[h=1]Why Iowa Changed Rubio’s And Trump’s Nomination Odds So Much[/h] By Nate Silver
Marco Rubio during a TV interview Tuesday in Exeter, New Hampshire. Betfair gives him a more than 50 percent shot at the Republican presidential nomination.
Steven Senne / AP
Marco Rubio finished in third in Iowa — a “strong third” in which he outperformed his polls, but third nevertheless. And yet, his chances of winning the Republican nomination nearly doubled according to the bookmaker Betfair, from about 30 percent before the Iowa caucuses to 55 percent now.[SUP]1[/SUP] Meanwhile, Donald Trump, who finished ahead of Rubio although behind Ted Cruz, saw his chances halved from 50 percent to 25 percent.
Even if you acknowledge the importance of the “expectations game,” isn’t that a little excessive? Well, maybe.[SUP]2[/SUP] But I think Betfair is coming up with approximately the right answer.
Here’s why: Presidential nominations are a lot like the stock market. In the long run, they’re reasonably well governed by the fundamentals. In the short run, they can be crazy. Iowa represented the equivalent of a stock market correction, a sign that sanity might prevail after all.
In the stock market, the fundamentals consist of things like the profitability and growth of a company. In the nomination process, the most important fundamentals are what we call electability (can the candidate win in November?) and ideological fit (does the candidate hold positions in line with the consensus of her party?). A party would prefer to nominate a candidate who scores well in both categories.
Rubio fits the bill, perhaps uniquely among the remaining Republican candidates. His image with general election voters is not great, but it’s better than the other leading Republicans. He’s also quite conservative. That’s convenient, because Republican voters are quite conservative also. In fact, Rubio is almost exactly as conservative as the average GOP primary voter.
By contrast, Trump is problematic in both categories. It’s not always clear what Trump believes or where he would wind up as a general election candidate, but he hasn’t been particularly conservative for most of his career. His electability case isn’t good either; instead he has an extremely negative image among general election voters. If Rubio is a blue-chip stock, Trump is a risky mortgage-backed security.
And yet, Trump was leading in the polls for many months. We’ve spent a lot of time considering why, and I won’t rehash all of that discussion here. But one highly plausible answer is that his national polls partly reflected his overwhelming lead in media coverage, which allowed him to top the field despite having a narrower base of support than Rubio or Cruz.
Under this theory, Trump’s polls and his round-the-clock media coverage are self-reinforcing: Better polls lead to more coverage, which leads to better polls, and so on. In stock market terms, you might even call them a bubble. Back in the summer and early fall, it seemed likely that something would burst the bubble eventually: The media would grow tired of Trump or he’d do something to break his winning streak. At around the time of the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, however, which brought even more attention to Trump, that became far less clear. Trump looked like he might ride the magic carpet all the way to the nomination in Cleveland.
Then Iowa intervened. Voters there researched their decision carefully and heard from all of the candidates, making the media playing field more level. And they decided they didn’t like Trump so much after all.
Maybe Iowa was just a fluke, and Trump will perform better in the next several states. Before Iowa, Trump had a big lead in New Hampshire, for instance, and in South Carolina. But Iowa was the first state to have voted, and the only test we’ve had so far of whether Trump’s support in the polls will turn into votes. Pretty much the whole case for Trump depends on the premise that it will; if the linkage is broken, it becomes futile to cite Trump’s polls in future states as evidence of his resilience.
Iowa might even prove to be Trump’s high-water mark. Rubio and Cruz are going to get a lot more coverage now, and Trump has lost his sheen of invincibility.
So although Iowa is just one data point, it was doubly important. If Trump’s campaign was a bubble, it might burst. If it wasn’t, Iowa nonetheless suggests that Trump might draw more like 25 percent of votes instead of the 35 percent or 40 percent support he receives in national polls. That happens to be an important range: A candidate getting a 35 percent or 40 percent plurality of the vote could easily win a majority of delegates under the GOP’s complex rules, but one winning 25 percent almost certainly couldn’t.
That doesn’t mean the betting markets have things exactly right; I think they’re too low on Cruz, for instance. But one data point can be awfully important when it’s the only data point you’ve got. New Hampshire will be the second, and you can bet it will be a market-mover too.
Hey, you should sign up for our weekly 2016 newsletter, “What I Thought About Over The Weekend.”
Audio Player00:00
00:00
Use Up/Down Arrow keys to increase or decrease volume.
Quick reaction to the Iowa results from our elections podcast team. Listen above, or subscribe on iTunes.
[h=2]Footnotes[/h]
Nate Silver is the founder and editor in chief of FiveThirtyEight. @natesilver538
Steven Senne / AP
Marco Rubio finished in third in Iowa — a “strong third” in which he outperformed his polls, but third nevertheless. And yet, his chances of winning the Republican nomination nearly doubled according to the bookmaker Betfair, from about 30 percent before the Iowa caucuses to 55 percent now.[SUP]1[/SUP] Meanwhile, Donald Trump, who finished ahead of Rubio although behind Ted Cruz, saw his chances halved from 50 percent to 25 percent.
Even if you acknowledge the importance of the “expectations game,” isn’t that a little excessive? Well, maybe.[SUP]2[/SUP] But I think Betfair is coming up with approximately the right answer.
Here’s why: Presidential nominations are a lot like the stock market. In the long run, they’re reasonably well governed by the fundamentals. In the short run, they can be crazy. Iowa represented the equivalent of a stock market correction, a sign that sanity might prevail after all.
In the stock market, the fundamentals consist of things like the profitability and growth of a company. In the nomination process, the most important fundamentals are what we call electability (can the candidate win in November?) and ideological fit (does the candidate hold positions in line with the consensus of her party?). A party would prefer to nominate a candidate who scores well in both categories.
Rubio fits the bill, perhaps uniquely among the remaining Republican candidates. His image with general election voters is not great, but it’s better than the other leading Republicans. He’s also quite conservative. That’s convenient, because Republican voters are quite conservative also. In fact, Rubio is almost exactly as conservative as the average GOP primary voter.
By contrast, Trump is problematic in both categories. It’s not always clear what Trump believes or where he would wind up as a general election candidate, but he hasn’t been particularly conservative for most of his career. His electability case isn’t good either; instead he has an extremely negative image among general election voters. If Rubio is a blue-chip stock, Trump is a risky mortgage-backed security.
And yet, Trump was leading in the polls for many months. We’ve spent a lot of time considering why, and I won’t rehash all of that discussion here. But one highly plausible answer is that his national polls partly reflected his overwhelming lead in media coverage, which allowed him to top the field despite having a narrower base of support than Rubio or Cruz.
Under this theory, Trump’s polls and his round-the-clock media coverage are self-reinforcing: Better polls lead to more coverage, which leads to better polls, and so on. In stock market terms, you might even call them a bubble. Back in the summer and early fall, it seemed likely that something would burst the bubble eventually: The media would grow tired of Trump or he’d do something to break his winning streak. At around the time of the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, however, which brought even more attention to Trump, that became far less clear. Trump looked like he might ride the magic carpet all the way to the nomination in Cleveland.
Then Iowa intervened. Voters there researched their decision carefully and heard from all of the candidates, making the media playing field more level. And they decided they didn’t like Trump so much after all.
Maybe Iowa was just a fluke, and Trump will perform better in the next several states. Before Iowa, Trump had a big lead in New Hampshire, for instance, and in South Carolina. But Iowa was the first state to have voted, and the only test we’ve had so far of whether Trump’s support in the polls will turn into votes. Pretty much the whole case for Trump depends on the premise that it will; if the linkage is broken, it becomes futile to cite Trump’s polls in future states as evidence of his resilience.
Iowa might even prove to be Trump’s high-water mark. Rubio and Cruz are going to get a lot more coverage now, and Trump has lost his sheen of invincibility.
So although Iowa is just one data point, it was doubly important. If Trump’s campaign was a bubble, it might burst. If it wasn’t, Iowa nonetheless suggests that Trump might draw more like 25 percent of votes instead of the 35 percent or 40 percent support he receives in national polls. That happens to be an important range: A candidate getting a 35 percent or 40 percent plurality of the vote could easily win a majority of delegates under the GOP’s complex rules, but one winning 25 percent almost certainly couldn’t.
That doesn’t mean the betting markets have things exactly right; I think they’re too low on Cruz, for instance. But one data point can be awfully important when it’s the only data point you’ve got. New Hampshire will be the second, and you can bet it will be a market-mover too.
Hey, you should sign up for our weekly 2016 newsletter, “What I Thought About Over The Weekend.”
Audio Player00:00
00:00
Use Up/Down Arrow keys to increase or decrease volume.
Quick reaction to the Iowa results from our elections podcast team. Listen above, or subscribe on iTunes.
[h=2]Footnotes[/h]
- As of Tuesday night. ^
- I would have had Rubio pegged a bit higher than 30 percent originally and Trump a bit lower than 50 percent, so I wouldn’t have had them shifting quite as much. ^
Nate Silver is the founder and editor in chief of FiveThirtyEight. @natesilver538
[h=1]Marco Rubio Is Now Winning The Race For Endorsements[/h] [h=2]But most Republican officials are still waiting on the sidelines.[/h] By Aaron Bycoffe
Marco Rubio speaks during a campaign stop Wednesday in Bow, New Hampshire.
Jim Cole / AP
FiveThirtyEight’s endorsement tracker has a new Republican leader for the first time in nearly six months: Marco Rubio, who, since his surprisingly strong third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses Monday, has received endorsements from two senators and two representatives.
There has been a lot of debate this presidential campaign about how much influence party elites have on the nominating process, but endorsements have historically been among the best signs of which candidates will succeed in primaries. And although four more endorsements and a slight lead in points[SUP]1[/SUP] do not make Rubio a lock as the choice of Republican elected officials, this bump is a sign that members of Congress could be starting to see him as the most acceptable option for the nomination. (Rubio has yet to receive an endorsement from a sitting governor.) Some politicians had put early support behind Jeb Bush — he had led our list since August — but since January the only new endorsement he has received was from former presidential candidate Sen. Lindsey Graham.
In some past years, party elites have rallied behind a candidate early in the election cycle — in both parties’ 2000 primaries, for example, both eventual nominees went into Iowa with commanding support from governors, senators and representatives. This cycle has been slower for the GOP, and many Republican officeholders are waiting on the sidelines: Out of 796 potential endorsement points, 223, or 28 percent, have been awarded.[SUP]2[/SUP]
Iowa caucus winner Ted Cruz has slowly been picking up points as well — he’s added seven since the beginning of the year — though he has yet to receive an endorsement from a sitting senator or governor.
Rubio showed some signs of momentum last fall, when he picked up 28 endorsement points between Labor Day and Thanksgiving, while Bush’s total went up by only 7 points. But that momentum stalled. Still, it’s possible that Rubio’s expectations-exceeding performance in Iowa will provide a more lasting effect.
In contrast to the slow pace of the Republican endorsement race, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton has won 465 points, nearly 80 percent of the total available.
Read more: Why Iowa Changed Rubio’s And Trump’s Nomination Odds So Much
[h=2]Footnotes[/h]
Jim Cole / AP
FiveThirtyEight’s endorsement tracker has a new Republican leader for the first time in nearly six months: Marco Rubio, who, since his surprisingly strong third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses Monday, has received endorsements from two senators and two representatives.
There has been a lot of debate this presidential campaign about how much influence party elites have on the nominating process, but endorsements have historically been among the best signs of which candidates will succeed in primaries. And although four more endorsements and a slight lead in points[SUP]1[/SUP] do not make Rubio a lock as the choice of Republican elected officials, this bump is a sign that members of Congress could be starting to see him as the most acceptable option for the nomination. (Rubio has yet to receive an endorsement from a sitting governor.) Some politicians had put early support behind Jeb Bush — he had led our list since August — but since January the only new endorsement he has received was from former presidential candidate Sen. Lindsey Graham.
Iowa caucus winner Ted Cruz has slowly been picking up points as well — he’s added seven since the beginning of the year — though he has yet to receive an endorsement from a sitting senator or governor.
Rubio showed some signs of momentum last fall, when he picked up 28 endorsement points between Labor Day and Thanksgiving, while Bush’s total went up by only 7 points. But that momentum stalled. Still, it’s possible that Rubio’s expectations-exceeding performance in Iowa will provide a more lasting effect.
In contrast to the slow pace of the Republican endorsement race, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton has won 465 points, nearly 80 percent of the total available.
Read more: Why Iowa Changed Rubio’s And Trump’s Nomination Odds So Much
[h=2]Footnotes[/h]
- We use a weighted system that gives candidates 10 points for endorsements from governors, 5 points for endorsements from U.S. senators and 1 point for endorsements from U.S. representatives. ^
- There are 246 Republican representatives, 54 Republican senators and 31 Republican governors in office, but we don’t include current presidential candidates, so the potential number of points does not include John Kasich, Chris Christie, Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz. ^
[h=1]Donald Trump Will Probably Win New Hampshire[/h][h=2]But he looks weaker in the South than he once did.[/h]By HARRY ENTEN
Donald Trump, during a campaign rally in Manchester, New Hampshire.
DAVID GOLDMAN / AP
Donald Trump more likely than not will win the New Hampshire primary today. Both FiveThirtyEight forecasts give him more than a 2-in-3 shot to finish first. So let’s take a moment to appreciate what’s about to happen. Sure, Trump has some rough precedents, like Pat Buchanan, but the fact that he will probably win the first primary is … noteworthy.
But Trump still has a long-term problem: Our forecast projects him to receive a little less than 30 percent of the vote in New Hampshire. That might be enough to win — but mostly because the field is so big and the non-Trump vote so divided. So far at least, Trump has had a ceiling on his support. And there are signs of this ceiling in upcoming primaries in the South, which was supposed to be one of his strongest regions.
Trump has historically done well in Southern polls. The region has a lot ofnon-college educated, moderate white voters — a demographic group that is right in Trump’s wheelhouse. These voters used to be Democrats but over the past couple of decades have identified more and more as Republicans. They’re receptive to Trump’s populist pitch.
But four Southern-state polls that were taken mostly or completely after Trump’s second-place finish in last week’s Iowa caucuses show him barely leading or behind. (Weirdly, since Iowa, no one has conducted a poll of South Carolina, the next GOP contest after New Hampshire.)
Let’s start with Arkansas, where Mike Huckabee (who also has a tinge of populism to his pitch) served as governor. A Hendrix College poll conducted late last week found Trump tied for second with Marco Rubio at 23 percent, while Ted Cruz led both with 27 percent.
Georgia was supposed to be one of Trump’s stronger states. It was so Democratic during the 20th century that not a single Republican governor was elected. A poll from Landmark Communications in December had Trump towering over the field with 43 percent. The same pollster also found Trump ahead last week, but with 27 percent. He was less than 10 percentage points in front of Cruz and a surging Rubio, each with 18 percent.
Perhaps the best sign for Trump is that he still leads in Florida, the home state of Rubio and Jeb Bush. However, Trump’s 27 percent in a new Florida Southern College is the lowest percentage he’s received in any Florida pollin nearly three months. Meanwhile, the 20 percent going to Rubio is the best he’s done there since October. (Keep in mind that Florida is filled with retirees from Trump’s native Northeast.)
Finally, North Carolina — it’s a state that Trump should want to do well in: It’s right next to the second primary state, South Carolina, and like New Hampshire, North Carolina allows unaffiliated voters, whom Trump is expected to do reasonably well with, to vote in the Republican primary. Trump, though, received only 26 percent in the latest High Point University survey, barely ahead of Cruz and Rubio, with 22 percent and 20 percent, respectively.
Any one of these surveys in isolation wouldn’t be a big deal for Trump. Indeed, if Trump wins New Hampshire, his numbers could bounce back. But the fact that he’s under 30 percent in four Southern states suggests that he’s vulnerable in the region. And Trump probably can’t count on the same divided field he’s facing now once the race makes it to the Southern contests in early March (Arkansas and Georgia vote March 1; Florida and North Carolina vote March 15).
The road after New Hampshire — win or lose — will be rougher.
DAVID GOLDMAN / AP
Donald Trump more likely than not will win the New Hampshire primary today. Both FiveThirtyEight forecasts give him more than a 2-in-3 shot to finish first. So let’s take a moment to appreciate what’s about to happen. Sure, Trump has some rough precedents, like Pat Buchanan, but the fact that he will probably win the first primary is … noteworthy.
But Trump still has a long-term problem: Our forecast projects him to receive a little less than 30 percent of the vote in New Hampshire. That might be enough to win — but mostly because the field is so big and the non-Trump vote so divided. So far at least, Trump has had a ceiling on his support. And there are signs of this ceiling in upcoming primaries in the South, which was supposed to be one of his strongest regions.
Trump has historically done well in Southern polls. The region has a lot ofnon-college educated, moderate white voters — a demographic group that is right in Trump’s wheelhouse. These voters used to be Democrats but over the past couple of decades have identified more and more as Republicans. They’re receptive to Trump’s populist pitch.
But four Southern-state polls that were taken mostly or completely after Trump’s second-place finish in last week’s Iowa caucuses show him barely leading or behind. (Weirdly, since Iowa, no one has conducted a poll of South Carolina, the next GOP contest after New Hampshire.)
Let’s start with Arkansas, where Mike Huckabee (who also has a tinge of populism to his pitch) served as governor. A Hendrix College poll conducted late last week found Trump tied for second with Marco Rubio at 23 percent, while Ted Cruz led both with 27 percent.
Georgia was supposed to be one of Trump’s stronger states. It was so Democratic during the 20th century that not a single Republican governor was elected. A poll from Landmark Communications in December had Trump towering over the field with 43 percent. The same pollster also found Trump ahead last week, but with 27 percent. He was less than 10 percentage points in front of Cruz and a surging Rubio, each with 18 percent.
Perhaps the best sign for Trump is that he still leads in Florida, the home state of Rubio and Jeb Bush. However, Trump’s 27 percent in a new Florida Southern College is the lowest percentage he’s received in any Florida pollin nearly three months. Meanwhile, the 20 percent going to Rubio is the best he’s done there since October. (Keep in mind that Florida is filled with retirees from Trump’s native Northeast.)
Finally, North Carolina — it’s a state that Trump should want to do well in: It’s right next to the second primary state, South Carolina, and like New Hampshire, North Carolina allows unaffiliated voters, whom Trump is expected to do reasonably well with, to vote in the Republican primary. Trump, though, received only 26 percent in the latest High Point University survey, barely ahead of Cruz and Rubio, with 22 percent and 20 percent, respectively.
Any one of these surveys in isolation wouldn’t be a big deal for Trump. Indeed, if Trump wins New Hampshire, his numbers could bounce back. But the fact that he’s under 30 percent in four Southern states suggests that he’s vulnerable in the region. And Trump probably can’t count on the same divided field he’s facing now once the race makes it to the Southern contests in early March (Arkansas and Georgia vote March 1; Florida and North Carolina vote March 15).
The road after New Hampshire — win or lose — will be rougher.
[h=1]What’s At Stake In New Hampshire’s Republican Primary[/h]By NATE SILVER
John Kasich, left, and Donald Trump, right, speak with members of the media after the Republican presidential primary debate hosted by ABC News at St. Anselm College on Saturday in Manchester, New Hampshire.
MATT ROURKE / AP
MANCHESTER, N.H. — Before the Iowa Republican caucuses last week, wewarned you that the uncertainty in the race was high and that the polls might be way off. That’s even more true here in New Hampshire.
At least we know that Donald Trump will finish first on the Republican side? Well, probably. Trump has led all but one poll here since July; his numbers have slumped by a couple of percentage points since his second-place finish in Iowa, but nobody has come especially close to him. And yet, because the uncertainty is so great in New Hampshire, Trump’s victory is not quite assured: Our polls-plus forecast still gives Trump a 31 percent chance of somehow losing here.
The reason for this is that, historically, the more viable[SUP]1[/SUP] candidates there are in a state, the more error-prone the polling has tended to be. Multi-candidate races open up the possibility of last-minute tactical voting and otherwise give voters plenty of options, making them more likely to change their minds at the last minute. Our forecast models account for this dynamic, which is why Trump’s lead is much less safe than Bernie Sanders’s in the two-way race on the Democratic side, even though both candidates lead their nearest competitor by about the same 15-percentage-point margin in the polling average. (I think the model might be a little bit too confident about Sanders — I’d personally put his odds at more like 95 percent rather than 99 percent — but we’ll save that discussion for later.)
So let’s look at New Hampshire from the standpoint of the six leading Republican candidates. For each one, I’ve listed their 90th percentile and 10th percentile forecasts from our polls-plus model to show the most likely range of possible outcomes.[SUP]2[/SUP]
[h=2]Donald Trump[/h]90th percentile forecast: 39 percent
10th percentile forecast: 17 percent
We’ve somehow reverted back to the pattern before Iowa, where the other Republicans weren’t spending much time attacking Trump despite his lead in the polls. In Iowa, voters took matters into their own hands and turned away from Trump at the last minute. Could the same thing happen here?
It’s entirely possible; the polls-plus model projects Trump to finish with 27 percent of the vote — a little less than the 30 percent he has in the polling average. But there’s a huge amount of uncertainty around that estimate. Suppose, for instance, that Trump finishes with a vote share in the mid-to-high 30s. Such a performance would erase many of our doubts about Trump’s ceiling and make him look formidable in South Carolina and beyond.
Conversely, if Trump won but with more like the 27 percent of the vote that Pat Buchanan got in New Hampshire in 1996, he’d look more like a factional candidate who was benefiting from the divided field. And if Trump’s vote share falls into the low 20s or even the high teens, meanwhile, he would be vulnerable to losing New Hampshire outright. It would also raise a lot of questions about whether the polls were oversampling Trump voters.
[h=2]Marco Rubio[/h]90th percentile forecast: 25 percent
10th percentile forecast: 9 percent
The polls-plus forecast still has Rubio in second place, but that’s deceptive. He’s only a fraction of a percentage point ahead of John Kasich, with Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz lurking almost as close. In fact, the polls-plus forecast has Rubio with a 64 percent chance of finishing third or worse and he couldeasily enough slip to fifth or sixth. Here’s our final matrix of probabilities for Rubio and the other candidates:
Chance of finishing in each position, N.H. GOP primaryPERCENTAGES DISPLAYED ARE FROM FIVETHIRTYEIGHT’S POLLS-PLUS FORECAST.
I’m erring toward the pessimistic interpretation for Rubio because I’m not sure that polls have had time to fully capture the impact of his poorly-reviewed debate performance from Saturday. At the same time, pundits areoften pretty bad at anticipating how voters will react to debates and other gaffes. Ultimately, the impact of the debate will be hard to measure: Rubio could wind up with 18 percent of the vote despite the debate, but would have gotten 22 percent without it.
No matter what happens, the media reaction to Rubio’s finish tonight is likely to be hyperbolic. If he gets (say) 22 percent of the vote, or only 8 percent, a strong reaction might be warranted. But you may also see reporters parsing relatively small differences, like between 16 percent and 13 percent. Mostly, you should ignore them, because there are two more important things to watch in the aftermath of New Hampshire. The first, as FiveThirtyEight contributor Julia Azari writes, is how Republican Party leaders react to Rubio’s performance. Is he continuing to get endorsements? How are people who actually have influence within the Republican Party — not just TV talking heads — spinning his performance? If Rubio finishes narrowly ahead of Bush, are there calls for Bush to drop out? The second thing to watch: How does Rubio perform in this Saturday’s debate in South Carolina.
[h=2]John Kasich[/h]90th percentile forecast: 24 percent
10th percentile forecast: 8 percent
As I said on our podcast, I suppose I’ll be “that guy” who thinks Kasich has some potential to outperform his polls. As measured by his number of voter contacts (as well as our own observations), he has one of the best ground games in New Hampshire. Also — this was a favorable indicator for Cruz and Rubio before Iowa — he’s seen a late, Election Day spike in Google search traffic. The polls-plus model also has Kasich beating his polls by a couple of percentage points, for what it’s worth. We’ll know soon enough.
The question is how Kasich would take advantage of a strong finish. He has run pretty far to the left in New Hampshire despite having a fairly conservative record as governor of Ohio. That moderation really does help him here, but there are fewer centrist Republicans outside New Hampshire. Furthermore, Kasich doesn’t have all that much money remaining, certainly not as compared with candidates like Bush.
My guess is that there’s a difference between Kasich doing pretty well and doing really well. If Kasich replicates Jon Huntsman’s 17 percent of the vote from four years ago, he might be a good story for a few days but not have much impact beyond that. If he gets to 20 percent or more of the vote, however, finishing well ahead of the other “establishment lane” candidates and even threatening to win here, that’s a different story.
[h=2]Jeb Bush[/h]90th percentile forecast: 22 percent
10th percentile forecast: 7 percent
Bush is only barely behind Kasich in the New Hampshire polls, and has some advantages Kasich does not: more money, more organization and more support from party elites. That could leave Bush better poised than Kasich to take advantage of a strong finish here.
He also has one big problem, however: Bush is much more of a known commodity among Republican voters, and he’s not very well-liked, with favorability ratings barely better than breakeven within his own party. So one possibility is that Bush has a strong performance in New Hampshire and eventually, after some further reshuffling, becomes the “establishment lane” finalist after all — only to lose to Trump or Cruz.
[h=2]Ted Cruz[/h]90th percentile forecast: 20 percent
10th percentile forecast: 6 percent
Cruz, who didn’t get much of a bounce after Iowa, probably has the least on the line in New Hampshire. If he does well here, that will be a sign that his turnout operation is effective at identifying evangelical and “movement conservative” voters even in a state that has relatively few of them. It might also mean he’s picked up some support from Rand Paul, who was reasonably popular here and dropped out of the race after Iowa.
But Cruz should mostly be focused on South Carolina and the March 1 primaries, where he’ll need to rack up a lot of delegates to make up for a calendar that will turn worse for him as the election wears on. Both Cruz and Trump would benefit from an ambiguous outcome in which at least three of Rubio, Kasich, Bush and Christie continue to run for some time after New Hampshire.
[h=2]Chris Christie[/h]90th percentile forecast: 13 percent
10th percentile forecast: 3 percent
I’ve been a little surprised that Christie, who has been excellent in debates and in the retail settings where we’ve seen him here in New Hampshire, is stuck at just 6 percent in the polls. When I mentioned this on Twitter yesterday, there were a bunch of theories: Bridgegate, The Hug, and even Christie’s being a New York Mets fan. I get all that, and we were pretty skeptical about Christie’s chances a year or so ago when other people were more bullish on them. But we’re not talking about Christie winning the nomination; we’re talking about him failing to poll in the double-digits in a state that should be pretty good for him.
Still, there’s some chance Christie could overperform his projection, especially if the Republican debate is not fully priced into the polls. The polls-plus model gives Christie a 7 percent chance of finishing in the top three, an outcome that would have the benefit of being unexpected and would therefore get him a lot of buzz. And if Christie finishes ahead of Rubio, the media buzzards will be circling Rubio’s campaign.
Audio Player
Use Up/Down Arrow keys to increase or decrease volume.
The FiveThirtyEight elections podcast team is in New Hampshire ahead of that state’s primary. Listen above, or subscribe on iTunes.
[h=2]Footnotes[/h]
MATT ROURKE / AP
MANCHESTER, N.H. — Before the Iowa Republican caucuses last week, wewarned you that the uncertainty in the race was high and that the polls might be way off. That’s even more true here in New Hampshire.
At least we know that Donald Trump will finish first on the Republican side? Well, probably. Trump has led all but one poll here since July; his numbers have slumped by a couple of percentage points since his second-place finish in Iowa, but nobody has come especially close to him. And yet, because the uncertainty is so great in New Hampshire, Trump’s victory is not quite assured: Our polls-plus forecast still gives Trump a 31 percent chance of somehow losing here.
The reason for this is that, historically, the more viable[SUP]1[/SUP] candidates there are in a state, the more error-prone the polling has tended to be. Multi-candidate races open up the possibility of last-minute tactical voting and otherwise give voters plenty of options, making them more likely to change their minds at the last minute. Our forecast models account for this dynamic, which is why Trump’s lead is much less safe than Bernie Sanders’s in the two-way race on the Democratic side, even though both candidates lead their nearest competitor by about the same 15-percentage-point margin in the polling average. (I think the model might be a little bit too confident about Sanders — I’d personally put his odds at more like 95 percent rather than 99 percent — but we’ll save that discussion for later.)
So let’s look at New Hampshire from the standpoint of the six leading Republican candidates. For each one, I’ve listed their 90th percentile and 10th percentile forecasts from our polls-plus model to show the most likely range of possible outcomes.[SUP]2[/SUP]
[h=2]Donald Trump[/h]90th percentile forecast: 39 percent
10th percentile forecast: 17 percent
We’ve somehow reverted back to the pattern before Iowa, where the other Republicans weren’t spending much time attacking Trump despite his lead in the polls. In Iowa, voters took matters into their own hands and turned away from Trump at the last minute. Could the same thing happen here?
It’s entirely possible; the polls-plus model projects Trump to finish with 27 percent of the vote — a little less than the 30 percent he has in the polling average. But there’s a huge amount of uncertainty around that estimate. Suppose, for instance, that Trump finishes with a vote share in the mid-to-high 30s. Such a performance would erase many of our doubts about Trump’s ceiling and make him look formidable in South Carolina and beyond.
Conversely, if Trump won but with more like the 27 percent of the vote that Pat Buchanan got in New Hampshire in 1996, he’d look more like a factional candidate who was benefiting from the divided field. And if Trump’s vote share falls into the low 20s or even the high teens, meanwhile, he would be vulnerable to losing New Hampshire outright. It would also raise a lot of questions about whether the polls were oversampling Trump voters.
[h=2]Marco Rubio[/h]90th percentile forecast: 25 percent
10th percentile forecast: 9 percent
The polls-plus forecast still has Rubio in second place, but that’s deceptive. He’s only a fraction of a percentage point ahead of John Kasich, with Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz lurking almost as close. In fact, the polls-plus forecast has Rubio with a 64 percent chance of finishing third or worse and he couldeasily enough slip to fifth or sixth. Here’s our final matrix of probabilities for Rubio and the other candidates:
| CANDIDATE | FIRST | SECOND | THIRD | FOURTH | FIFTH | SIXTH+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Donald Trump | 69% | 19% | 7% | 3% | 1% | <1% |
| Marco Rubio | 11 | 25 | 23 | 19 | 13 | 9 |
| John Kasich | 10 | 24 | 23 | 19 | 14 | 11 |
| Jeb Bush | 6 | 16 | 20 | 22 | 19 | 17 |
| Ted Cruz | 4 | 13 | 17 | 22 | 22 | 23 |
| Chris Christie | <1 | 2 | 5 | 10 | 18 | 64 |
| Carly Fiorina | <1 | <1 | 3 | 5 | 11 | 80 |
| Ben Carson | <1 | <1 | <1 | <1 | 3 | 96 |
Chance of finishing in each position, N.H. GOP primary
I’m erring toward the pessimistic interpretation for Rubio because I’m not sure that polls have had time to fully capture the impact of his poorly-reviewed debate performance from Saturday. At the same time, pundits areoften pretty bad at anticipating how voters will react to debates and other gaffes. Ultimately, the impact of the debate will be hard to measure: Rubio could wind up with 18 percent of the vote despite the debate, but would have gotten 22 percent without it.
No matter what happens, the media reaction to Rubio’s finish tonight is likely to be hyperbolic. If he gets (say) 22 percent of the vote, or only 8 percent, a strong reaction might be warranted. But you may also see reporters parsing relatively small differences, like between 16 percent and 13 percent. Mostly, you should ignore them, because there are two more important things to watch in the aftermath of New Hampshire. The first, as FiveThirtyEight contributor Julia Azari writes, is how Republican Party leaders react to Rubio’s performance. Is he continuing to get endorsements? How are people who actually have influence within the Republican Party — not just TV talking heads — spinning his performance? If Rubio finishes narrowly ahead of Bush, are there calls for Bush to drop out? The second thing to watch: How does Rubio perform in this Saturday’s debate in South Carolina.
[h=2]John Kasich[/h]90th percentile forecast: 24 percent
10th percentile forecast: 8 percent
As I said on our podcast, I suppose I’ll be “that guy” who thinks Kasich has some potential to outperform his polls. As measured by his number of voter contacts (as well as our own observations), he has one of the best ground games in New Hampshire. Also — this was a favorable indicator for Cruz and Rubio before Iowa — he’s seen a late, Election Day spike in Google search traffic. The polls-plus model also has Kasich beating his polls by a couple of percentage points, for what it’s worth. We’ll know soon enough.
The question is how Kasich would take advantage of a strong finish. He has run pretty far to the left in New Hampshire despite having a fairly conservative record as governor of Ohio. That moderation really does help him here, but there are fewer centrist Republicans outside New Hampshire. Furthermore, Kasich doesn’t have all that much money remaining, certainly not as compared with candidates like Bush.
My guess is that there’s a difference between Kasich doing pretty well and doing really well. If Kasich replicates Jon Huntsman’s 17 percent of the vote from four years ago, he might be a good story for a few days but not have much impact beyond that. If he gets to 20 percent or more of the vote, however, finishing well ahead of the other “establishment lane” candidates and even threatening to win here, that’s a different story.
[h=2]Jeb Bush[/h]90th percentile forecast: 22 percent
10th percentile forecast: 7 percent
Bush is only barely behind Kasich in the New Hampshire polls, and has some advantages Kasich does not: more money, more organization and more support from party elites. That could leave Bush better poised than Kasich to take advantage of a strong finish here.
He also has one big problem, however: Bush is much more of a known commodity among Republican voters, and he’s not very well-liked, with favorability ratings barely better than breakeven within his own party. So one possibility is that Bush has a strong performance in New Hampshire and eventually, after some further reshuffling, becomes the “establishment lane” finalist after all — only to lose to Trump or Cruz.
[h=2]Ted Cruz[/h]90th percentile forecast: 20 percent
10th percentile forecast: 6 percent
Cruz, who didn’t get much of a bounce after Iowa, probably has the least on the line in New Hampshire. If he does well here, that will be a sign that his turnout operation is effective at identifying evangelical and “movement conservative” voters even in a state that has relatively few of them. It might also mean he’s picked up some support from Rand Paul, who was reasonably popular here and dropped out of the race after Iowa.
But Cruz should mostly be focused on South Carolina and the March 1 primaries, where he’ll need to rack up a lot of delegates to make up for a calendar that will turn worse for him as the election wears on. Both Cruz and Trump would benefit from an ambiguous outcome in which at least three of Rubio, Kasich, Bush and Christie continue to run for some time after New Hampshire.
[h=2]Chris Christie[/h]90th percentile forecast: 13 percent
10th percentile forecast: 3 percent
I’ve been a little surprised that Christie, who has been excellent in debates and in the retail settings where we’ve seen him here in New Hampshire, is stuck at just 6 percent in the polls. When I mentioned this on Twitter yesterday, there were a bunch of theories: Bridgegate, The Hug, and even Christie’s being a New York Mets fan. I get all that, and we were pretty skeptical about Christie’s chances a year or so ago when other people were more bullish on them. But we’re not talking about Christie winning the nomination; we’re talking about him failing to poll in the double-digits in a state that should be pretty good for him.
Still, there’s some chance Christie could overperform his projection, especially if the Republican debate is not fully priced into the polls. The polls-plus model gives Christie a 7 percent chance of finishing in the top three, an outcome that would have the benefit of being unexpected and would therefore get him a lot of buzz. And if Christie finishes ahead of Rubio, the media buzzards will be circling Rubio’s campaign.
00:00
00:00
00:00
Use Up/Down Arrow keys to increase or decrease volume.
The FiveThirtyEight elections podcast team is in New Hampshire ahead of that state’s primary. Listen above, or subscribe on iTunes.
[h=2]Footnotes[/h]
- Jim Gilmore won’t contribute much to the uncertainty in New Hampshire by having his name on the ballot and getting his 0.2 percent of the vote, but candidates who are polling in the double-digits or higher certainly do. ^
- Remember, if the model is calibrated correctly, there’s a 10 percent chance of a candidate finishing above his 90th percentile forecast and, likewise, a 10 percent chance he’ll finish below his 10th percentile forecast. ^
[h=1]Bernie Sanders Wins Every Demographic Group[/h]
"And, though Mrs. Clinton lost nearly every income group, she did carry voters in families earning over $200,000 per year."
===
Candidate of the people!!!
"And, though Mrs. Clinton lost nearly every income group, she did carry voters in families earning over $200,000 per year."
===
Candidate of the people!!!
Again, Silver has parlayed his 1-trick ponyism into quite the lucrative gig.
He also has dumb people like guesser convinced he's smart.
Uh who says this....you or Nate
" I don't think Hillary will actually run"
the only time you didn't hide behind an article written by somebody else.....you came up with that gem.
