Live Blog / Las Vegas Democratic debate live updates: Six candidates face off in Nevada
Former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg will take the stage for the first time.
Former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg will take the stage for the first time.
In the wake of his fourth-place finish in Iowa and fifth-place finish in New Hampshire, the candidate struggling most notably is Joe Biden, who was considered the race’s clear front-runner less than two weeks ago.
When the Iowa caucuses went to hell in a handbasket last week, they probably took some of Americans’ last morsels of trust in the political system down too. But when I asked political scientists and psychologists about the impact of the bungled caucuses on overall political cynicism, they, by and large, weren’t particularly concerned. The vast majority of voters probably won’t care all that much, they said; instead, these experts are more worried about the indirect effects. Long after the shoddy apps have been forgotten, mistrust and bitterness could still be trickling down from political elites to everyone else.
Welp, this is never fun. We discovered an issue with how our primary model was making state-by-state and district-by-district forecasts. Specifically, the model was not properly calculating the demographic regressions that we use as a complement to the polls.
Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly polling roundup.
Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s weekly politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.
It’s not often that a third-place finish grabs more headlines than first place, but there’s nothing the media loves more than an underdog, and they got one in spades with Sen. Amy Klobuchar on Tuesday night.
In a beige reception hall in a Des Moines suburb, over paper plates piled with the remains of a Monday morning continental breakfast, Sen. Bernie Sanders urged a packed house of Iowans to manifest their dreams. Imagine an America where cancer only kills you, rather than also rifling through your wallet. Visualize a future where no American child has to pay off her grandmother’s student loans. Cynicism is high and more than a quarter of us believe the American Dream is unattainable, but Sanders’s stump speech offered hope. “Everything is impossible until it’s not,” he said. The crowd went wild.
According to the FiveThirtyEight primary forecast, the single most likely outcome of the Democratic presidential primary is that no one wins a majority of pledged delegates (there is a 2 in 5, or 41 percent, chance of this). However, it is almost equally likely that Sen. Bernie Sanders will bag a majority (a 2 in 5 chance, or 37 percent). And a recent avalanche of national polls has been particularly good for Sanders.1
Many observers of the 2020 Democratic primary expect that the race will be much different as it moves to states with more diverse electorates. In particular, the expectation is that former Vice President Joe Biden will do better and former Mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Pete Buttigieg will do worse. After all, polls have consistently shown Biden leading among black voters and in the top two1 with Hispanic Democrats, and Buttigieg way behind with both groups.