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Politics Podcast: We Have The Mueller Report. Now What?

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To impeach or not to impeach? To criticize or to fall in line? The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast crew discusses how politicians across the spectrum are reacting to the newly released Mueller report.

The Democratic primary field also expanded again Monday, with Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts joining the race. The team considers the strengths and weaknesses of his presidential bid.

Plus, 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.

The Biggest Surprises From The First Week Of The NBA Playoffs

sara.ziegler (Sara Ziegler, assistant sports editor): We’ve had almost one full week of games in the NBA playoffs, and trends are emerging. Golden State took a 31-point third-quarter lead over the Clippers on Thursday night … and didn’t lose! So after a few early surprises, things seem to be getting back to what we expected.

One series not playing out according to seeding is San Antonio-Denver. The No. 7 Spurs beat the No. 2 Nuggets 118-108 on Thursday to take a 2-1 lead in the series. This comes as a surprise to the FiveThirtyEight NBA Predictions model, which had Denver as an 88 percent favorite to move on. The Nuggets are still favored, but just 60-40. Are you guys surprised by how this series is going?

chris.herring (Chris Herring, senior staff writer): Not all that much, no. I think I picked Denver out of respect for the season it had. But this was the one team basically everybody had questions about coming in.

I had the series going seven games, with Denver winning. It could easily be 3-0 Spurs right now.

tchow (Tony Chow, video producer): I am surprised, but I don’t think we really should be. It’s the Spurs being the Spurs again.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): Our model doesn’t like San Antonio very much, so given their regular-season performance and home-court advantage — and Denver has a big home-court advantage — the Nuggets were pretty clear favorites. But it didn’t really like the Nuggets all that much either. They aren’t a great playoff team because their depth doesn’t really help them in the playoffs, the topline talent is not all that good, and they don’t have much playoff experience.

So I’m surprised that we had them as high as 88 percent, frankly! But not surprised that the Spurs are ahead in the series.

chris.herring: On Denver’s home-court advantage: The Nuggets haven’t beaten the Spurs in San Antonio in 14 tries now.

tchow: I am surprised because at one point in the season, our model gave the Spurs just a 4 percent chance of even making the postseason. We had a story a while back that talked about how they started turning it around (better defense, better bench production), but they were still underdogs going into this series, in my opinion.

sara.ziegler: Yeah, I had sort of counted the Spurs out a long time ago.

Let that be a lesson to me: Never count out Pop.

The experience factor really seems to be hurting the Nuggets so far. (And our model took 3 points away from them for their lack of playoff experience.)

chris.herring: Nuggets coach Mike Malone has talked about the experience factor a pretty decent amount in the past week

His young starting point guard, Jamal Murray, began Game 2 going 0-for-8. Malone was asked if he gave thought to pulling him because of Murray’s performance. He said no, in part because he needed to show his young players that he believed in them, and that he’s with them, win or lose. Murray responded by hitting 8-of-9 in the final quarter to bring the Nuggets all the way back for a dramatic win.

The win probably saved their season for the time being. But it speaks to the volatility of having such a young/young-minded club.

tchow: Murray wasn’t much better in Game 3 — just 6 points and two assists. I’m not trying to pin Denver’s failing’s this postseason all on Murray, though. All the Nuggets starters were pretty terrible in Game 3.

chris.herring: It’s a pretty big contrast between the teams.

While we’re talking about the growing pains for a young team, it’s worth pointing out that the Spurs are being led in part by youngster Derrick White, whose defense is his calling card. I think this is his first real exposure to a national audience, but he’s been playing really well for months.

tchow: White’s Game 3 performance was kind of a reminder for a lot of people who don’t watch the Spurs that he existed.

sara.ziegler: LOL

chris.herring: White’s experience has been different because of all the injuries they’ve had. But White and Dejounte Murray are going to be an annoyingly good backcourt once the team is healthy again next season. AND there’s Bryn Forbes, too.

natesilver: The whole Nuggets backcourt feels like it’s way short of championship caliber. It needs an anchor. There are lots of useful pieces you could rotate around that anchor, like Murray and Gary Harris, but without that anchor, it doesn’t quite come together.

chris.herring: It’s tough: They have a fantastic, sure-handed backup in Monte Morris, who led the NBA in assist/turnover ratio.

sara.ziegler: MORE MONTE MORRIS

Cyclones, represent!

chris.herring: He may not win a game for you. But he’s extremely unlikely to ever lose one for you, which you could argue Murray either occasionally does, or comes close to doing. Again: These are the growing pains for a young team sometimes.

sara.ziegler: On to another team that has seemed shaky at times this postseason: the Philadelphia 76ers. But they seem to have recovered from their upset in Game 1 — they’ve beaten the Nets convincingly twice in a row now. What looked different for them in Games 2 and 3?

tchow: Ben. Simmons.

natesilver: Sen. Bimmons.

chris.herring: Yeah, that sounds about right. Whether it was Jared Dudley that got in his head, or just him recognizing that he had to be more aggressive, Simmons has been a completely different player since Game 1.

tchow: Simmons had a -21 plus/minus in Game 1. Game 2 he was +23, and then +11 in Game 3 with a 31 point performance on 85 percent shooting.

chris.herring: I hate to say this, because maybe it’s premature, but I was beginning to think that the Nets could steal this series if things broke right for them.

tchow: I think a lot of people thought that, Chris. The Nets are legit and play really hard.

chris.herring: The Nets stole home-court advantage in Game 1. Were basically even at halftime of Game 2. And then get a gift rolled out on a platter for them, with Joel Embiid sitting out of a Game 3 played in their home arena, in front of a fan base that hasn’t hosted a playoff game in four years.

Thursday was their chance. And I think with the loss now, that might be about it.

natesilver: I’m in the Ben-Simmons-is-underrated camp. Yeah, he doesn’t really have a jumpshot. But he does pretty much everything else well. And there have been a lot of players throughout NBA history who have survived or even thrived without jump shots — Giannis Antetokounmpo basically does that now. The advanced stats like Simmons.

tchow: I think it’s very different for a player like Giannis to not have a jump shot than Simmons.

chris.herring: While we’re on the issue of Simmons, I think we learned that Embiid not being there might have been a help for him

For all the wonderful things Embiid does, he plays at a plodding pace.

Someone like Simmons thrives in an up-tempo environment because of his inability to shoot.

tchow: Sara, I found the hot take for next week’s Hot Takedown episode: FiveThirtyEight’s Chris Herring says Sixers are better without Joel Embiid.

sara.ziegler: LOLOLOL

Yes!

chris.herring: They might be in this series! Well, probably not: Greg Monroe was rough.

If they had more depth, they might be.

natesilver: That’s the thing about Philly. Look how bad their bench is:

Everyone’s like, “Why are these four stars such awkward fits together” — and I’ll admit that they’re a little awkward, but with a half-decent bench, it’s an entirely different team.

chris.herring: I don’t think it’s a terrible bench. And the truth is, you can stagger when you have that many stars.

But the spots in which it’s terrible … yeah.

tchow: Sixers’ bench: Who? Who? Who? The big guy. Who? and Who?

sara.ziegler:

Politics Podcast: The Fallout From The Mueller Report Has Just Begun

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The U.S. Department of Justice released a redacted version of the full Mueller report Thursday. On this episode of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew reacts to special counsel Robert Mueller’s findings that the Trump campaign did not criminally conspire with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election. The report came to no conclusion about the criminality of President Trump’s actions during the investigation.

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.

Is The Mueller Report A BFD?

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

sarahf (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): At long last, we have special counsel Robert Mueller’s report into Russian interference in the 2016 election. And compared with Attorney General William Barr’s summary of the report, which he sent to Congress last month, it paints a murkier picture of whether President Trump might have obstructed justice; for example, the report includes details of the president attempting to fire the special counsel.

Ultimately, though, Mueller’s team wrote that it did not have the confidence to clearly state that the president either did or did not obstruct justice and that “while this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

So, tell me … now that we have the report, is it a BFD?

ameliatd (Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, senior writer): The obstruction findings were a BFD, to me, because I was surprised by how clear Mueller was in suggesting that Trump had corrupt intent when he took various actions around the Russia investigation (such as firing FBI Director James Comey). That was a big deal, for Mueller to paint such a dark picture of Trump and his White House.

Mueller essentially told the story of a president who’s willing to intervene in ongoing criminal investigations to serve his own ends, and I wasn’t expecting Mueller to do that so directly.

Whether anything will come of that is another question, though, since Mueller himself didn’t actually come to a conclusion on obstruction.

clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): “Our analysis led us to conclude that the obstruction-of-justice statutes can validly prohibit a president’s corrupt efforts to use his official powers to curtail, end, or interfere with an investigation.”

That line from the report really stood out to me in contrast to what we’d been hearing from Barr over the past few weeks.

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): There was a whole, whole lot of obstruction documented here. Like 95 on a scale of 1-100, to me. And it sounds like Mueller didn’t conclude that Trump obstructed justice largely because Justice Department guidelines are viewed as not allowing a president to be charged with a crime. Mueller all but said Trump obstructed repeatedly.

ameliatd: There were a lot of things that were pretty different from what we heard from Barr, both in his summary and in his press conference today — it will be interesting to see what happens if Mueller does testify before Congress. I will be curious to hear what he thinks about how Barr handled this.

clare.malone: I agree, Amelia. I sort of wonder if he’ll unburden himself in a lawyerly way.

ameliatd: I am sure that he’ll do some expert hair-splitting. But still. It will have to be hair-splitting to explain some of the discrepancies between how Barr characterized the report/Mueller’s analysis and what we can read in the actual report.

sarahf: Let’s dive into those discrepancies a bit.

What do we think are the key ways in which Barr’s summary and comments in the press conference on Thursday differed from Mueller’s team’s conclusions?

ameliatd: Well, Barr said on Thursday that Mueller’s decision not to come down on obstruction was not driven by an opinion from the Justice Department saying that a sitting president can’t be indicted. And that was important in the wake of the Barr summary because it raised the question — OK, so is Mueller not coming down on this because there just isn’t enough evidence to support obstruction charges?.

Reading Mueller’s report, it is very clear that he started from the position that he couldn’t indict the president and then charted his path from there.

perry: Barr, to me, implied that Mueller couldn’t reach a conclusion on obstruction, like it was a 50-50 call or something, based on the evidence. It looks like Mueller saw obstruction and the question was should he indict based on that or defer to Congress.

clare.malone: I was going to say what Amelia and Perry said. Barr really seemed to have been misleading.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): I’ve mostly read Volume 1 so far — i.e., the collusion/conspiracy part — and there are some discrepancies there as well. Namely, Barr downplays the extent to which people in the Trump campaign were sometimes receptive to efforts to coordinate with Russia. (Although they rebuffed them at other times.)

From the report:

And from Barr’s letter:

perry: Also, Barr in his press conference today implied that Trump was annoyed by the investigation because it was hurting his presidency and the media coverage was bothering him. The report suggests that Trump was worried where the investigation might lead and wanted to stop it by any means necessary.

sarahf: Right. That’s the part of the report that hasn’t gotten as much attention — Mueller’s team wrote that “while the investigation identified numerous links between individuals with ties to the Russian government and individuals associated with the Trump Campaign, the evidence was not sufficient to support criminal charges.”

ameliatd: Barr’s summary also seemed to imply that the fact that there wasn’t an underlying crime (i.e., nobody within the Trump campaign was ultimately charged with coordinating with Russia) had an impact on whether Trump could have obstructed justice. Mueller said very pointedly that you can charge obstruction without an underlying crime.

perry: Mueller’s team also notes that the collusion/conspiracy/coordination investigation was hampered by Trump allies lying about what happened.

clare.malone: More to the Russia side of things, not obstruction?

I think there’s still the question of why Trump was so into being pro-Russia or accepting help. You could maybe extrapolate that he had business interests …

natesilver: But “evidence not sufficient to support criminal charges” is a lot different than “no evidence” or “no effort to coordinate.” For instance, the stuff about former Trump campaign Chairman Paul Manafort sharing internal polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik (a Russian political operative with suspected ties to Russian intelligence) — including the emphasis the Trump campaign would go on to place on Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania! — isn’t great for Trump. And Mueller isn’t sure what happened to that data, in part because Manafort isn’t a reliable witness so everything about what he did is murky.

perry: Right, there is “no evidence to support criminal charges” on the collusion part is just way different than nothing happened.

clare.malone: Yeah, especially given the narrow definition that Mueller gave to “collusion.” And we should note that there are a lot of other criminal referrals that came from this investigation, so there’s still some story left to tell.

ameliatd: Clare, to your point, it’s also relevant that Mueller focused very narrowly on 2016 election interference. We don’t know what he found and turned over to other investigators.

One other big unanswered question on the Russia side: Why were all of these people making false statements about their ties to Russia?

natesilver: Maybe because (i) there’s a lot of “smoke,” enough for them to be paranoid even if it all doesn’t amount to a criminal conspiracy to interfere with 2016; and/or (ii) nobody actually is quite sure what happened or what didn’t because the campaign was such a shitshow; and/or (iii) they’re people who lie habitually?

And for the most part, the report confirms media reporting, as well as material uncovered in earlier indictments that Mueller issued.

ameliatd: I genuinely don’t know, Nate. I think the explanation could be any of the above, all of the above or none of the above. It’s just so puzzling. It’s also puzzling that Trump saw the Russia investigation as such a serious threat, and ultimately we’re left with something that’s not so dramatic.

natesilver: The one thing Mueller really seems to go out of his way to bat down is the idea that Russia interfered to change the GOP platform on Ukraine — he seems pretty confident that there’s an innocent-enough explanation for that, which is that Trump had already taken a position on Ukraine on the campaign trail and the campaign/Republicans didn’t want the GOP platform to contradict it.

perry: And he also downplays the idea that former Attorney General Jeff Sessions was involved in much of anything during the campaign.

natesilver: Yeah, he bats down the Sessions stuff too.

clare.malone: One thing that does come across in the report is that a lot of this obstruction stuff was self-inflicted. So, it could be just the idea of Trump being habituated to the “deny, deny, deny” theory of PR. Which, when you’re president, leads you down a pretty dangerous road.

perry: I think I get why he wants to end the investigation. Volume 1 documents:

Trump going around telling former national security advisor Michael Flynn to get Hillary Clinton’s emails.
Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner meeting with Russians to get dirt on Clinton.
The various things Manafort was doing that would all look bad for Trump.

So all of that stuff in total looks pretty bad.

natesilver: For the most part, though, if you were one of those people who, from the Barr memo, characterized the media’s entire Trump-Russia coverage as a gigantic fail … well, the Mueller report itself makes you look pretty dumb. All of the stuff that people were expecting to be in there is pretty much in there. And some of it is reasonably serious! But does it amount to a criminal conspiracy? Mueller thinks not.

perry: Like Volume 2 (obstruction) is worse for Trump than Volume 1 (collusion), but if Trump knew most of what is detailed in Volume 1, I can see why he wanted to stop the investigation.

clare.malone: Volume 2 just lays out a lot of Keystone Kops scenarios: Trump giving different orders to different people, mismanaged responses to media stories dropping, etc.

natesilver: And also, to the extent that his efforts to obstruct the probe were pretty serious, maybe Mueller didn’t find out everything he could have in Volume 1.

The report actually says that at some point, and it seems particularly relevant for the Manafort-related stuff.

I'm not an expert on this stuff, but this seems like an interesting part on page 18 of the PDF that I haven't seen other people point out, where Mueller says his conclusions could conceivably be different if not for witnesses lying, invoking privilege, etc. pic.twitter.com/nRm85Ec4zj

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) April 18, 2019

ameliatd: It does seem pretty clear that Mueller was frustrated with his inability to get reliable information out of Manafort. I wonder now that the report is out whether we’ll actually see any pardons.

That’s been hanging over the investigation this whole time, and it would actually be unusual, from a historical perspective, if no one implicated in the Mueller investigation ended up being pardoned.

natesilver: I mean, that would be a very risky move for the White House politically.

ameliatd: Right. There’s a reason why presidents wait until they’re on their way out the door to pardon people.

clare.malone: Who do we think the most likely candidates for a pardon are?

ameliatd: Manafort.

clare.malone: Yeah.

ameliatd: Maybe someone like George Papadopoulos, who was a relatively minor figure.

natesilver: But maybe Trump would do it. You sometimes get the sense that the whole way the White House played it was more to soothe Trump’s ego than to necessarily win the battle of public opinion. The press conference this morning didn’t help the White House at all, I don’t think.

perry: Well, the report suggests that Manafort stayed loyal to Trump. But the report also says he was involved in some of the stuff that looks most collusion-like (meeting with Russian officials and discussing poll numbers).

Pardoning Manafort would be a really stupid political move.

But he might do it anyway.

ameliatd: If this report has taught me anything it is that Trump does not think about risk in a way that I understand.

clare.malone: I feel like Trump definitely misses the forest for the trees. ALL THE TIME.

perry: Well, it appears Trump is always trying to get deputies to actually carry out the legally dubious actions.

So I suppose that is smart.

sarahf: OK, on the question of obstruction of justice, though, what did we learn that was particularly damning or mischaracterized by Barr’s interpretation that made it a big deal?

After all, there were some examples in which Mueller’s team said that the president had the prerogative to, say, fire Comey because it didn’t prevent the FBI from continuing its investigation.

But in other instances, Trump was arguably saved from complicated legal issues only because someone in his administration intervened.

ameliatd: It would have been huge if Trump had actually managed to fire Mueller.

clare.malone: Well, the Comey thing is more complicated, though. It’s within Trump’s power to fire the FBI director, but the way he went about it and the reasons given could tilt it more toward obstruction.

perry: The actual activities had been reported — trying to get Mueller fired, firing Comey. But Mueller provided new details that suggest Trump really was behaving in nefarious ways — like deciding to fire Comey but then trying to get Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to say he came up with the idea is pretty bold. And trying to get former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowki to tell Sessions to basically un-recuse himself from the Russia probe and stop parts of the investigation.

ameliatd: And Barr was making it seem like maybe the evidence wasn’t there, when in fact Mueller said he couldn’t charge Trump but he could, in theory, clear him of wrongdoing. Then Mueller explicitly said he could not exonerate Trump, which suggests Mueller does think the evidence was at least somewhat compelling.

perry: The report shows Trump being deeply involved in the details of trying to stop the investigation and obscure his role in stopping the investigation.

ameliatd: Which makes it pretty clear that Mueller found this evidence at the very least compelling, in terms of obstruction. And he didn’t buy arguments from the president’s defenders that Trump couldn’t obstruct justice by firing Comey because it’s one of his constitutional powers, regardless of his motivation.

perry: Right.

ameliatd: I also just want to note that Mueller said explicitly that a president could be charged with obstruction after leaving office. And Barr just closed that door!

natesilver: Are y’all surprised at how wantonly Barr was willing to spin?

clare.malone: No, Nate — I guess not?

natesilver: I mean, I guess I thought that, say, if the actual report were a 5 out of 10 for Trump (on a scale where 0 is terrible and 10 is great), he’d be willing to spin it to a 6 or a 6.5. Instead he tried to spin it to an 8.

ameliatd: I am surprised, if only because it seemed so ill-advised. Eventually, much of the report was going to go to Congress and the public, right? So why be so misleading?

clare.malone: To play to Trump?

perry: I think Nate suggested this in the podcast, but the report would have basically met my expectations if it came out pre-Barr’s summary. But the White House took the Barr letter and framed it as an exoneration. So that made the report even more damning — I expected it to be not that bad, and it was, on the merits, really bad for Trump.

sarahf: So to that point about expectations — how much of the Mueller report did we already have?

ameliatd: I don’t think there’s much of the report that is genuinely new, but there’s a lot we hadn’t heard from Mueller before.

natesilver: Let’s keep in mind: If you’re willing to work for Trump — at, frankly, a lot of risk to your reputation and maybe also some legal risk — then maybe you’re a True Believer after all.

sarahf: But do we really think this is bad for Trump? For example, what do we think Congress actually does next? Or will it be advantageous for Democrats to use this in 2020?

natesilver: It’s not that bad for Trump. It’s a 5 out of 10, relative to pre-Barr letter expectations. But it feels a lot worse because of Barr’s clumsy attempts at spin.

clare.malone: I think Democrats are going to:

Want Mueller to testify.
Face a struggle between leadership (which has resisted impeachment efforts) and a renewed push to start impeachment hearings.
And fundraise off making the full Mueller report available!

perry: The report portrays Trump very negatively. And a report can be bad in a legal sense that is separate from its electoral impact.

ameliatd: One of the main takeaways for me is that the report has given Democrats ammunition to drag this fight out without necessarily calling for impeachment. Instead, they can call Mueller to testify, call Barr to testify, and use what’s in the report to support more investigations.

clare.malone: We’re already seeing Trump campaign emails and videos out today pushing the line that the tables need to be turned and the investigators investigated. We’re already seeing the playbook for how the Mueller report will play out in the campaign: Trump running with the idea that he was persecuted, and Democrats running with the whole “can you believe this guy?” line.

natesilver: The report is bad, but it’s roughly in line with what people would have expected, as Amelia and Perry said. Keep in mind that only 42 percent of the public approves of Trump, and that’s in a really good economy! They don’t think he’s honest about Russia or other things. They also didn’t necessarily expect there to be a smoking gun about collusion/conspiracy. The public was way smarter than the media on this stuff, I think.

ameliatd: Barr’s little intro to obstruction of justice in the press conference, saying that Trump was facing all of these investigations and scrutiny and there was ultimately no collusion, seems like it will be very useful for Trump and his defenders.

perry: So earlier today, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer made this “no impeachment” statement. And as you can see the tweet referring to it was ratioed:

“Based on what we have seen to date, going forward on impeachment is not worthwhile at this point. Very frankly, there is an election in 18 months and the American people will make a judgement,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer told @DanaBashCNN .

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) April 18, 2019

natesilver: But Hoyer is right on the politics of this. Impeachment is not a popular option. As Amelia said, call Mueller to testify. Call Barr to testify. Call other people to testify. So you can have a drip, drip, drip against Trump, mostly to satisfy partisans and keep him off balance. But impeachment? Not popular.

clare.malone: The ultimate “Twitter is not the Democratic base” stance!

natesilver: It’s also Trump’s first term. The Nixon/Clinton impeachment efforts both came in the second term, when those presidents were lame ducks and there wasn’t any recourse from the public.

ameliatd: I’m not sure this gives Democrats much fodder for more investigations because the obstruction stuff was so clear and there don’t seem to be many more avenues to explore the 2016 election. Maybe it helps them get momentum to look into Trump’s finances for ties to Russia?

natesilver: Also, if Trump were unpopular enough that he could be not only impeached but also removed by the Senate — which would mean that his approval rating with Republicans would have to be way down — wouldn’t you rather run against him anyway?

That would probably imply he had like a 29 percent approval rating or something, in which case the Democratic nominee in 2020 would be on track to win in an epic landslide and maybe pick up some huge congressional majorities too.

clare.malone: But what does it take for him to slide to that point? And is that a realistic expectation given our political environment, Nate? That just seems to be a pretty unlikely thing to happen.

natesilver: No, I’m not saying that at all.

I’m saying that impeachment won’t actually result in his removal from office unless he’s fallen to like 30 percent.

But if he’s fallen to 30 percent, Democrats don’t want to impeach him because then they’re basically guaranteed a landslide victory in 2020!

ameliatd: And if they impeach him, they risk turning him into a martyr.

sarahf: OK, to wrap … We have the report. And the evidence that Mueller had on the question of obstruction justice was a bigger deal than Barr indicated in his initial summary. But what does the report’s release actually change? Is it a question of who wins the political narrative?

ameliatd: This is the tricky thing about special counsel investigations! If they don’t come to a conclusive result, it’s hard to know what to do with the findings politically.

clare.malone: Basically, Democrats have to keep their base on board with the long-term plan of winning back the White House and not the short-term impulse to impeach.

perry: The question, I think, that is on the table is: What is the non-impeachment remedy for a president who appears to be at least somewhat open to violating norms and/or laws?

natesilver: What does it change going forward? I dunno. The Barr memo didn’t do much to shift public opinion in Trump’s favor, so Occam’s razor is that the Mueller report won’t do much to shift public opinion against him.

I do think it will make the press more skeptical of Barr and any efforts the White House makes to normalize its conduct.

ameliatd: And it does mean we’re going to keep hearing about the investigation, which could be good for Democrats because people are so fired up about it.

natesilver: It certainly describes a White House and a campaign that’s in total disarray. In the end, as Perry said earlier, I think it brings us back to where we were a month ago, where “the Russia stuff” is a negative for Trump and one of the reasons his approval rating is so low but not an acute crisis for him or the first (or second or third or fourth) thing that voters are thinking about.

From ABC News:

Silver Bulletpoints: We’ve Got Your Backlash To The Buttigieg Backlash

Welcome to the first edition of … [taps microphone and grins sheepishly] … Silver Bulletpoints.

You don’t want to know how much time we spent workshopping that name. What you do want to know is what this column will be all about. Here are the parameters: Every week or so, I’ll write about three topics in 300 words per topic or less, not counting headings, words embedded in charts or tables, screenshots of tweets and so forth.1 I’m going to ask FiveThirtyEight’s editors to hold me to those constraints even if I complain about them later, sort of like how you can ban yourself from casinos and even get arrested if you then try to play the slots. For the time being, all the topics will relate to the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, but that might change later.

The idea is that I have a lot of thoughts about 2020 — let’s not call them half-baked thoughts, but three-quarters baked might be fair — that are longer than a tweet but shorter than a full-length article. (I tend to write long, the editors tell me.)2 Back in my day in the mid-to-late aughts, we used to call those three-quarters-baked thoughts “blog posts,” so this column is basically an effort to Make Blogging Great Again. We’ll also sometimes take reader questions — if you have a 2020 Democratic primary question that you think I can do justice to in 300 words, drop us a line. I could go on, but that would be defying the spirit of the column. So let’s get back to politics.

Bulletpoint No. 1: The Buttigieg boom isn’t just a media bubble

Pete Buttigieg is everywhere on your TV these days. Last week, he ranked second among declared Democrats in cable news coverage, behind only Bernie Sanders. And as tends to happen with these things, there’s already a backlash to the Buttigieg boom, from jokes mocking the media’s admiration for his language skills to Columbia Journalism Review articles describing him as the “flavor of the month.”

Here at Silver Bulletpoints, we like nothing better than to backlash against the backlash when we think the data supports our case. And in this case, we’re wary of the notion that the Buttigieg boom is solely a media concoction.

There’s no doubt about the initial spark for the Buttigieg bump: It was his CNN town hall on March 10. You can see it in itemized donations to Buttigieg’s campaign, which begin to spike on March 10 and continued from there.

But how the public and the media responded to that initial spark was different — and the public responded sooner. Here is a comparison of Buttigieg coverage on cable news to how much Google search traffic he’s been getting.

Notice how that Google search spike (like the fundraising spike) began immediately after the town hall and then slowly but steadily built. The media coverage boom lagged behind, by contrast, and largely didn’t accelerate until the past two weeks, long after Buttigieg’s rise had begun to be apparent in polls and in other ways.

Yes, it’s complicated. Public interest and media attention have a self-reinforcing, symbiotic relationship. The CNN town hall was itself a type of media coverage. But this looks like a reasonably organic surge in voter interest in Buttigieg and not just a media fixation.

Bulletpoint No. 2: High-information voters may be leading indicators; high-education voters may be misleading ones

But maybe we should be cautious about Buttigieg for another reason. As my former colleague (and still friend) Harry Enten points out, Buttigieg’s support is concentrated among demographics overrepresented in the media. He overperforms, for example, among highly educated Democrats. For better or worse, journalists are also highly educated, and they mostly live in highly educated neighborhoods and have highly educated peers. If journalists are going by what they hear in their social networks, they may overrate candidates like Buttigieg and underrate those like Joe Biden. According to the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, 65 percent of voters in the Democratic primary electorate in 2016 did not have a four-year college degree.

We’ve also detected this when interacting with FiveThirtyEight readers. Buttigieg drew huge applause when I selected him in a 2020 candidate draft at a live podcast in New York on March 20. He’s not the only candidate popular with our readers; Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris are well-liked too. But — no surprise if you know the demographics of our audience — Warren and Harris also rely heavily on college-educated voters.

Here’s the catch: High-education voters also tend to be high-information voters. And we probably do want to hear from high-information voters. They’re more likely to vote — and they may be leading indicators for how other voters behave once they acquire more information. Maybe, for instance, high-information voters like Warren for her wonky policy proposals, while low-information voters don’t have much of an impression beyond that she’s a liberal woman from Massachusetts who flubbed some DNA test — but they’ll come around once they learn more.

In other words, if education is correlated with informedness, then performing well among college-educated voters could be a bullish sign.

Bulletpoint No. 3: Why it’s hard to rank the Democratic candidates

One recurring bit you’ll see in Silver Bulletpoints — maybe we’ll try to rotate in different features like different pricing games on the “The Price is Right” — is an attempt to rank the Democrats into different tiers. Here’s a version of that from last week, for instance:

I don't have particularly strong feelings about the order of the candidates after that, but I suppose I'd go:

Tier 3a: Castro, Gillibrand, Inslee
Tier 3b: Yang, Hickenlooper, Ryan
Tier 4: Everyone else

Abrams would be at least Tier 2 if she ran.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) April 10, 2019

I’d like to propose one tweak, which is to further subdivide tier 1b. Specifically, I’m keeping Sanders and Buttigieg in 1b while demoting Warren and Beto O’Rourke into a new tier, 1c. That isn’t a huge difference, but that’s how I’d bet.

I have mixed feelings about this exercise. On the one hand, ranking the candidates without a model or some other rigorous methodology is exactly the sort of thing that can get me in trouble. On the other hand, I have a mental list of candidates and tiers in my head at all times, and I feel like I owe y’all an occasional, explicit glimpse into that thinking rather than forcing you to guess.

But this is a tricky race to diagnose. Most primaries either take the form of a follow-the-leader race where everyone is chasing a single clear front-runner (say, Hillary Clinton in 2008 or 2016) or a free-for-all in which there’s no obvious heir apparent (say, Democrats in 1992 or 2004). This year is somewhere in between; there are two sort-of front-runners (Biden and Sanders), but for lots of reasons (age, lack of support from party elites), they’re much less formidable than someone like Clinton. I feel reasonably comfortable comparing Biden and Sanders to one another — I have Biden higher because he’s polling quite a bit better than Sanders — but comparing them to the rest of the field will be a challenge until other candidates become better known.

Who Is Winning The Fundraising Primary So Far?

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

sarahf (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): Monday night marked the filing deadline for first-quarter political fundraising numbers. Bernie Sanders led the pack with $20.7 million,3 74 percent of which came from small donors, or those who gave $200 or less to his campaign.

And if we just look at contributions from individual donors (so excluding campaign transfers or candidates who self-fundraise), Kamala Harris came in second behind Sanders’s $18.2 million raising $12 million. By this metric, Beto O’Rourke came in third with $9.4 million and Pete Buttigieg in fourth with $7.1 million.

So what does it all mean this far out? What were some of the biggest surprises and what does it tell you about the health of some of these campaigns?

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): If you had told me in January that Buttigieg would raise more money from individual donors than Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker and Kristen Gillibrand, I would have said that you were insane. So that’s definitely the biggest surprise to me.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): I’d agree that Buttigieg has been the biggest upside surprise of the Democratic primary so far. And that Warren has been the biggest downside surprise, at least in terms of fundraising, because she always raised a ton of money for her Senate campaigns.

Everything else is pretty much to form. Sanders’s fundraising total is neither underwhelming nor overwhelming.

Harris and Beto’s fundraising numbers are decent but not great, which is exactly where you’d describe their standing in the polls too.

maggiekb (Maggie Koerth-Baker, senior science writer): I was doing an interview with Richard Briffault from Columbia Law School last week, and one of the things he told me was that small donations have, historically, been tied to more polarizing or extremist candidates. Which makes sense if you think about what might get someone really fired up to send in that $30 or whatever. It’s things like personality or somebody who’s pushing policies that are outside the (presumably better-funded) mainstream.

But then Briffault cited people like Buttigieg, who he called “the epitome of a non-extremist” and who is running this small-donation campaign that’s meant to appeal to middle-of-the-road voters. So he’s watching both that campaign, and O’Rourke’s, to see if they turn out to be the things that upend this conventional wisdom that campaigns that attract small donors can’t be moderate campaigns.

sarahf: Carrie, does what Maggie learned from Briffault reflect what you’ve heard in your reporting? Or how should we think about the rise of small donors?

carrie.levine (Carrie Levine, senior political reporter at the Center for Public Integrity): I’ve also heard that small-dollar donors can be more polarized than large donors. It’ll be interesting to see whether that holds true this cycle with candidates’ increased focus on expanding the small-dollar donor pool. Another question to consider about the rise of small donors is that we don’t really know how large that pool can get, or whether there’s a limit to how much they’ll give. On the Democratic side, donors are being heavily courted by multiple candidates, so now lots of strategists are watching to see if donors get exhausted before we get to November 2020.

perry: Looking at other first quarter fundraising numbers, I thought Bernie’s numbers were really strong. I’m not saying it’s surprising, but he does have a huge number of small donors, which is both a sign of intense support and a valuable resource, as those people can give multiple times before they hit the contribution limit. I was pretty sure he would be a formidable candidate in his second run, and his first quarter fundraising helped confirm that.

carrie.levine: One other interesting note on Bernie: his campaign said about 20 percent of first-quarter donors were new to his campaign, which is a sign that he’s appealing to people who didn’t necessarily give last time.

natesilver: I don’t know. Sanders was raising around $30 million a quarter in the 3rd and 4th quarters of 2015. He raised $44 million within a month in March, 2016. So I don’t find his numbers all that impressive this time around. I think they’re right in line with (reasonable) expectations.

sarahf: But surely, Nate, part of the reason Bernie is bringing in less money is because this time around there are 16 other major candidates, including Bernie.

And if 20 percent of the first-quarter donors are first-time givers like the campaign says, that’s at least somewhat promising, no?

natesilver: It’s consistent with a world where Bernie is polling at 20 percent, after having received 43 percent of the vote or something in 2016. On the one hand, in a field with more than a dozen candidates, 20 percent is good enough to make you one of the frontrunners. On the other hand, it still means you’re well off your benchmarks from 2016, because some of your support has also gone to other candidates.

sarahf: Something I found staggering in the New York Times’s reporting on the first quarter numbers:

“President Trump’s re-election campaign also reported its fund-raising. The campaign brought in about $30 million in the first three months of 2019 — roughly equal to that of Mr. Sanders and Ms. Harris put together. Mr. Trump has his own powerful base of small donors. The campaign said its average donation was $34.26.”

So definitely some real downsides to the Democratic field being this large — candidates just aren’t bringing in as much money even if donors are giving to multiple candidates.

natesilver: I also think Trump’s $30 million number is pretty underwhelming.

sarahf: Nate just thinks everyone could be fundraising better.

natesilver: Well, yeah. I just don’t get why people are so impressed by any of these numbers, in an era where online fundraising has massively increased the ability for candidates to raise gargantuan sums of money in a hurry. Again, Sanders raised $44 million in a month in March, 2016.

maggiekb: If campaigns are going to be courting small donors more, they’re right to do it during the primaries. One of the big takeaways from a story we did last year on the social science around campaign fundraising was that the money you raise (or, for those playing at home, the money you donate) matters a lot more during the primary.

By the time you get to the general, the outcomes are much more driven by partisanship, and frankly most candidates are raising and spending way more than most of them actually need to get elected.

So, I guess, if you’re a small donor, burn yourself out now!

:fire:

carrie.levine: Anecdotally, I am also hearing a lot about donors spreading money among different candidates. We see some overlap in the data we have on contributors who give more than $200, but the small donor data that will be released by ActBlue, the payment platform used by all the Democratic presidential candidates, in July, will give a better picture of that.

perry: Do we think giving to multiple candidates is a sign of indecision? For instance, in 2016 I assume there were few people who gave money to Clinton AND Sanders. But are we now in a situation where people like several candidates and don’t want to choose just one?

carrie.levine: I also have heard in my reporting that the Democratic National Committee’s decision to set a grassroots fundraising criteria as a way to qualify for the first two primary dates has prompted donors to give to multiple candidates that they would like to see on the debate stage. Some candidates have even directly referenced the debate thresholds in their asks.

Here’s some language from a Gillibrand Twitter ad from March 21, for example:

Citing the debate criteria, Gillibrand is now asking for $1 pic.twitter.com/7KMTXrTvmF

— Chris Zubak-Skees (@zubakskees) March 21, 2019

perry: In other words, the emphasis on having a lot of donors is affecting the nature of the campaign. Like, $1 donations are not particularly useful for say, campaign ads, even at a fairly large scale, but are useful for qualifying for the debates.

carrie.levine: Exactly. But a lot of candidates did ask for $1 contributions, or $3 or $5.

Which, of course, also has the ancillary effect of putting the $1 donor on an email list so they can be asked repeatedly for more money. It would take a lot of $1 contributions to hit the maximum contribution. But as CPI’s data editor, Chris Zubak-Skees, points out, it’s also not free to raise those $1 contributions.

sarahf: My understanding was that part of the reason why the DNC introduced this fundraising threshold is that they saw candidates with large numbers of small donors as a good way to measure enthusiasm. Is that right? Or is this a flawed way to think about fundraising?

carrie.levine: I think a lot of people see small contributions as a proxy for support or enthusiasm, and in that statement announcing the debate criteria, DNC Chair Tom Perez specifically said they wanted to give “small-dollar donors a bigger voice in the primary than ever before.”

natesilver: Yeah, I wonder if there’s an overcorrection toward these tiny donations.

On the one hand, I suppose the theory is that once you sign someone up for any amount of money, they can contribute a lot more in the future. On the other hand, running for president is expensive, and some of these candidates haven’t raised enough money to run a full-fledged campaign, even if the donor number is impressive.

sarahf: So that brings me to my next question. I know it’s early yet, but what do these fundraising numbers tell us about the health of some of these campaigns? It might not be anything we don’t already know, i.e. John Delaney was always a bit of a , but the fact that most of his money was self-raised, and he spent a lot of it … means he could be in trouble, no?

By the same token, maybe this spells trouble ahead for Warren? A good bulk of her money was transferred from her 2018 Senate campaign and she also had a pretty high burn rate.

perry: Delaney is very rich. He will be fine.

carrie.levine: I think it’s tricky to say whether someone is in trouble because some of the candidates have access to pots of money besides what they get from individual contributions. Gillibrand, Warren, Booker and Klobuchar, for example, have all transferred money from their Senate campaigns to their presidential campaigns, though that cash won’t last forever either, of course.

perry: Warren still has a lot of cash on hand ($11.2 million, second only to Sanders at $15.7 million), so now if they know they are going to have trouble raising money, her campaign can at least adjust its spending.

sarahf: Sure, but as Nate said, running a campaign is expensive! And if more and more Democratic candidates are shunning big dollar donations from corporations and PACs, and can’t win over enough small-dollar donors that will put some real strains on their staffing or campaign outreach needs.

natesilver: Goodhart’s Law states that “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Meaning, once someone caters their strategy to meet a certain statistical benchmark, it’s no longer as useful as when someone reaches it organically.

Small-donor contributions are a proxy for grassroots support, but ultimately they’re just a proxy for it and what you really want is for people to show up at the polls and vote for you.

carrie.levine: Right, dollars aren’t votes. That’s always the catch with looking at fundraising.

But, Nate, one more thing to consider is whether a boom of small-dollar donors is ever completely organic. Campaigns spend money on list acquisition, for example, and on online ads to serve up to potential supporters. Prospecting for small-dollar donors costs money, and isn’t as spontaneous as it can appear.

maggiekb: And how much of fundraising is really just about being a proxy for support, or a narrative to prove to the media that the candidate has support? There’s a lot of evidence that suggests advertising (the main thing donations get spent on) doesn’t really work all that well.

Or, at least, doesn’t create a bump that lasts long enough to affect actual votes.

natesilver: The money matters, so it’s not just a proxy. The Democratic calendar is front-loaded, so even though it’s easier for a candidate to go “viral” in the age of social media, you’re still going to have candidates who survive Iowa and New Hampshire, who need to quickly build out a ground strategy in California, Texas, Virginia and all these big, expensive states that vote on Super Tuesday. That takes resources.

However, fundraising has historically not been a super great predictor of primary outcomes. It’s generally worse than polls and worse than endorsements. It is quite a useful predictor in House elections, though, and to some extent Senate and gubernatorial elections.

But with presidential elections, less so. And that’s partly because beyond a certain point, candidates encounter diminishing returns, e.g. raising $600 million vs. $500 million probably doesn’t matter much. But, say, $10 million vs. $1 million probably matters a lot.

maggiekb: I keep feeling like I’m trapped in a pit of conflicting data when it comes to fundraising research. Or maybe not exactly conflicting, but it just feels messy. Like this stuff Nate is talking about with fundraising not being a good predictor of primary outcomes. Meanwhile, the political scientists tell me that while the biggest fundraisers tend to win the general elections, that’s not usually BECAUSE they raised the most. Like the money is a predictive factor, but not the cause.

The way Richard Lau at Rutgers put it when I spoke to him last fall was, “I think where you have to change your thinking is that money causes winning. I think it’s more that winning attracts money.”

It’s now a favorite quote of mine.

carrie.levine: The candidate raising the most money may not win the primary, but the candidate raising the least — self-funding aside — is going to have trouble competing.

sarahf: Right, so where do we see trouble? And did any of it surprised you?

natesilver: Yeah. Warren probably needs to be at least a little bit worried, because she has a well-staffed, expensive campaign with a high burn rate. The candidates in the Julian Castro/John Hickenlooper/Jay Inslee group might be a little worried.

Gillibrand, certainly.

perry: The senator-candidates, excluding Harris, should be worried that the polls and the fundraising are telling the same story — they are basically even (Warren in polls) or behind the mayor of South Bend right now.

But if I were Beto or Harris, I would be worried that another establishment, big-donor friendly candidate (Biden) is probably entering the race. It’s not that Sanders donors are suddenly going to give to Biden, but big donors might be deciding among those three.

natesilver: I wonder how much money Biden would raise. His support skews older and probably low-to-middle income, which might actually be a disadvantage from a fundraising standpoint.

perry: I tend to think he will have a lot of trouble raising small-dollar donations (I don’t know if Biden has a passionate base), so I think he will be really trying to woo the big money.

natesilver: Yeah, he might be willing to do the whole traditional rubber chicken / $2,800-to-buy-a-photo-with-the-candidate-and-a-couple-of-glasses-of-decent-Chardonnay fundraising thing, which a lot of candidates seem to be eschewing this cycle.

And he might be willing to say “fuck it, I’d love to have me a super PAC.”

carrie.levine: One question about the eschewing of the traditional rubber chicken circuit this cycle is whether it will continue past the primary. But yes, I’d be very surprised if Biden walks away from the traditional donor base that can write a $2,800 check and has supported him in the past.

perry: Are the kinds of voters attracted to Biden also the kind of people who don’t care about issues like super PACs? Maybe no voters care about super PACs, but I think Sanders and Warren in particular would face immense backlash if they had one.

natesilver: That’s part of Biden’s advantage, I think. He isn’t trying to seem “woke”, for lack of a better term. That’s not where his voters are, anyway. So he can do all sorts of stuff without taking a hit to his brand, that might be a tougher call for Warren or Beto or whomever.

carrie.levine: And online fundraising has surged in the years since Biden was last on the ballot. How he’ll do is still really an open question, even though conventional wisdom seems to be that he won’t do particularly well. We just don’t know.

perry: Good point. Maybe Biden will be a fundraising juggernaut on online. I don’t know — I’m assuming he doesn’t have a big small donor base, but I didn’t think he would be leading in the polls either.

sarahf: It’s not just Biden who faces this fundraising question. There’s already a bit of a divide in where candidates are getting their money. For instance, both Gillibrand and Booker are two candidates that still rely heavily on big dollar donations. Granted, I do think within the Democratic Party, at least, this form of fundraising is less popular.

carrie.levine: Yes, though Gillibrand has also courted new donors. For example, she has really encouraged women’s giving circles. My colleague Sarah Kleiner and I touched on that in this piece.

sarahf: OK, what should we be looking for in Q2? Do we think we can expect to see candidates’ campaigns folding because they aren’t bringing in enough cash and aren’t rising in the polls? Or do we think we’ll see more consolidation around one candidate?

What will you be keeping an eye on?

carrie.levine: I think candidates who post anemic fundraising totals for two quarters in a row will be under some pressure to get out of the race so the field can consolidate, so I’ll be looking for that.

I’m also interested in the total universe of donors giving to presidential campaigns and how big that gets, given the aggressive courting of new donors for small amounts. A growing number of unique donors engaged in giving to Democratic presidential campaigns is definitely something to watch.

perry: Harris started her campaign fairly early (Jan. 21) and raised a lot from big donors. That worked in the first quarter, but it will be interesting if she finishes second again. Warren is getting attention for releasing a lot of detailed policy proposals — but does that turn into donations? Does Mayor Pete keep up his buzz? Beto raised $6 million on the first day and fairly little afterward. Does he raise a lot in the second quarter? What does Biden raise?

And yes, I think we will see 1-3 candidates drop out, although there is a lot of incentive to stay in the race through at least June, when the first debates happen.

sarahf: Yeah, Beto is going to have a lot to prove in Q2. But who knows, he could have his Buttigieg moment!

natesilver: It’s very likely that Buttigieg and Sanders will continue to raise a lot of money in the medium term, but I’m more interested in what Beto’s bringing in on a sustained basis.

And keep in mind that we don’t have any debates until the end of Q2, which makes viral moments a bit more unlikely.

This quarter right now is going to be by far the most boring quarter of the entire primary process, in fact. NOT THAT YOU SHOULD FORGET TO CLICK ON FIVETHIRTYEIGHT.COM EVERY DAY.

Politics Podcast: Where The 2020 Democratic Primary Field Stands After One Quarter

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First-quarter financial reports for presidential campaigns are due to the Federal Election Commission on Monday. So the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast crew takes the opportunity to assess the state of the 2020 Democratic field with the first quarter of the year in the rearview mirror.

Also, the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recording a live podcast in Houston, Texas, 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.

Politics Podcast: We Evaluated All Of Our Forecast Models. They’re Reliable.

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The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast series “Model Talk” is back for a special installment! In this episode, Galen and Nate discuss the results of our “How Good Are FiveThirtyEight Forecasts?” project, in which we assess the accuracy of a decade’s worth of FiveThirtyEight forecasts in politics and sports. Fortunately, it turns out they’re well calibrated.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recording a live podcast in Houston, Texas 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.

The NBA Playoffs Are Here. And We Have Thoughts.

neil (Neil Paine, senior sportswriter): Now that every NBA team has played Game 82 of the regular season, we can finally get to the real business at hand: The playoffs. Let’s start with the Eastern Conference, where the Milwaukee Bucks earned the franchise’s first top seed since the league adopted the 16-team playoff format in 1984.

What do we think about the big picture in the East? The No. 1 Bucks and No. 2 Raptors were the most dominant during the regular season, but seeds 3 and 4 (Philadelphia and Boston) have as much talent as anybody in the conference on paper. Who do you think should have the edge and why?

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): I’m going to go ahead and agree with our algorithm that there’s a big gap between the top two (Milwaukee and Toronto) and No. 3 and 4 (Philly and Boston). Milwaukee and Toronto were a LOT better in the regular season. I agree that Philly might have as much talent on paper, but they didn’t really get it together. I’m not sure you can say that about Boston, especially with Marcus Smart out.

chris.herring (Chris Herring, senior sportswriter): Yeah. I spent some time around the Sixers over the past week, and Brett Brown admits what Nate just said: That the Sixers have an enormous amount of talent on paper, but he almost would’ve preferred to have less rest if it meant having more cohesion with that group.

The Marcus Smart injury could end up being really problematic for the Celtics for a couple reasons, too — we don’t know exactly how much time he’ll miss, but it could even be a bad sign in this series vs. Indiana.

Smart would have been the guy guarding Bojan Bogdanovic, who’s essentially taken over as the Pacers’ top gun since Victor Oladipo went down with injury.

Bogdanovic struggled against Smart all season, and his worst numbers of the year were against Boston because of it. But now, I assume they’ll go to Jaylen Brown to defend him, and that hasn’t worked well at all in those instances.

tchow (Tony Chow, video producer): Our predictions give the Celtics a 79 percent chance to advance. Even with the Oladipo injury for the Pacers, that still seems … high?

chris.herring: Probably a little high, yeah. Especially now, without Smart.

natesilver: I mean, I think people tend to underestimate how little luck there is in a seven-game series. The better team tends to win out, especially if it has home-court advantage.

chris.herring: I tend to think the Pacers are The Little Engine That Could. They play very hard … but that will probably only get them so far.

natesilver: For what it’s worth, our algorithm is giving Boston some credit for being more talented “on paper” than they played like during the regular season. Jayson Tatum is probably a better player going forward than what he showed this season, for instance. Gordon Hayward is obviously in a different category, but maybe him, too. Boston also had the point differential that you’d associate with a 52-win team instead of a 49-win team, which is not huge, but it’s something.

chris.herring: Yeah. Hayward has come on really nicely as of late, including a 9-of-9 game vs. Indiana last week. If he’s getting back to his old self, it could be tough for Indiana.

natesilver: It does seem, though, that it’s a team with only one real star-level talent right now, and Kyrie Irving seems pretty checked out. That’s subjective, I know, but they have a pretty big hill to climb — having to win three road series against three VERY good teams (likely Milwaukee, Toronto and Golden State, in that order) even if they get past Indiana.

chris.herring: I’ll be honest: I’m not very amped about the East’s first round at all. But that second round will probably be eons better than the West’s conference final.

neil: Yeah, it sounds from this like Boston-Indiana is the first-round series that has caught your attention the most. But that might be by default.

chris.herring: I think Philly-Brooklyn could be somewhat interesting. It doesn’t sound like an absolute given that Joel Embiid will play Game 1. The Nets are essentially playing with house money, and though they’ve struggled as of late, they had a harder end-of-season schedule than the other teams fighting their way into the playoffs.

natesilver: The Nets are kind of a buzzy team. But Philly, maybe in contrast to a Marcus Smart-less Boston, has enough talent that maybe they can be slightly subpar and still win fairly easily.

chris.herring: Yeah. I don’t expect much from Brooklyn, but I could see them making things interesting because of the limited time the Sixers have had together. Other than that — and some slight interest in how Boston looks without Smart/what it means for Indiana — I wish I could just simulate the East’s first round like a video game or something

neil: Haha. Let’s just play it out in NBA 2K.

chris.herring: Maybe that isn’t fair to Orlando, though. They’ve been good for a decent amount of time now.

neil: They’ve been on fire (11-2) since mid-March.

chris.herring: I just feel like it ultimately won’t matter against a club like Toronto.

natesilver: I also think Philly has more flip-the-switch potential than Boston. Maybe Jimmy Butler accepts his role as what’s essentially a third fiddle on offense and plays dominant defense and starts hitting 3s again. Maybe they treat the playoffs as a fun eight-week road trip instead of worrying too much about how the team is constructed in the future.

tchow: Just tell me what needs to happen to get Sixers vs. Bucks in the Eastern Conference finals.

neil: Well, the Raptors would have to lose in the second round AGAIN. How soul crushing would that be for that franchise? This was sorta supposed to be their year after LeBron left the East. (Especially after adding Kawhi Leonard.)

chris.herring: I don’t know how I feel yet about the Sixers-Raptors series, assuming it happens. But I think the Bucks should be favored against everyone, honestly. I think everybody has downplayed them, even as they’ve had this unbelievable season, with the likely MVP and coach of the year.

natesilver: The Raptors somehow won 58 games with Kawhi only playing 60. That’s seriously impressive.

chris.herring: I don’t know if it’s a small-market thing. Or if it’s just that people seem to be a year late on everything. It is impressive!

At the same time, they won 59 last year without him. So I’m more impressed by the Bucks essentially having the same cast and transforming into what they are now. I don’t know. Maybe it’s simply Milwaukee’s newness that I’m taken by.

neil: Are we also maybe holding Toronto’s playoff track record against them? (Even if it’s a relatively new version of that team this season?)

chris.herring: Nah. I’m not. Kawhi is such a different player than DeMar DeRozan, who had a game that didn’t translate all that well to postseason. Also, Pascal Siakam has improved by leaps and bounds. You could ignore him before on defense, and now that’s tantamount to having a death wish.

natesilver: They also have one of the two real stars in the East that’s won a ring before (Kawhi, with Kyrie being the other). Which I know sounds like boilerplate sports radio talk, but our research has found that playoff experience is actually fairly predictive.

chris.herring: I think Toronto fans have wanted to believe their team was different for a couple years now. Almost like that “Shawshank Redemption” scene where Red keeps going to the parole hearing and saying he’s a changed man, ready to rejoin society. But this time, the Raptors are different. Kawhi alone would have made them that way, but Siakam is a different player. As is Lowry, who hasn’t quite looked himself at all times. But has the experience, and has a better roster around him.

natesilver: Our algorithm also thinks that all six of their top rotation guys are above-average defensively. So that’s likely to keep them in every game unless they get mentally checked out.

Which, I don’t know. I wouldn’t totally rule out the possibility that they take a rough loss in a Game 1 or 2 somewhere and start panicking, and Kawhi starts thinking about how nice the Clippers could look next year with him in L.A.

But on balance, I think I’m on the side that says people are reading too much into the Raptors’ past playoff failures. It’s a different team this year, and there’s no LeBron.

chris.herring: Like the Munchkins when they realize the Wicked Witch is dead. Why do I keep using these movie references? What is wrong with me?

neil: LOL.

tchow: As of right now though, our model actually favors Toronto (slightly) over the Bucks to make the Finals (46 percent vs. 42 percent). Toronto fans have to be happy to see that.

neil: Do you guys agree?

natesilver: Yeah, that surprised me a bit. But Toronto has more playoff experience and Milwaukee has some injury issues.

tchow: I guess it’ll go a long way in the “playoff experience” argument to see how far a team like the Bucks go this year after that seven-game series last season against Boston. I have a hard time betting against them in the East though.

natesilver: On the flip side, Giannis Antetokounmpo is presumably going to start playing 37-38 minutes a game now after only playing 32.8 minutes in the regular season. That actually makes a pretty big difference.

chris.herring: That surprises me, but only a little. Their records aren’t that far off. The Raptors have played Kawhi a lot fewer games than Giannis.

What I do think will be key at some point, which we haven’t talked about yet, is the Bucks’ need to get back to full strength. They’ve been without Malcolm Brogdon, and Tony Snell has missed time, too. It doesn’t matter in a round 1 matchup. But it comes into play in a very big way in the following two rounds, should they get that far.

natesilver: I do wonder if Milwaukee’s whole floor spacing thing will work slightly less well in the playoffs. If you can contain Giannis — obviously not at all easy — there really isn’t a second iso-ball scorer on the whole roster. Maybe Eric Bledsoe, I guess.

chris.herring: I just don’t know how it’s done

natesilver: Containing Giannis you mean?

chris.herring: Before, there wasn’t much trust or belief. But now, you kind of either have to help in the paint against him, or leave open someone like Brook Lopez, who will gladly shoot a triple.

There were screenshots last postseason of four Celtics standing in the paint at one time to stop him, because Milwaukee wasn’t trained to score outside of his drives to the basket.

Now, even Giannis will pull 3s every now and then, just to keep defenses honest. Bledsoe’s had a nice year. Lopez is there, but wasn’t before.

@JonAriasRadio agree Giannis needed to play better but the below image is why he struggled to get more shots off. Spacing. Brogdon sitting in the corner makes a world of difference. Instead you have Bazz and Jabari collapsing the lane. pic.twitter.com/VXdYo7oYiE

— WiscoScoot (@WiscoScoot) April 25, 2018

natesilver: I guess I’m saying a team like Toronto that is quick (at least with certain lineups) and can switch a lot, maybe they can contest that Lopez 3.

Or get a few steals when the Bucks telegraph their intentions too much.

tchow: Nikola Mirotic also may be back in time for Game 1. So yeah, the Bucks will have shooters.

neil: And for what it’s worth (maybe something?), Milwaukee beat Toronto in three of their four regular season matchups. Those games were also before all the little upgrades Milwaukee made around the trade deadline. But we’ll have to see how the Bucks look at full strength and if they and the Raptors can even make it all the way to the Conference Finals to face each other.

Let’s move on to the West, where — here’s a surprise — the Golden State Warriors are the No. 1 seed, for the fourth time in five years. Our model currently gives the Warriors a commanding 78 percent chance of winning the conference (and a 60 percent chance of winning the NBA title). On the one hand, that is amazingly high, but does it sound right to you guys?

natesilver: The West playoffs feel a lot less climactic to me now that the Rockets wound up on the same side of the bracket as Golden State.

chris.herring: It sounds about right to me. The one side of the West bracket is the equivalent of Michigan State and Duke being in the same region.

natesilver: Utah is also a pretty rough first-round matchup for Houston. Rudy Gobert is going to make it much harder for James Harden to get to the rim.

neil: Well, Chris, we were talking the other day this idea that the Rockets may have actually wanted the No. 4 seed so that they’d face the Warriors sooner. Can you explain a little about what you meant there?

chris.herring: I fully believe the Rockets may be happy with this setup. At this point, they’re probably of the opinion that they can beat anyone other than GSW (and maybe them, too).

Utah isn’t a pushover at all. It’s kind of an amazing first-round matchup that, in most years would be at least a second-round matchup, and in a post-Warriors universe, maybe even a conference finals.

But that said, Houston beat Utah last year. And they did it by neutralizing what the Jazz do best: Take away threes and the rim. They forced the Rockets to take midrange shots, which they basically view as evil. But the Rockets did that — Chris Paul is a midrange specialist and went off for 40 points one game — and were able to win. So if the Rockets can get by Utah again, having the Warriors in round 2 instead of the Western Conference finals might be beneficial. Just so Paul and Harden aren’t exhausted or injured like they were by round 3 last season, when they played the Warriors.

natesilver: Yeah, I think Chris Paul is key in that series. Utah’s pretty optimally designed to curb Harden as much as you can curb him, but CP3 is a big problem for them.

natesilver: Overall, though, I think if I’m Houston, I’d rather have a hope-and-a-prayer that someone else knocks Golden State out before they reach the finals. Or that someone on the Warriors gets hurt.

chris.herring: Yeah. They’d never admit it out loud, but the potential theory that they want GSW early is fascinating to me. If your line of thought is that you’re almost certainly gonna have to go through them anyway, might as well do it before you’re too spent to have a chance.

neil: Right, because fatigue seemed like a big issue for them by the Western Conference finals last year.

chris.herring: Golden State doesn’t fear anyone, but I think they would privately acknowledge that they see Houston as the only team that, in optimal circumstances, could beat them

natesilver: It could make the Western Conference finals pretty boring though. Our model says there’s a 93 percent chance the Warriors win the WCF (!) conditional on reaching them.

chris.herring: Yeah. That’s why I keep saying the semifinals are gonna be the best round this year. Especially if Houston-Golden State is the matchup, along with those East series.

tchow: Hey kudos to Oklahoma City for avoiding Golden State AND Denver AND Houston. Actually, OKC vs. Portland is the only series in the entire playoffs where the lower seed is favored according to our model. We give the Thunder a 78 percent chance of advancing.

natesilver: OKC and Denver saw their championship odds improve when Houston wound up in the No. 4 seed, and it’s mostly because of the parlay that Houston beats Golden State (possible) and then THEY beat Houston (also possible). I’m not sure that Denver would have any chance against Golden State in a seven-game series, however.

chris.herring: I feel bad that I don’t believe in Denver, given how well they played all year, with injuries, and with so many young guys on that roster.

neil: Is Denver the weirdest No. 2 seed we’ve seen in recent memory? They didn’t even make the playoffs last year, albeit with 46 wins.

chris.herring: Also, every single time Denver plays Golden State, it feels very much like GSW goes out of its way to show how easily they can dominate the Nuggets when they want to. Basically to show that a playoff series could get embarrassing if Golden State felt like imposing its will.

natesilver: The Nuggets benefited a lot from their depth in the regular season — that’s why they battled so well through injuries — but depth doesn’t mean much in the playoffs.

chris.herring: Their relative inexperience in the playoffs concerns me maybe more than it should.

natesilver: It’s a pretty weird roster, and I think the Nuggets have some offseason work to do to turn a couple of their many, many league-average players into another really good player, especially someone who can play out on the wing.

chris.herring: Part of me feels like they simply may not have another gear. Almost like those Tom Thibodeau teams. Because they’re young, perhaps they don’t know to pace themselves. And how could they? They missed the playoffs in the final game of the season last year.

But the fact that Golden State just runs them out of the building whenever they play very much feels like an experienced team versus one that isn’t and needs some playoff seasoning so that they’re ready for the next time.

neil: They feel destined to become another poster child for the difference between what wins in the regular season and the playoffs, for all the reasons you guys mentioned. But at least they do have a legit star in Nikola Jokic.

natesilver: Denver does have a pretty big home-court advantage because of the altitude. So that they got the No. 2 seed is actually pretty relevant.

chris.herring: That’s true. I at least like that they aren’t reliant on the altitude anymore to win games. (Although those teams that played at a breakneck pace under George Karl — and Doug Moe before that — were pretty fun to watch.)

neil: Good point. They were an NBA-best 34-7 at home this season, and they are in that relatively lesser bottom section of the bracket.

natesilver: I mean, we have the Nuggets with a 53 percent chance of reaching the Western Conference finals … and a 6 percent chance of reaching the NBA Finals. That tells you a lot right there.

chris.herring: What else are you all interested to see in the West? Any hope whatsoever for Portland, despite the injury to Jusuf Nurkic?

neil: Portland is another team with a lot to prove after that unexpected first-round sweep vs. the Pelicans (remember THEM?) last year. But OKC is a very tough draw.

chris.herring: Portland got swept this year by OKC. Our projection model is right to not trust them. And Nurkic not being there is a killer. They had put together a really, really nice run before his injury, and perhaps could have made things interesting.

tchow: I really feel for Portland fans. So many “what ifs” due to injury, and they always seem to happen when it looks like they’re on the cusp of putting it all together.

natesilver: Pretty unusual to have a No. 6 seed be better than a 3 to 1 favorite (OKC is 78 percent to win the series, according to our model), but I think I agree, too.

chris.herring: Yeah. There’s isn’t much to love about Portland’s chances

natesilver: The Thunder are also the team that I’d fear the most if I were Golden State after Houston.

chris.herring: Damian Lillard went nuts during the regular season against the Thunder. Had a 50-point game and averaged better than 30 a night against them, yet they dropped all four meetings.

tchow: Is CJ McCollum going to be back for this first round?

chris.herring: Yeah. McCollum is back. But he had a true shooting percentage of 46 against OKC, his worst mark of any opponent out West that he played at least three times.

natesilver: Tenacious defense + Paul George (especially if he can get back to his midseason form) is a formula that gives you a puncher’s chance against any opponent.

chris.herring: I don’t trust OKC yet. Some of that is Russell Westbrook’s tendencies being all over the place at times. Some of it is George not having played the way he was playing earlier in the year (still not sure his shoulder is completely right at times).

Their defense, which is one of the best in the league, has been merely average since the break. They don’t have enough shooting. But their top-level talent is better than anybody else’s, outside of Houston and GSW. And that ultimately matters. And their side of the bracket is amazing.

natesilver: Jerami Grant shot 39 percent from three this year, although that’s likely a fluke (he’s 33 percent careerwise).

chris.herring: He’s been a big bright spot for them.

natesilver: If they had another wing that was a true 39-40 percent 3-point shooter, that would make a ton of difference.

neil: OK, so to wrap things up, let’s look at the big picture for the title as it runs through Golden State (like always). If we each had to put together a short list of teams — from either conference — who could beat the Warriors in these playoffs, how many teams would be on it and who are they?

Mine might be two: Rockets and Bucks.

natesilver: Our algorithm feels strongly that the list is EXACTLY three teams long: Milwaukee, Toronto and Houston.

tchow: Bucks

natesilver: I guess people — or Neil and Tony, anyway — have trouble envisioning the Raptors doing it.

tchow: Sorry, Toronto.

natesilver: And to be clear, the Raptors would be big underdogs. Like 3:1 underdogs, per our model, despite having home-court advantage.

tchow: Another way to ask that question, Nate, as a fan of gambling, Warriors have a 60 percent chance of winning another title. Would you bet on the field?

natesilver: No. I think that’s a pretty fair price. And it’s pretty close to the Vegas odds, I think.

chris.herring: Yeah. I feel much better about Milwaukee, just based off their season, analytics and star power than anyone else. But I don’t think Toronto would match up poorly at all with Golden State. They’d have guys who could credibly guard Kevin Durant, Steph Curry and Klay Thompson and have enough offense of their own to make things interesting.

Boston seemed like a good bet to get there in preseason, but I don’t trust them to accomplish that without Smart being healthy., a And without them putting together a solid string of performances, I still ultimately think it’s the Warriors winning it all again. But I hope someone at least gives them a competitive series, be it Houston, Milwaukee (Toronto?) or both.

tchow: That’s all folks!

Politics Podcast: Do Democrats Want An Outsider In 2020?

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Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of a small city in Indiana, has attracted national media attention and is rising in early Democratic Primary polls. Andrew Yang, an entrepreneur with no political experience, already has the 65,000 unique donors required to qualify for the Democratic primary debate stage. The appeal of political outsiders is nothing new in American politics, and in this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the team debates whether an outsider is what Democrats want in 2020.

In a round of “Good Use of Polling or Bad Use of Polling,” the crew also considers how many of the Democratic candidates for president pollsters should include in their surveys. And they discuss an article by Clare Malone about the class divide among white voters.

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.