Again I won’t do percentages and numbers but here is my Nevada and Super Tuesday GOP predictions.
Marco Rubio-State Won: Nevada
John Kasich-State Won:Minnesota
Ted Cruz-State Won:Texas
Donald Trump-State Won:Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Vermont, Virginia, Wyoming.
Ben Carson-State Won:None
Look Trump could win Nevada and leave Marco Rubio winless until March 1. I am being generous, and if my scenario comes true, Rubio will win Nevada only a slim margin over Trump. For Massachusetts I predict a similar result to New Hampshire, with Trump, followed by Kasich, Cruz and Rubio fighting out.
I believe (and I’m running on my faulty memory) Carson and Cruz are the two candidates who have at least a sizable portion of supporters whose #2 choice is Trump, so either of those guys getting weaker you will probably see Trump get a little stronger. It’s definitely true of the 65% of people who haven’t gotten on Trump’s train yet, for most of them Trump isn’t their number two choice. But in a three way race if enough of them from the fallen candidates go to Trump to push his general support up to 40%, I think he becomes unbeatable.
To be honest, even if Kasich drops out after Super Tuesday–and he’s literally skipping Nevada which votes today to campaign in states that don’t vote until after Super Tuesday (I’m not entirely sure what John’s strategy is, because there’s no way he wins a majority of the delegates), I think Trump being able to win almost all the states (I agree he will probably win everything but Texas, and he’ll come in a strong second in Texas) and the fact that even the GOP’s “proportional” states aren’t true proportional, means he’ll have a pretty nasty delegate lead, possibly an insurmountable one. Especially since to me, it isn’t likely that in a three way Trump/Cruz/Rubio race that Trump loses 100% of the WTA races on or after 3/15, and he will need to win fewer of them than his opponents if he takes a lot of delegates next Tuesday.
I still think there’s a good chance the establishment simply cannot consolidate efficiently enough to stop Trump. Just this week Kasich got a big public endorsement from a hedge fund billionaire who says it’s important for the future of the party to keep Kasich in the race, so we could see a situation like we did when Gingrich was in the primaries long past his expiration date because of Sheldon Adelson bankrolling him.
I also think the weakening of Cruz in the past few weeks bodes poorly for Rubio’s chances, because I think that’s the one candidate who will shed voters to Trump (and a lot to Rubio too–but Rubio is far enough behind Trump he really can’t have any voters being shed to other candidates if he’s to hit viability.) It seems the outright dishonest campaign tactics of Cruz have really hurt his favorability, the South Carolina results show that a lot of evangelicals are willing to vote outside of their religious principles for Trump because his overall message appeals to them. The ones that are sticking with Cruz are doing so largely based on his personal favorability and integrity, and one campaign dishonesty scandal after another really hurts that, and puts more evangelicals in play for Trump in my opinion.
If it was bad enough that Cruz dropped out, I think that would give enough voters to Rubio if Kasich dropped out that it would be an even race, maybe slightly advantage Rubio; but given Cruz’s infantile behavior and obstinance in his Senate career I see no reason to believe he drops out as long as he has enough supporters to fund his campaign, and as long as he’s poling 15-20%.
538 now has Rubio at a 51% chance of winning Georgia. Trump still polling better so I guess they are giving fair weight to those endorsements Rubio’s getting.
Scroll down to see that among Carson supporters, Trump and Cruz are tied at 26% for second choice with Rubio at 11%. So I think overall it’s to Trump’s advantage to have Carson in the race. That polling is a little old now though.
Yeah, the FiveThirtyEight model particularly for Donald Trump has the biggest difference between polls plus and polls only for Trump of anybody, Trump has not and will not get many formal endorsements. I think the Lieutenant Governor of South Carolina may have been the highest elected official to have endorsed Trump at all. So places like Georgia will be a real test of how valid polls plus is when applied to this election and this candidate.
The guys at FiveThirtyEight did a good job explaining why historically polls plus makes a lot of sense, because the historical data supports such a model, but even they have been talking about it with big caveats this year because they concede the huge support for the big outsider candidates in both parties is kinda blowing their model up a little bit. Plus with only three data points it’s hard to analyze how well it’s working. I will say it’d be unusual in an actual primary state for a guy up 10% in several consecutive polls from different pollsters to outright lose. So Georgia might be an edge case where polls plus is really just blown up by the reality on the ground. But maybe not.
Nevada is one where there’s been some truly bizarre outcomes in the past, in 2008 McCain was projected to win a close caucus there, 29%, with Huckabee getting 20% and Romney getting 19%. On caucus day Romney came away with 51%, Ron Paul came in second and McCain came in third with only 19%. Now, McCain did go on to solidly win the nomination, but that surge for Romney that followed is probably the root of how he made enough noise in 2008 to become the “anointed one” in 2012. But it also shows how crazy hard it is to poll caucuses. Low turnout and difficulty even accurately capturing who is a likely voter make it hard. Someone may say on the phone they’re likely to go caucus, because they are, but then when they show up and it takes three hours they may have to leave to go back to work or etc–that was reported to have happened to a lot of people who were given long breaks by their employer to caucus but still couldn’t finish in time in the Democratic caucus. I’m not sure if the Republican caucuses work the same way in Nevada or not, but we know at least from 2008 the GOP caucuses there are very difficult to poll accurately.
A Rubio win today or even a Cruz win wouldn’t shock me in Nevada.
Anyway, Nevada amazingly turned out pretty much like it was polled, with Trump in the mid-40s and the other two in the low 20s.
Trump’s vote percentage in Iowa was noticeably under what he’d been polling there, but in the three states since then, he’s pretty much hit his marks.
So now that we’ve got two new polls of Georgia, and they have Trump at 32/34, Rubio at 23/22, Cruz at 19/20, and the other two guys around 8/9, I’m thinking Rubio has to clear 30% to be competitive in GA, and that might be a heavy lift, given that so far, low to mid 20s seems to be his range. And that I’d trust 538’s polls-only odds more than their polls-plus ones.
My prediction: Tuesday is when Trump has this thing wrapped up (at least in the mind of most pundits). IMHO, he’s already got this in the bag, but I wouldn’t bet the mortgage on it or anything.
Wow, the last poll up on RealPolitics from Texas shows a dead heat between Cruz and Trump with what looks like a bunch of support going to Rubio. It has them at 29-28-25 respectively. If Cruz loses there he’ll definitely being crying into his pillow that night.
That poll is from Emerson College, which 538 gives a C+ rating. (And disagrees substantially with a fairly contemporaneous YouGov poll (37-29-15, respectively), which 538 also rates as a C+ pollster. So who knows which one is right.)
A lot of Super Tuesday states, of course, have little or no recent polling, as everyone’s been polling Iowa, NH, and SC. Georgia, Texas, and Massachusetts have been polled since the NH primary, but the others apparently haven’t. (Trump’s lead in MA is yuuuuge, if you were wondering.)
For primaries later in March, Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, North Carolina, and Arizona have been polled since NH. (Trump leads in all of those states.)
And I am no expert in Ancient History, but I believe it was the fire during the time of Nero that cleared the land where Nero then erected his colossus statue. Which only years later, when the Flavian Amphitheater was constructed, lent it’s name to the “Coliseum”. So I don’t see how they could have been going to the Coliseum when Rome was burning…
So, the cockroaches are starting to allow themselves be drawn to what they are beginning to perceive as inevitable. “Principles? What are those? I just want to be remembered as having backed the winner.”
Let’s keep in mind the GOP has a lot of true crazies, especially in the House, I’m actually surprised it’s taken this long for some of them to come out of the wood work. I actually buy what Duncan Hunter (one of the two to endorse Trump today) said–there’s more congressmen who support Trump but are “still in the closet.” Trump himself has shown that at least in the Republican race endorsements don’t seem to matter to the degree they do in others, but it still shows some “fracturing” in the establishment wall against Trump.