538 Final Forecast For Super Tuesday

Our (538) Final Forecast For Super Tuesday Shows Biden’s Surge — And Lots Of Uncertainty

"One thing we haven’t had a lot of since South Carolina was hard data. That changed late last night with a flurry of new polls — we now have at least two polls conducted since South Carolina in every single Super Tuesday state. So by the time we froze the FiveThirtyEight forecast at 9:30 a.m. on Tuesday,1 the Super Tuesday picture was a lot clearer — and overall, things look good for Biden.

Biden is now about twice as likely as Sanders to win a plurality of pledged delegates, according to our primary model, which gives him a 65 percent chance of doing so compared with a 34 percent chance for Sanders. This represents the culmination of a trend that has been underway in the model for about a week; it started to shift toward Biden once polls showed the potential for him to win big in South Carolina — and it anticipated a polling bounce in the Super Tuesday states if he did win big there.

To be clear, however, there is still a lot of uncertainty. We’ve been talking about delegate pluralities, which obscures the fact that the most likely outcome in the model is still that no one wins a majority of pledged delegates. And we should note that the lack of a majority does not necessarily imply a contested convention. For instance, if Biden enters the convention with 46 percent of delegates and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg with 10 percent, they could strike a deal where Bloomberg delegates vote for Biden on the first ballot.

Still, in the overnight polling, the numbers for Bloomberg — and to a slightly lesser extent, Sen. Elizabeth Warren — held up better than you might have expected. The model has Bloomberg projected to finish with at least 15 percent of the vote in most states, which is the threshold required to receive delegates allocated at the state and district levels — and it has Warren projected to do so in most states outside of the South. While to our eye, the model’s numbers look a little optimistic for Bloomberg, the whole point of a model is to rely on objective data. And that says Bloomberg could still accumulate plenty of delegates, even though he isn’t a favorite in any state. Keep in mind that both Bloomberg and Warren also benefit from Buttigieg and Klobuchar dropping out — it’s easier to get 15 percent in a four-way race than a six-way one.

Overall, the model has “no majority” happening 61 percent of the time, a Biden majority 31 percent of the time and a Sanders majority 8 percent of the time. Anyone else winning a majority would require a minor miracle.

Graphs at link:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/our-final-forecast-for-super-tuesday-shows-bidens-surge-and-lots-of-uncertainty/