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Why Aren’t Sherrod Brown And Michael Bloomberg Running For President? And What Does It Mean?

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

micah (Micah Cohen, managing editor): Welcome all. This is a special, extra edition of our weekly politics chat. Why are we here? To talk …

Politics Podcast: Iowa And New Hampshire Can Go To Hell

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Every four years, a select few states — particularly Iowa and New Hampshire — play an outsized role in determining who voters get to choose between for president. Those states’ demographics are out of line with the makeup of the Democratic electorate. In this episode, elections analyst Geoffrey Skelley joins the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast to discuss what other lineupsWell, to the back of the primary calendar. might look like.

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 Beto O’Rourke Overrated Or Underrated?

Take a look at prediction markets and you’ll find what bettors think is a clear top tier of four Democratic presidential candidates. Three of the names are exactly who you’d expect to see. There’s Joe Biden, the former vice president, who has led in the vast majority of state and national polls (even though he hasn’t yet announced a bid for president). There’s Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, the runner-up in 2016, who is second and rising in the polls and who has already raised lots of money and drawn huge numbers of people to his rallies. There’s California Sen. Kamala Harris, who realized the biggest gains in the polls following her announcement in January, who potentially has the broadest coalition and who seems to have the most support from party leaders in early states.

And then there’s … Beto O’Rourke, the former Texas Congressman who has never held statewide office, who lost his bid for U.S. Senate to Ted Cruz last November and who has spent most of his time since then trying to find his way out of a post-election “funk”/midlife crisis.

That’s a deliberately troll-ish characterization of O’Rourke, who has some strong attributes as a candidate, including the potential to appeal to a broad coalition of millennials, moderates and possibly Hispanics. His performance against Cruz was actually quite strong — one of the four best performances by a Democratic Senate candidate last year along with Sanders, Joe Manchin and Amy Klobuchar — relative to Texas’s partisanship and Cruz’s incumbency status. It’s not uncommon for candidates to take some time to decide whether to run for president, and lately, O’Rourke has given fairly clear signals that he does want to run for the White House after all.

But like a candidate such as Klobuchar or Cory Booker, O’Rourke would seem to have a roughly even mix of upside potential and downside risks. A good prospect, but not necessarily someone who has established himself in the big leagues, as Sanders has.

I’m guessing that you — yes, you!, dear reader — agree with me so far. I’m guessing that you don’t take O’Rourke’s chances as seriously as you do those of Biden, Harris and Sanders. That’s not to say you don’t think he could win, just that you wouldn’t put him in that top tier.

I’m guessing that because … I already asked you about it. In a series of (unscientific) Twitter polls I conducted on Monday, I asked people to assess the chances of 16 actual or potential Democratic candidates winning the nomination. O’Rourke didn’t come out as one of the front-runners, but instead in a second tier along with Elizabeth Warren and Booker.1

@NateSilver538 Twitter followers are bearish on Beto

But they’re bullish on Warren and Booker

Chance of winning the presidency according to …


Candidate
@NateSILVEr538 poll
Betting markets*




Kamala Harris
17.7%
18.4%


Bernie Sanders
16.9
18.1


Joe Biden
13.8
15.1


Elizabeth Warren
9.8
5.1


Beto O’Rourke
9.4
14.3


Cory Booker
7.5
4.6


Amy Klobuchar
5.2
4.8


Sherrod Brown
4.2
4.9


Kirsten Gillibrand
3.2
2.2


Pete Buttigieg
1.9



Julian Castro
1.7



John Hickenlooper
1.5



Tulsi Gabbard
1.5



Michael Bloomberg
1.2



Jay Inslee
1.0



John Delaney
0.5

* Average of PredictIt and Betfair as of 11 a.m on March 5. Only candidates with liquid markets in both PredictIt and Betfair are listed. Probabilities are adjusted so that they equal 100 percent once also accounting for unlisted candidates.

So I’m here to make the case that maybe you’re wrong and that maybe O’Rourke really does belong in the top tier. I’m not sure I entirely believe the case, but I’m going to make it, so hold tight. We’re about to enter the Beto Quadrant, where Democrats are always exactly one election cycle from flipping Texas and the only content is Pod Save America.

[ … ENTERING BETO QUADRANT … ]

Things are so much clearer to me now, dear reader. By virtue of being a FiveThirtyEight and/or a @NateSilver538 follower, you see, your political tastes are much too highbrow. You like Warren because of her detailed policy stances. You’re bullish on Harris and Booker because you think they could unite the different factions of the party as evidenced by their strong start in endorsements.

Most Democrats aren’t like you, though. They don’t care that much about policy or any of that shit. They almost certainly have never visited the FiveThirtyEight endorsement tracker. They don’t even follow the news cycle all that closely. They weren’t aware of Beto’s road trip, let alone that it became a subject of derision by smart-aleck journalists. They just want someone who can beat Trump.

And from what they do know about Beto, they like him, he makes them feel good, and they think — despite his loss to Cruz — he’s a 2020 winner.

Start with Beto’s favorability ratings, which are among the strongest in the field. In this week’s batch of Morning Consult polling, for instance, which is culled from interviews with more than 12,000 Democratic voters, Beto had the second-best ratio of favorable to unfavorable ratings, with 43 percent of Democrats saying they have a favorable view as compared to just 8 percent with an unfavorable one. Only Biden’s ratio is better, and indeed, Biden, Beto, Sanders and Harris are the four strongest candidates by this metric, just as betting markets have them.

Democrats who know Beto O’Rourke like Beto O’Rourke

Share of Democratic voters who had a favorable impression or unfavorable impression of each candidate according to a Morning Consult survey

Candidate
Favorable
Unfavorable
Ratio of favorable to unfavorable




Joe Biden
79%
11%
7.2


Beto O’Rourke
43
8
5.4


Bernie Sanders
75
15
5.0


Kamala Harris
52
11
4.7


Cory Booker
43
12
3.6


Sherrod Brown
23
8
2.9


Elizabeth Warren
54
19
2.8


Eric Holder
32
13
2.5


Kirsten Gillibrand
32
14
2.3


Amy Klobuchar
28
13
2.2


Julian Castro
25
12
2.1


Terry McAuliffe
17
9
1.9


Pete Buttigieg
13
7
1.9


Jay Inslee
12
7
1.7


John Hickenlooper
12
8
1.5


Tulsi Gabbard
16
11
1.5


Michael Bloomberg
33
23
1.4


John Delaney
13
10
1.3


Steve Bullock
10
8
1.3

Survey conducted from Feb. 25 to March 3, 2019. Respondents were given an option to say they had never heard of a candidate

Source: Morning Consult

Beto also has the potential to make a big splash if and when he announces — in contrast to candidates like Booker, who are well-liked by Democratic voters but whose entry into the race didn’t create major news. Look at Google search volume for some of the major Democratic candidates dating back to Labor Day and you’ll find that the spike of interest in Beto on and around Election Day last year exceeded that for any of the Democrats when they announced their campaign so far.2

Then there’s Beto’s ability to raise loads of money. He brought in more than $80 million in individual contributions in the 2018 cycle, more than double the fundraising haul for any other candidate for Congress last year (not counting self-financing or party and PAC contributions). Almost half of these contributions, $37 milion, were unitimized, meaning that they came from small donors. Sure, the mechanics are going to be different now that Beto is competing against other Democrats and not just Cruz. That was nonetheless an impressive accomplishment — the most money raised in individual contributions by any Senate candidate, ever — and Beto will have a heck of a donor list to start with.

O’Rourke lapped the field in money raised in the 2018 cycle

2018 congressional candidates who raised at least $20 million in individual contributions

Candidate
Party
State
Total individual contributions
Small-donor (unitemized) contributions




Beto O’Rourke
D
Texas
$80.1m

–

$36.9m

–



Claire McCaskill
D
Missouri
32.0m

–

11.5m

–



Ted Cruz
R
Texas
30.5m

–

12.0m

–



Jon Ossoff*
D
Georgia
29.5m

–

19.1m

–



Heidi Heitkamp
D
North Dakota
25.6m

–

11.5m

–



Bill Nelson
D
Florida
25.5m

–

7.2m

–



Doug Jones*
D
Alabama
24.5m

–

13.8m

–



Tammy Baldwin
D
Wisconsin
24.2m

–

9.4m

–



Jacky Rosen
D
Nevada
22.9m

–

8.4m

–



Elizabeth Warren
D
Massachusetts
21.3m

–

13.3m

–

Self-funding is excluded.

* Special election

Source: Federal Election Commission

So by these rather important metrics — fundraising, favorability ratings, virality in Google searches — Beto indeed looks like a top-tier candidate. Are they the fanciest metrics? No! And that’s fine. The point is not to overthink it. Beto was sort of a candidate-celebrity not all that long ago, which is not a bad thing to be when you have to differentiate yourself in a field that will likely consist of about 20 candidates. (It worked pretty well for President Trump!) And nothing has really changed since then other than that Beto has been out of the spotlight, a problem that would instantly fix itself once he announces his bid. The candidates with the strongest launches to date, Sanders and Harris, are running well to Beto’s left; indeed the moderate-ish, beer-track “lane”3 is wide open, with Klobuchar off to an OK-but-not-great start and Biden not yet having decided about whether to run at all.

Furthermore, the various mini-controversies Beto had in January — about his road trip, about his Instagramming an interview with his dental hygienist (something that was misdescribed in media accounts as “live-streaming his teeth cleaning”), about his sometimes answering interview questions with “I don’t know” — are things that only media snobs care about and aren’t substantively important, as evidenced by the fact that they didn’t dent his favorability ratings one bit. Indeed, to the extent that pundits and political analysts are more bearish on Beto than people in betting markets, that’s at least as likely to be a favorable indicator for Beto as an unfavorable one, considering the pundits’ track record in situations like these.

[ … EXITING BETO QUADRANT … ]

I’m back. I’m home! I’ve returned safely from the Beto Quadrant, and I mostly feel fine, although I feel an inexplicable urge to order a Sleep Number mattress, promo code #PODSAVE.

I’ve also almost managed to convince myself that O’Rourke really is a top-tier candidate after all, although I expect the feeling to wear off after a few more hours.

Here’s what I really think. I think O’Rourke has the potential to have a very strong launch, as measured by the various metrics (polling gains, fundraising, impressive staff hires, endorsements, media attention) that we’d usually measure it by. O’Rourke was a pretty big candilebrity in 2018, and I think it really does help to have a differentiated brand in a divided field. Furthermore, although the “lanes” thing is way overdone, there are still quite a few moderate Democrats (both voters and “party elites”) who might be looking for a place to hitch their wagon. O’Rourke doesn’t have any endorsements yet,4 but he’s been getting plenty of encouragement from influential Democrats to run, especially from former Obama staffers.5 Conditional on that strong launch, I think he belongs in the top tier.

He also may have missed his moment, or he may not look the same to voters now that the sugar high of almost beating Cruz has worn off. The road trip and dentist stuff may not have mattered to voters, but it didn’t necessarily reflect great self-awareness or judgment. And the dynamics of a white man running in a field full of women and people of color — and potentially getting the nomination despite having considerably less experience than several of them — are not great in the context of contemporary Democratic politics. So for the time being, I put Beto in Tier 1.5, behind the Harris/Biden/Bernie group but ahead of the rest of the Democrats.

From ABC News:

How Has Fox News Changed In The Trump Era?

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

sarahf(Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): In the latest issue of the New Yorker, reporter Jane Mayer suggests that Fox News has become a propaganda organ of the Trump administration, but who do you think really sets the agenda? Is President Trump influencing Fox or vice versa? And what does that mean for the state of journalism in the U.S., particularly in an era as politically polarized as ours?

Also welcome Jay Rosen, who is joining us today from New York University!

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): I suppose it’s a cop-out to say that it’s a symbiotic relationship? But I think Fox is following Trump’s lead — and the ratings he produces — more than the other way around.

One of the things I was wrongest about in the 2016 GOP primary was that once Fox went to war with Trump he’d have to back down (thinking of when Megyn Kelly asked him tough questions at that first debate, for example). But nope. He called their bluff.

That’s the short-term history, though. In the long term, Fox did an awful lot to lay the groundwork for Trump.

clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): Mayer points out this dynamic in the piece, about former chairman and CEO of Fox News Roger Ailes working with Fox to create the audience that would eventually come to love Trump. And in some ways, I think we have to concede that Trump was a member of that audience himself, before he ever ran.

jay.rosen (Jay Rosen, journalism professor at New York University): I think we should see it as a merger, in which it no longer makes sense to ask: Who is influencing whom? The two have become one. You do not have the necessary separation between the two to even say that Fox “covers” the Trump presidency since the Trump presidency is so frequently driven by what’s on Fox.

clare.malone: Maybe it’s a symbiotic merger … I think we can agree that Trump/Fox share a certain tabloid sensibility. That’s what really makes it all zing so well on TV.

sarahf: What was hard for me to grapple with in Mayer’s piece was how things at Fox have changed. To Clare’s point, Fox’s audience predates Trump and Fox News has long been a conservative outlet criticized for its right-leaning coverage coverage. So what’s really changed?

clare.malone:That’s an interesting question, Sarah. Mayer’s story does suggest that Ailes at least urged a valence of journalistic norms … that seems to have disappeared under the new leadership.

jay.rosen: This is the central problem in discussing Fox as a propaganda network. One way to answer that is that Ailes understood that it was in the long term interests of Fox News to preserve some independence or some space between itself and the political actors it promoted. Now that discipline is gone.

natesilver: If you’re a Weekly Standard (RIP) conservative, maybe you think that Trump does too much long-term damage to the cause of movement conservatism. But I don’t think the people running Fox News have never been those types of conservatives. They’ve always been attracted to the sensational, the conspiratorial and sometimes the slightly or not-so-slightly racist or xenophobic angle. They probably also want lower taxes and conservative Supreme Court justices. But if Trumpism is a bridge to get there — that’s more a feature than a bug for Fox News, especially since Trump is so good for ratings.

clare.malone: It’s basically the rise of New York Post conservatism over Wall Street Journal conservatism, I guess!

natesilver: I mostly agree, although the New York Post has a pragmatic streak on issues like gun control by virtue of being in New York, which Trump sort of had during the course of the campaign but has mostly given up since then.

Like, although it’s a subtle difference, I think Trump would be slightly more popular as a New York Post conservative than as a Fox News conservative.

But part of this is also that there’s not much of a market for the Weekly Standard/Wall Street Journal brand of conservatism. That was reflected in the failure of Marco Rubio’s campaign, for instance.

jay.rosen: Something that makes it hard to interpret the behavior of Fox News: For the most part, the people at Fox sneer at the legitimacy rituals of mainstream journalism. The network was founded on the rejection of those norms. But every once in a while they find the pressure too great and the situation “flips” into a conventional one, where the criticism is too great and they fire or reprimand someone, or pull back from a story. But it can be hard to predict when these normal rules take over, and when they will be rejected.

natesilver: Isn’t that a little bit like Trump himself? He will back down from a crisis, e.g. the government shutdown, at least occasionally. Every now and then — say, the State of the Union — he tries to exhibit some auspices of normality.

jay.rosen: Yes.

sarahf: But Fox does have some good reporters. I’m thinking about Chris Wallace here. So I don’t think they’ve entirely abandoned all journalism post-Ailes, even if they’re giving Sean Hannity a longer leash than they did, say, Glenn Beck.

natesilver: They do, yeah. Wallace is a very good reporter. Also, there’s Martha MacCallum. But as the New Yorker piece illustrated, their Trump boosterism is starting to impinge upon the journalistic parts of their operation.

clare.malone: I think we have to talk about the way that the public has no real sense of the separation between hard news reporters and opinion journalists at networks (and newspapers).

Journalists complain about that, but it’s not an intuitive distinction for a lot of people, i.e., Rachel Maddow is not a journalist, even if you like what she’s saying and even if she’s reporting tax returns (in a long and drawn out manner).

She has a point of view and I use MSNBC as an example because while they’re obviously different from Fox, they do very much have point of view in their journalism that can be difficult for viewers to separate out from their hard reporting.

jay.rosen: Disagree that if you have a point of view, you’re not a journalist. I wrote about it in greater detail here.

clare.malone: That’s not quite what I’m saying, Jay.

I think that shows where the host is first and foremost a personality — a Maddow, a Hannity — can have outsized effects on the way that the audience views the network as a whole.

natesilver: I’m with Jay on this, although I do think it’s interesting that Hannity has, at times, explicitly said he’s not a journalist — something you could never imagine Maddow saying.

I guess I think the whole opinion vs. newsroom distinction is problematic on a LOT of levels. Like, it’s a big problem for the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, because the distinction as they advance it doesn’t make a ton of sense to consumers.

jay.rosen: To me the relevant distinction is not whether a POV is present in the presentation, but whether you maintain high standards of verification, or regularly relax them to accomplish some other agenda you have that comes from outside journalism.

But a personality-driven style is different, I agree with that, Clare. That said, I still don’t understand why Rachel Maddow is not a journalist.

clare.malone: It’s fair to say that networks or a reporter with a certain point of view can have high standards of factual verification and can report really important work. For example, you can point to a place like Mother Jones that has a distinctly liberal point of view and still does a lot of investigative work. But I guess I’d again point to the, shall we call them, atmospheric effects that politically slanted presentation can have? A liberal news network’s opinion/point of view hosts might cover the Mueller investigation with greater gusto for instance, because of editorial choices that inherently influence what an audience should think is the most important news of the day.

natesilver: I guess I’m arguing that news organizations should abolish their opinion sections. If it’s good enough to run in the New York Times, you don’t need to segregate it into an opinion page, even if has a point of view or makes a devil’s advocate case. If it’s not good enough to meet those standards, it shouldn’t run.

clare.malone: Ooh, there’s a take, Nate!

sarahf: But Nate, we would never have learned about the #resistance inside the administration!

natesilver: I’m not sure we learned much about it anyway! Probably would have learned a lot more with a Maggie Haberman story about it.

clare.malone: I don’t think we should abolish the opinion sections of newspapers, though … but maybe there’s a better way to telegraph the editorial red line that exists between opinion/hard news?

Should they be published only in the weekend editions of the paper? Is that the silliest idea ever in the internet age?

A separate site online?

natesilver: Maybe by the comics page?

jay.rosen: Both the New York Times and the Washington Post use the news/opinion distinction to start doing things they should be doing to innovate in news by labeling them “opinion” to avoid a holy war in the newsroom.

natesilver: But again, readers absolutely should hold the New York Times (substitute WaPo or WSJ or anyone else as you see fit) accountable for dumb shit that runs in the op-ed pages.

They certainly benefit from the traffic and buzz those hot takes create.

clare.malone: But when you say that, Nate, do you mean the publisher should be held accountable? Or the top management/editors? Because a lot of people take their frustration out on reporters and writers who don’t have as much power.

natesilver: The publishers (so e.g. the Sulzbergers in the case of the NYT) should primarily be held accountable. But I also think the NYT executive editor Dean Baquet and every reporter in the newsroom should be furious at the Sulzbergers every time there’s some Bret Stephens piece engaging in hokey climate change semi-denialism, for instance.

clare.malone: Yes. That’s fair.

But to take it back to Fox …

Who should be accountable there? Is anyone accountable? WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?

jay.rosen: My solution to this mess is: All journalists state where they are coming from, all practice high standards of verification, all are transparent — explaining how they work — and all engage in dialogue with their users.

clare.malone: In some ways, the Mayer story and the anonymous Fox contributors who gave quotes is some people raising a kind of alarm from the inside. But does Fox chairman Rupert Murdoch and his sons have much incentive to change the network?

Of course not.

sarahf: The accountability question is a good one. I find this idea that Ailes was a moderating force … hard to believe?

Especially considering his preoccupation with Fox covering Obama.

clare.malone: The news is a business on some level, and if the businesspeople are not “The Trust” (a la Sulzbergers) it gets really tough. Journalism is both integral to democracy and accountable to capitalism. Unless you get Laurene Powell Jobs’s money. And even then, who knows …

jay.rosen: I don’t know if “moderating” is the right word. He was more concerned with maintaining power by making them fear you. Even your “friends” should fear you, Sarah.

natesilver: It’s hard to know, but it does seem from Mayer’s reporting that Fox News is extremely personality-driven. So Ailes and Murdoch matter a lot, as individuals. In the news organizations that I’ve worked for, I think outside observers actually overrate the influence of the two or three leaders at the top as compared to the overall institutional culture. But it doesn’t seem to be overrated at Fox News.

There’s also something to be said about the culture of sexual harassment at Fox, which also seems to flow in part from highly hierarchical and closely-held decision making processes.

jay.rosen: Here’s a question I have for FiveThirtyEight people: Do you think Fox and MSNBC are fundamentally similar, or fundamentally unlike each other despite the right vs. left POV?

clare.malone: I mean, they have roots in similar approaches to TV news.

But they’ve obviously gone different directions.

natesilver: I think about halfway in between similar and dissimilar.

sarahf: I would argue similar, though I don’t know MSNBC’s origin story as well.

natesilver: The business model is pretty similar, but a higher percentage of MSNBC programming adheres to higher (or at least more traditional) journalistic standards.

sarahf: Yeah, that’s the distinction I was going to make.

natesilver: But I don’t think there was the same degree of symbiosis between MSNBC and, say, the Obama administration, so that’s also something that’s qualitatively different.

jay.rosen: For me the key variable is standards of verification and in this they are fundamentally dissimilar.

natesilver: In some ways, CNN has somewhat more of those problems (not the verification problems, but the symbiosis problems), since they’re sort of a revolving door between both Democratic and Republican White Houses and with positions for them as an on-air commentators.

jay.rosen: Also, a story like Mueller pushing back on Buzfeed’s report. It is not likely that MSNBC would simply pretend this did not happen. But that kind of thing happens on Fox all the time. Which is not to say MSNBC doesn’t ignore inconvenient stories sometimes.

natesilver: Yeah, that seems like an important point. Very often, Fox News simply won’t cover the major story of the day.

clare.malone: It’s also possible there are/were a lot more left-leaning mags/outlets that served as feeders to bigger orgs that adhered to rigorous journalism norms — The New Republic, The American Prospect, Mother Jones, Washington Monthly, The Nation. The conservative movement had fewer. Maybe The Weekly Standard, The Federalist, The American Conservative? (I’m sure I’m missing some.)

There were just a lot more jobs for young journalists at left-leaning places. And conservative outlets tended to get more think tank/former political operative writers. That probably fed the ecosystem divide writ large.

natesilver: Clare, I think there’s an imbalance in that the rightmost 30 percent (just a rough guesstimate) of the news-reading audience is catered to by a small number of outlets (e.g. Fox News), whereas remaining 70 percent is catered to by a large number of outlets.

So you have a large field of news organizations that’s center-left, on average. It’s definitely not right down the middle, in part because their readerships lean left because the most conservative 30 percent of the audience is missing.

sarahf: And for that 30 percent, Fox News is their main/only source of political news, at least according to a 2014 Pew Research study.

jay.rosen: This was another key moment in Mayer’s article because it makes an important distinction. The speaker is Nicole Hemmer, assistant professor of presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and the author of “Messengers of the Right,” a history of the conservative media’s impact on American politics, “Fox is not just taking the temperature of the base—it’s raising the temperature,” she says. “It’s a radicalization model.”

That’s different from just “appealing” to the base.

sarahf: Unpack that a little more for us, Jay. How is it different?

natesilver: Some of the stuff that appears on the Lou Dobbs program is extremely — “radical” would be a polite word for it, frankly.

jay.rosen: It’s because it’s a leadership strategy. Not striking a responsive chord in the audience, but pulling it somewhere. If you have someone in your family who has been changed by Fox News (I do) you get this distinction right away.

sarahf: If Fox News really has become the propaganda organ of the Trump administration, what are the implications? Do we really have an example of “state TV” on our hands? And does this just mean the polarization in news will get worse?

clare.malone: I do think that we’ve got a problem for democracy with what’s going on at Fox News because it does spread misinformation and disinformation. And liberal democracies do best when they’ve got an educated citizenry. And he fact that journalistic lines have been blurred so completely there is a real harm. I’m not sure what happens with Fox.

jay.rosen: The implications are that 30 percent of the electorate is being isolated in an information loop of its own, and increasingly do not live in the same world as the rest of the voters.

natesilver: One thing that helps both Fox and Trump to succeed is the sort of autoimmune response that they generate. Journalists get outraged — occasionally they get trolled by something minor but usually, the outrage is fully justified! And so they drop their “view from nowhere” (to use Jay’s term) veneer.

But because the audience has been taught for years that the “view from nowhere” is how you know when a new organization is “objective” and trustworthy, it doesn’t say “gee, this outrage must mean the offense by Fox or Trump was really serious.” Instead, it thinks that Trump’s point is being proven!

Or at least, that’s one somewhat stylized view of what’s going on.

It’s worth remembering that Trump is a rather unpopular president and that the average voter trusts the New York Times a lot more than she trusts Trump.

Both Fox and Trump are quite smart at understanding where the weaknesses are in the journalistic immune system.

They might be smarter still if they dialed it back by 10 percent, but that’s a minor quibble.

Politics Podcast: Should We Cancel The Electoral College?

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Colorado is set to become the latest state to sign on to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact — an attempt to sideline the Electoral College and award the presidency to the winner of the popular vote. In this episode, the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast team debates the merits of the Electoral College. The crew also discusses the latest candidates to enter the Democratic primary race — Jay Insee and John Hickenlooper — and considers how much party endorsements matter in the Trump era.

Also, while you’re here: The podcast is recording a live show in New York City on March 20. Click here for tickets and more information.

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: What We Learned From The Cohen Hearing

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How Our Presidential Endorsement Tracker Works

References

Why We’re Tracking Endorsements / 2016 endorsement tracker / The Party Decides

The Details

We consider an endorsement to be a public display or pronouncement of support that articulates or strongly implies that a candidate is the endorser’s current No. 1 choice for president. That’s a wordy description, but it makes a few important points:

The endorsement must be made publicly. A New York Times article saying that Senator Y is quietly backing Candidate X would not count, unless Senator Y has said or done something on behalf of the candidate publicly.
The endorsement need not be as explicit as a statement saying “I endorse Candidate X.” Introducing a candidate at a rally would usually count as an endorsement, for instance, depending on the context and tenor of the remarks.
Endorsers can’t cheat by endorsing multiple candidates at once; an endorsement only counts if it indicates a first choice. Endorsers may switch candidates at any time, however.
That first choice need not be someone who has officially entered the race. Hillary Clinton lined up dozens of endorsements before officially announcing her 2016 candidacy, for instance.
When it’s unclear whether someone intended to endorse a candidate, we’ll check with the offices of the candidate and the endorser about the context. We would also encourage candidates and endorsers to contact us directly to let us know about any new endorsements or any that we’ve missed. If the candidate and the endorser disagree about whether an endorsement has occurred, the endorser’s view will prevail.

Often, if you see someone listed as having endorsed a candidate and their public statements seem ambiguous, we’ve done additional reporting to confirm the endorsement. These were the same rules we used in 2016, and they didn’t cause too many problems, but there are always going to be issues we didn’t anticipate. But again, we would encourage both endorsers and candidates, as well as third parties, to contact us about any missing endorsements or any that seem to be in error.

The universe of potential endorsers we’re tracking in the 2020 cycle is larger than what we tracked in 2016, when we included only current governors and members of Congress. Different endorsers are worth different numbers of “endorsement points” to reflect the relative value of various endorsers, although the scale is flatter than the one we used in 2016. Specifically, it includes the following:

Current and former presidents and vice presidents (10 points).
Current party leaders: Nancy Pelosi (House speaker), Steny Hoyer (House majority leader), James Clyburn (House majority whip), Chuck Schumer (Senate minority leader), Duck Durbin (Senate minority whip) and Tom Perez (Democratic National Committee chair) (10 points).
Current governors, including governor equivalents from the U.S. territories and Washington, D.C.1 (8 points).
Current U.S. Senators (6 points).
Past presidential and vice presidential nominees (5 points).
Former party leaders2 (5 points).
Former 2020 presidential candidates who appeared in at least one debate and have since dropped out (5 points).
Current U.S. representatives, including non-voting delegates from U.S. territories (3 points).
Mayors of cities with at least 300,000 people (3 points).
Officials holding statewide or territory-wide elected office, excluding positions (e.g. commissioners) that are held by multiple people at once (2 points).
State and territorial legislatures’ majority and minority leaders (2 points).3
DNC members not otherwise covered by this list (1 point).

No set of categories and point values is going to be perfect; it doesn’t necessarily seem right that Hillary Clinton’s endorsement is worth less than that of Delaware Gov. John Carney, for instance. But 12 categories is already quite a few, and we don’t want to make too many one-off exceptions. Endorsers’ point values cannot be increased by qualifying for multiple categories; instead, endorsers are associated with the highest-ranking category they fit into on the list above. For instance, Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine is treated as a senator (6 points) rather than a former VP nominee (5 points) because being a senator is worth more points.

Below is the number of current potential endorsers in each category, including both Democratic and independent (e.g. Maine Sen. Angus King) potential endorsers, except independents who are de facto Republicans. Republican endorsers will appear on the list if and when any of them endorse Democratic candidates for president.4 Note that the list can grow and shrink over time as, for example, vacant DNC positions are filled and offices change hands, since many of these categories assign values only to the whoever currently holds the position in question. If a senator resigns from office, for instance, their endorsement is no longer worth any endorsement points unless they fit into one of our other categories. (An exception: The candidate keeps the points if the endorser dies while holding the position.) Candidates cannot endorse themselves, so people who are currently running for president are removed from the endorsement pool until they drop out.

Who are the potential Democratic endorsers?

As of Feb. 27, 2019

Category
No. of potential endorsers
Points per endorser
Total points




Past presidents and vice presidents
5
10
50


Current party leaders
6
10
60


Governors
25
8
200


U.S. senators
39
6
234


Past presidential and VP nominees
5
5
25


Former party leaders
21
5
105


Former 2020 presidential candidates
0
5
0


U.S. representatives
234
3
702


Mayors of large cities
48
3
144


People in statewide office
100
2
200


State legislative leaders
102
2
204


Democratic National Committee members
332
1
332


Total
917

2,256







Model Creator

Aaron Bycoffe A computational journalist for FiveThirtyEight. | @bycoffe

Nate Silver Editor in chief. | @NateSilver538

Version History

1.1 2020 endorsement tracker.Feb. 28, 2019

1.0 2016 endorsement tracker.July 14, 2015

Related Articles
Why We’re Tracking Presidential Endorsements

We’re Tracking 2020 Presidential Endorsements. Here’s Why They Probably Still Matter.

Will order emerge from the early chaos of the 2020 Democratic presidential field? Or will the party remain as divided as Republicans were in 2016?

One indication will be whether Democratic elected officials and other influential party members seek to winnow the field by endorsing a narrow range of candidates. Confronting a similarly large field in 2016, Republican “party elites” never achieved any sort of consensus, with many potential endorsers sitting on the sidelines or not offering more than tepid support for establishment-friendly candidates such as Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio. Meanwhile, Donald Trump emerged as the GOP nominee despite not receiving a single endorsement from a sitting Republican governor or member of Congress until after his wins in the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries.

So as we did in 2016, FiveThirtyEight will be tracking endorsements for the Democratic presidential nomination. We’ll also add the Republican nomination if it eventually appears that someone will give Trump a real run for his money, but we aren’t doing that just yet. Instead, we’ll be focusing on a universe of more than 900 potential Democratic endorsers, a more comprehensive list than we evaluated in 2016, including at least a few possible endorsers in every U.S. state and territory.

We’ll detail the procedures for tracking endorsements separately, but here’s some background about why we’re doing this and why we think it’s valuable both as a journalistic exercise and as a tool to help predict which Democrat will win.

Despite 2016, the party still mostly decides

The 2016 Republican campaign raised questions about the value of endorsements as a measure of success in the presidential primaries. Indeed, we raised a lot of those questions ourselves after being unduly skeptical of Trump’s chances of winning the nomination until around the time of the Iowa caucuses.

In our coverage of the 2016 primaries, we were heavily invested in the hypothesis articulated in the book “The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform,” by the political scientists Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel and John Zaller. The book, which is also backed by other political science scholarship, argued that the preferences of party elites, as expressed by endorsements, tend to lead voter preferences. If party elites achieve consensus on a candidate, that candidate tends to win the nomination, even if he or she initially receives only tepid support in the polls, the book argues. And even if those elites can’t achieve consensus, parties rarely nominate candidates who aren’t at least minimally acceptable to the party establishment, it implies.

Trump was an extremely problematic data point for this hypothesis, as well as for our own expectations about how the nomination process was supposed to work. In the past, parties usually went for candidates who could be entrusted to enact the party’s agenda, but who also helped to maximize the chances of winning the general election. Trump was just the opposite of that: He bucked Republican orthodoxy on many issues, but he also polled poorly among independents and swing voters. So given the information available in early 2016, Trump looked like the worst of both worlds to the Republican establishment.5

So why bother tracking endorsements at all? Well, partly because whether or not they predict anything, we think it’s useful descriptive data — creating a fossil record of how the Democratic Party was behaving in 2019 and 2020. It also makes for a good reality check. One can make assertions about which candidates are backed by the party establishment and which ones aren’t, and these claims are common in media coverage of the campaigns. Tracking endorsements raises the bar by requiring tangible evidence for those claims, however. It’s potentially noteworthy, for instance, that the supposedly establishment-friendly New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand doesn’t have any endorsements yet, while Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders already has almost as many as he did in 2016.6

But also, to put it bluntly, we think a lot of political analysis is dumb. And a lot of the reason it’s dumb is because people are too quick to draw conclusions from just one or two cases. In fact, the “Party Decides” hypothesis has a fairly good track record overall. As poorly as the theory fared in the 2016 GOP nomination, it had done exceptionally well in the 2012 Republican race, when the party-backed Mitt Romney fought back a series of insurgent candidates (Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain) who surged in the polls but didn’t have staying power. That doesn’t mean the candidate leading in endorsements will automatically win the nomination, or even necessarily be an odds-on favorite. But endorsements are one of the more useful instruments to have in your toolkit if you’re taking a multifaceted approach to covering the primary.

The modern presidential nomination system emerged in advance of the 1972 election, when the Democrats’ McGovern-Fraser Commission adopted a series of reforms that gave voters a more direct say in electing delegates to the national convention through primaries and caucuses. From 1972 to 2016, the parties went through 16 nomination processes — nine for Democrats and seven for Republicans — that did not involve their own incumbent president running for re-election.

The argument of “The Party Decides” is that, despite the McGovern reforms, voters usually agreed with the party elites anyway. Indeed, in these 16 elections, the candidate who was leading in endorsements the day before the Iowa caucus won 10 nominations, or 63 percent of the time.

The endorsement leader usually wins

Leaders in endorsement points in nomination processes where no incumbent president was running for that party, 1972-2016

Year
Party
Endorsement leader before Iowa
Did they have a clear endorsement lead?
Did they win the nomination?




1972
D
Ed Muskie
✓



1976
D
Fred Harris




1980
R
Ronald Reagan
✓
✓


1984
D
Walter Mondale
✓
✓


1988
D
Dick Gephardt




1988
R
George H.W. Bush
✓
✓


1992
D
Bill Clinton
✓
✓


1996
R
Bob Dole
✓
✓


2000
D
Al Gore
✓
✓


2000
R
George W. Bush
✓
✓


2004
D
Howard Dean




2008
D
Hillary Clinton
✓



2008
R
John McCain

✓


2012
R
Mitt Romney
✓
✓


2016
D
Hillary Clinton
✓
✓


2016
R
Jeb Bush

Endorsement leaders from 1980 to 2016 are based on FiveThirtyEight’s 2016 system for calculating endorsement points. Endorsement leaders in 1972 and 1976 are based on “The Party Decides.”

Sources: “The Party Decides,” News accounts

But look at the data in more detail, and a more subtle pattern emerges. In 11 instances since 1972, there has been a clear front-runner in endorsements as of the Iowa caucuses. That front-runner won the nomination nine times, the lone exceptions being Hillary Clinton in 2008 and Ed Muskie in 1972. In five other instances, there was no clear consensus among endorsers, and the endorsement leader was at best a first among equals. Only one of these five candidates (John McCain in 2008) won the nomination.

So in some ways, the question is not so much who gets the most endorsements but whether a consensus forms. Sometimes, party elites’ preferences are murky initially, but a clear front-runner emerges before Iowa: The most notable examples of this are Mitt Romney in 2012 (who at earlier points in time was neck-and-neck with Texas Gov. Rick Perry in endorsements) and Bill Clinton in 1992. A consensus can also emerge after Iowa and New Hampshire and potentially predict how contentious the rest of the nomination process will be. John Kerry got a huge surge in endorsements after winning Iowa and New Hampshire in 2004 and went on to secure the Democratic nomination with relative ease; in contrast, the Iowa and New Hampshire results in 2016 only seemed to freeze Republican endorsers, and the outcome of the GOP nomination remained fairly uncertain until late April or early May.

And although endorsements aren’t perfect, they do roughly as well as polls at predicting the nominee. Below is a comparison of the endorsement leader before Iowa and the leader in national polls at the same point in time.7

What happens when polls and endorsements disagree?

Leaders in endorsement points and national polls in nomination processes where no incumbent president was running for that party, 1972-2016

Year
Party
Endorsement leader before Iowa
National polling leader before Iowa
Nominee




1972
D
Ed Muskie
Ed Muskie
George McGovern


1976
D
Fred Harris
George Wallace
Jimmy Carter


1980
R
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan


1984
D
Walter Mondale
Walter Mondale
Walter Mondale


1988
D
Dick Gephardt
Gary Hart
Michael Dukakis


1988
R
George H.W. Bush
George H.W. Bush
George H.W. Bush


1992
D
Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton


1996
R
Bob Dole
Bob Dole
Bob Dole


2000
D
Al Gore
Al Gore
Al Gore


2000
R
George W. Bush
George W. Bush
George W. Bush


2004
D
Howard Dean
Howard Dean
John Kerry


2008
D
Hillary Clinton
Hillary Clinton
Barack Obama


2008
R
John McCain
Rudy Giuliani
John McCain


2012
R
Mitt Romney
Newt Gingrich
Mitt Romney


2016
D
Hillary Clinton
Hillary Clinton
Hillary Clinton


2016
R
Jeb Bush
Donald Trump
Donald Trump

Endorsement leaders from 1980-2016 are based on FiveThirtyEight’s 2016 system for calculating endorsement points. Endorsement leaders in 1972 and 1976 are based on “The Party Decides.”

Sources: “The Party Decides,” News accounts

In 11 of the 16 nomination races, the pre-Iowa polling and endorsement leaders were the same. Differences have become more commonplace in recent years — in three of the five incumbent-free nomination processes since 2008, the polling and endorsement leader was not the same — which may suggest an increasing divide between voters and elites, especially within the Republican Party, or which may just be a fluke of a small sample size.

In the five cases where polls and endorsements differed, endorsements were right twice (Romney in 2012 and McCain in 2008), polls were right once (Trump in 2016), and in the final two instances (the Democratic nominations in 1976 and 1988) a third candidate who was neither the polling nor the endorsement leader won. Given the small sample size, I wouldn’t call that a “win” for endorsements over polls, but I would say it’s at least a draw.

So the party usually does get its way. But it also usually agrees with voters in the first place — or at least it can live with their choices — and it’s not so clear what happens in the event of a disagreement. Maybe the voter-centric model of the 2016 Republican primary is the new normal, but we’ll need to see more evidence of that before we can say for sure. In Democratic primaries for governor and Congress in 2018, establishment-backed candidates prevailed a high percentage of the time, despite the media’s fixation on exceptions such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York’s 14th Congressional District.

I haven’t talked much about which Democrats have received the most endorsements to date because it’s awfully early in the process and so far less than 10 percent of all Democratic endorsement points have been claimed. Furthermore, the large majority of the endorsements that have been made so far are from within the same state as the candidate, e.g. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz backing Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar. So far, however, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker has the most endorsement points, with Klobuchar and California Sen. Kamala Harris essentially tied for second. Sanders’s initial total, while well behind the other three, is also fairly promising for him given that he received so few endorsements in 2016.

That pretty much covers it. If you have any questions, or see any endorsements we’ve missed, please drop us a line. Otherwise, we hope you’ll check in regularly to see who’s winning the endorsement primary.

Is The ‘Green New Deal’ Smart Politics For Democrats?

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

sarahf (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): In early February, Democrats Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez unveiled the “Green New Deal,” an ambitious 14-page manifesto that outlines a number of different proposals to tackle climate change.

It wants to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and create millions of jobs. It’s not just a plan to save the environment; it’s also an economic vision, focused on social justice. And depending on which side of the political aisle you sit, it’s either been touted as absurd or as a way forward.

Democratic 2020 contenders are busy taking positions on it –- even if they’re wary of it — so it’s safe to say it’ll keep cropping up, even if it’s as fodder for Republicans trying to paint Democrats as having moved too far to the left.

So is this bad politics for Democrats? Good politics? What do we make of the Green New Deal? And where do we think the conversation goes in 2020?

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): The Green New Deal is neither green, nor new, nor a deal. Actually, I take that back. It’s certainly green and it’s certainly new, in the sense that it represents a pretty big pivot in strategy from what Democrats had been trying previously.

clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): Well, we should also clarify that the plan doesn’t lay out policy specifics. So … people are kinda just taking stances on the ultimate goals it outlines.

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): The video of school children confronting Sen. Dianne Feinstein about the Green New Deal, and the reaction to it, was super interesting. It showed how divided Democrats are on policy, but also how divided they are by ideology, age and tactics.

It reminded me of when speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, another longtime congressional Democrat, referred to the Green New Deal as the “,” and also dismissed younger members of the party.

sarahf: Philip Bump at the Washington Post had an article about how younger Americans are more likely to view climate change as “very serious” problem compared to older generations, which might help explain why Sen. Feinsten, who has been in Congress for more than thirty years, didn’t see eye-to-eye with the students asking her to support the Green New Deal — some of what we’re seeing is a generation gap.

natesilver: Well, it’s young people who are going to have to live with the mess.

maggiekb (Maggie Koerth-Baker, senior science writer): Although you can’t count on that to be a trend where the next generation just cares more forever. One researcher I talked to looked at whether age cohorts are a factor that determines support for environmental policies. He found that political ideology and economics mattered more — meaning if there’s a recession and people are feeling economically insecure, that can trump support for environmental policies.

perry: Interesting. I wonder if younger Democrats are more liberal overall, and we are capturing that effect on this issue but would see it on other issues as well.

natesilver: But maybe young people are more liberal in part because of climate change?

maggiekb: Ehhh, that’s not what the social research suggests, Nate. For instance, there’s a study from Australia that found support for climate change follows FROM your political identity and who you voted for. Not the other way around.

natesilver: It seems like the Green New Deal raises two major tactical questions:

1) Incrementalism vs. swinging for the fences.

2) Separating climate change from other issues vs. lumping them together.

sarahf: In regards to your first point, Nate … why not swing for the fences? I’m thinking of Maggie’s piece on the Green New Deal where she pointed out that an incremental approach hasn’t exactly gotten Democrats the environmental change they wanted.

perry: I don’t know, Sarah. Other political movements have happened incrementally and have experienced success. I’m thinking of the civil rights movement, and various health care programs (Medicare, Medicaid, and, of course, the Affordable Care Act). So I see merits in a more incremental approach.

It’s not clear, at least to me, that incrementalism has failed on this issue — maybe it’s just taking too long and there is not enough time.

maggiekb: Yeah, that’s the really big question, Perry. Incrementalism can work. But can it work fast enough?

natesilver: And obviously a lot of scientists feel that unless action is taken immediately, the problem is going to become exponentially worse. The U.S. has somewhat curbed its CO2 emissions, right?

maggiekb: Yes. But the biggest drops coincided with the recession and have tapered off since 2015.

sarahf: But what do we make of the intentional choice to package it as the “Green New Deal.” Was it smart of Democrats to explicitly evoke President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal? Or a bridge too far?

maggiekb: Is it namby-pamby waffling on my part to say that’s probably really going to depend on what you thought about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Democrats to begin with?

sarahf: Yes, Maggie

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