The Iowa caucuses are weird, in case you haven’t noticed. With the polls so close, the person who wins the most statewide delegates may not be the person who a plurality of caucusgoers support going into the caucuses. That’s important because the candidate with the most statewide delegate equivalents at […] Read more »
This Iowa Poll Was Never Published. It’s Still Influencing What You Read.
The Des Moines Register spiked its poll Saturday night, but by the next day it seemed most reporters here had seen the numbers — or something purporting to be the numbers. … Here are what some reporters told me about how the poll affected their work: CONT. Ben Smith, BuzzFeed […] Read more »
Our Final Forecast For The Iowa Caucuses
With just a few hours to go before the voting starts in Iowa, it’s time for us to freeze the FiveThirtyEight primary forecast model! So here are our final estimates of each candidate’s chance of winning a majority of pledged delegates and their chances of winning Iowa ahead of tonight’s […] Read more »
The Iowa caucuses are very unpredictable — as is the aftermath
We have reached the end of the beginning of the 2020 primary process and the beginning of the end. … It’s worth pointing out that, in addition to a revised system in which the Iowa Democratic Party will literally release multiple data points that could allow multiple campaigns to claim […] Read more »
Iowa Road Trip: Do Reporters Know Anything?
What’s going to happen? The Uber driver, learning my occupation, wants to know. So, too, newsroom colleagues who cover beats other than politics. So, too, family members, who not unreasonably imagine that I must have gained some insight by leaving them to travel here. Two words I have learned to […] Read more »
What To Expect From The Iowa Caucuses
It’s finally time for the Iowa caucuses! In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast’s “Model Talk,” Nate Silver discusses the latest data and what unknowns could still lead to a surprise result. FiveThirtyEight Read more »