Nate Silver Forecasts Iowa and NH

[SheriffJoe]

How much have you earned betting against his picks?

What picks? You mean Brazil over Germany in the WC? :missingte

Have you been reading the posted articles in this thread? Silver is a clueless, rambling establishment idiot who is guessing like everyone else.

"So if I were ranking the four establishment candidates’ chances of eventually defeating Trump and Cruz..."

Keep rambling and wishing, fagboy.

 

[superbeets]

 

[superbeets]

 

[superbeets]

 

[Dave007inVegas]

Historically, polls-plus would have been somewhat more accurate, but it’s pretty close — so we think the models are most useful when looked at together. Indeed, they present different perspectives on the races this year, mostly because of that endorsements variable, which helps Hillary Clinton and Marco Rubio but hurts Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Nate Silver


Rubio gives up on Iowa and NH to focus on SC?


Sen. Marco Rubio’s campaign has cancelled almost $1 million worth of TV-advertising in the Hawkeye State, just one week prior to the state’s first-in-the-nation caucus.


http://www.breitbart.com/big-govern...o-scales-back-campaign-in-iowa-new-hampshire/


RCP POLL AVERAGE
South Carolina Republican Presidential Primary


35% Trump 20% Cruz 11% Rubio

 

[Acebb]

New ARG poll of IAEMS
Bernie 48%
Hillary 45%



And:

Hillary Clinton's national lead over Bernie Sanders has dropped to its lowest margin so far in the ABC News/Washington Post national poll out Wednesday, surveying registered Democrats and independents leaning toward voting in their state's Democratic primary.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/01/poll-hillary-clinton-lead-nationally-218275#ixzz3yS9ooVcZ

 

[Acebb]

[h=1]MIA: Hollywood's Power Women for Hillary[/h][h=2]Says one industry dealmaker, "We all want a woman to be president — some of us just wish it were someone else."[/h]

 

[Acebb]

 

[ScottL]

As someone who recoils at both Hillary and Sanders I couldn't care less who leads one day to the next. It's like being offered a choice between polio and pancreatic cancer.

 

[Dafinch]

What picks? You mean Brazil over Germany in the WC? :missingte

Have you been reading the posted articles in this thread? Silver is a clueless, rambling establishment idiot who is guessing like everyone else.

"So if I were ranking the four establishment candidates’ chances of eventually defeating Trump and Cruz..."

Keep rambling and wishing, fagboy.

Ahhh, but Nate rammed it in and broke it off inside of you in 2008 and 2012, didn't he(Causing you run off whimpering to crawl under the sink, licking your balls in frustration...whereupon you emerged with yet another alias...)?

 

[Dafinch]

As someone who recoils at both Hillary and Sanders I couldn't care less who leads one day to the next. It's like being offered a choice between polio and pancreatic cancer.

...or listening to yet ANOTHER incorrect war prediction from that money grubbing prick from Israel, Yahoo...Shush()*Loser!@#0Slapping-silly90))cockingasnook()kth)(&^:carto1710:kissingbb

 

[ScottL]

Ignorant Schvatzah says what?

 

[Acebb]

[h=1]Eric Garner's Daughter Endorses Bernie Sanders[/h]
"Black Americans—all Americans—need a leader with a record that speaks for itself. And to me, it’s clear. Of all the presidential candidates, Sen. Bernie Sanders is our strongest ally," Erica Garner wrote.

 

[Dafinch]

Ignorant Schvatzah says what?

Always knew you were a racist prick, just like Yahoo. Go lay small ipe into Mama Landau..Shush()*Loser!@#0Slapping-silly90))cockingasnook()kth)(&^:carto1710:kissingbb

 

[ScottL]

money grubbing prick from Israel

Always knew you were a racist prick, just like Yahoo. Go lay small ipe into Mama Landau..Shush()*Loser!@#0Slapping-silly90))cockingasnook()kth)(&^:carto1710:kissingbb

You always knew huh? I only give what a get, Porch Monkey Watson.

 

[Dafinch]

You always knew huh? I only give what a get, Porch Monkey Watson.

When you insert your 3.5 inches of Oscar Meyer Weiner into Mama Landau, does she ask, "Is it in yet?"

 

[The Guesser]

Four Roads Out Of Iowa For Republicans

How Trump, Cruz and Rubio finish will set the terms of the campaign.

By NATE SILVER

An elephant statue sits outside a campaign event for Scott Walker at Modern Woodman Park in July 2015 in Davenport, Iowa.
SCOTT OLSON / GETTY IMAGES


Yes, I know: There’s an incredibly handsome orange-haired man from Queens sitting atop the polls. Donald Trump has a serious chance of winning the Republican nomination — not words I’d have expected myself to be writing six months ago.[SUP]1[/SUP] Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, however, still have a shot to knock Trump off his pedestal. Jeb Bush, John Kasich and Chris Christie might have a chance too, although they’ll need a lot of things to break right for them.
The dominoes will begin falling after the Iowa caucuses Monday night. It seems to me there are four basic narratives that could emerge from the state. (By “narratives,” I mean how the media, Republican party elites and the other candidates will interpret the results. Be warned: How the media responds is sometimes way more predictable than how voters do.) They depend, respectively, on whether Trump beats Cruz and on how well Rubio does.
About Rubio: What it means to perform “well” is obviously a little subjective, but how a candidate does relative to his polls is usually a pretty good guide to the spin that eventually emerges. Recent Iowa polls have Rubio in third place, with a vote share in the mid-teens. If Rubio finishes in the low teens or worse, his performance is likely to be regarded as disappointing (he’ll also be at risk of falling behind Ben Carson or another candidate into fourth place). If he’s in the high teens or better, he’ll probably be regarded as having momentum, especially if he slips into second place. Our models also think there’s an outside chance — 7 percent to 10 percent, depending on which version you look at — for Rubio to win Iowa. That’s mostly out of an abundance of caution: Iowa polls aresometimes wildly off the mark.[SUP]2[/SUP] The scenarios below contemplate Rubio finishing in second or a strong third place, but not winning. Of course, there could be even crazier outcomes still — our models give Carson around a 1-in-100 chance of winning Iowa, for example — but the four cases we describe below are the ones we take to be most likely.
Road No. 1: Trump beats Cruz, and Rubio does well

This seems to be the result the cognoscenti are expecting. Betting marketsgive Trump a 2-in-3 chance to win Iowa; our models now have him favored too, although not by as clear a margin as the markets. Meanwhile, there’s a lot of talk, with some justification, that Rubio has “momentum” going into the caucuses.
No matter what happens, the first headlines that emerge from Iowa are likely to be about Trump. Depending on exactly how well Rubio does, however, the conventional wisdom could congeal into anticipating a two-man race between Trump and Rubio. Perhaps that’s the matchup Republicans deserve. Rubio and Trump offer the two clearest visions for what the Republican Party’s future might look like: a forward-looking but emphatically conservative party in Rubio’s case, a populist-leaning andperhaps radically changed one in Trump’s.
It’s also the matchup that Republican “party elites” seem to want. Bymounting an anti-Cruz campaign in Iowa, they were necessarily helping Trump, perhaps on the theory that another candidate could emerge to defeat Trump later on. If Rubio performed well in Iowa, he’d look like that candidate, giving party elites as good an outcome as they had any right to expect.
The big caveat is that this was possibly an idiotic strategy to begin with; it’s nearly impossible to control either Trump or the media narrative surrounding him, and it might be even harder after a big win in Iowa. We’d want to look for active signs of party leaders moving toward Rubio — in the form of endorsements and explicit pressure on candidates like Bush to drop out of the race. If Republican bigwigs just sit passively golf-clapping the result instead, the Trump whirlwind could sweep the news about Rubio’s vaguely good finish off the front pages.
Road No. 2: Trump beats Cruz, and Rubio does poorly

Get your Drudge Sirens ready. If Trump not only wins but blows out the competition, with both Cruz and “savior” Rubio flopping, Monday will be one of the most famous days in American political history.[SUP]3[/SUP] Although there might be some hope of anointing a new savior in New Hampshire — Bush, Kasich or Christie — other party elites might begin to capitulate toward Trump, as is already happening to some degree.
Could Trump get off to an extremely strong start, winning the first several states along with most of those in the “SEC Primary” on March 1, only to fail later on? Well, perhaps. The GOP calendar backloads a lot of winner-take-all or winner-take-most primaries in blue and purple states into April and beyond, so Trump could emerge with huge amounts of momentum but not be anywhere close to mathematically clinching the nomination. To some extent, we’d be in uncharted territory, since a Trump-like candidate has never gotten off to such a strong start before. But for Trump to lose, someone would have to beat him, and if both Cruz and Rubio blew their chances, it’s hard to know which candidate that would be. In my view, it would be safe to say that Trump had become the odds-on favorite to win the nomination, but where he’d fall on the spectrum between 51 percent and 99 percent I’m not sure.
You might notice I’ve pulled a little trick there, however, presuming a “blowout win” for Trump when that wouldn’t necessarily be the case. Suppose Rubio did badly, but Trump only narrowly beat Cruz. Would that make a difference? My guess is that it wouldn’t make a lot of difference — a Trump win is a Trump win — unless the vote were so close that (as in 2012) the outcome was uncertain well after midnight.
But this is one of the trickier cases. Cruz’s campaign would point toward how it had beaten expectations despite “the establishment” having stacked the deck against it. Which would be a pretty reasonable argument! But that doesn’t mean that Republican elites, having registered their discomfort with Cruz, would be receptive to it.
Road No. 3: Cruz beats Trump, and Rubio does poorly

If Cruz beats Trump, however, Cruz will look Teflon, and the Republican elites who tried to stop him will seem feckless. Also, since the conventional wisdom no longer anticipates a Cruz win in Iowa, it will be more surprising and possibly produce a bigger Cruz bounce. Furthermore, suppose that Rubio has a poor night. This is the nightmare case for Republicans who were hoping to stop Cruz.
It would also make New Hampshire really interesting. Trump begins with a fairly large lead there, and Cruz is not a good fit for the state. So even a fairly large bounce for Cruz (and an erosion in Trump’s support) could leave both candidates stuck in the high teens or low 20s, not necessarily enough to win. It’s possible that someone like Kasich or Bush could emerge under those circumstances.
We’d also want to look for signs of whether Cruz’s win in Iowa was an indication of Cruz’s strength or Trump’s weakness. If it seemed to be a result of Trump’s failed ground game, maybe that wouldn’t be as much of a problem for Trump in New Hampshire and other primary states, where the barriers to participation are less than in a caucus. Nonetheless, Trump would be — for the first time all campaign — a loser. To the extent his support is partly based on a bandwagon effect, it would be seriously tested.
Road No. 4: Cruz beats Trump, and Rubio does well

If both Cruz and Rubio have strong nights in Iowa, however, the meaning is clearer: Trump didn’t live up to the hype. There would be questions about whether Trump’s support in polls was a mirage to begin with, whether it had collapsed at the last minute because of voter dissatisfaction with his having skipped the Republican debate, or whether his lack of a turnout operation had foiled him. Those questions would be important for determining whether Trump had a chance to recover in New Hampshire. But in terms of the media narrative, they’d all be variations on the theme that Trump had gone bust.
In some ways, the Republican primary might even start to look fairly conventional. An “outsider” candidate with evangelical support would have won Iowa. A couple of “insider” candidates would be looking to emerge out of New Hampshire, with Rubio having a leg up because of his strong Iowa showing. Trump wouldn’t necessarily disappear — the media will keep writing him into the plot so long as he is willing — but it might be as more of a Newt Gingrich-esque sideshow, a candidate who wins a few states here and there but has little chance of commanding a majority. If we enter Iowa in a Trumpnado and exit it with what seems to be a fairly normal Republican race, that might be the biggest surprise of all.

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Read more:
Four Roads Out Of Iowa For Republicans
What Happens If Bernie Sanders Wins Iowa
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Footnotes

• Although, the record will show that we weren’t especially skeptical about Trump getting to this point, with a chance to win the Iowa caucuses. It was what came after Iowa that we thought would be the hard part, making Trump unlikely to win the GOP nomination. For a variety of reasons, however, but mostly because of how Republican “party elites” are behaving, Trump’s post-Iowa path doesn’t look as foreboding now. We think he has a real shot. ^
• With that said, it’s not that impossible to imagine how a Rubio win comes together. Cruz has had a rough couple of weeks, so maybe he underperforms his polls Monday and slips behind Rubio. But suppose also that Trump’s supporters don’t turn out because of his campaign’s lack of a traditional field operation. It’s unlikely that both these things would happen, but not impossible. Rubio would have a shot at first under those circumstances. ^
• Doubly so if Bernie Sanders also beats Hillary Clinton. ^

Nate Silver is the founder and editor in chief of FiveThirtyEight. @natesilver538

 

[SheriffJoe]

Four roads???

Way to stick your neck out and take a stand!

Awesome "forecasts", Nate!

Loser!@#0

 

[The Guesser]

2016 ELECTION 5:17 PM FEB 1, 2016
Iowa Is The Hardest State To Poll

By NATE SILVER

Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio, speaks during a campaign rally Sunday at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls.
CHARLIE NEIBERGALL / AP


It’s common for pundits to recite ass-covering phrases like “it all comes down to turnout” or “anything could happen” on the eve of a big election. If you’ve been following FiveThirtyEight over the years, you know it’s not our style to do that. Instead, we issue probabilistic forecasts, which can sometimes seem quite confident: We had Barack Obama as a 90.9 percent favorite to beat Mitt Romney on the eve of the 2012 general election, for example.
So let’s get a couple of things straight before the results start trickling in from Iowa tonight:

• It all comes down to turnout.
• Anything could happen.

All right, not absolutely anything could happen. Martin O’Malley is not going to win the Democratic caucuses. Donald Trump will probably not finish behind Carly Fiorina.
But could Marco Rubio win the Iowa caucuses despite not having led a single poll there? Sure. Rick Santorum did that exact thing four years ago.
Could Trump slip all the way to third place? Entirely plausible. But he could also get upwards of 40 percent of the vote and double his nearest rival’s total.
Ben Carson in second place? Rand Paul in third? The odds are against it — but equally strange things have happened in Iowa before.
We say this for the same reason we can sometimes issue highly confident forecasts just before a general election: It’s what the data tells us. That data tells us that polling in general elections is pretty accurate, at least in the final few weeks before the election. The data also tells us that polling in primaries and caucuses is not very accurate. Historically, the average error of late polls in presidential general elections is about 3.5 percentage points.[SUP]1[/SUP]By contrast, the average polling error associated with presidential primaries is more like 8 percentage points, more than twice as high.
So imagine that we have a forecast showing Trump 4 percentage points ahead of Ted Cruz in some state. If Trump wins by 12 points instead, or Cruz wins by 4, the pollsters would be pilloried, and we’d come in for our share of flak too. But that’s what an 8-point error looks like, and 8-point errors happen fairly often in primaries and caucuses.
What makes polling these elections so difficult? There are a few major factors:

• Turnout is much lower in primaries and caucuses, and much harder to predict.
• There are often multiple candidates running. Such races increase polling error because of the potential for tactical voting.
• There are far more swing voters because most voters like several of their party’s candidates. In the recent Des Moines Register Iowa poll, for example, the average Republican respondent had a favorable impression of four of the Republican candidates. By contrast, only a small fraction of general election voters like both the Democratic and Republican candidates.
• A substantial number of voters wait until the last few days of the campaign to make up their minds in primaries and caucuses; by contrast, the vast majority of general election voters have their minds made up well ahead of Election Day.

But if primaries and caucuses are always tough for pollsters, some are even harder than others. This is something we’ve studied extensively too. Historically, the polling error has been higher when:

• A state holds a caucus instead of a primary.
• It’s early in the nomination calendar rather than later. (Perhaps because pollsters haven’t yet had a chance to learn from their mistakes.)
• There are more candidates running. (See above for why this matters.)

You’ll note that the first two circumstances apply in the Democratic caucuses tonight, and all three do for Republicans. Iowa is a caucus state, and it’s the first state to vote. And there are still a huge number of candidates on the GOP side. In our polling average, candidates other than Trump, Cruz and Rubio have a collective 28 percent of the vote, while another 3 percent or 4 percent of voters still say they’re undecided. That’s almost a third of the vote that could easily enough recirculate to one of the front-runners.
Put another way, the uncertainty associated with forecasting tonight’s Iowa Republican caucus is about as high as it gets in a major American election. Even Ann Selzer, the best pollster in the country, could have a rough night.
That doesn’t mean we’re completely in the dark. Our forecast models are designed to account for this uncertainty. Hillary Clinton, for example, leads Bernie Sanders by 4.5 percentage points in our Iowa polling average. In a general election, that would make her a rather heavy favorite, probably upwards of 90 percent. But in the Iowa caucuses, it’s not that much of an edge. Thus, our polls-only forecast still gives Sanders a 28 percent chance of winning, and our polls-plus forecast, which likes Sanders because his Iowa numbers exceed his standing in national polls, puts his chances slightly higher, at 33 percent.
There’s even more uncertainty on the Republican side. Trump leads Cruz in our polling average by about the same margin that Clinton leads Sanders, 4.7 percentage points. But the larger number of candidates involved could make for a wild finish. Here’s each candidate’s chances of finishing in first, second or third, according to our polls-only model:

CANDIDATE	1ST	2ND	3RD	4TH OR WORSE
Donald Trump	54%	30%	12%	3%
Ted Cruz	33	39	20	8
Marco Rubio	11	24	40	24
Ben Carson	1	5	15	79
Rand Paul	<1	<1	4	95
Jeb Bush	<1	<1	3	96
Mike Huckabee	<1	<1	2	98
Chris Christie	<1	<1	1	99
John Kasich	<1	<1	1	99
Carly Fiorina	<1	<1	<1	99
Rick Santorum	<1	<1	<1	>99

Trump has a 54 percent chance to win, according to our polls-only model, compared with Cruz’s 33 percent. But you’ll notice that the model gives Rubio an outside chance too, 11 percent. Surely Rubio will finish in the top three, at least? No, that’s not certain either; the model gives him a 24 percent chance of finishing in fourth place or worse.
Then there are some of the truly wild scenarios I described earlier. Carson is given a 5 percent chance of finishing in second place. How might that happen? I can’t tell you. But by definition, the biggest surprises are the ones no one is prepared for, like Hillary Clinton beating Barack Obama in the 2008 New Hampshire primary.
Our polls-plus forecast also has Trump favored, but only narrowly. Its algorithm gives an extra percentage point or two to Cruz and Rubio because their Iowa polls exceed their standing in national polls — historically a favorable indicator — and the opposite is true for Trump.

CANDIDATE	1ST	2ND	3RD	4TH OR WORSE
Donald Trump	46%	33%	17%	4%
Ted Cruz	39	37	19	5
Marco Rubio	14	26	42	18
Ben Carson	<1	3	13	83
Rand Paul	<1	<1	3	96
Jeb Bush	<1	<1	2	98
Mike Huckabee	<1	<1	1	98
Chris Christie	<1	<1	<1	>99
John Kasich	<1	<1	<1	>99
Carly Fiorina	<1	<1	<1	>99
Rick Santorum	<1	<1	<1	>99

But again, there’s a lot of uncertainty. Polls-plus assigns Trump a 10 percent chance of finishing with 15 percent of the vote or less, which could be a campaign-ending embarrassment. However, it also gives him a 10 percent chance of finishing at 38 percent or higher, in which case he’d look unstoppable.
As primary season wears on, our models won’t be hedging their bets quite so much. Candidates will drop out, and voter preferences may become more stable. As we learn more about who is voting for whom, we may also be able to add demographic information to our forecasts, which can potentially make them quite a bit more accurate.
But for tonight? Keep an open mind about the results. And don’t be shocked if the polls are way off.

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Our elections podcast just launched. Listen to the latest episode above, or subscribe on iTunes.

Footnotes

• More specifically, that’s the error associated with individual polls in the final three weeks of the campaign. The error associated with polling averages is somewhat lower, as is the error of polls just a few days instead of a couple of weeks before the election. ^

Nate Silver is the founder and editor in chief of FiveThirtyEight. @natesilver538

 

[The Guesser]

Road #4 it is. Thanks Nate:

Road No. 4: Cruz beats Trump, and Rubio does well

If both Cruz and Rubio have strong nights in Iowa, however, the meaning is clearer: Trump didn’t live up to the hype. There would be questions about whether Trump’s support in polls was a mirage to begin with, whether it had collapsed at the last minute because of voter dissatisfaction with his having skipped the Republican debate, or whether his lack of a turnout operation had foiled him. Those questions would be important for determining whether Trump had a chance to recover in New Hampshire. But in terms of the media narrative, they’d all be variations on the theme that Trump had gone bust.
In some ways, the Republican primary might even start to look fairly conventional. An “outsider” candidate with evangelical support would have won Iowa. A couple of “insider” candidates would be looking to emerge out of New Hampshire, with Rubio having a leg up because of his strong Iowa showing. Trump wouldn’t necessarily disappear — the media will keep writing him into the plot so long as he is willing — but it might be as more of a Newt Gingrich-esque sideshow, a candidate who wins a few states here and there but has little chance of commanding a majority. If we enter Iowa in a Trumpnado and exit it with what seems to be a fairly normal Republican race, that might be the biggest surprise of all.