How The Iran Conflict Could Affect The 2020 Election

Late Thursday, the Pentagon announced that the United States killed Iran’s Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, “at the direction of the President” in an airstrike in Iraq. Iran has since vowed retaliation. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew discusses how the current conflict or any further escalation […] Read more »

Understanding the precarious, uncertain position of the Democratic primaries right now

One’s confidence in predicting what’s likely to happen in the contest for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination correlates neatly with how closely one is looking at it. In the abstract, it seems like a mess, with a field of more than two dozen trimmed down only partially and a leading […] Read more »

What Decades Of Primary Polls Tell Us About The 2020 Democratic Presidential Race

… Early national polls conducted in the year before the first nominating contests do have predictive value, but remember there isn’t one national primary. Instead, parties choose presidential nominees via state-by-state elections over the course of a few months. And that sequential nature of the primary makes it hard for […] Read more »

Trump thought war with Iran could help reelect Obama. What about Trump?

The president who once mused about a president attacking Iran to win reelection has now inched closer to war with Iran — in his own reelection year. But if President Trump truly thinks a new war in the Middle East might help him win, he might want to think again. […] Read more »