538 : Five Scenarios For How Super Tuesday Could Go

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/five-scenarios-for-how-super-tuesday-could-go/

Earlier today, my colleague Nathaniel Rakich and I wrote about the final FiveThirtyEight forecast before Super Tuesday. There are basically two big themes there. First, yes, the model has shifted strongly to former Vice President Joe Biden in recent days because of his big win in South Carolina and a major bounce for him in polls of Super Tuesday states. But second, there’s a lot of uncertainty, both in terms of what happens tonight and for the rest of the race. The most likely outcome is still that there’s no pledged delegate majority on June 6, once all states and territories have finished voting.

I’m going to focus more on the uncertainty in this story. Let’s stress test the model and see how its Super Tuesday projections might change if various candidates perform better or worse than our projections expect. (If you want to do your own version of this, you can! Please see our Super Tuesday scenarios interactive here.)

Scenario 1: The model is all-knowing

First, let’s establish a baseline case. Here’s how delegates would be allocated tonight under the DNC’s rules if our forecast is exactly right in every state and Congressional district. If this happens (it will not), I’m going to buy myself a really nice steak dinner tomorrow night. (Also, it will probably mean we’re living in a simulation, so this is not necessarily something to root for.)



In the base case, we have Biden finishing just slightly ahead of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, with 461 delegates (34 percent of the total possible tonight) to Bernie’s 445 (33 percent). But our baseline projections also have Michael Bloomberg and Elizabeth Warren picking up decent numbers of delegates. Heck, they even have Amy Klobuchar staying just above 15 percent of the vote in Minnesota and thereby getting delegates there, even though she dropped out. So basically, the base case for tonight is that one-third of the delegates go to Biden, one-third go to Sanders and one-third go to “other,” which is why we could be headed to a no majority (and possibly contested convention) outcome.

Scenario 2: Biden overperforms



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