, who was at 15 percent. Quinnipiac University had Biden at a similar 38 percent, but with Elizabeth Warren nominally in second place at 12 percent of the vote, compared with 11 percent for Sanders and 10 percent for Pete Buttigieg.
Morning Consult also released its weekly tracking poll, and it showed Biden at 36 percent, up from 30 percent last week — an impressive result, especially considering that about half the poll was conducted before Biden officially launched his campaign. In interviews conducted after Biden’s announcement, he was polling closer to 39 percent. A HarrisX poll for ScottRasmussen.com found the smallest bounce, with Biden at 33 percent, up from 29 percent in its poll last month.1 The Morning Consult and HarrisX polls still had Sanders fairly clearly in second place.
New national polls show Biden clearly in front
Democratic primary polls released on April 30, 2019
CNN
HarrisX
Morning Consult
Quinnipiac
Candidate
Latest
Change
Latest
Change
Latest
Change
Latest
Change
Biden
39%
11
33%
4
36%
6
38%
9
Sanders
15
-4
16
-2
22
-2
11
-8
Warren
8
1
6
1
9
2
12
8
Buttigieg
7
6
5
2
8
-1
10
6
Harris
5
-7
5
-1
7
-1
8
0
O’Rourke
6
-7
5
-1
5
-1
5
-7
Booker
2
0
3
-1
3
-1
2
0
Klobuchar
2
-1
1
-1
2
0
1
-1
Castro
1
1
1
0
1
0
1
0
Yang
1
N/A
0
-1
2
0
1
1
Gabbard
2
2
1
1
1
0
0
0
Gravel
N/A
1
N/A
N/A
N/A
Gillibrand
1
0
1
0
1
0
0
0
Hickenlooper
0
0
2
2
1
0
0
-1
Delaney
0
0
1
0
1
1
0
0
Inslee
1
0
0
0
1
0
1
1
Williamson
1
N/A
0
-1
N/A
0
0
Swalwell
1
N/A
1
N/A
N/A
0
N/A
Ryan
0
N/A
0
N/A
1
0
0
N/A
Moulton
0
N/A
1
N/A
0
N/A
0
N/A
Messam
0
N/A
0
N/A
N/A
0
N/A
Source: polls
On average between the four national polls, Biden has gained 8 percentage points. Where did he take that support from? It came from all over the place. Sanders is down 4 points, on average, as is Beto O’Rourke. Kamala Harris is down 2 points; Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar are each down 1 point.
But some other Democrats have also gained ground. Warren is up 3 points, on average, in the new national polls. So is Buttigieg, although that’s a little misleading since the previous HarrisX, Quinnipiac and CNN polls were conducted before his surge had really kicked in. In the poll that offers the most recent basis for comparison, Morning Consult, Buttigieg is actually down 1 point from last week’s edition.
Biden’s support is driven by older Democrats and by nonwhite Democrats — two groups that aren’t always well-represented on social media or in other forums that sometimes dictate the conventional wisdom about the candidates. Biden had 50 percent of nonwhite voters in the CNN poll, well ahead of Sanders’s 14 percent. In Morning Consult’s poll, Biden polled at 43 percent among black Democrats, compared to Sanders’s 20 percent. Biden had 46 percent support from Democrats age 50-64 in CNN’s poll and 50 percent support from those 65 and older.
In addition to the various national polls, Suffolk University also released a poll of New Hampshire on Tuesday, and it can’t leave any of the Democratic contenders feeling especially satisfied. Biden was in first place at 20 percent, with Sanders and Buttigeg tied for second at 12 percent and Warren in fourth place at 8 percent. Suffolk has not previously polled New Hampshire this cycle, but compared with other recent polls of the state, this is clearly a poor result for Sanders, while it’s roughly in line with the previous polling for the other candidates.
The latest New Hamphire poll shows weakness for Sanders
Recent New Hampshire Democratic primary polls as of April 30, 2019
Latest Poll
Earlier Polls in April
Candidate
Suffolk
UNH
Saint Anselm Coll.
Biden
20%
18%
23%
Sanders
12
30
16
Buttigieg
12
15
11
Warren
8
5
9
Harris
6
4
7
O’Rourke
3
3
6
Booker
3
3
4
Klobuchar
1
2
2
Yang
1
2
Gabbard
1
1
1
Ryan
0
2
Gillibrand
0
1
1
Delaney
1
0
1
Messam
0
1
Swalwell
0
1
Hickenlooper
0
0
1
Castro
0
0
Bullock
0
Williamson
0
0
Inslee
0
0
0
Bennet
0
de Blasio
0
Moulton
0
Gravel
0
Source: POLLS
What should we make of all of this? I have roughly four conclusions:
Biden’s bounce will probably fade. Biden’s not the only candidate to have seen his numbers improve following his announcement; Sanders and Harris did too, and so, to a lesser extent, did O’Rourke. All of those candidates have since seen their numbers revert to their previous position, however. Sanders has fallen back to the low 20s in his better polls and the low-to-mid teens in his worse ones, and Harris and O’Rourke are now back to polling in the mid-to-high single digits.
And it’s not clear that much has changed in terms of voters’ underlying attitudes toward the candidates. Biden’s favorability ratings are strong in the Morning Consult poll, but they’re also largely unchanged from earlier editions of the poll, which suggests that some of his new support is fairly soft and consists of people who are suddenly hearing his name a lot more often in the news, and who might switch candidates again once the news cycle moves on.
Nonetheless, the bounce is sorta important. At least in the medium term — basically, from now through the Iowa caucuses — Biden is more likely to lose support than to gain it. Other candidates will become better known, and they will tend to take support from candidates such as Biden and Sanders who already have essentially universal name recognition. Biden is doing very well among black voters for now, but Harris and Booker might have something to say about that later in race. Biden benefits a lot from perceptions that he’s electable, but that could also fade over time as voters grow more comfortable with the rest of the field.
But it’s precisely for that reason that starting from a higher perch is important. If you’re polling at around 28 percent — where Biden was before his announcement — you don’t have much margin for error, given that it usually takes support in at least the low-to-mid 20s to win Iowa and New Hampshire. If you’re at 37 percent, however, you can lose 5 or 10 points and still hold up in the early states against a candidate making a late surge.
In addition, Biden’s bounce comes near an empirical inflection point of when early polling leads tend to hold up and when they don’t. Well-known candidates polling in the mid-30s in the early going2 are about even money to win the nomination, historically. Well-known candidates polling in the mid-to-high 20s have roughly a 1 in 4 shot, conversely.
In some ways, the bounce exposes the weakness of the other candidates — especially Sanders — as much as Biden’s strength. Although previous bounces, such as Harris’s, have faded, that doesn’t necessarily mean the candidates who were hurt by those bounces have regained ground. Instead, it has sometimes opened up an opportunity for yet another candidate to surge instead.
What that means is that it’s time to take stock of the three candidates who have clearly fallen from their peak (so far) in the polls — Sanders, Harris and O’Rourke. You might think that on the basis of his current polling, Sanders remains in a better spot than the other two. However, he’s also much more of a national brand name. And as I wrote last week — and as you can see from the chart — polling at 20 percent is not all that strong a position for a candidate with near-universal name recognition. Sanders, however, polled at just 16 percent in the average of the four national polls released on Tuesday. And he was at only 12 percent in New Hampshire, which should be one of his strongest states. Sanders can win — he’ll raise a lot of money, he came from way far back last time, and he’d likely benefit from scenarios where the field remains divided. But given his name recognition, those polling numbers put him right at the divide between someone whose campaign is going well and someone whose campaign is going poorly.
Harris and O’Rourke are not as widely known as Sanders, and they still have reasonably good favorability ratings and plenty of cash on hand, which suggest that they have upward potential if and when the media’s attention turns to them again. But it’s become harder to make the case that they’re on the lead lap with Biden, especially for O’Rourke, who is competing against a field that’s overstatured with white male candidates and whose polling has fallen further than Harris’s.
Buttigieg doesn’t have any reason to be unhappy; given his low name recognition, polling in the mid-to-high single digits — sometimes higher than that, especially in polls of Iowa and New Hampshire — is a pretty decent position. But if you were expecting a further immediate surge into the teens or beyond — and I sort of was — it isn’t as clear now whether that’s coming. Instead, Buttigieg will need to work to expand his support beyond his initial coalition of highly educated white voters and survive media coverage that’s both less plentiful and more skeptical than it was initially.
But Warren is in an intriguing position. Warren’s the candidate who we thought might have the least overlap with Biden and therefore would be least hurt by his entry into the race — and the polling seems to bear that out. Although both candidates are broadly within the Democratic mainstream, she’s toward the left half and he’s toward the moderate half. She’s a woman and he’s a man, obviously. His case rests heavily on electability and big, abstract, meat-and-potatoes themes; she appeals to voters on the basis of her highly detailed policy proposals. Her base is college-educated whites; his is non-college-educated white voters and black voters. Biden and Warren have directly clashed over issues such as bankruptcy laws.
In short, Biden and Warren make pretty good foils for one another, probably better foils than Biden and Sanders make, as both are old white men who aren’t especially well-liked by party activists. A showdown between Biden and Buttigieg, or Biden and O’Rourke, could also leave big segments of the party unhappy, including parts of the left and many women and nonwhite voters.3
So in the scenario where the nomination comes down to a battle between Biden and one other Democrat — not the only way the race could unfold, but one plausible path — Warren could turn out to be that Democrat. Together, they capture most of the major Democratic constituencies. I’m less convinced that you could have a Biden-versus-Sanders showdown. I think a lot of voters, and certain parts of the Democratic establishment, would go shopping for a third candidate in that eventuality.
But Warren could also become a major player in the race in other ways. Independently of Biden’s entry to the race, she seems to be gaining ground from the candidates who are fading, including gathering some of Sanders’s support on the left, some of O’Rourke’s college-educated whites, and perhaps some of Harris’s support among women.
With that in mind, it’s time for one more rendition of my not-to-be-taken-too-seriously presidential tiers. I’d already had Biden as the front-runner — note that doesn’t mean I think he has a better-than-50-percent chance to win (I don’t), just that I think he’s more likely to win than anyone else. But we probably need to create an additional half-step between Biden and everyone else. That means I’m demoting Harris, Sanders and Buttigieg from tier 1b (which we’ll leave empty for the moment) into tier 1c. However, I’m moving Warren up to tier 1c from tier 2. Harris, Sanders, Buttigieg and Warren can all make interesting arguments for why they’re the next-best-positioned candidate after Biden, and I really have no idea whose argument is best, so it makes sense to group them together.
Nate’s not-to-be-taken-too-seriously presidential tiers
For the Democratic nomination, as revised on April 30, 2019
Tier
Sub-tier
Candidates
1
a
Biden
b
[this row intentionally left blank]
c
Harris ↓, Sanders ↓, Buttigieg ↓, Warren ↑
2
a
O’Rourke
b
Booker, Klobuchar, Abrams*
3
a
Yang, Castro, Gillibrand, Inslee
b
Hickenlooper, Bennet*, Ryan, Bullock*, Gabbard ↑
* Candidate is not yet officially running but is reasonably likely to do so.
Beyond that, O’Rourke, Klobuchar and Booker probably belong in the next tier down. But the safest conclusion right now is that this is a race with one frontrunner — Biden, who has both some clear weaknesses and some overlooked strengths — and no clear No. 2.
From ABC News:
Check out all the polls we’ve been collecting ahead of the 2020 elections.
April 29, 2019
Politics Podcast: Biden Is In, But Most Of The Democratic Establishment Is Still On The Sidelines
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After announcing his presidential campaign last week, Joe Biden jumped to the front of the pack in FiveThirtyEight’s endorsement tracker. He also raised the most money of any candidate in the first 24 hours after kickoff.
The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast team assesses how voters, the Democratic Party and the rest of the field are reacting to Biden’s candidacy. The crew also asks to what extent Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are competing for the same voters, given their similar progressive economic policies. Lastly, the team answers questions from listeners, including how many candidates we can expect to drop out of the race before the Iowa caucuses.
Also, the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recording a live podcast in Houston on May 8. For more information and to get tickets, go here.
You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes , the ESPN app or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen .
The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast publishes 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.
Who Takes A Hit Now That Biden’s In The Race?
Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s weekly politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.
sarahf (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): At long last, the wait is over — former Vice President Joe Biden announced Thursday that he is officially running for president.
Biden enters the Democratic field as the polling front-runner and with some serious establishment credentials as both a long-time senator and former VP. But this doesn’t mean he’s a favorite to win. If anything, in a field with so many candidates, it’ll be hard for any one candidate to stand out and win over a significant chunk of voters. Which means that building a coalition and a base of support will be vital. So, how does Biden’s candidacy change the dynamics of the Democratic race? Let’s tackle this by talking through the following questions:
Which candidates are hurt by Biden’s decision to run?
Who is his biggest competition?
And, more generally, what does this mean for candidates looking to cobble together a winning coalition? How does Biden’s entry ease this or complicate it?
OK, let’s get started with question No. 1: Which candidates are hurt by Biden’s decision to run?
natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): Maybe almost everyone is negatively impacted in some way, or maybe almost everyone except Elizabeth Warren.
For the more moderate white Democrats, like Beto O’Rourke, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar, Biden is sort of running adjacent to their lane, if not actually in their lane.
He also has a lot of the black vote, so Biden’s candidacy complicates the ability of Kamala Harris and Cory Booker to win South Carolina.
perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): For all the candidates who are making electability an implicit (O’Rourke, Jay Inslee) or explicit (Klobuchar, Tim Ryan) part of their campaigns, Biden is a very big threat. Plus, black voters find him appealing, which could hurt those candidates I just mentioned, but especially Booker and Harris.
natesilver: If you’re Bernie, now you can’t really call yourself the front-runner. And if Biden is getting 30 percent, maybe your 20 percent or 25 percent factional support isn’t going to be enough.
clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): But at the very least, Biden probably weeds out some of those guys like Ryan and Seth Moulton sooner rather than later, right? That is, if we’re thinking about the field winnowing at some point.
sarahf: Ryan just qualified for the debate stage though, Clare!
clare.malone: Big day in Youngstown.
natesilver: Ryan is the one guy who really seemed to be running on a Poor-Man’s-Version-of-Biden platform. Some of the other candidates who might have done that (e.g., Michael Bloomberg, Andrew Cuomo, Terry McAuliffe) didn’t run.
I think others, like Moulton and Eric Swalwell, are just running because they like doing TV.
And they aren’t really affected by Biden because they didn’t really have a chance to begin with. (If Moulton or Swalwell wins the Democratic nomination, feel free to throw this back in my face, Internet.)
sarahf: Well, as our colleague Nathaniel Rakich pointed out, Nate, Moulton and Swalwell don’t have that much to lose by running — so why not run?
clare.malone: I wonder who of the top-tier candidates Biden sees as his biggest competition? I was pretty surprised to see that he hired Sanders’s 2016 press secretary.
natesilver: Biden probably sees Bernie as competition, although to some extent welcome competition because Biden probably wins a one-on-one showdown with Bernie because he has broader support among both elites and regular voters.
sarahf: What will you all be looking for as a sign that Biden’s candidacy is making a dent in the support of these other contenders?
perry: Biden already leads among moderates, voters over 50 and black people. So I will be looking to see if those leads grow.
geoffrey.skelley (Geoffrey Skelley, elections analyst): I don’t know if it’s so much about a dent as about them never getting off the ground. For someone like Klobuchar, is she just going to remain stuck in the polls at 2 percent? Does O’Rourke never consistently get into double digits nationally?
sarahf: I saw some speculation on Twitter that the first 24 hours after his announcement will be crucial for Biden as a test of whether his first-day fundraising number can compete with other candidates’:
We'll know if @JoeBiden is a name recognition front runner, or a real front runner, when he posts those 24 hour fundraising numbers. He can't just match @BernieSanders, he needs to obliterate him. In a call to supporters yesterday, Biden acknowledged as much. https://t.co/cHgBljmkKk
— Rachel "The Doc" Bitecofer
April 26, 2019
The Big Questions Facing The Big Four In The East
gfoster (Geoff Foster, senior sports editor): The first-round of these NBA playoffs was widely viewed as a small appetizer (an amuse-bouche?) before the real meal begins in the conference semifinals. That has largely held true, particularly in the East, where the four teams that won — the Bucks, Celtics, Sixers and Raptors — lost a combined two games. In the West, things have gotten more interesting with the Nuggets-Spurs going to seven games and the Clippers refusing to go away against Golden State.
But let’s start by looking at the two East matchups, which begin this weekend. The first game of the second round is Philly-Toronto on Saturday. Our model gives the Raptors an 81 percent chance of moving on. Obviously Joel Embiid’s health is the big question here, and if he’s not at full strength, that could make those 19 percent odds look even slimmer. Does Philly stand a chance here? How much hinges on Embiid’s health?
chris.herring (Chris Herring, senior sportswriter): The Sixers definitely have a chance. I’d give them more than just a chance. But I have huge questions for them, too. And the Raptors deserve to be favored, for sure.
natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): With Embiid at 100 percent, you can make the case that the Sixers have a more talented starting five, however effective that talent might or might not be at coming together as a team. Without him, you really can’t.
tchow (Tony Chow, video producer): It’s obviously an understatement to say the Sixers’ chances hinges on how well Embiid plays, but I think they showed they can also play pretty well without him in the last series.
chris.herring: Yeah. He was asked whether time off has been helping his tendinitis at this point, and he essentially said: Not really. I’m fascinated in this series from a matchup standpoint. It’s going to present some real challenges both ways.
natesilver: I don’t think they had a terribly good record without him during the regular season, did they? And Toronto is much better equipped to exploit holes at both ends of the floor than the Nets were.
chris.herring: Just 8-10 without him
tchow: Yeah, as far as matchups go, it’s going to be really interesting to see how Marc Gasol does against Embiid. Gasol was solid against Nicola Vucevic last series, but Embiid — even a not-100-percent Embiid — is an entirely different scenario.
chris.herring: I will say this: I would assume Embiid is going to be available for each game of this series. I could be wrong on that, and who knows how he’ll hold up. But they don’t have much room for error here, whereas against Brooklyn they did, and he still played four of the five games.
Agreed that the Embiid-Gasol matchup is an interesting one, and one that Gasol played pretty well. Embiid has struggled some with him over the past year, even dating back to Gasol’s time in Memphis. Embiid tears Serge Ibaka apart when that’s the guy guarding him.
natesilver: Kawhi Leonard also seems like he’s pretty well-equipped to neutralize Ben Simmons as an offensive force.
tchow: How much should we read into the regular-season performance here? The Raptors went 3-1 against the Sixers this season, but all those games happened before the trade deadline, so no Tobias Harris on the Sixers and no Gasol on the Raptors. (Also, it’s fair to point out that the one game they did win against the Sixers, the Raptors were playing without Kawhi.)
chris.herring: Not too much, in my opinion. We mentioned it before, but the Sixers only had 10 regular-season games with their entire starting five together. That group has been so jumbled all season. I think we saw both the best and worst of the Sixers in the last series. That first game against Brooklyn, they played as if they were total strangers. Shot totals were out of whack, and Jimmy Butler finished with 36 points. Simmons and JJ Redick were awful that game.
gfoster: After going all-in on this season with Harris and Butler, the Sixers are very top heavy. They really don’t get much from their bench, and now Mike Scott’s status doesn’t look good for the start of the series. How much does this matter? It seems like depth is more an issue for the regular-season grind.
chris.herring: It’s huge. The Nets’ bench outplayed Philly’s for most of the series. Sixers are going to need their starters to be fantastic.
natesilver: In the playoffs, you can go about seven players deep instead of eight to 10 players deep, but Nos. 6 and 7 still matter quite a bit.
chris.herring: Yep. And that means on both ends of the floor. It hasn’t been talked about a whole lot, but Harris is going to be a big swing player in this series, I think. Figuring out who he can guard in this series is critical.
tchow: Would we see him on Pascal Siakam? Siakam seems like a nightmare for a lot of the Sixers’ starters.
chris.herring: Maybe you can put him on Danny Green? But that’s the sort of assignment he’s not exactly used to. If he guards Siakam, Siakam will feast like it’s Thanksgiving. He’s definitely not guarding Kawhi. And it’s already strange in the sense that you might end up having to put Redick on Kyle Lowry, which is far from traditional in the first place. The Sixers are such an interesting team.
natesilver: For Philly, what’s the threshold between a successful season and a failure? Do they need to win this series? If they play a good, tough series and lose in seven, is that a failure?
tchow: It feels like they put this team together to reach the NBA Finals.
chris.herring: Assuming it’s not a five-game series or shorter, I think Brett Brown can make an argument that this was a brand-new team that wasn’t cohesive at all. They’re going to need to re-sign either Butler or Harris, if not both. I think you could run this team back and see growth next season. No one is old at that point. I don’t feel like many people are taking the Sixers here, and an 81 percent chance for the Raptors seems like such a high number to me, given the talent Philly has. But they don’t have the experience together. Nor do they have home-court advantage.
tchow: As much as I want a Sixers-Bucks Eastern Conference finals, I don’t think I’m taking the Sixers here either.
gfoster: Part of that is us not having seen them very much at full capacity. And they aren’t even at full capacity now with Embiid banged up.
natesilver: I guess all I’m saying is that both Boston and Philly are in this weird bucket where getting knocked out in the second round might seem like a disaster — but there are also two VERY good teams at the top of the conference and there isn’t necessarily a lot of shame in losing to them.
chris.herring: Absolutely. I agree with that notion.
gfoster: Speaking of getting knocked out in the second round, the Raptors’ playoff history is grim. But things are obviously different. For starters, they won’t be swept by LeBron for the third straight year. Also, Lowry is the only real holdover from those previous teams. Does this seem like a team that can go to the finals and make noise? We give them a 54 percent chance of making the finals, for what it’s worth.
chris.herring: They are so difficult to believe in because of the slow, “Are they really doing this again?” sorts of starts they get out to.
tchow: Game 1s are just not Toronto’s friend.
chris.herring: They are a pretty complete package. I still don’t know that I would take them over the Bucks, but I wouldn’t argue with anyone who said they are taking Toronto to win the East.
natesilver: Our model is REALLY high on Toronto right now. Which has been the downfall of many a good model in the past, being too high on the Raptors.
chris.herring: And speaking of not playing at full strength, the Raps weren’t leaning heavily on Kawhi at all this season. You’d hope that pays dividends now, with him being rested and healthy.
natesilver: Yeah, the model is basically saying that the fully intact, healthy version of the Raptors’ rotation is almost Warriors-level good.
chris.herring: They are missing OG Anunoby, who may be back if they get to the Conference finals or NBA Finals. He’s solid for them, as a 3&D option. But they’re in a good place.
gfoster: Interesting that their “full-strength Carmelo” is less than their current Carmelo. How does that work?
tchow: I think it’s because our model is not high on Anunoby.
natesilver: Yeah, it thinks Anunoby is a replacement-level player, whereas the other guys they’d play instead of him are closer to league-average players
tchow: I agree with Chris that he’s a solid option for Toronto once he returns. But according to our model, he’s a negative on both offense and defense.
gfoster: Boston and Milwaukee met in the first round a year ago, with the Celtics winning in seven games (without Kyrie Irving and Gordon Hayward, no less). Obviously things are different this time around. We give the Bucks a 77 percent chance of winning this. Does that sound about right to you?
chris.herring: I think so. I’m almost as high on Milwaukee as I am the Warriors, which sounds wild to say out loud. But I am.
natesilver: It sounds about right to me: 3-to-1 favorites with the best player in the conference, home-court advantage, and a much better regular-season record seems reasonable.
chris.herring: I do feel like this series has the potential to make me look stupid, though.
gfoster: Best player in the conference or in the league, Nate?
natesilver: Don’t bait me into answering that! I think he was probably the MVP this year, but answering if he’s the best player in the league going forward is trickier.
tchow: Just to make sure our readers follow, we’re talking about Giannis right? There’s no Bucks fan out there that’s going to assume Nate thinks Eric Bledsoe or Malcolm Brogdon is the MVP.
natesilver: We’re talking about Nikola Mirotic, Tony.
tchow: Of course.
gfoster: Who guards Giannis? Boston has two great defenders in Al Horford and Aron Baynes.
tchow: I would assume Horford gets the assignment for the most part, but they’re going to have to double.
chris.herring: They’ll use everyone. Probably starting with Horford, who’s guarded him pretty well before. I don’t think they’ll have to double! And it’ll be dangerous to try that, given all the shooting the Bucks have.
tchow: For what it’s worth, Giannis averaged 31 points against Boston in the regular season. That’s his third-highest scoring average this season against a team he played at least three times (behind the Knicks and the Sixers).
chris.herring: I just think they’ll try to confuse him by using a lot of different faces over the course of each game.
natesilver: Don’t Horford and Baynes seem a little too slow to guard Giannis? I mean, 90 percent of the league is too slow, but they’re in that 90 percent, no?
chris.herring: Horford’s been pretty decent at this before. If you can force him to pass without doing it through a double-team/over-helping, it’s a win. He was really, really good on Simmons last year, which is similar in some ways, even though Giannis is obviously the better player. It’s strange, but I almost feel like looking at last year’s series doesn’t help a whole lot. Milwaukee was playing such a stupid offense, and Giannis couldn’t kick the ball out to anyone because of their spacing.
gfoster: It seems like the strategy for some teams is to just let Giannis get his points and shut down the perimeter. Could that work for Brad Stevens?
chris.herring: It could. I think the biggest fear if you’re Boston is Horford getting into foul trouble, which, as Nate brought up, would force you to play Baynes a lot in a matchup that’d be tough for him.
natesilver: I suppose that’s the strategy you have to try — shutting down the perimeter. Which is different than saying that strategy will succeed, but you have to try it because this Bucks team without the perimeter shooting is basically last year’s Bucks team, and that team was very beatable, obviously.
chris.herring: The other alternative, if those guys simply can’t stay with Giannis, is to play small — Gordon Hayward, Jaylen Brown, etc. This is another series where they’ll miss Marcus Smart. (And Milwaukee could really use Malcolm Brogdon as another ball-handler/shooter.) I really do think the key to the series will be more about how Milwaukee defends, though.
natesilver: Yeah, I think Smart would have been huge in this series.
chris.herring: To me, this series will probably answer the biggest question I’ve had about Milwaukee all along: Is their defense — which gives up more threes than any team in basketball — one that can work in the playoffs? They dare teams to shoot threes. In today’s NBA, that’s going against the grain hardcore. Especially when the other team has a big with that sort of range.
And can the Celtics exploit that sort of defense, with Brook Lopez dropping back in pick-and-rolls instead of stepping up? Horford can shoot! It’s dangerous to sag off him.
natesilver: I guess I didn’t realize how problematic the Bucks’ 3-point defense was during the regular season. They let opponents shoot 36.3 times per game — most in the league — at a 36.1 percent clip. Now, some of that is that their interior defense can be so good that threes are the only shots you can get. But if you’re forcing opponents to take undesirable threes, the percentage should be lower than 36.
chris.herring: Exactly. That’s their entire strategy: To allow threes from the top of the key, which Lopez doesn’t venture out to, but to try and limit them from the corners, and to play a smart strategy in terms of who you’re letting take them. Mike Budenholzer’s idea is straight out of the Popovich/Spurs’ belief that you can plan to allow certain guys to get open and bait them into taking those shots.
tchow: By the way, shoutout to Ben Falk from Cleaning the Glass. Just out here creating smarter basketball fans everywhere.
chris.herring: But the Bucks go to an extreme with it, and a lot of it is rooted into having Lopez protect the rim, where he’s more comfortable. It’s amazing that Milwaukee basically lets teams take threes — in this day and age — yet still is the best defense in the league. It says a lot.
But think about it: If you decide you aren’t going to take a three, it means you’re either pulling up from midrange or going into the paint against the long arms of Giannis AND Lopez?
gfoster: Do we believe in the Gordon-Hayward-is-back narrative?
chris.herring: I don’t know. His end of the season was encouraging. I feel like the Bucks could be a tough matchup for him, though. He was simply average, or slightly below average, against the Bucks this season.
tchow: I see where that narrative is coming from though. His stats against Indiana last series aren’t that far off from his career averages. But yeah, this is a tough, tough matchup.
chris.herring: I just kind of feel like the Bucks can bring you back down to reality very quickly with the way they defend. A shot that seems like it’s there and open can vanish really quickly against a defense that moves like Milwaukee does.
gfoster: Hayward only had a 16 percent usage rate in the first round, so he’s not a huge part of the offense at the moment.
chris.herring: I think it could be a great series.
tchow: It’s kinda strange we’ve gone this long without even mentioning Kyrie.
gfoster: I feel like if you are in the middle of the regular season and draw Giannis, it’s a nightmare. But if you give Brad Stevens four to seven straight games to plan a way to limit him or his teammates, maybe things change? (Or maybe I’m just too high on Stevens’s impact.)
chris.herring: There’s been so much talk this year about Stevens and whether the media crowned him too quickly.
gfoster:
chris.herring: It seems like it’s been a real challenge for the Celtics to jell this season. They never really hit a true stride. And even their sweep over Indiana wasn’t the most convincing.
natesilver: In some sense, I guess Stevens is a victim of his own success, because last season raised expectations so much.
chris.herring: I’m just not sold on the Celtics. Which is saying a lot, because I picked them as my preseason NBA champs.
tchow: Bold pick, Chris.
chris.herring: It just seemed like there wasn’t a real answer for how to shake them out of their funk this year.
natesilver: I mean, I don’t quite get the notion that the Celtics were huge juggernauts.
They probably only have one top-25 player (Kyrie).
chris.herring: I get it. They were a win shy of making the NBA Finals last year without two max players. Then they added those guys back in, and you figured you’d get the maturation from the youngsters who were so impressive in the playoffs.
natesilver: Well, with a full-strength Hayward, it’s a different case, although even at his best he was also in the top-25-but-definitely-not-top-10 discussion.
chris.herring: Absolutely. But their growth hasn’t been linear at all. Terry Rozier was pretty bad this season. Horford looked at least a half-step slow at times. And as you said, Kyrie is the only star who’s truly on a lot of the time. Hayward’s recovery and rehab into the player he was before still isn’t fully complete.
natesilver: I’m just saying when you rely on grit and teamwork and so forth, sometimes those teams actually have limited upside because it implies they don’t have all that much talent.
tchow: The leap, or lack thereof, of Jayson Tatum and Brown has also challenged those high expectations.
chris.herring: Hence the “Is Brad Stevens the best coach in the league?” talk, which also seemed really premature.
gfoster: Part of that narrative is people watching him take Butler University to the NCAA title game twice.
natesilver: Yeah, this season was toward the lower end of expectations for Tatum. Some of that was probably because he was freakishly good (43.4 percent) on threes as a rookie, which really inflated his metrics. But it’s also not totally unusual for a guy who was perceived as overachieving in year one to regress a bit in year two.
gfoster: OK, let’s talk about the West. The Warriors series was supposed to be over. It’s not. Is anyone a bit worried about them (not against the Clippers)? It seems like we are waiting for the switch to be flipped.
chris.herring: Not worried, no. It may show us that when a team is giving everything it has — and is good, like the Clippers are — that’s enough to beat the Warriors. I don’t think there’s any indication that the Warriors would take a team like the Rockets for granted. And that may be all that matters once Golden State finishes this series.
tchow: I’m still not worried, but maybe I should be? It’s still tough to bet that they won’t win it all, though.
natesilver: At times during Game 5, it looked like they were ready to flip the switch and just didn’t have the energy for it. But, yeah, I’m with Tony that the question is less about whether they’ll beat the Clippers than what it says about the road ahead.
chris.herring: Their defense is the real concern
tchow: Yeah, if they advance (and our model gives them a 98 percent chance of doing so), I’m expecting them to be highly motivated against Houston. I don’t think you can say they were against LA.
chris.herring: Lou Williams has been amazing, and they just haven’t had an answer for him in late-game situations.
tchow: Lou is playing out of his mind.
chris.herring: I will say this about the Warriors: I don’t know what it is, but Steve Kerr seems like he’s reaching a breaking point.
natesilver: What do you think that means, Chris? That he knows this is the last run for the team as currently constructed? That it’s his last run?
chris.herring: I just think the annoyances have built up to a level that they’ve never reached before.
Awkward moment at practice today. Steve Kerr wants the music down so media/reporters can hear questions/answers. Appears Draymond Green, who’s going through intense shooting routine behind scrum, wants it up. It stays up. pic.twitter.com/JcFp10X05o
— Anthony Slater (@anthonyVslater) April 25, 2019
tchow: Kerr has talked so much about how tough it is to three-peat, mentally. I don’t think he was exaggerating.
chris.herring: The video I posted is a small thing. But earlier in the season, there was the video of Kerr in which many people though he had mouthed that he was sick of Draymond Green. There was the stuff with Draymond and Kevin Durant. There’s the stuff with KD potentially leaving. The gap between the Warriors and other teams has closed. We haven’t even mentioned the DeMarcus Cousins thing much, because there’s still this perception that they should win anyway. And, as Tony said, it’s really hard to three-peat, and Kerr knows that better than anyone.
natesilver: I feel like the Warriors sort of benefit from the fact that their two toughest series are in the second round and the finals and the Western Conference finals matchup might be comparatively easy. You bear down to beat Houston, and then you get another break where you can play not your best for a game or two and then still beat Portland or whatever. And then you can bear down again in the finals. That seems easier than having to play 12 or 14 really tough games in a row.
chris.herring: I think the odds of them doing it without being truly pushed by someone in a series are slim at this point. Yeah. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t even think it’s a given that they get past Houston. Will they? Probably! But Houston had them on the ropes last year.
And I’m amazed at how quickly we seem to write that off.
gfoster: It’s odd that GSW seems to be a worse team at Oracle.
natesilver: Oh, of course not. I’m not sure they’re particularly heavy favorites against Houston and didn’t mean to imply otherwise.
chris.herring: I’m guilty of it, too, at times.
natesilver: We now show Houston with almost a 40 percent chance of winning that series.
chris.herring: It’s also amazing that the Clippers have beaten them twice — at Oracle, as Geoff mentioned — and we aren’t even slightly worried that it could become a series again.
The Warriors can’t do anything to impress us anymore (not that this series would be a sign that we should be impressed). I think that expectation has to weigh pretty heavily on them at some point. But all of that said: If they come out dull in Game 6 — and particularly if they lose — the noise will reach a fever pitch. And I’d go as far as to say that Houston would be favored by a lot of people in the next series. Maybe they should be if they have that much rest.
tchow: The Warriors are like sound mixers on films. You’re never impressed or notice sound mixing when everything sounds right, but the moment something sounds off, it’s all you can focus on. I don’t know if that analogy really works, but I’m running with it.
natesilver: I was in San Francisco for the NBA Finals last year — not actually for the finals, I just happened to be there when Game 1 was being played — and the atmosphere was awfully nonchalant for it being a major pro sports championship. I went to the game, and inside the arena, it was better — although it’s a weird arena — but I don’t think it’s one of the bigger home-court advantages at this point.
chris.herring: Thank goodness we’re doing this chat from our offices/homes, because Nate’s last message would have Warriors fans coming after us with pitchforks.
tchow: Nonchalantly though. Coming after us, nonchalantly, with pitchforks.
gfoster: Imagine what it will be like when they move to actual San Francisco. My understanding is that many Oakland residents resent the Silicon Valley scene their games have become.
natesilver: It was a weird crowd. Everyone was either like a super awesome old-school die-hard fan or like a Rich Venture Capital/Tech Bro who whined about how unfair the refs were being to Golden State, without a lot in between.
chris.herring: !!!
gfoster: That sounds like 1990s Madison Square Garden. But bankers instead of Tech Bros.
chris.herring: I love Oracle and will miss the roar that you hear when Steph or Klay goes nuts. And I feel for the folks in Oakland who feel like their team is being gentrified/taken away. (I honestly empathize with that part. Seriously.) But on a lighter note, as a journalist, I won’t miss the awful Wi-Fi or being shoulder to shoulder.
gfoster: Lastly, we have a Game 7 on Saturday. Hooray! We still have Denver at 58 percent to make the conference finals. That seems high. Unlike Portland, the Nuggets still have a game to win to get into the semifinals.
tchow: Our model still down on Portland.
natesilver: Our model doesn’t really like any of the teams in this part of the bracket, so if it’s high, it’s not because it loves the Nugs so much as that it isn’t that enthralled with Portland. Or San Antonio, for that matter.
chris.herring: I don’t feel particularly great about anyone on that side of the bracket, either. But I am kind of loving this “why not us?” mentality that Damian Lillard and his team have. They really shouldn’t be here. Extreme failures in their past. A first-round sweep to an underdog last year. Injury to arguably their second-best player this year, right at the end of the season. But here they are. And Lillard has been the best player this postseason, hands down.
gfoster: After that performance, I’m officially on Team Dame in next round.
tchow: These playoffs gave us that Dame stare-down meme. Whatever happens the rest of the way, it’s already been a great postseason.
natesilver: Denver’s advantage in that series, according to our model, is all about (1) Jusuf Nurkic being out and (2) home-court advantage (the Nuggets have a big one). It’s not like they’re really a better team per se. But Portland is forced to either play a ton of Enes Kanter or some very strange lineups. And they have to win at least once at 5,280 feet. And those things aren’t easy.
gfoster: Colorado’s venues need to be moved to sea level in all sports.
chris.herring: Who knows if Denver even gets there? Jokic had the game of his life in Game 6 — one of the most sound NBA games ever — and it wasn’t enough. Although I did see that a No. 7 or No. 8 seed has never won a Game 7 before. Which is kind of a nitpicked stat, since seeds that low have won winner-take-all Game 5s before. But still.
natesilver: Yeah, I’m being presumptuous, I guess. Our model would have Portland as like 2:1 favorites or better against San Antonio, which seems like exactly the kind of series that would boil down to “Portland wins because Dame Lillard is by far the best player on the court.”
chris.herring: At this point, Portland and Golden State would be the most fun matchup we could ask for. Golden State seems to enjoy putting Denver in its place, whereas Lillard has shown that he’s not afraid and that he can dominate a series. I think round 2 is fascinating because Houston and Golden State will almost certainly meet then. But for the sake of spreading out the best series, I wish the Rockets had finished as a No. 2 seed instead. Because the East will be more than enough entertainment already, but I feel like we’re already somewhat down on the WCF.
tchow: This is just more fuel for Dame’s fire, Chris.
gfoster: All right, enjoy the second (and the rest of the first) round! We will be back next week to discuss each series.
Check out our latest NBA predictions .
Silver Bulletpoints: I’m Revising My 2020 Tiers To Better Match The Polling
Welcome to the second edition of Silver Bulletpoints. If you missed last week’s debut, the premise of this column is simple: Each week, I cover three topics related to the 2020 primary in 300 words or less.
One habit I don’t want to get into is re-evaluating my candidate tiers each week, since there are usually more interesting and informative ways of talking about the field. But I am going to review the tiers again this week now that former Vice President Joe Biden has officially entered the race.
Bulletpoint No. 1: The polls tell us Biden is a half-step in front of everyone else
This week, we evaluated what one can learn from early polling. Answer: more than you might think. For instance, a well-known candidate polling like Biden (about 28 percent in national polls) should win the nomination about 35 percent of the time, other factors held equal. But polling like Elizabeth Warren (around 7 percent) works out to roughly a 3 percent chance, other factors held equal.
I’m emphasizing “other factors held equal” because polls aren’t the only thing to look at. But they do provide a reality check.
Suppose you’re a GM preparing for the NFL draft and you have a simple algorithm that sorts college quarterbacks into two groups. In Group 1, historically, 35 percent of quarterbacks have become star players. In Group 2, 3 percent have.
A scout comes to you, says he’s evaluated every factor, more than the algorithm considers, and you should draft a Group 2 quarterback ahead of a Group 1 guy.
Do you buy it? Maybe. But that’s putting a lot of faith in the scout. The algorithm tells you the Group 1 player is about 12 times more likely to succeed. Perhaps you can overcome that prior with a deeper analysis, but the circumstances should be special.
The upshot: I think my tiers should align more closely with the polling. Maybe we can liberally scramble candidates around by half a tier, but more than that should require a really solid argument. Looking at it that way, Biden should probably be alone in the penthouse level since he clearly has the best polling. You should also adjust polls for name recognition, however, and once you do, it’s clear that Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg have the next-best polling.
So here’s where I have the candidates in my revised, still-subjective-but-now-more-poll-driven tiers:
Nate’s not-to-be-taken-too-seriously presidential tiers
For the Democratic nomination, as revised on April 26, 2019
Tier
Sub-tier
Candidates
1
a
Biden
b
Harris, Sanders, Buttigieg
2
a
Warren, O’Rourke
b
Booker, Klobuchar, Abrams*
3
a
Castro, Gillibrand, Inslee, Yang
b
Bennet*, Hickenlooper, Ryan, Bullock*
* Candidate is not yet officially running but is reasonably likely to do so.
Bulletpoint No. 2: Kamala Harris is doing fine, but where are her endorsements?
You’ll notice my tiers don’t exactly follow the polling. Instead, I have Harris in the bottom half of Tier 1 with Buttigieg and Sanders even though her polling isn’t as strong. That’s actually a demotion from before, when I had her at the top of Tier 1 with Biden.
Maybe it helps to define the tiers more precisely. Here’s how I think of them:
Tier 1: Things are coming together, to one degree or another. Maybe not everything has gone exactly to plan, but events are broadly in line with a script where the candidate takes a fairly linear path to the nomination.
Tier 2: Things aren’t quite coming together now, but it’s reasonably easy to imagine how they could in the future.
Tier 3: Things aren’t coming together now, and there’s no particular reason to think they will. But it wouldn’t be entirely shocking if they did. The candidate isn’t quite waiting in the wings, but maybe they’re backstage — waiting to wait in the wings.
I still think Harris fits the Tier 1 description. There’s no real reason to think she can’t win. She raised a decent amount of money, her favorability ratings are roughly as good as anyone’s, party activists like her, and she’s the only woman or person of color in a top tier full of white dudes.
But I wonder why Harris hasn’t gotten more endorsements. Harris fits the archetype of a coalition-building candidate, and endorsements are a pretty good benchmark for how well you’re building your coalition. Instead, Biden pulled ahead in our endorsement tracker after just one day and is already getting endorsements from black leaders that Harris is missing.
Bulletpoint No. 3: A theory for why Warren isn’t getting more of Sanders’s voters
Warren epitomizes what I think of as a Tier 2 candidate. She’s not polling like one of the front-runners. And her endorsements and fundraising totals don’t have her at the top of the field. She may still be dealing with the fallout of her DNA test, so you wouldn’t say her campaign has gone according to script.
From ABC News:
But it’s easy enough to imagine scenarios where she becomes a front-runner. Voters could gradually overcome their doubts about her electability. Or she could maybe reorient perceptions if she keeps focusing on policy. Rank-and-file voters don’t care that much about policy, but being policy-focused can be a good way to get favorable media coverage and influence party activists.
Or if Sanders falters, maybe Warren would stand to gain ground as the leading candidate of the left. Or would she? One question is why she hasn’t picked up more support from Sanders voters in the first place. Her policy proposals, if anything, have been a little bolder than his — for instance, she proposed a wealth tax rather than just an increased estate tax. Yet she’s sitting at 7 percent in the polls while he’s at 20.
There are a lot of plausible answers, but this tweet from Bhaskar Sunkara, founder of the socialist magazine Jacobin, suggests one explanation:
For a layer of intellectuals, policy people, and other professionals, supporting Warren is a way to signal genuine concern with the US and support broadly egalitarian fixes, while still not crossing the Rubicon. It’s understandable. For the rest of us, it’s Bernie. pic.twitter.com/YejpX2HEWa
— Bhaskar Sunkara (@sunraysunray) April 23, 2019
It isn’t just about policy, Sunkara is saying. It’s about the candidates’ attitudes toward American institutions, including the institution of capitalism. Perhaps by extension, it’s also about attitudes toward the institution of the Democratic Party, of which Sanders isn’t a member. If Sunkara is right, it means Sanders and Warren may not be swimming in the same lane after all. It may also mean Sanders’s upside is limited since it’s hard to win the Democratic nomination when running against the Democratic Party.
Check out all the polls we’ve been collecting ahead of the 2020 elections.
April 25, 2019
Politics Podcast: Joe Biden’s Path To The Democratic Nomination
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Former Vice President Joe Biden announced his candidacy for president on Thursday. The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast crew discusses how he could win the Democratic nomination and also why he might come up short. A core question for his campaign will be whether he runs as a consensus candidate or as a factional candidate, relying on the older and more moderate part of the Democratic Party.
Also, the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recording a live podcast in Houston on May 8. Find more information and tickets here.
You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes , the ESPN app or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen .
The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast publishes 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.
How Joe Biden Could Win The 2020 Democratic Primary
Joe Biden has officially entered the 2020 presidential race. His case to win the 2020 Democratic nomination is fairly simple: As Barack Obama’s two-term vice president, he’s the most familiar brand in the field. He’s ahead in the polls (it’s emphatically not a tie for the lead with Bernie Sanders; Biden’s polling is quite a bit better). He’s also the best-performing Democrat in polls against President Trump, and he gains a lot of support from Democrats on the basis of his perceived electability. And while he might not be the most liberal Democrat, that isn’t necessarily a disadvantage; roughly half of voters in the Democratic primary identify as moderate or conservative,1 which could be a plus in a field where many candidates are running to the left.
Of course, this doesn’t mean Biden’s path to the nomination is easy. Not by a long shot. But before we start to poke holes in Biden’s candidacy, let’s ruminate on his advantages a little longer. There’s a case to be made that the media — in seeking out shiny new objects like Pete Buttigieg, and in ignoring the preferences of older, more working-class and more moderate Democrats who still make up a large part of the Democratic base — is overlooking the obvious front-runner in Biden. Arguably, in fact, media elites have the same blind spots for Biden that they had for Trump. There aren’t likely to be a lot of Biden voters in most journalists’ social circles, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t out there.
The case for why Biden is the front-runner
Former vice presidents usually win their party nominations when they seek them. Let’s start with his credentials: Biden was vice president until about two years ago. And as Biden might put it, that’s a Big Fucking Deal. Of the nine previous cases in which a current or former vice president sought his party’s nomination since World War II (not counting cases such as Lyndon Johnson’s where the vice president had ascended to the presidency beforehand), he won it six times:
Vice presidents usually win their party’s nomination
Former vice presidents who sought their party’s nomination since World War II
Candidate
VP Years
Year Nomination Sought
Early Polling Avg.*
Won nomination?
Alben Barkley
1949-53
1952
—
Richard Nixon
1953-61
1960
—
✓
Richard Nixon
1953-61
1968
—
✓
Hubert Humphrey
1965-69
1968
—
✓
Hubert Humphrey
1965-69
1972
24%
Walter Mondale
1977-81
1984
34
✓
George H.W. Bush
1981-89
1988
37
✓
Dan Quayle
1989-93
2000
7
Al Gore
1993-2001
2000
54
✓
Joe Biden
2009-17
2020
28
TBD
* Polling averages aren’t calculated for years before 1972. Early polling averages for past election cycles use polls conducted in January through June of the year before the primaries. Biden’s average includes the most recent poll from each polling firm in FiveThirtyEight’s polling database since Beto O’Rourke’s entry into the race on March 14. Vice presidents who ascended to the presidency before seeking another term aren’t included.
Source: polls
Sure, you could nitpick at this. Most former vice presidents sought the presidential nomination at the first possible opportunity; Biden waited four years, and candidates who waited — small sample size warning — don’t have the same track record. And Biden’s polling is somewhere in between the vice presidents who failed to win the nomination (such as Dan Quayle in 2000) and the ones who achieved it (such as Walter Mondale in 1984). But for a lot of Democrats, among whom Obama is still extremely popular, the vice presidency will go a long way toward answering questions about Biden’s electability, fitness for the office, and policy positions.
Biden is leading in the polls, and it isn’t that close. Speaking of that polling: While Biden’s polling isn’t spectacular, it’s stronger than anyone else’s in the field by some margin. In recent surveys,2 he’s averaged 28 percent in national polls (ahead of Sanders’s 20 percent) and 25 percent in Iowa polls (better than Sanders’s 18 percent). And while New Hampshire is a potential liability for Biden in Sanders’s backyard, South Carolina — populated with moderate Democrats and African Americans — is a potential strength.
Biden is outpolling Bernie
Most recent poll from each polling firm in FiveThirtyEight’s polling database since Beto O’Rourke’s entry into the race on March 14*
National
Pollster
Dates
Biden
Sanders
Ipsos
4/17 – 4/23
24%
15%
Morning Consult
4/15 – 4/21
30
24
Change Research
4/12 – 4/15
21
20
Monmouth University
4/11 – 4/15
27
20
USC Dornsife/LA Times
3/15 – 4/15
27
16
Emerson College
4/11 – 4/14
24
29
HarrisX
4/5 – 4/6
36
19
Quinnipiac University
3/21 – 3/25
29
19
McLaughlin & Associates
3/20 – 3/24
28
17
Fox News
3/17 – 3/20
31
23
CNN/SSRS
3/14 – 3/17
28
20
Average
28
20
Iowa
Pollster
Dates
Biden
Sanders
Gravis Marketing
4/17 – 4/18
19%
19%
Monmouth University
4/4 – 4/9
27
16
David Binder Research
3/21 – 3/24
25
17
Emerson College
3/21 – 3/24
25
24
Public Policy Polling
3/14 – 3/15
29
15
Average
25
18
New Hampshire
Pollster
Dates
Biden
Sanders
University of New Hampshire
4/10 – 4/18
18%
30%
Saint Anselm College
4/3 – 4/8
23
16
South Carolina
Pollster
Dates
Biden
Sanders
Change Research
3/31 – 4/4
32%
14%
Nevada
Pollster
Dates
Biden
Sanders
Emerson College
3/28 – 3/30
26%
23%
* Where the pollster conducted versions of the poll with and without Joe Biden, the version with Biden is used.
Source: Polls
Maybe it seems as though I’m casting Biden’s polling in a pretty friendly light given that I just wrote an article about how Sanders’s polling wasn’t all that impressive. But there’s a gap between where Sanders is polling and where Biden is, and empirically, it’s a relevant one. Based on historical data, we estimate that candidates with high name recognition who are polling at 20 percent (Sanders) in early national polls can expect to win their nominations about 15 percent of the time, other factors held equal. But candidates who are polling at 28 percent (Biden) win their nominations something more like 35 percent of the time, or roughly twice as often.
It’s also possible that Biden will get a bounce in his polls after his announcement, as Sanders did and as Kamala Harris did and as Beto O’Rourke sorta did. Perhaps that doesn’t matter much since announcement bounces tend to fade (as Sanders’s and Harris’s did). But we should note that the comparison between Biden and Sanders isn’t strictly apples-to-apples. Biden has been leading Sanders even as an unannounced candidate while Sanders has been actively campaigning.
Biden’s support is pretty robust. Biden’s support . He has the highest favorable ratings in the field and relatively low unfavorable ratings — in recent early-state and national polls, an average of 74 percent of Democrats said they viewed him favorably, compared with 15 percent who said they viewed him unfavorably. His ratio of favorable ratings to unfavorable ratings is 4.8, which essentially ties him for second-best in the field with Harris and puts him only slightly behind the leading candidate, Buttigieg.
Biden’s favorability ratings are near the top of the pack
Average of favorability ratings among Democratic voters in recent national, Iowa and New Hampshire polls
Morning Consult: U.S.
Monmouth: Iowa
Saint Anselm: N.H.
Average
Candidate
Fav.
Unfav.
Fav.
Unfav.
Fav.
Unfav.
Fav.
Unfav.
Ratio
Buttigieg
38%
9%
45%
9%
42%
6%
42%
8%
5.2
Biden
75
14
78
14
70
18
74
15
4.8
Harris
49
12
61
13
54
10
55
12
4.7
Booker
44
12
54
16
56
11
51
13
3.9
O’Rourke
47
11
60
13
46
17
51
14
3.7
Sanders
75
16
67
26
67
25
70
22
3.1
Klobuchar
28
13
51
10
31
13
37
12
3.1
Castro
28
12
36
9
24
8
29
10
3.0
Inslee
17
7
26
5
10
6
18
6
2.9
Warren
55
19
67
20
58
30
60
23
2.6
Hickenlooper
16
9
32
8
15
10
21
9
2.3
Delaney
14
9
31
12
17
7
21
9
2.2
Gillibrand
32
14
37
17
33
18
34
16
2.1
Gabbard
16
11
29
13
16
13
20
12
1.6
Only candidates whose favorability was asked about in all three polls are included in the table.
Morning Consult poll was conducted April 15-21, Monmouth University poll conducted April 4-9 and Saint Anselm College conducted April 3-8.
Sources: Polls
Whether this will last is anyone’s guess, but in talking with the Biden campaign, they think their candidate’s strengths are fairly self-evident — that voters perceive Biden as authentic, as experienced, as concerned with the middle class, as fighting for Obama’s legacy — and that these personal qualities will be more important and enduring to voters than Biden’s policy positions. Plus, he already survived one early challenge intact; so far, a series of accusations by women about inappropriate touching has hurt Biden’s numbers only at the margins.
Biden is viewed as electable, and that matters to Democrats. But perhaps Biden’s biggest strength — although it can also be read as a bearish signal, as I’ll explain later on — is the perception that he can beat Trump. In a recent Quinnipiac University poll of California, for instance, 35 percent of Democratic voters said he had the best chance of beating Trump — more than the 26 percent who put Biden as their first choice. Only one other candidate, O’Rourke, polled higher on electability than on first-choice support (and O’Rourke’s difference was within the margin of error).
This gets into some uncomfortable territory for Democrats. Only about 25 percent of voters in the Democratic primary electorate are straight white men.3 But the two leading candidates in the polls are straight white men. Democrats care a lot about electability this election cycle, and sizable minorities of Democratic voters have said that they worry about whether nominating a woman or a gay candidate would reduce their chances of beating Trump. But there’s a fine line between saying “vote for me because I’m the most electable candidate” and “vote for me because I’m a safe white guy,” which is why Biden will have to be careful in how he speaks about electability.
Biden can also point toward concrete evidence of his electability in the form of head-to-head polls showing him performing well against Trump. On average in polls conducted since Sanders’s announcement on Feb. 19, Biden leads Trump by 7.1 points, whereas Sanders leads Trump by 3.5 points. Meanwhile, the other Democrats who have been polled frequently are roughly tied against Trump.4
Biden fares better than others in polls against Trump
Head-to-head matchups against Trump in national polls since Feb. 19, 2019
Pollster
Biden
Sanders
Warren
Harris
O’Rourke
Booker
Buttigieg
Change Research
5
4
2
1
1
—
—
Civiqs
0
1
-2
-1
-1
-2
—
D-CYFOR
11
9
3
2
—
3
—
Emerson
6
3
-3
1
2
—
-3
Fox News
7
3
-2
-2
—
—
—
HarrisX
9
3
-4
-6
-4
-7
-9
Morning Consult
8
—
—
—
—
—
—
PPP
13
8
6
7
6
7
4
Rasmussen Reports
5
-3
—
—
—
—
—
Average
7.1
3.5
0.0
0.3
0.8
0.3
-2.7
The most recent poll from each polling firm is used for each matchup, dating back to polls from when Bernie Sanders officially entered the race (Feb. 19). Where a pollster included versions of a poll with and without Howard Schultz, we list the version without Schultz.
Sources: Polls
But are these head-to-head polls actually a meaningful signal? To a first approximation, I’d say “no.” For one thing, presidential polls simply aren’t very accurate a year-and-a-half before a general election. (Even half a year out is marginal, for that matter.) For another, candidates with low name recognition tend to poll poorly in early, head-to-head matchups, so while the polls are somewhat interesting to look at for Biden and Sanders, they really don’t say very much about the lesser-known Democrats. For a third, Biden may have benefited from the fact that he hasn’t officially been running for the nomination and therefore has been somewhat above the fray. Sanders’s numbers with general election voters declined after he announced his candidacy, and Biden’s conceivably could too. For the time being, however, the polls give the Biden campaign a good talking point.
If some of the Biden campaign’s justifications for its electability argument are flimsy, others have some basis in reality. Other factors held equal, more moderate candidates tend to perform better in presidential elections, and Biden’s appeal to working-class white voters and African Americans could conceivably reduce or even reverse the Electoral College disadvantage that cost Hillary Clinton the presidency.
Biden’s “lane” is relatively clear. Although I wouldn’t go overboard with this, since “lanes” in the Democratic primary are still blurry, Biden faces relatively little competition for some of his base voters. In 2016, according to the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, 25 percent of the Democratic primary electorate was in the baby boom generation or older and identified as moderate or conservative. Another 14 percent of Democrats were baby boomers or older and identified as “liberal” but not “very liberal.” Candidates such as O’Rourke and Amy Klobuchar will try to compete for those voters, but other candidates who might have done so — such as Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown5, former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg — declined to run for president. Democrats obviously did not clear the field for Biden — that so many candidates are running is a bearish indicator for him. But he did clear his own orbit, at least.
Related:
Biden also has some big liabilities
While there are several reasons to think Biden is not as strong as he appears in the polls, there are other critiques that I don’t find as convincing. So let me run through those quickly, just so you know I’m not ignoring them. They are:
First, I’m not convinced that Biden’s positions on long-ago controversies such as school busing are liable to hurt him much. Although it’s not quite the same thing, we’ve found that voters tend to apply a high discount rate to presidential scandals; a new scandal can hurt a candidate, but older ones tend to be priced into his stock. It’s reasonable to infer that the same is true of issue stances, especially in the case of Biden, when Democrats have eight years of more recent data in the form of his tenure as Obama’s vice president. And Biden’s not really trying to out-woke or out-liberal other Democrats anyway; his voters are older and more moderate.
Second, the initial evidence from polls seems to be that Democrats are fairly indifferent toward accusations that Biden touched women inappropriately. I don’t want to totally dismiss this as a risk factor for Biden; there could be other accusations later that Democrats view differently, and party activists may care about the accusations even if rank-and-file Democrats don’t. Nonetheless, Biden is helped by the fact that (i) his base is older and less progressive and therefore less likely to view this sort of conduct as inappropriate and (ii) voters feel like they know him given his eight years as vice president.
Third, while it’s worth noting that Biden’s previous presidential campaigns, in 1988 and 2008, flopped, the boilerplate criticism that he’s a “bad candidate” also strangely ignores his mostly controversy-free performances as a vice presidential candidate in 2008 and 2012 (and as a surrogate for Clinton in 2016). Plenty of politicians have learning curves as candidates, and although Biden will make his share of gaffes, I’m not sure that he’s necessarily more at risk of them than other, less-experienced candidates.
But there are several areas of real concern for Biden.
He’s really old for a presidential candidate. Biden is currently 76 and would be 78 upon taking the oath of office; the same age that Trump would be at the end of his second term. (Sanders is 77, so he has some of the same problems, of course.) And while there isn’t any hard-and-fast medical rule about how old is too old to run for president, 62 percent of general election voters (!) said they’d have reservations about voting for someone older than 75 in a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, far more than the share who said they’d have reservations about a woman, an African American, or a gay or lesbian president. While you could argue that age is priced into voters’ assessments of Biden, there hasn’t really been a news cycle devoted to the age of the candidates yet, although there probably will be at some point.
Despite Biden’s credentials as Obama’s heir apparent, his party support may be lukewarm. Traditionally, former vice presidents are strong in a “Party Decides” model of the race in which party leaders and party activists have a lot of influence — or at least, are good leading indicators — over who rank-and-file voters eventually pick. In Biden’s case, however, the reception from the Democratic Party establishment has been mixed. He has some endorsements, including from the only Democratic senator (California’s Dianne Feinstein) and governor (Cuomo) to have endorsed a candidate from outside of their home states so far. But he isn’t racking up dozens of them, as Clinton already had at this point in the cycle in 2016 or Al Gore did in 2000. Nor, obviously, has Biden cleared the field of other candidates as Clinton and Gore did. And while Biden enjoys some support from former Obama staffers and donors, he by no means monopolizes it, with some ex-Obamaworld people having gravitated toward candidates such as O’Rourke and Buttigieg. (Obama himself is not expected to endorse a candidate anytime soon.) Party activists in the early states are also lukewarm on Biden and in some cases are actively opposed to him, based on surveys and interviews with them.
All of this makes Biden difficult to assess. He’s somewhere in between being a traditional, next-in-line front-runner, with the polling and party support to match, and a factional candidate, where the faction is the old guard of more moderate, working-class Democrats. Factional candidates sometimes can win their nominations, but it’s a harder road to navigate, especially given a Democratic nomination process where delegates are awarded in a highly proportional fashion and a plurality of support is not necessarily sufficient to avert a contested convention.
“Electability” could be inflating Biden’s numbers. In the California poll I mentioned earlier, Biden was the first choice of 26 percent of voters, but 35 percent of voters thought he was the most electable. The flip side to this is that only 13 percent of voters said they thought Biden had the best policy ideas. The same share of voters, 13 percent, thought Elizabeth Warren had the best policy ideas. But only 4 percent thought she had the best chance to beat Trump. And only 7 percent of voters had her as their first choice.
In essence, voters are averaging out how electable they see the candidates with how they see them on the issues. We shouldn’t necessarily expect that formula to change. Democrats really want to beat Trump, and they think electability is important.
But we could see assessments of the candidates’ electability even out as lesser-known candidates become more familiar to voters, perform well in the debates and eventually start winning primaries and caucuses. In 2008, for instance, electability was initially a huge advantage for Hillary Clinton, but that perception eroded after Obama won endorsements from trusted leaders, began to perform as well or better than Clinton in head-to-head polls against Republicans, and won Iowa, a general-election swing state that largely consists of white, working-class voters. That helped Obama gain ground in the polls against Clinton; voters no longer felt like they had to make a tradeoff between beating John McCain and picking the candidate they really liked.
It’s easy enough to imagine a similar process taking place this time around for Warren or Harris or Buttigieg, as voters grow more comfortable with how a woman or black or gay candidate would perform in the general election. Women candidates also performed extremely well in Democratic congressional primaries last year, so there’s a chance that several of the male candidates lose ground to women as perceptions of electability evolve beyond voters’ initial, gender-driven priors.
Harris and Cory Booker are likely to erode Biden’s support among black voters. Recent polling has shown Biden performing strongly among African American voters. Morning Consult has had him with around 40 percent of the black vote in its recent national surveys, for instance, and Quinnipiac had him at 44 percent in its national poll last month. Biden has also been performing well in polls of South Carolina, where about 60 percent of the Democratic electorate is black.
This is a real asset for Biden. Black voters — especially older black voters — tend to be more moderate than white Democrats, so they fit fairly naturally into his constituency. His tenure as Obama’s vice president undoubtedly also gives him credibility with black voters. Nonetheless, there are two major black candidates in the race, and Harris and Booker probably stand to gain ground with black voters as they become better-known, not unlike how it took some time for Obama to win over black voters in 2008. The Biden campaign also said they expect some erosion, although it thinks that Biden could hold 25 percent to 30 percent of the black vote even once it occurs. That’s a fairly reasonable expectation, but it does mean that Biden’s overall numbers would decline a little bit from where they are now.6
His media coverage will probably be unfriendly. The conventional wisdom about Biden has already been wrong at least once. His winning chances plummeted in betting markets after New York magazine published an account from Lucy Flores that Biden made her feel “uneasy, gross, and confused” when he allegedly kissed her on the back of her head at a campaign event of hers in 2014. But they later rebounded once a variety of polling showed that Democratic voters hadn’t changed their perceptions of Biden by much. So it’s possible that the media is underestimating how robust Biden’s support might turn out to be.
Media coverage could nonetheless be a problem for Biden. Within the mainstream media, the story of Biden winning the nomination will be seen as boring and anticlimactic. That tends not to lead to favorable coverage. Meanwhile, some left-aligned media outlets may prefer candidates who are some combination of more leftist, more wonkish, more reflective of the party’s diversity, and more adept on social media.
If Biden is framed as being out of touch with today’s Democratic Party and that narrative is repeated across a variety of outlets, it could begin to resonate with voters who don’t buy it initially. If he’s seen as a gaffe-prone candidate, then minor missteps on the campaign trail could be blown up into big fumbles. Biden might not have the sort of openly antagonistic relationship with the media that Hillary Clinton did — but he could have similar sorts of problems with it gradually sapping his favorability ratings.
Two theories for how Biden can wage his campaign. Neither are sure to work.
As I mentioned earlier, Biden is unusual in that he embodies some aspects of a traditional, odds-on front-runner (good credentials, a claim to being the party’s natural successor, reasonably strong polling) and some of a factional candidate (lukewarm support from party elites, inability to clear the field, much stronger support with some demographic groups than others). That’s a challenge for him, because each of those archetypes involve different strategies.
As a front-runner, Biden would seek to build consensus by not being too combative with other candidates, playing it safe on policy, spending time before different Democratic constituencies (e.g., unions, black evangelicals) and seeking endorsements among these groups, putting a lot of time and effort into fundraising, and projecting forward to the general election by emphasizing his strengths against Trump. In essence, he’d go into a risk-averse, “prevent defense” mode. The goal would be to win Iowa and/or South Carolina, at which point the field would winnow and Biden could use his fairly broad favorability to appeal to the rest of the party and glide to the nomination. In this strategy, Biden is probably perfectly happy to have Sanders in the mix, since Sanders as a factional candidate soaks up support from candidates who might otherwise leapfrog Biden. Not to mention, Biden is probably a favorite against Sanders in a two-candidate race.
The problem with a prevent-defense strategy is that you tend to lose a few yards on every play even if you avoid giving up a long pass. And it’s not clear whether Biden’s position is robust enough to withstand this. If you’re Hillary Clinton and you start out with 60 percent or 65 percent of the vote, you can lose quite a bit of that support and still come out ahead. But if you’re Biden and you start out with 25 percent or 30 percent, there’s much less margin for error. Is Biden’s floor higher than everyone else’s ceiling? Maybe, but it’s not hard to imagine Sanders or Buttigieg or O’Rourke or Klobuchar or pretty much anyone else cobbling together 20 percent or 25 percent of the vote in Iowa, winning the state and sending the race on an entirely different trajectory — or Harris or Booker causing problems for Biden in South Carolina.
Alternatively, Biden could adopt a more combative and defiant approach, leaning into his differences with the rest of the field, not playing it safe in his public appearances and perhaps even pushing back against the “identity politics” of the left. The idea would be to prop up his floor — to ensure that he won the 25 percent of Democrats who are older moderates — at the cost of lowering his ceiling. But this would also entail risk. He’d be resigning himself to being a factional candidate, and like Sanders, Biden could have trouble building consensus later on once the had field winnowed, even if he’d won some early states.
So those are two deeply challenging paths to the nomination. Still, both are plausible, and having two paths isn’t so bad in a field in which a lot of candidates don’t seem to have any path at all.
From ABC News:
April 23, 2019
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This week on Hot Takedown, we’re joined by FiveThirtyEight editor in chief Nate Silver as we look ahead to the second round of the NBA playoffs and the potential Warriors-vs.-Rockets rematch. Some experts are picking Houston to advance, but our model still favors Golden State. Who’s right? As for the other opening rounds, with the exception of the all-knotted-up Nuggets-Spurs series, the higher seeds seem likely to advance — which leads us to ponder some possible restructuring of the NBA’s playoff format.
With the NFL draft starting Thursday, the big question on everyone’s mind is whether the Arizona Cardinals will take Kyler Murray with the No. 1 pick. We discuss Murray’s draft position and take a look at the draft value of quarterbacks in a year when there aren’t a lot of great QB prospects available. As for the teams in general, is it better to draft for need or draft for talent?
We’re also introducing a new segment called “Get Off My Field.” This week, Nate thinks there are too many home runs and strikeouts in baseball.
Here’s what we’re looking at this week:
Chris Herring writes about Russell Westbrook’s continued playoff woes.
We’re following the playoffs with our NBA Predictions.
We eagerly await Kirk Goldberry’s new book, “SprawlBall: A Visual Tour of the New Era of the NBA.”
Michael Salfino explores the value of different NFL draft positions.
We marvel at Giannis Antetokounmpo laughing in the face of the laws of physics.
Bernie Sanders Can Win, But He Isn’t Polling Like A Favorite
If there’s one thing the Democratic establishment is good at, it’s panicking. And the latest reason for panic among Democratic insiders is Bernie Sanders. According to a New York Times article from earlier this month, the prospect of a Sanders nomination is “spooking establishment-aligned Democrats, some of whom are worried that his nomination could lure a third-party centrist into the field.” It is “also creating tensions about what, if anything, should be done to halt Mr. Sanders,” the article says.
Should Democratic insiders really be worried that Sanders will be nominated and cost them an election against President Trump that they’d otherwise win? I’m here to make the case that they shouldn’t be, or at least not yet. Instead, Sanders-related panic is premature for at least three reasons:
While Sanders is one of perhaps a dozen candidates with a plausible shot at the nomination, the field is fairly wide open, and it’s too early to say how formidable he is.
It’s also too early to conclude very much about Sanders’s “electability” against Trump, especially in comparison to other Democrats.
Finally, even if they wanted to stop Sanders, it’s too early for the party establishment to know how to go about doing that — without more input from rank-and-file voters, any move meant to hinder Sanders could backfire.
Each one of these claims could be the subject of a long post — so I just want to focus on the first one for today and leave the others for later.
To be clear, I think Sanders can win the Democratic nomination. He’s probably the 3rd- or 4th- most likely nominee, in my estimation — slightly behind Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and roughly tied with Pete Buttigieg, but ahead of everyone else. All of these candidates (and others such as Elizabeth Warren and Beto O’Rourke) have their own assets and liabilities, so I wouldn’t go to the mat if you put them in a different order.
But sometimes, I get the sense from Sanders backers — or from other election analysts who look at the polls a little differently than I do, or from traditional reporters — that they think Sanders’s strength in the polls is being ignored. Empirically, however, Sanders’s position in the polls is not all that strong; it’s consistent with sometimes winning the nomination but usually not.
Candidates in Sanders’s position in the polls have a mediocre track record
According to our polling tracker, nine polling organizations have released national polls of the Democratic primary since O’Rourke declared for the race last month.1 On average, Sanders has 21 percent of the vote in the latest polls from each of these firms.2 His polls in Iowa are a bit worse than that — he’s averaging 18 percent in the last five polls there.3 New Hampshire is a mixed bag, with Sanders at 30 percent in one recent poll but just 16 percent in another one.
How Sanders fares in recent national and early-state polls
Most recent poll from each polling firm in each state since Beto O’Rourke’s entry into the race on March 14*
National
Pollster
Dates
Sanders
Morning Consult
4/15 – 4/21
24%
Change Research
4/12 – 4/15
20
USC Dornsife/LA Times
3/15 – 4/15
16
Emerson College
4/11 – 4/14
29
HarrisX
4/5 – 4/6
19
Quinnipiac University
3/21 – 3/25
19
McLaughlin & Associates
3/20 – 3/24
17
Fox News
3/17 – 3/20
23
CNN/SSRS
3/14 – 3/17
20
Average
21
Iowa
Pollster
Dates
Sanders
Gravis Marketing
4/17 – 4/18
19%
Monmouth University
4/4 – 4/9
16
David Binder Research
3/21 – 3/24
17
Emerson College
3/21 – 3/24
24
Public Policy Polling
3/14 – 3/15
15
Average
18
New Hampshire
Pollster
Dates
Sanders
University of New Hampshire
4/10 – 4/18
30%
Saint Anselm College
4/3 – 4/8
16
South Carolina
Pollster
Dates
Sanders
Change Research
3/31 – 4/4
14%
Nevada
Pollster
Dates
Sanders
Emerson College
3/28 – 3/30
23%
* Where the pollster conducted versions of the poll with and without Joe Biden, the version with Biden is used.
Source: Polls
Across the board, those numbers are well down from 2016 — when Sanders got 43 percent of the vote nationally, along with 50 percent in Iowa and 60 percent in New Hampshire.
You could take a glass-half-full view of this for Sanders, however. Sure, he isn’t getting as many votes as last time around, but you wouldn’t expect him to in a field that already includes 17 major candidates, rather than just Sanders and Hillary Clinton. And 20 percent or 30 percent of the vote could still be good enough for first place in the early states.
Historically, though, candidates who are polling at only about 20 percent nationally despite the near-universal name recognition that Sanders enjoys don’t have a great track record. From our research on the history of past primary polls, I found 15 candidates from past nomination processes who, like Sanders, (i) polled at an average of between 15 percent and 25 percent4 in national polls in the first six months of the year before the Iowa caucuses5 and (ii) who had high or very high name recognition.6
Candidates in Sanders’s polling position mostly lost
Candidates with high name recognition and 15 percent to 25 percent of the vote in early national polls
Year
Party
Candidate
Poll Avg.
Off. ran for Pres.?
Had Run For Pres./ V.P. Before?
Won Nomination?
2016
R
Jeb Bush
16%
✓
2012
R
Mitt Romney
20
✓
✓
✓
2008
D
Barack Obama
23
✓
✓
2008
R
John McCain
21
✓
✓
✓
2004
D
Joe Lieberman
19
✓
✓
2000
R
Elizabeth Dole
18
✓
1988
D
Jesse Jackson
15
✓
✓
1988
R
Bob Dole
22
✓
✓
1984
D
John Glenn
24
✓
1980
R
Gerald Ford
19
✓
1976
D
George Wallace
19
✓
✓
1976
D
Hubert Humphrey
15
✓
1976
R
Ronald Reagan
22
✓
✓
1972
D
Ted Kennedy
24
1972
D
Hubert Humphrey
24
✓
✓
Three of these candidates won their nominations; the other 12 lost. That would imply that Sanders has around a 20 percent chance of winning the nomination, about where he is in betting markets.
Of course, you could look at that list and debate which candidates are and aren’t truly similar to Sanders. To be that well-known so early in the primary process, you generally need to either have (i) run for president or vice president before (e.g., Mitt Romney or Joe Lieberman), or (ii) be related to someone else who did (e.g., Jeb Bush), or (iii) be famous for reasons not directly related to politics (e.g., John Glenn), or (iv) be a political celebrity (e.g., Barack Obama). If you look only at the candidates who — like Sanders — had run for president or VP before, 2 out of 10 won their nominations (John McCain in 2008 and Romney in 2012), so that’s still 20 percent.
There are other ways to slice and dice the list. Candidates polling like Sanders have done better in recent elections. And the list includes some candidates who never officially declared for president (e.g., Gerald Ford in 1980), so arguably, they should be excluded. If you look only at candidates who at some point officially ran for president, 25 percent (3 of 12 ) won. On the other hand, there’s also an argument for including the candidates who didn’t officially run since some of them were de facto candidates who lost in the “invisible primary” and bowed out before anyone voted to avoid embarrassment.
Achieving a delegate majority could be hard for Sanders
You could also argue that the three winning candidates from the list — Barack Obama and John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012 — aren’t good comparisons for Sanders, especially from a “The Party Decides” standpoint where preferences among party insiders and activists are leading indicators of voter preferences. Romney, for instance, had the backing of the GOP party establishment as a potential consensus choice, whereas Sanders largely lacks it from Democrats. Obama was a rising star, rather than someone left over from a previous cycle, and gained a lot of momentum among party elites as the 2008 cycle wore on, even if they also liked Clinton. McCain, who ran against the party establishment in 2000 but was someone the party could live with in 2008, is in some ways the most favorable comparison for Sanders.
In many respects, however, Sanders is more similar to Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988, George Wallace in 1972 and 1976 or Ron Paul in 2012, candidates who represented important constituencies within their respective parties but who didn’t have an obvious way to unite the rest of the party behind them or to win a delegate majority.
At times, Sanders’s strategists actually seem to be leaning into the strategy of being a factional candidate. The Sanders campaign may have all kinds of reasons to feel aggrieved by how the party establishment has treated it, especially when it reads articles like the one in The New York Times that suggest the establishment is out to get it again! Nonetheless, the campaign hasn’t sought to mend fences when conflicts have arisen this year. Instead, Sanders aides told The Atlantic’s Edward-Isaac Dovere that they think they can win the nomination with as little as a 30 percent plurality of delegates. That’s a risky strategy since it would necessarily entail a contested convention, where party insiders would play an outsized role. Nor would Sanders, a 77-year-old white man, reflect the various constituencies of the Democratic Party (and the demographics of the delegates themselves) as well as someone like Harris might.
But isn’t Sanders well-liked by a broad spectrum of Democrats — even if he isn’t necessarily their first choice? That isn’t entirely clear, either. Rather, his favorability ratings with Democratic voters have varied a lot from poll to poll. Here’s a table, for instance, comparing favorability ratings in the three most recent national or early-state polls where I could find them: Morning Consult’s national poll, Monmouth University’s poll of Iowa, and Saint Anselm College’s poll of New Hampshire. (Note to pollsters: Please ask favorability questions of your respondents! It would be helpful to have more than three recent polls to go by.)
Sanders’s favorability ratings are good but not great
Average of favorability ratings among Democratic voters in recent national, Iowa and New Hampshire polls
Morning Consult: U.S.
Monmouth: Iowa
Saint Anselm: N.H.
Average
Candidate
Fav.
Unfav.
Fav.
Unfav.
Fav.
Unfav.
Fav.
Unfav.
Ratio
Buttigieg
38%
9%
45%
9%
42%
6%
42%
8%
5.2
Biden
75
14
78
14
70
18
74
15
4.8
Harris
49
12
61
13
54
10
55
12
4.7
Booker
44
12
54
16
56
11
51
13
3.9
O’Rourke
47
11
60
13
46
17
51
14
3.7
Sanders
75
16
67
26
67
25
70
22
3.1
Klobuchar
28
13
51
10
31
13
37
12
3.1
Castro
28
12
36
9
24
8
29
10
3.0
Inslee
17
7
26
5
10
6
18
6
2.9
Warren
55
19
67
20
58
30
60
23
2.6
Hickenlooper
16
9
32
8
15
10
21
9
2.3
Delaney
14
9
31
12
17
7
21
9
2.2
Gillibrand
32
14
37
17
33
18
34
16
2.1
Gabbard
16
11
29
13
16
13
20
12
1.6
Only candidates whose favorability was asked about in all three polls are included in the table.
Morning Consult poll was conducted April 15-21, Monmouth University poll conducted April 4-9 and Saint Anselm College conducted April 3-8.
Sources: Polls
From what data we do have, however, Sanders’s favorability ranks somewhere in the middle of the Democratic pack. While Sanders does well in the Morning Consult poll, he has relatively high negatives in the polls of Iowa and New Hampshire. On average between the polls, Sanders has a favorable rating of 70 percent and an unfavorable rating of 22 percent, or a ratio of 3.1 to 1. That’s good, but not great. Julian Castro and Amy Klobuchar are much less well-known than Sanders but have about the same favorable-to-unfavorable ratio among voters who know them. And Buttigieg, Biden, Harris, Cory Booker and O’Rourke have better ratios than Sanders.7
So while Sanders currently trails only Biden in first-choice preferences, it’s not clear who would win a one-on-one race between, say, Sanders and Booker, or Sanders and Buttigieg, especially once Booker and Buttigieg became as well-known as Sanders is. Buttigieg in particular is already running close to Sanders in some recent polls (though not others) despite considerably lower name recognition.
Learning the lessons of 2016 — or overlearning them?
But doesn’t all of this sound awfully familiar? The chances of a candidate who polls fairly well are dismissed by the media on the theory that he lacks support from party elites and/or because supposedly he’s a factional candidate who won’t improve his support beyond his 20 percent or 25 percent base?
We made all of those arguments in 2016 about Donald Trump, about which — of course — we were pretty darned wrong.
The parallels between Sanders in 2020 and Trump in 2016 aren’t perfect, by any means. Sanders isn’t exactly a traditional politician, but he’s much closer to being one than a reality-TV star like Trump is. Trump initially polled poorly but surged in the summer of 2015, whereas Sanders started out polling well from the get-go.8 Trump (after his surge) was polling in first place, whereas Sanders is second behind Biden. Perhaps most importantly, Republicans use a winner-take-all system in some of their primaries, especially later on the race, so winning 30 or 35 or 40 percent of the vote could allow Trump to win a preponderance of delegates. The Democratic system is more proportional, so the same vote totals for Sanders might result in a contested convention.
Still, the cases are similar enough that Democrats see the parallels — “a political scenario all too reminiscent of how Mr. Trump himself seized the Republican nomination in 2016” is how the Times article put it. Reporters and people analyzing the campaigns see the parallels too, and that undoubtedly makes them reluctant to downplay Sanders’s chances — all the more so since Sanders himself did better in 2016 than most people (myself included) expected.
But our goal here at FiveThirtyEight is not to make predictions that minimize the amount of crap we get from readers. Instead, it’s to use data and history to zoom out and provide as much perspective as possible. Over the long run, that philosophy has worked pretty well. And over the long run, and across a larger sample — not just the recency bias brought about by 2016 — candidates in Sanders’s position have been fairly big underdogs against their respective fields,9 whether on the basis of polling alone or polling plus other factors. That doesn’t mean Sanders can’t win or won’t win, or that his . But in a field this wide open, and so early on in the race, he’s equivalent to a No. 1 or a No. 2 seed in the 68-team NCAA basketball tournament: about as likely (arguably) as anyone else to win it all, but still a clear underdog against the field.
From ABC News:
Check out all the polls we’ve been collecting ahead of the 2020 elections.
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