Monday, February 29, 2016
If You Want To Understand What’s Roiling The 2016 Election, Go To Oklahoma
OKLAHOMA CITY — As airline tickets proliferate in the pockets of reporters crisscrossing the country ahead of Super Tuesday, perhaps no voting state is so underrated as Oklahoma. Situated on one of the flatter, windier portions of that hunk of continental crust we call America, Oklahoma is used to being unappreciated — “Grapes of Wrath” did its reputation no favors — but thanks to a populist streak, the state might just be the locus of Bernie Sanders’s last statistical stand in the Democratic presidential primary. What’s more, that cowboy individualism could take us one step closer to deciphering the desires of the 2016 Republican electorate, Donald Trump’s supporters’ in particular.
The Oklahoma stakes on the Democratic side of the race are fairly straightforward. After his nearly 50 percentage point loss in South Carolina on Saturday, Sanders’s chances for the nomination are dimming, and the Vermont senator is looking to scoop up any delegates he can. His prospects in most Super Tuesday states are looking bleak. But over the past month or so, Sanders has eaten into Hillary Clinton’s lead in Oklahoma — chomped through it, actually. Sanders went from being down 25 points in mid-January to bringing the race to within 2 points by mid-February in one poll. He recently said flat-out he thinks he’ll win the state.
Why the surge?
Clinton has a solid history in Oklahoma. She won the state handily in the 2008 primary, but as we all know by now, the first rule of the 2016 election season is that there are no rules. It might be the eau de anti-establishment ambrosia that Sanders has doused himself in, but he appears to be appealing to the overwhelmingly white, middle to lower-middle class Democratic voters in Oklahoma in ways that he hasn’t been able to with minorities in other parts of the South (see: South Carolina). Eighty-two percent of Oklahoma’s 2008 Democratic primary voters were white and half had yearly household incomes between $30,000 and $75,000.
In some ways, according to Keith Gaddie, chair of the University of Oklahoma’s department of political science, this Sanders support is a return to the state’s historic political roots. “Oklahoma is where your Southern agrarian populism and Nebraska prairie populism collided in America,” he said of the state forged by homesteaders in the late 19th century. Gaddie noted that for the first couple of decades after statehood in the early 20th century, “there was a really strong socialist political strength; we at one point had five socialists in the state legislature.”
Oklahoma’s present-day polling still bears this out. “I think there is still a strong populism in the Oklahoma electorate, both Republican and Democrat,” said Bill Shapard, who runs SoonerPoll, one of the state’s independent public opinion polling firms. “That’s why you’re seeing Trump doing well, because he’s the most populist candidate of the bunch, and I think Bernie Sanders is much more the populist candidate on the Democrat side.”
The notion that Trump and Sanders are pulling different ends of the same troubled American heartstring is not new, but over the disparate strains of Muse tunes and “Mustang Sally” at the Cox Convention Center in downtown Oklahoma City on Sunday, Paul and Sherelle Bowermann were living proof of this theory. They, along with over 4,000 other Oklahomans, had come to hear Sanders speak at an event that included Native American dancing and the obligatory rendition of “This Land Is Your Land” (Woody Guthrie was from Oklahoma, after all). The Bowermanns were supporting the Vermont senator, but “believe it or not, our second choice is Trump,” said Sherelle, 73. In a general election, given the choice between the Manhattan businessman and Clinton, they would vote for Trump. Paul, 68, who characterized his political outlook as “eclectic,” liked that Sanders seemed “more compassionate to people who are down and out” and that Trump seemed to be “protesting the powers that be, the billionaires that run the country.”
There are numbers to back up this populist enthusiasm, a messy purple watercolor of reds and blues bleeding together rather than a neat, paint-by-numbers rendering of party-line adherence. According to Pam Slater of the Oklahoma State Election Board, the state has seen a spike in both new voter registrations and requests to change party affiliation. From Jan. 1 through Feb. 26, the state has registered 13,340 Democrats and 20,929 Republicans. During the same time period, the office saw 5,000 Democrats apply to change their registration to Republican, and 1,500 switch from being registered Independents to the GOP. Shapard called the movement a “micro-trend,” likely of voters who see the Trump appeal or, at the very least, want in on the action of this year’s Republican race.
This could be a sign of things to come, and Tuesday, when 12 states scrum for delegates, might very well be when the faint patterns of the race are finally drawn in Sharpie rather than in pencil. Oklahoma’s middle-class, white Democrats changing party affiliation to vote for Trump could foreshadow what voters of comparable demographics in states like Michigan and Ohio might do.
Oklahoma could also prove to be another relevant data point in ending the myth of the evangelical vote as monolith. Shapard calls South Carolina a bellwether for Oklahoma — “We’re much more Western than they are, but our electorate still mirrors theirs; Republicanism is high, evangelicals are high” — and in South Carolina, Trump won 34 percent of the evangelical vote. It makes sense to expect about the same in Oklahoma, especially given the flaws of Ted Cruz’s operation, which once upon a time in the alternate reality of six months or so ago seemed to be the perfect vehicle for the religious conservative vote. Cruz has been tainted by his campaign’s unsavory public reputation, according to Shapard, including accusations that the operation spread rumors of Ben Carson dropping out of the race the night of the Iowa caucuses. It’s not a look that plays well with many evangelical voters. “Cruz may have won the battle in the Iowa caucus, but it ended up costing him the war,” Shapard said.
Gaddie, of the University of Oklahoma, characterized evangelical voters as being split into a couple of groups, those who “vote culture war” — on issues of school prayer, abortion and the like — and those “who think of themselves as Christian nationalists.” Those latter voters, he said, “think the United States was established as a Christian nation, they think that separation of church and state is overblown and they want to see a candidate who’s about American nationalism, restoring American pride. That’s what Trump taps into.”
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Significant Digits For Monday, Feb. 29, 2016
You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the telling numbers tucked inside the news. Big thanks to Oliver Roeder who took over last week while my desk overflowed with Oscars obligations.
1 Oscar
Leonardo DiCaprio is now the proud owner of one Oscar. It doesn’t mean he was the most deserving, but now perhaps he can make a movie that is fun. [ABC News]
4 for 6
FiveThirtyEight’s Oscar tracking model went four for six in the top categories, correctly calling the winners for best director, actress, actor and supporting actress but whiffing on best supporting actor and picture. Not a great night, but not terrible by any stretch. [FiveThirtyEight]
6 Oscar wins
Biggest winner of the night? “Mad Max: Fury Road,” which won six Oscars for sound editing, sound mixing, editing, production design, costumes, and hairstyling/makeup. It had the most wins of any one film. [The Verge]
7-6
A bill that would require unvaccinated children to be reported to the Colorado Department of Health and Environment passed through a committee in Colorado’s state legislature on a 7-6 vote. I mean, if I find a danger to society and public health, it’s generally a good policy to report that even if the public health danger is named Aiden or Sophia. [KLFY]
10 sets
When he was writing his opening monologue for the 88th Academy Awards, Chris Rock unconventionally workshopped it over the course of “about 10” sets at The Comedy Store in West Hollywood. The process appears to have worked wonderfully, because that monologue crushed expectations. [The Washington Post]
13 arrests
Three people were stabbed and 13 were arrested at a Ku Klux Klan rally in Anaheim after a clash between Klan members and protesters. [Los Angeles Times]
14 percent
Hillary Clinton thrashed Bernie Sanders in South Carolina on Saturday, winning by about 50 percentage points. Black voters in particular went with Clinton, with Clinton pulling 86 percent of African-American voters to Bernie’s 14 percent. [FiveThirtyEight]
27 points
Donald Trump received the endorsements of two governors, one senator and two members of the House of Representatives in the past several days. Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, Gov. Paul LePage of Maine and Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama have contributed most of Trump’s 27 recent endorsement points. [FiveThirtyEight]
31 inches
Sen. Chuck Schumer is trying to put the FAA in charge of airline seat space requirements. According to Schumer, the average space between two airline seats dropped from 35 inches in the 1970s to 31 inches today. [ABC News]
$835 million
Dow Chemical will settle an anti-trust case for $835 million that was potentially bound for the Supreme Court. Given Antonin Scalia’s death, it appears Dow thinks the court would be less sympathetic to their case, which may have led the company to drop the appeal. [Bloomberg BNA]
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Sunday, February 28, 2016
FiveThirtyEight Watches The Oscars
Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s coverage of the Oscars! We’ll be watching along, updating this article several times through the night to highlight winners who beat out the odds, those who come right in line with expectations, and people who did a great job predicting who would win a statue this year.
Interactive:Our elections-style Oscar model looks at the predictive power of film awards over the past 25 years and tracks this year’s nominees and winners to try to gauge the race in the big six Academy Award categories. See the state of the Oscars race »
In the meantime, check out our coverage of why it’s hard to predict the Oscars, the people exploring new ways to do so, and how the race has evolved. If you’re still figuring out how to talk about the absence of non-white acting nominees, check out our coverage of how the studios campaign for these awards and Hollywood’s big problem with casting minorities.
We’ll be updating this post after the winners of each of the major six awards we tracked this year are announced, as well as periodically throughout the ceremony to shine a light on some of the other categories.
ABC Breaking News | Latest News Videos
ABC Breaking News | Latest News Videos
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Saturday, February 27, 2016
With All Eyes On Trump, Clinton Is Winning The Democratic Nomination
In South Carolina today, Hillary Clinton scored her biggest victory yet in the Democratic presidential primary. She beat Bernie Sanders by what looks to be at least 30 percentage points, according to exit polls, thanks to overwhelming support from African-Americans. As the race heads into Super Tuesday, Clinton has clear momentum: She has big leads in many of the 12 contests that will take place, according to the polls.
According to the South Carolina exit poll, Sanders lost black voters 16 percent to 84 percent. That doomed him in a contest in which 62 percent of voters were black. If white voters were more supportive of his candidacy, Sanders might have been able to keep the race closer. But they split 58 percent for Sanders to 42 percent for Clinton. That’s simply not good enough to overcome Clinton’s advantage among black voters. It also makes the result among white voters in New Hampshire look more like an outlier compared to South Carolina, Iowa and Nevada. Maybe the Vermont senator had more of a next-door-neighbor advantage in New Hampshire than we initially thought.
Perhaps the most worrisome sign for Sanders is that the momentum he had heading into the first three contests seems to have been halted in South Carolina. Sanders was down 25 percentage points in the FiveThirtyEight South Carolina polling average a month ago, and it looks like he’s going to do even worse than that tonight.
Sanders needs something to change because frankly he’s losing.
Indeed, South Carolina is even more of a setback for Sanders than it appears at first glance because it reverses the progress he had been making. If you look at my colleague Nate Silver’s estimates of how Sanders would do in each caucus or primary if the race were tied nationally (Sanders needs to beat these targets to have a shot at the nomination), we see that Sanders did 19 percentage points worse than the benchmark in Iowa, 10 percentage points worse in New Hampshire and 5 percentage points worse in Nevada. That is, Sanders did not hit the target in any of those contests, but he got closer to it as time went on. In South Carolina, it looks like Sanders will run at least 10 percentage points worse than we would expect given a tie nationally, suggesting that the race has stabilized or moved in Clinton’s direction since Nevada.
Sanders’s loss of momentum couldn’t have come at a worse time for his campaign. There are six Super Tuesday states (Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia) where black voters made up a larger share of the electorate in 2008 than they did in Iowa, New Hampshire or Nevada this year. That Sanders couldn’t break through with black voters in either Nevada or South Carolina, despite a heavy investment, makes it difficult to believe he will have any more success in these six states, where his campaign hasn’t put in the same effort.
What’s worse for Sanders — of the 865 delegates up for grabs Tuesday, 66 percent come from these six states. An average of polls in each state1 gives Clinton at least a 23 percentage point lead in all of them. These include the two biggest prizes of Super Tuesday: Georgia (102 delegates) where Clinton is up by 39 percentage points and Texas (222 delegates) where Clinton is up by 29 percentage points. If the delegates from these states broke perfectly proportionally based on the polling average, Clinton would end up with a 369 to 202 delegate lead.
In the other six Super Tuesday contests, Sanders has a clear lead in only Vermont, and the candidates are likely to split the delegates in the other five contests fairly evenly. That means that on Super Tuesday, Clinton is likely to win around 508 delegates and Sanders 357.
It’s difficult to oversell how big that lead is. Not only will media be filled with “Clinton Wins Big” headlines, but the way that delegates are awarded in Democratic primaries (proportionally) makes it a tall task to come back from a 100+ delegate deficit. You can’t just win; you have to win big. No one knows this better than Clinton herself; she barely touched Barack Obama’s delegate lead in March and April 2008, even after winning in big states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas. So even if Sanders were to win in states like Wisconsin by a few percentage points, it wouldn’t be enough.
The fact is that South Carolina may spell the beginning of the end of Sanders’s having any real chance of winning more pledged delegates than Clinton. He needs a game-changer between now and Tuesday, or it’ll become a monumental task to catch Clinton in the delegate count.
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Friday, February 26, 2016
Christie’s Endorsement Of Trump Totally Makes Sense
Well, this is big news: New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie endorsed Donald Trump for president on Friday. This is Trump’s first endorsement from a Republican governor, and, more to the point, Christie is easily the most mainstream Republican who has backed Trump so far.
But just how surprising is Christie’s endorsement? Is it a one-off — or a sign of things to come?
My view is that it’s not quite as shocking as it might seem. We noticed during the campaign that Christie was strangely reluctant to go after Trump, even after Trump spread mistruths about Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the Sept. 11 terror attacks. This seemed to us like a poor strategic choice for Christie, whose campaign slogan was “telling it like it is” and whose alpha-male personality gave him the chance to break out of the “establishment lane” and compete for Trump voters.
There’s a lot that ties Christie and Trump together, however. Christie and Trump have a close personal relationship. Trump has long done business in Atlantic City and is quite popular among New Jersey Republicans. Neither Christie nor Trump is especially conservative, and they’re certainly not small-government conservatives. Both can rankle their fellow Republicans, as Christie did with his self-serving convention speech and embrace of President Obama during the 2012 campaign.
Some of this may also be plain old opportunism. Trump is the most likely Republican nominee, after all. (Or at least one of the two most likely if you’re feeling very generous to Marco Rubio.) If nominated, Trump will have to pick a running mate. And if he’s elected president, he’ll have to appoint a Cabinet. Vice President Christie or Attorney General Christie ain’t all that far-fetched.
Christie also replicates many of Trump’s weaknesses, however. Like Trump, Christie is very unpopular with general election voters. Like Trump, he has been accused of cronyism and corruption. Like Trump, he can come across as a bully. So Rubio and Ted Cruz won’t have to change their messaging all that much.
Still, the Christie endorsement steps on Rubio’s buzz after a strong debate Thursday night and once again proves how easily Trump can control the news cycle. Christie, long a favorite subject of political reporters, will also be an effective surrogate for Trump.
It probably also won’t be the last major endorsement for Trump. Even if most “party elites” continue to resist Trump, a lot of Republican elected officials will be looking after their own best interests instead of the collective good of the party. Some will back Trump because he’s popular in their states. Some will be looking for opportunities within a Trump administration. Some will agree with Trump’s views on immigration or his critique of the political establishment. So there will be more of these endorsements, probably. But it isn’t surprising that Christie is one of the first.
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Every Oscar Prediction We Could Find
Want to predict the Oscars? Yeah, you and everyone else. It’s still one of those unsolved problems. No one has found a way to get inside the heads of the Academy voters, so we’re still in the Wild West of prediction.
Throughout this awards season we’ve explored the best ways to predict something when you don’t have a lot of data. We have a model that takes a stab at it, and this year we reached out to other people to talk about ways to predict the big show. But the time for talking is over, and the time has come to find out which models work and which ones don’t.
So ahead of the Academy Awards on Sunday, we’re rounding up every prediction we could find. Here are the final Oscar predictions in the top six categories from FiveThirtyEight and from the eight amateur modelers we’ve been following. Since betting markets and Irish gambling houses actually offer pretty reliable predictions, I’ve also included the Irish bookmaker Paddy Power’s front-runner in each category. And since there are some very good models out there for the down-ballot categories, we put in bonus predictions for them as well.
Interactive:Our elections-style Oscar model looks at the predictive power of film awards over the past 25 years and tracks this year’s nominees and winners to try to gauge the race in the big six Academy Award categories. See the state of the Oscars race »
If you haven’t met our modeler friends, here’s the gist of their approaches:
- Burak Tekin’s model uses Google News to predict the awards.
- Paul Singman’s pulls predictive data from tweets.
- Brian Goegan has a model that looks at earlier award shows and additional nominations.
- Zach Wissner-Gross and Randi Goldman have one that looks at box office dollars and reviews.
- James England asks people to vote on nominees they saw in head-to-head matchups.
- Nigel Henry and his crew at Solution by Simulation base their predictions on the preferences of people in the MovieLens data set.
- Allison Walker analyzes film reviews for words that have historically been used to describe Oscar winners.
- Gary Angel and his team at Ernst & Young pick winners based on which nominee hews closest to the Hollywood worldview by analyzing publications and reviews.
Best picture
The FiveThirtyEight model gives the highest score to “The Revenant,” followed by “The Big Short” and “Spotlight.”
Tekin, Walker, Goegan and Singman pick “The Revenant” to win. Goldman/Wissner-Gross pick “Brooklyn.” England picks “Spotlight.” Angel says “The Big Short.” Henry’s team says “Room.”
Paddy Power has “The Revenant” winning with 4-to-9 odds.
Best actor
Our model says Leonardo DiCaprio (“The Revenant”) will win best actor.
Tekin, Henry, Walker, Singman, Goldman/Wissner-Gross, Goegan and England also pick Leo. Angel’s team says Bryan Cranston (“Trumbo”).
Paddy Power has Leo as favorite, with 1-to-100 odds. Those are very good indeed.
Best actress
We’re going with Brie Larson (“Room”).
So are Singman, Walker, Goegan and England. Tekin picks Cate Blanchett (“Carol”); Goldman/Wissner-Gross and Angel pick Jennifer Lawrence (“Joy”). Henry’s picking Charlotte Rampling (“45 Years”).
Paddy Power has Brie Larson as favorite with 1-to-25 odds.
Best supporting actor
It’s a tight race this year, and this will be a very cool category to watch. Our model says Sylvester Stallone (“Creed”), but Mark Rylance (“Bridge of Spies”) is hot off a win at the BAFTAs and could prove an upset.
Tekin, Goegan and Singman pick Stallone. Walker picks Rylance. Henry and England pick Mark Ruffalo (“Spotlight”).
Paddy Power has Stallone as the favorite with 2-to-7 odds.
Best supporting actress
We’ve got Alicia Vikander (“The Danish Girl”) winning it, with Kate Winslet (“Steve Jobs”) as a close second.
Tekin and Singman pick Winslet. England, Goegan and Walker pick Vikander. Henry picks Rachel McAdams (“Spotlight”).
Paddy Power has Vikander as the favorite with 2-to-5 odds.
Best director
The model has Alejandro G. Iñárritu (“The Revenant”) as the winner, following a significant win at the Directors Guild awards.
Tekin, Walker, Goegan and Singman picks Iñárritu. Goldman/Wissner-Gross and England pick George Miller (“Mad Max: Fury Road”). Henry’s going with Lenny Abrahamson (“Room”).
Paddy Power has Iñárritu as the favorite with 1-to-14 odds.
ABC Breaking News | Latest News Videos
Now for the predictions in the down-ballot races, from those who make them.
Best original screenplay
Singman picks “Inside Out,” while Goegan says “Spotlight.” Paddy Power has “Spotlight” as the favorite with 1-to-10 odds.
Best adapted screenplay
Singman and Goegan each pick “The Big Short.” It’s also the favorite at Paddy Power with 1-to-12 odds.
Best animated feature film
Goldman/Wissner-Gross, Singman, Goegan and Henry pick “Inside Out.” It’s Paddy Power’s favorite as well, with 1-to-100 odds.
Best cinematography
Goegan says “The Revenant” and so does Paddy Power (1-to-14 odds).
ABC Breaking News | Latest News Videos
Best costume design
Goegan says “Mad Max: Fury Road.” Paddy Power gives it even odds to win.
Best documentary feature
Goegan says “Amy.” Paddy Power has it as the favorite as well with 1-to-7 odds.
Best film editing
Goegan says “Mad Max: Fury Road.” It’s also the favorite at Paddy Power with 1-to-4 odds.
Best foreign language film
Henry’s team says “Mustang.” Goegan says “Son of Saul.” The latter is the Paddy Power favorite with 1-to-12 odds.
Best makeup and hairstyling
Goegan says “Mad Max: Fury Road”; it’s the favorite at Paddy Power with 1-to-5 odds.
Best original song
Goegan says “Writing’s on the Wall” from “Spectre.” Paddy Power’s favorite is “Til It Happens To You” from “The Hunting Ground,” with 2-to-5 odds.
Best original score
Singman picks “The Hateful Eight”; Henry’s team says “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” “The Hateful Eight” is the Paddy Power favorite with 1-to-12 odds.
Best production design
Goegan says “Mad Max: Fury Road.” It’s also the favorite at Paddy Power with 1-to-10 odds.
Best sound editing
Goegan says “The Revenant.”
Best sound mixing
Goegan says “The Revenant.”
Best visual effects
Henry’s team says “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” Goegan says “Mad Max: Fury Road.” A model from visual effects artist Todd Vaziri that exclusively monitors this category has “The Revenant” as the favorite for this one. Paddy Power has “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” ahead with 1-to-2 odds.
Congratulations to all the folks who pitched, built and maintained Oscar prediction models with us this year. A lot of behind-the-scenes work goes into these models, and it takes some bravery to put your name on a publicly posted prediction. Many of our predictors are new to the game but still managed to put together really compelling models. It’s been a blast.
On Oscar night, we’ll be tracking the winners in real time see how our models stack up. The show airs at 7 p.m. Eastern this Sunday on ABC; be sure to watch with us as your second screen!
In the meantime, please feel free to watch the ABC News videos above where I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing. Peter Travers is my hero.
And in closing, here is a video with me in a vicious argument about Leonardo DiCaprio:
ABC Breaking News | Latest News Videos
Read more Oscars coverage:
- Hollywood Studios Barely Promoted Non-White Actors And Films
- FiveThirtyEight’s Final Oscar Picks
- Does Leonardo DiCaprio Deserve An Oscar? An Interrogation.
- Can Math Predict The Oscars? A Debate.
- Can You Read Between The Lines To Pick The Oscar Winners?
- The 2016 Oscars Race
- How Much Do We Need To Know To Predict The Oscars?
- Can The Internet Predict The Oscars?
- FiveThirtyEight’s Guide To Predicting The Oscars
- Can You Fake The Academy To Predict The Oscars?
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Significant Digits For Friday, Feb. 26, 2016
You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the telling numbers tucked inside the news.
Well over 1 tweet per minute
“I’m not even gon lie to you. I love me so much right now,” Kanye West tweeted Wednesday, in a typically glorious tweetstorm. Other Ye-storms have implored Mark Zuckerberg to give him $1 billion, and taken swipes at Wiz Khalifa. And when he gets going, West tweets quickly — well over a tweet per minute in a recent rant. How does he do it? They don’t appear to be scheduled. Is it a quick-fingered assistant? Autocomplete typing? Text-to-speech? Mind reading? The world may never know. #ff @KanyeWest. [GQ]
10 GOP debates
Last night was the tenth GOP debate, which came just a handful of days before Super Tuesday. It was bigly the fruit salad of my life. If you missed it and need weekend plans: Grab four friends, print this out and a perform a (very) dramatic reading. [FiveThirtyEight]
26 minutes
The average American commute is just under half an hour — 26 minutes to be precise — the longest since the Census Bureau began tracking commute times in 1980. That’s 1.8 trillion minutes we spend commuting for the year, or enough time to build nearly 300 Wikipedias, or 26 Great Pyramids of Giza, according to the Post’s Christopher Ingraham. [Washington Post]
49 selfie-related deaths
There have been 49 recorded selfie-related deaths since 2014, according to data from Priceonomics. Nineteen of those occurred in India, resulting in the creation of selfie-free zones across Mumbai. “To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance,” Oscar Wilde wrote. [New York Post]
80 percent of hives
From the stuff-of-childhood-nightmares file, what scientists are calling “zombie bees” are spreading across the East and West Coasts. As many as 80 percent of the hives one entomologist inspected in San Francisco were infected. The zombie bees are actually hosts to parasitic infections which cause them to act erratically — staggering in circles, leaving their hives at night — before they die. [New York Times]
80 percent satisfied
Europeans are happier! Eighty percent of European Union citizens said they were satisfied with their lives, per the Eurobarometer survey. This is up from 76 percent in 2008. If you’re happy, Europe, well then I’m happy. You’ve been through a lot. [The Economist]
2,188 billionaires
There are over 2,000 billionaires on the planet, whose combined wealth is $7.3 trillion. There are 568 billionaires in China, 535 in the U.S. and 111 in India. And I, for one, am proud to report that there is a thousandaire living in my very apartment. [MarketWatch]
75 million adults
Body mass index, or BMI, is the batting average of health metrics — it’s a terrible gauge. Using BMI alone as a measure of health would misclassify nearly 75 million American adults. [FiveThirtyEight]
$265 billion in deals
During his tenure at AIG, Brian Schreiber did $265 billion in deals. Now, you see, that’s a lot of deals. He also helped negotiate AIG’s government bailout in 2008. He never held AIG’s top job, but he worked for six different CEOs and was reported to have known more about the company’s inner workings than anyone. But now Schreiber is out, “leaving to pursue new opportunities,” and declining to comment further. (Also, do read the URL on this story.) [Bloomberg Business]
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If you see a significant digit in the wild, send it to @WaltHickey. He’ll be back here next week.
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Thursday, February 25, 2016
Here Are The Super Tuesday States Rubio’s Super PAC Is Betting On
With just five days until Super Tuesday, time is growing perilously short for the Republican “establishment” — whatever that means these days — to stop the Donald Trump train from picking up even more speed. Five days is two fewer than God had to make the world and all its creatures, and if you have looked at Trump’s poll numbers lately, the establishment’s task might seem equally gargantuan.
But there are a couple of places where Trump looks vulnerable. Where? We don’t have polling for every Super Tuesday state, and certainly not enough to drill down beneath state-level data. But here’s one clue: Where is Team Rubio buying TV time? The answer: Virginia, Georgia and Texas. His PAC has splashed out over $1.5 million in these key Super Tuesday states and appears focused on the establishment’s backyard as well — Virginia’s Washington, D.C. suburbs.
According to our most recent polls-plus forecast, Rubio, recently crowned prince of the GOP donor class, has a 44 percent chance of winning Virginia on Tuesday, a slight advantage over Trump. The D.C. suburbs in northern Virginia are home to many who make their living working, directly or indirectly, for the government. Like most large metropolitan areas, the District of Columbia and its suburbs tend to break for Democrats in general elections, but the area has sizable pockets of Republican voters. In 2012, 40 percent of Fairfax County and 30 percent of Arlington County voted for Mitt Romney.
Since Tuesday, a Rubio PAC, Conservative Solutions, has spent $245,430 in the D.C. media market for ads set to air through Tuesday’s primaries. And the PAC has spent over $144,000 in the rest of the state, focusing its buys in the Virginia Beach/Norfolk area, along with Richmond. (The Rubio campaign itself has made modest buys in Virginia Beach/Norfolk, though not in the D.C. metro area.)
And in Georgia, where we give Rubio a 41 percent chance of winning (compared with 48 percent for Trump), the Rubio PAC just dropped $455,258 in the Atlanta media market. Hotlanta indeed.
Where else is the money going? Texas — including t Houston, Ted Cruz’s fortress of Constitutionalism and cowboy boots. Conservative Solutions spent a whopping $689,302 on ads to air over the next few days in Dallas, Austin, Houston, and San Antonio.
And what about Trump? Not a major ad buy in sight.
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Significant Digits For Thursday, Feb. 25, 2016
You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the telling numbers tucked inside the news.
6 reactions
Facebook has added “love,” “haha,” “wow,” “sad” and “angry” to its classic “like,” as the available reactions to posts. Still no “lassitude,” “torpor” or “ennui,” however. [New York]
Nearly 20 percent
Nearly 20 percent of Donald Trump’s voters disagree with the Emancipation Proclamation — which freed slaves during the Civil War — according to national YouGov data. Five percent of Marco Rubio’s supporters held the same view. [The Upshot]
26 percent chance
Woe, Canada. There’s just a 26 percent chance that any of the NHL’s seven Canadian franchises will make the playoffs this season, according to an analysis by my colleague Neil Paine. The last time no Canadian team made the playoffs was the 1969-70 season. What’s more, Canadian teams are in the midst of a 23-year Stanley Cup drought. [FiveThirtyEight]
30 meteorite impacts
The largest meteor since 2013 hit the earth a couple of weeks ago. The meteor landed in the ocean off the coast of Brazil in early February, with the force of 13,000 tons of TNT. It was the largest meteor strike since an impact in Russia in 2013 that injured more than 1,000 people. That strike had the force of 500,000 tons of TNT. Turns out, though, that most of these hits go unnoticed, and there are a few dozen each year. The majority of the earth’s surface, after all, is uninhabited water. [Christian Science Monitor]
127 games
A little less than two years ago, Atlanta Hawks sharpshooter Kyle “Hot Sauce” Korver set an NBA record by hitting a three-pointer in 127 consecutive games. Last night, Steph Curry, who continues to ruin everything for anyone not in a Warriors jersey, tied that record just 78 seconds into Golden State’s game against the Miami Heat. No word yet on whether he can best this adorable girl at flinging toast into the toaster. [AP]
About 1,500 listings
Airbnb admitted to purging roughly 1,500 listings from its records before releasing data to regulators, a move that was ostensibly meant to publicize the company’s transparency. The cleanse made it appear that fewer professional hosts with multiple listings used the site. These were the exact types of listings that were of concern to regulators. [Fusion]
$10,000 fine
In Puerto Rico, you can now be fined up to $10,000 for raising the price of condoms. Ditto insect repellent, hand sanitizer and tissues. The price freeze comes in response to the spread of the Zika virus there. Puerto Rico has had nine confirmed cases of Zika, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. [CNN Money]
200,000 advertisers
Instagram now has over 200,000 advertisers. Three-quarters of those advertisers are from outside the U.S. One analyst estimates that the company will reap $1 billion in ad revenue in 2016. But like, life is just one big advertisement, am I right? [USA Today]
245,000 mutant mosquitos
On a typical morning, Cecilia Kosmann drives around Brazil and releases nearly a quarter million mosquitos from a van. She’s been repeating the exercise daily for 10 months. These mosquitos are special, though. They are genetically modified to pass a deadly gene to their offspring, in hopes of quelling the Zika virus, which has been linked to thousands of cases of birth defects, malaria (which kills around 438,000 people a year), and dengue (which claims around 12,500). Kosmann’s organization, Oxitec, reported that their special mosquitos had succeeded in reducing the wild mosquito population by 82 percent. [BuzzFeed]
$400 million donation
Phil Knight, the co-founder and chairman of Nike, donated $400 million to Stanford University to recruit grad students to tackle “society’s most intractable problems.” The gift matches the previous record for biggest gift to a university, from a hedge fund tycoon to improve Harvard’s engineering program. Hey Phil, Significant Digits goes a long way in tempering society’s most intractable problems, and its authors are waist-deep in student debt. You can Venmo me. [New York Times]
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Wednesday, February 24, 2016
Significant Digits For Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2016
You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the telling numbers tucked inside the news.
12 human feet
Over the last nine years, human feet in running shoes have been washing up on the shores of British Columbia, including a pair earlier this month. Conspiracy theories abound, but the coroner has said that the deaths are either suicides or accidental deaths due to storms off the coast. The coroner’s work suggests the feet — and their shoes — are being preserved during decomposition because of advanced sneaker technology, including the increased use of air pockets and light foam. [The Guardian]
29 people
While the majority of us go around at least mildly interested in the world around us, asking it questions and listening to its answers, apparently unaware of the inevitability of death and the uselessness of it all, an enlightened few actively try to eschew knowledge. The goal of the annual Last Man challenge is to be the last person alive who does not know what team won the Super Bowl, and 29 competitors (and counting down) are still blissfully ignorant this year. Sounds like fun. If I forgot who won a very forgettable game, can I be grandfathered in? [FiveThirtyEight]
55 countries
Mars, the candy company, has recalled chocolate bars in 55 countries. It started after a customer in Germany found a piece of plastic in a Snickers bar early this year, which was traced back to a Dutch factory. Also affected are the eponymous Mars bar, and the Milky Way. The recall could cost the company tens of millions of dollars. “#mars ist das neue #vw?,” one Twitter user wondered. [The Guardian]
60 to 90 seconds
The average Netflix subscriber spends just 60 to 90 seconds browsing the site’s movies and TV shows for something to watch before giving up. Jeez, it’s almost like Netflix and chill doesn’t even mean what it sounds like it means. [Quartz]
91 detainees
There are 91 prisoners currently imprisoned at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. military prison. President Obama yesterday touted a White House plan to close the prison, likening it to “closing a chapter in our history” and correcting policy excesses following the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Obama has “resettled” 147 Guantanamo prisoners abroad since taking office. The prison comes with a $450 million a year price tag. [Washington Post]
337 round trips to Pluto
Americans drove 3.15 trillion miles last year, surpassing pre-Great Recession highs. The reason: cheap gas. A byproduct of all this driving is death. Traffic-related deaths were up 11.3 percent over the first nine months of 2015, compared to those months the year before. [Washington Post]
$40,000 custom toilet
A Thai princess, Maha Chakri Sirindhorn, commissioned a $40,000 toilet for her recent visit to Cambodia. The princess never even used the toilet, but rather “just looked at it from outside and took some pictures.” Fewer than 40 percent of rural Cambodians have toilets, but hey, if you don’t gotta go you don’t gotta go. [BBC]
$232,000
I could hawk this year’s Oscars gift bag and laugh all the way to the bank, at which point I would do a lot of paperwork and pay off my student loans. The bag includes a Vampire breast lift ($1,900, also wtf?), personalized M&Ms ($300, they really need a better M&M guy), and Joseph’s Toiletries toilet paper ($275, again wtf?). The Academy, however, stopped giving out gift bags in 2006 under scrutiny from the IRS. This bag is being distributed by a marketing firm, against which the Academy has filed suit. [Harper’s Bazaar]
$-1 million
John Kasich, governor of Ohio and Republican presidential candidate, signed a bill Sunday that will prevent more than $1 million from going to Planned Parenthood for programs like HIV testing, health screenings and the prevention of violence against women. [CNN]
$72 million
Johnson & Johnson must pay $72 million to the family of a woman who died of ovarian cancer. The cancer was linked to the company’s products, including its “flagship baby powder.” The woman had used them for feminine hygiene for over 35 years. Women nationwide have also filed suits against the company for failing to alert them to the link to ovarian cancer. [Fast Company]
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Nevada Was Great For Donald Trump, Bad For Ted Cruz
Let’s get right to the point: Donald Trump had a great night, easily winning the Nevada caucuses. The 46 percent of the vote he received is by far the highest share won by Trump, or any other Republican, in any state so far. Marco Rubio placed a distant second, with 24 percent of the vote, and Ted Cruz finished in third with 21 percent.
If South Carolina, which Trump won on Saturday, provided some bits of good news for Trump skeptics — Trump faded over the course of the week and finished with less of the vote than he had in New Hampshire — his victory in Nevada was much more emphatic. Trump proved he could win in a relatively low-turnout environment,1 suggesting that his lack of a traditional “ground game” may not be that harmful to him.
The result underscores that preventing Trump from winning the nomination is likely to require both that anti-Trump Republicans coalesce around an alternative, and that they adopt a much more aggressive strategy in probing Trump for signs of weakness. On the first point, anti-Trump Republicans have made some progress: Rubio, who narrowly finished second in both South Carolina and Nevada, has received a cavalcade of endorsements in recent days as Republican “party elites” have increasingly rallied around him as the top alternative to Trump.
But there are not yet many signs of a concerted effort to attack Trump. Instead, reports from Politico and other news organizations suggest that potential conservative donors are largely sitting on the sidelines. Remarkably little advertising money has been spent against Trump so far, especially given his position in the race. Rubio has also conspicuously avoided attacking Trump.
Here are a few other stray thoughts about the Nevada result — written early in the morning from New York and not, unfortunately, the New York-New York Hotel and Casino:
- There were a lot of reports about voting irregularities. While it’s hard to say exactly how widespread these were, they are nevertheless another reason to prefer primaries to caucuses — and they may put Nevada’s status as a “first four” state in jeopardy in 2020 and beyond. They don’t, however, invalidate Trump’s win. One of the functions of polling is to provide a check against profound voting irregularities, and the results in Nevada were reasonably in line with both pre-election polls and the entrance poll in the state.
- If last night’s results were great news for Trump, they were very bad news for Cruz. It’s not just that it was his third third-place finish in a row. It’s also how Cruz lost. He carried only 27 percent of the white born-again and evangelical Christian vote, behind Trump’s 41 percent. Cruz also lost this group in New Hampshire and South Carolina. But, unlike in South Carolina, Cruz also trailed among “very conservative” voters in Nevada, 34 percent to 38 percent for Trump. Finally, Cruz continues to struggle among “somewhat conservative” and moderate voters. He earned just 16 percent and 7 percent among those groups, respectively, according to the entrance poll.
- How about Rubio? Well, he just got blown out by Trump in a state that was once thought to be the most favorable for him of the first four contests. He’ll also have to suffer through a few news cycles of mockery over his second place “victories.” The good news for Rubio: He beat Cruz for the second state in a row. No, second place is not winning, but Rubio would have improved chances against Trump in a smaller field, and the fastest way to shrink the field is to beat Cruz. Rubio did beat his polling average for the third time in four states, although there were no Nevada polls conducted after South Carolina.
- Did Trump win Hispanics in Nevada? You can be sure that Trump will tell us that he did! There was a lot of nerd-fighting over who won the Hispanic vote in the Democratic caucuses in Nevada, and we suspect there will be some over the Republican caucuses as well. Indeed, the entrance poll had Trump beating Rubio 45 percent to 28 percent among Hispanics. But keep in mind the sample size on that result is somewhere between 100 and 200 people. That means the margin of sampling error for the Hispanic subgroup is near +/- 10 percentage points (or even higher). Perhaps more importantly, just 8 percent of Republican voters were Hispanic (or 1 percent of the Nevadan Hispanic population), and they are not politically representative of the larger Hispanic community.
- One not-so-great sign for Trump: As was also the case in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, he didn’t perform as well with late-deciding voters. Instead, Rubio easily won the plurality among people who decided who to vote for in the past few days, according to the entrance poll. But in Nevada, The share of late-deciders was considerably lower than in the first three states, and Trump dominated among voters who decided early.
Last but not least, we should keep in mind that this was just one state. Trump won 46 percent of the vote, blasting through his 33 percent (or there about) ceiling, right? Not totally. It’s been clear for a while that Nevada Republicans loved Trump. As far back as October, polls have had Trump beating his national averages in Nevada. Meanwhile, Morning Consult polls, which have had Trump averaging 36 percent nationally over the course of the Republican primary, had Trump at 48 percent in Nevada. Believe it or not, every state is not the same! Recent polls have shown Trump getting anywhere from 50 percent of the vote in Massachusetts to 18 percent in Utah. It’s certainly possible that Trump uses his momentum from Nevada to propel him to even greater heights. But sometimes what’s billed as “momentum” is really just demographic and cultural variance among different states.
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Tuesday, February 23, 2016
What’s Going To Happen In Nevada Tonight?
For this week’s 2016 Slack chat, we preview tonight’s Republican caucuses in Nevada. The transcript below has been lightly edited.
micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): It’s Republican caucus day in Nevada!
clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): Sho is.
micah: You’re still in Vegas, right, Clare? Have you gambled away your plane ticket home?
natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): People are voting as we type this! Except they’re not — because voting in a caucus is a huge pain and the caucuses don’t start until tonight.
clare.malone: I am still in Vegas, a city that very much appears to not know there is an election today. Like most of America, probably.
harry (Harry Enten, senior political writer): I, for one, look forward to a completely inept state party running a caucus where they will record votes on the back of an envelope, take pictures of those results and send those pictures into headquarters.
natesilver: Nevada: the state where you have no idea who’s going to win before the caucus, and also no idea who won after the caucus.
micah: Donald Trump is going to win, right? So sayeth our forecasts.
harry: Well, I think almost everybody thinks that Trump is going to win. Two reasons for that: Limited polling information suggests as much and most voices on the ground, like my good ol’ friends Jon Ralston and Nick Riccardi, say the campaigns’ internal polls say the same thing. But the turnout is going to be excruciatingly low, which increases the chances that the polls could be wrong.
clare.malone: So we have a couple more second-place “victory speeches” to look forward to!
harry: The 3-5-2-2 strategy looks good.
micah: Marco Rubio’s the favorite to finish second?
natesilver: Let’s not pretend that we have any idea. I mean, really. Look at the confidence intervals in our “forecast.” It’s basically saying ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
clare.malone: OK, who does well if there’s bigger turnout? “Bigger” in a relative sense, given last time’s turnout was 33,000 or so.
natesilver: The smaller the turnout, the more potential for a surprising outcome. I don’t doubt that Nevada is a pretty good state for Trump. But if turnout is like 2-4 percent of the voting-eligible population, there’s a large element of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ involved.
micah: Clare, do you have any sense from being on the ground in Nevada of whether turnout will exceed these very low expectations?
clare.malone: I do not think it will exceed. I went to a Rubio rally the other night and talked to people who were undecideds, and one of the women said she caucused last time but very likely wouldn’t because it was confusing and seemed to her a little “corrupt.” But more broadly, and here I will make a SHAMELESS PLUG for a piece I wrote, but one of the bigger groups that turned out last election in Nevada were Mormons (25 percent of the electorate), most of whom voted for Romney. Political scientists I talked to said that that number is probably going to be way lower this year. People are split, Mormons included, and there’s just less enthusiasm for spending your Tuesday night at a caucus. Nevada still doesn’t have the pride that Iowa has about its caucuses — they’re a new beast!
micah: Even if LDS turnout is a bit lower, they could still prove decisive. Which way do you think they’ll go? Do we have any idea?
clare.malone: I think the LDS vote is very much split and there are good arguments for Ted Cruz or Rubio. And yes, some Mormons will vote for Trump. Rubio has more of the sheen of a traditional conservative, which, in general, the Mormon community has liked in the past. And Rubio’s immigration record is actually a boon, given that Mormons are more liberal on that issue than most Republicans (they spend a lot of time abroad in their missions, which is a factor that comes into play).
On the Cruz side of things, his Constitutional conservative thing plays well, given that it’s a theological tenet of Mormonism that the Constitution is divinely inspired. And he’s been trying to pick up some of the Rand/Ron Paul libertarians — also a Mormon contingent in that ideological aisle.
So, I think it’s going to be an interesting little slice of the pie to watch tonight.
natesilver: Nevada might be a pretty good state for either Rubio or Cruz if not for the fact that Trump literally has his name in lights on a building there. And there are certain parochial interests in Nevada. In Morning Consult’s polling of all 50 states, Trump’s top two states were Nevada and New Jersey. Guess what they have in common? (Although, to be fair, there’s no gambling at the Trump hotel.)
micah: What explains that, though? Is that just name recognition? Or are people like, “Well, that Trump hotel is top-notch … he should be president!”?
clare.malone: Nevada is coming off a huge housing crisis, and I think a lot of people are ready to receive that Trump message of “throw the bastards out, overhaul the system.” And he’s also, might I say, a little Vegas himself? So it might be a bit cultural.
harry: How is there no gambling at Trump’s hotel? Here’s what I know: Turnout in 2012 was just over 30,000. Turnout in 2008 was around 45k. Those were both on Saturdays. This is a Tuesday night.
clare.malone: What’s on TV on Tuesday night? That could be key. Shit, guys, “NCIS” is on. Ballgame over.
micah: So what are the stakes? This feels a little low stakes to me, tbh, but is that just because Nevada is hard for the East Coast media to cover — there’s little polling and results won’t come until midnight Eastern time at the EARLIEST — so they’re downplaying the contest?
harry: I think if Trump wins, the train continues. If Trump loses, the media will cover it big time. The reason? It’s the same as always: The media wants a contest. Plus, it’ll show Trump has a weakness in caucuses and potentially out West in general.
natesilver: If Nevada had its act together and held a primary, the stakes would be higher.
micah: Nate, you’re really coming off as anti-Nevada.
natesilver: I love Nevada! I think Nevadans should have the opportunity to vote in a primary. But the caucus is a hard event for the media to cover, and also hard for it to set expectations between the lack of polling and the low turnout.
micah: “Reno 911!” is an all-time great show.
clare.malone: What if Rubio finishes a strong second (whatever that means), that’s good, no?
harry: Well, Rubio wants to get to a one-on-one against Trump ASAP. So anything that helps him do that is helpful.
clare.malone: Keeps the people who have been endorsing him over the last few days happy. My inbox has been, I would say, 40 percent press releases from the Rubio campaign telling me which congressman believes in Marcomentum.
natesilver: Rubio finishing ahead of Cruz would be not unimportant. If you’re filling in Cruz’s map, then other than the South, the next place you might expect him to do well is in Western caucus states: libertarian-ish, low turnout. If he finishes third in a Southern state, then finishes third in Nevada, the map looks even tougher for him than before.
clare.malone: Cruz had Glenn Beck out here stumping for him — bringing in the big guns. I think Rubio seems pretty confident. He’s out of the state already, I believe. On to Minnesota and Michigan.
harry: Cruz’s map is essentially Reagan’s from 1976. Win in the West and the South. But it’s unclear — after South Carolina and recent polling — that he can do either.
harry: Can we talk about John Kasich for a second here?
clare.malone: Always. He’s in the South this week!
harry: He’s not in Nevada.
clare.malone: Nope.
harry: How is he running a national campaign?
clare.malone: He’s in Mississippi and Georgia, I believe.
harry: He didn’t run in Iowa. He’s not running in Nevada. He sorta campaigned in South Carolina.
clare.malone: I think he’s running for VP. Which to me, means you need to stay in for a while.
natesilver: I want to pick apart one more thing on Rubio, though. Rubio actually spent a fair amount of time in Nevada earlier in the campaign. He’s got a lot of state legislator endorsements.
clare.malone: The lt. governor of the state is Rubio’s campaign chair. That helps.
harry: And he has the endorsement of Dean Heller, the Republican senator from that state.
natesilver: At some point, there was talk about how Nevada could be Rubio’s first victory. When did that stop? Did his campaign conduct a bunch of polling and conclude “oops, Trump”? Or are they doing a really, really good job of lowering expectations?
micah: Yeah, I think it would be pretty easy to argue that if Rubio doesn’t do well in Nevada, maybe even win, it’s a sign of something wrong. One thing we know for sure: The Rubio campaign has maybe done the most amazing job of managing expectations in the history of U.S. presidential elections.
natesilver: Ehh, I’m not sure about that, Micah.
micah: Nate, the Republican Party elite is consolidating around Rubio and he hasn’t won a single state — or even come particularly close!
natesilver: Usually the party consolidates around a candidate during the invisible primary before voters have weighed in at all. Basically, Rubio just won the invisible primary after the visible primary started. Which is, uh … a little different.
micah: But I don’t think that happens if expectations weren’t managed as they have been.
natesilver: Well, Rubio miserably underperformed expectations in New Hampshire. And the party stuck with him then.
micah: But the race didn’t start with New Hampshire. If Rubio’s third-place finish in Iowa wasn’t perceived as such a boon …
natesilver: If “the party” had been reading FiveThirtyEight, they’d have gotten behind Rubio in 2013!
harry: The only candidate besides Rubio left in the race that most party elites would even think of getting behind is Kasich, and Kasich isn’t really running a national campaign. That’s why after Jeb Bush left we are seeing the consolidation.
Bush was holding these guys back.
micah: For sure, but I think that consolidation behind Rubio is the result of two main factors: 1. Every other candidate sucks (from the GOP elite’s POV), and 2. Expectations spin by the Rubio folks. It was just all well executed.
clare.malone: Maybe it’s less expectations and more practicality masquerading as expectations?
micah: Yeah, maybe it’s both.
clare.malone: Because to me, the Rubio campaign’s strongest argument behind the scenes is, “Hey, our guy will look like a relatively normal Joe to the general electorate. You cannot say the same for Cruz, despite all his resources, and you, Mr. fill-in-the-blank-congressman, just need to make a decision now of practicality. Rubio is the “love the one you’re with” candidate.
micah: Alright, let’s get back to Kasich before we wrap. Let’s posit for a second that he’s not running to be Veep. Does he have any path to the nomination? Or would he be in Nevada if he had a path?
clare.malone: I’m not sure he has a path, but he would need to do well in Ohio and Michigan.
harry: He’s trailing Trump in a Quinnipiac poll out this morning by 5 percentage points in Ohio, and his supporters are far less likely to say their mind is made up.
natesilver: It’s hard to think Kasich has any path at the nomination. He’s running in the “establishment lane,” too, but he has very little establishment support. No endorsements of any kind since January. No endorsements by someone outside of Ohio since September.
micah: Penultimate question: Kasich’s message (“let’s all come together”) is basically the opposite of Trump’s, so if you don’t like Trump’s message, you probably think having Kasich on the national stage is good for the country. But Kasich also pulls support more from Rubio than from Trump, so the longer Kasich remains in the race the more of a problem he becomes for Rubio. So if you’re anti-Trump, do you want Kasich in the race and on the debate stage to offer a different vision of what the GOP should be? Or do you want him gone?
clare.malone: Honestly, who outside of the people of New Hampshire and us know what John Kasich’s message is? I think he’s a bit of a nonentity in many ways, nationally.
harry: Call me ruthless, but you want Kasich out now if you don’t like Trump. Look, I understand the Kasich frustration. Here’s a guy who has been in politics pretty much all of his life. He’s offering a different message. At the end of the day, though, you got to know when to fold. And Kasich has no infrastructure and not that much money.
natesilver: Yeah, this is an easy question. If you want to stop Trump, you want Kasich out.
micah: Final question: Besides the topline result, what one thing will you be watching for in Nevada tonight?
clare.malone: Turnout, I guess, to see if there’s any surprise organizing that was going on. But I mean, I might be watching “NCIS,” so not sure I’ll check in on this whole presidential election thing.
natesilver: I’ll be watching for how badly the Nevada GOP bungles the vote counting. Otherwise, yeah, this is a topline-result kind of contest. There will be entrance polling, but with such a small turnout in a quirky state, I’m not sure how many inferences it will allow us to make.
micah: Take us home, Harry.
harry: I’ll be watching to see if Rubio finishes ahead of Cruz again. If that happens, the movement to crown Rubio as the anti-Trump will move even faster.
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Bill Self Is Finally Warming Up To The 3-Pointer
During Kansas’s win over Oklahoma on Feb. 13, the Jayhawks attempted 26 3-point field goals, tying a season high against Division I competition. Across college basketball, 2-point field goals are at an all-time low, with D-I teams attempting about 35 percent of their field goals from beyond the arc. Today, the three accounts for a greater proportion of points than it has since at least 2002.
When viewed through that prism, the 48 percent perimeter rate in KU’s victory appears normal, if a little above average. But if one considers that Bill Self has been the Jayhawks coach for the past 13 seasons, that same percentage might cause a double take.
Self is one of the finest coaches in the college game’s modern era. He has coached the Jayhawks to 11 straight Big 12 regular-season titles, won an NCAA title, reached another Final Four and seen 13 players leave Kansas as first-round draft picks. But there is a constant for each of those seasons spent in Lawrence: Self does not like 3-pointers. He has continually waved the anti-threes banner, defending the bygone era when a 21-foot shot was a long 2 and the only recorded three-point plays were and-1s.
“What is so interesting about Self,” says ESPN analyst and tempo-free guru John Gasaway, “is not that Kansas doesn’t shoot threes — there are coaches whose teams attempt fewer — but that his squads are steady in how few they attempt. Their 3-point attempts percentages never waver.
“He is yelling ‘Stop!’ and is clearly trying to stand and thwart this Steph Curry NBA history. None of this is for him.”
Self wasn’t always such a threetotaler. His last two Illinois seasons were filled with players who would consistently connect from deep, and those squads’ rates ranked within Ken Pomeroy’s top 100 database. But something clicked within Self when he swapped high-major conferences. “He came to Kansas and immediately shut the faucet off,” says Jesse Newell, who covers the Jayhawks for the Kansas City Star and who in jest initiated a #freethe3 Twitter movement last season.
During the 2003-04 season, his first at Kansas, only 29.2 percent of the team’s field goals were from beyond the arc, and the needle has barely moved since, rising as high as 32.4 percent and dipping to 26.1 percent. As Self mentioned last February, “Based on our history and the success that we’ve had with our shot selection over the years, I think 30 percent is a pretty good number for us.”
Self prefers his offense be run through the Jayhawk bigs, which means either high-lows between the power forwards and centers, big-to-big passing or an inside-out game — that is, look to score within 10 feet of the hoop and, when need be (i.e. when doubled or facing the raking hands of pesky smaller defenders), kick to the perimeter for an open look. For Self, good offense is getting the ball as close to the rim as possible. And that is fine — the best shot is often the one with the highest chance of going in.
When Self coached the Morrii or Darnell Jackson, this strategy made sense. But then the type of big Self featured as an offensive anchor up and vanished. Perry Ellis, a senior at Kansas this season, will go down as one of the all-time KU greats, but the three-year starter and Sunflower State native is more of a hybrid big than the traditional Self-style bruiser. Ellis is capable of scoring in the post, but he is equally gifted facing up, dribble-driving from the top of the arc or pulling up from the elbow. The high-low game has worked in spurts and is still used as a framework, but not with the same effectiveness it showed in the past. Jamari Traylor, Landen Lucas and Cheick Diallo are no Thomas Robinson or Jackson.
According to Hoop-Math.com, since the 2011-12 season (and not including 2016), roughly 37 percent of Kansas’s half-court attempts were at the rim. This season, that rate has dropped to 34 percent. To the college basketball observer, this change doesn’t seem that substantial, but to Self, it is another sign the game he has controlled for years is teetering on the verge of change. “He wants to get Kansas back to the glory days of old,” says Newell.
During the Jayhawks’ NCAA tournament loss to Wichita State last March, Self was particularly apoplectic. KU had attempted five 3-pointers before the second media timeout (making only one), and according to Newell, Self laid into his squad: “He asked them, ‘All you guys want to shoot threes — how soft are you?’ For Self, it’s a mindset, but it does have a subconscious impact on his players.”
Not that Self confines this mindset to the sideline:
- “[Making 3s is] fool’s gold … You want to [make 50 percent of threes], but if that’s what you play to, then you’re not going to be able to hang your hat on that if you play a team that takes away the threes and forces you to score inside and things like that, and you can’t do it. You’ll end up going home sad … That’s the name of the game, in my opinion, is getting easy baskets and eliminating easy baskets. And we’re not doing near a good enough job of doing that inside.” (February 2015)
- “I probably changed too much last year … obviously there the last half of the season, we were an outside-in-type team. We still wanted to play through our bigs, but not like we have in the past. I don’t think that we ran near as good of offense last year.” (May 2015)
- “When we make shots, we relax defensively … I think we lost a little bit of energy or a little bit of focus defensively when we made shots.” (November 2015)
Like Phil Jackson’s Triangle, Self’s philosophy on threes informs his philosophy on the game as a whole, and that bedrock isn’t going to change easily. “When highly successful coaches adapt and succeed, like win a championship, we say they adapted to their players,” Gasaway says. “Self does not adapt to his players.”
Players notice. Conner Frankamp was a talented shooter who, after playing one season at Kansas, abruptly chose to transfer to Wichita State. Mitchell Ballock, one of the best long-range marksmen in the 2017 class, recently spurned a Kansas offer and committed to Creighton, saying, “At the end of the day, I was looking for the best situation for me that would let me excel as a player. I just really believe Creighton gives me the best opportunity to do that.”
This season, though, Self’s hand has been forced. His team is just too good from beyond the arc to do anything but fire off threes. Wayne Selden is a 6-foot-5 wing and Big 12 player of the year candidate. Selden has limitless range, is strong enough to take a bump as he rises from deep and shoots 41.9 percent on 5.2 threes per game. Self likes to pair Frank Mason and Devonte’ Graham — roughly a third of the Jayhawks’ lineups feature the jet-quick guards — because they can either break down the defense off the dribble and find open Jayhawks or stop on a sneaker-squeak and connect. The two make a combined 40.2 percent of their threes on 7 attempts.
Brannen Greene, who barely leaves the bench, may be Self’s best shooter — he sees action in just 27.4 percent of the team’s minutes yet connects on 53.8 percent of his threes, an automatic threat when he spots up in the corner. Even Ellis, who epitomizes Self’s paint-scoring hopes and dreams, has expanded his offensive repertoire: He has attempted 48 threes, a career high, and is converting at 47.9 percent. He’s developed into a skilled pick-and-pop 4, freeing the interior for dribble penetration from Mason and Graham.
According to Synergy Sports, Kansas ranks fourth nationally with 1.25 points scored per possession on those that end with a 3-point attempt, the most ever for a Self team. The D-I leader, though, is Oklahoma (1.27), and therein lies the rub. Fans would like Kansas to resemble the Sooners, to lighten the rigidity of the offense and give the players more freedom. Buddy Hield is a delight to watch, a guard seemingly without conscience whose game, which includes his ability to shake free a defender to not only attempt but make threes, is Curry-esque. But picture Hield in a Jayhawk jersey (it could have happened) and there is no way the senior guard would have attempted 224 threes by late February. He would likely be a different type of player — still great, but not this transcendent from the perimeter.
Close observers see Self taking baby steps toward acknowledging that for this 2016 squad to fulfill its destiny, he has to change. During nonconference play, 31.8 percent of the team’s attempts were 3-pointers. For the first eight Big 12 games, that rate slightly increased (to 33.3 percent), but since the late January loss to Iowa State, the KU offense has undergone a revolution — it’s now at 40.5 percent. The squad has gone 7-0 during that span, and for perhaps the first time in his Kansas tenure, Self has realized his team is simply too talented from the perimeter to maintain a stranglehold on the offense.
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Rubio And Cruz Need The Mormon Vote In Nevada
NORTH LAS VEGAS — The people lined up on stage waiting for Marco Rubio to arrive at the Texas Station casino in North Las Vegas on Sunday night looked like a phalanx of soldiers dressed by Men’s Wearhouse, and the Florida senator liked the way they looked up there, I guarantee it.
The assembled were the living, breathing references section on Rubio’s résumé, personifications of the steady stream of endorsements that keep coming in for him — despite his perpetual second place-ness to Donald Trump — now that Jeb Bush has departed. Before the candidate took the stage, speakers included a senator, a congressman, a “Pawn Stars” star and a former New Kid on the Block (hint: the Wahlberg that’s not Mark); all were marshaled to and from the mic by an energetic man in rimless glasses with sandy-blond hair, Lt. Governor Mark Hutchison.
Hutchison is, among other things, the chair of Rubio’s Nevada campaign and a prominent member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. These two facts are not unimportant in the context of today’s Republican caucuses in Nevada. Mormons are only 4 percent of Nevada’s population, but they have exercised outsize influence in the state’s past two caucuses, accounting for 25 percent of Republican participants in 2012 and 26 percent in 2008; Mitt Romney, America’s most famous Mormon, won their vote by 88 and 95 percent, respectively.
But there is no Romney on the ticket in 2016, meaning the Mormon vote is seen as a prize among the Republican candidates, with Rubio and Ted Cruz each making gambits. The same night Rubio stumped amid the slot machines, Cruz was introduced at a rally in Henderson, Nevada, by radio personality Glenn Beck, who got a cheer from the crowd when he said he was Mormon. “Well that’s a very different reaction,” he said.
The Mormon community makes up a small slice of the electoral pie, but their reach is significant, according to Quin Monson, a political scientist at Brigham Young University who has studied the community’s voting habits. “In caucus situations where it’s a little more effort and civic responsibility and organizing ability, this is where the Mormons can be particularly effective,” he said.
Caucuses involve standing up and stumping for a candidate, and that, said David Campbell, a political scientist at Notre Dame and Monson’s co-author, is a natural fit for members of the LDS Church. “Mormons as a group are very comfortable with public speaking; that’s a regular part of the faith,” he said, citing the rotating talks given at weekly church sermons by members of the congregation. “The mission experience just kind of ramps that up,” Campbell added. “You’ve either spent 18 months or two years of your life approaching complete strangers.”
In 1960, John F. Kennedy won close to 80 percent of the Catholic vote in his race against Richard Nixon, according to estimates. By the time 1972 rolled around, Nixon won 52 percent Catholics. The world changed in those 12 years, and Catholics went from being identity-politics voters to those grappling with the issues-based implications of their faith in public life. While Mormons are overwhelmingly Republican, they are generally not knee-jerk party-liners, according to Monson, who called them “conservative with a twist.” Campbell noted that time spent overseas doing mission work means “Mormons as a group are actually more cosmopolitan than you might think.” That makes whatever way their vote swings this election an object of certain fascination.
There isn’t polling data that tells us which way Mormons might be leaning in this year’s Republican primary, but thanks to Trump’s something-there-is-that-doesn’t-love-a-wall campaign, hard-line rhetoric on immigration and refugees has become something of a staple in this campaign, and Mormons hold nuanced views on immigration. “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is concerned that any state legislation that only contains enforcement provisions is likely to fall short of the high moral standard of treating each other as children of God,” a 2011 statement from the Mormon Church read. “The Church supports an approach where undocumented immigrants are allowed to square themselves with the law and continue to work without this necessarily leading to citizenship.”
This stance is reflected by split Mormon public opinion on immigration. A Pew survey published in 2012 showed that 45 percent of LDS Church members thought immigrants strengthened the country and 41 percent said they were a “burden.” This tracks with the general public’s views on immigration, but not Republicans’; according to a 2015 Pew survey, 43 percent of Republicans were more likely to vote for a candidate who would deport all illegal immigrants. In October, in the midst of the Syrian refugee crisis, the Church released a letter expressing support for those fleeing. “It didn’t mention Trump by name, the Church is very careful,” Monson said. “But the timing was unmistakable.” Harassed and misunderstood for over a century — their founding father was killed by an angry mob, after all — Mormons are acutely sensitive to the plight of the outsider.
Rubio’s past attempts at immigration reform could make him a favorite with Mormons, but Cruz’s ardent Constitutionalism is a boon in the LDS community as well; it is a theological tenet of the religion that the Constitution was divinely inspired. “You will often find Mormons talking about the Constitution in very reverential terms,” Campbell said. “That’s why the term ‘Constitutional conservative’ resonates so well.” (Utah Senator Mike Lee, also a Mormon, has built a career on this foundation.)
Rubio himself went to a Mormon church for a time when his family lived in Nevada. While he didn’t explicitly bring that up at the Sunday night rally, he did spend an inordinate amount of time (for a stump speech) pointing out how many family members were present and detailing the Las Vegas chapter of his life. “I’d never seen mountains before and they looked like cardboard cutouts,” he said of getting off the plane from Miami. “My skin had never been so dry.”
The establishment on the stage behind him laughed politely. At about the same time, “Mitt Romney” started trending on Facebook: Rumors were flying that America’s most famous Mormon would soon endorse Rubio.
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Significant Digits For Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2016
You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the telling numbers tucked inside the news.
2 stars
Starbucks is reconfiguring its rewards program. As of April, customers in the loyalty program will earn two Starbucks “stars” for every dollar spent, rather than one star per visit. I’m no coffee mathematician, and my coffee comes from a bodega, but I think Starbucks drinks cost like $18.50 per, so I thought “stars” will be easier to come by. But the Twitterverse has done the math, and found that it’s much tougher for many to earn rewards under the new scheme. [USA Today]
13 bald eagles
Thirteen bald eagles were found dead in eastern Maryland. Authorities believe they may have been poisoned, possibly by a chemical sprayed on a field, or by a poison meant to kill rodents. There is a $2,500 reward for information related to the case. [Insert “Make America Great Again” joke here.] [Washington Post]
25 years
Labrador retrievers are America’s best best friends. The breed took the top spot on the most popular list last year, according to registrations with the American Kennel Club. It was the 25th consecutive year of their reign. Only four other breeds — the Boston terrier, the beagle, the poodle and the cocker spaniel — have held the most-popular distinction, since 1935. [American Kennel Club]
37 films
Leonardo DiCaprio, who appears to be on his way to receiving his first Oscar on Sunday, has appeared in 37 films over 24 years. The standard lines on Leo have often been “it’s about time,” “he deserves it,” “just give him the statue already,” and so on. But my colleague Walt Hickey found that, if Leo wins, he’ll have had just the 33rd most successful pre-Oscar career of 90 winners tracked. [FiveThirtyEight]
40 percent
Single women voters will be hugely important this cycle, Rebecca Traister argued. Their numbers are growing, bringing “massive social and political implications.” In 2012, unmarried women were 23 percent of the electorate, and for the first time it’s expected that a majority of women voters will be unmarried. However, last presidential-election cycle, 40 percent of single women had not registered to vote. “This is partly because of the very obstacles that single women need social policy to account for,” Traister wrote. [The Cut]
$49
Amazon has raised the limit on what you have to spend to qualify for free shipping, from $35 to $49. The move is seen as a nudge to get customers to sign up for the company’s Amazon Prime service. No word on when the company’s drones will be ready to deliver a burrito on an hour’s notice through my sixth floor apartment window at 3 a.m. on a Tuesday morning. [Fortune]
15,000 houses
Speaking of Starbucks, in one of life’s small but surprising victories, it turns out there are more historic house museums in the U.S. than there are Starbucks locations. There are 15,000 such museums, like the former home of Edgar Allen Poe in the Bronx. There’s only one problem: Way more people visit Starbucks than the museums. More than half of the historic house museums receive fewer than 15 visitors per day. Take that grande soy latte to go and visit a famous person’s birthplace, would you? [Urban Omnibus]
$3 million
Marlene Ricketts, of the billionaire Ricketts family that owns the 2016 World Series champion Chicago Cubs, donated $3 million to a super-PAC devoted to derailing the presidential run of Donald Trump. The group, called Our Principles PAC, is run by a former adviser to Mitt Romney. Amazingly, and consistent with the coming end of a 108-year curse, Trump spilled no vitriol on the Cubs via Twitter yesterday. [The Hill]
$130 million
Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign — RIP! — burned through $130 million, with precious little to show for it. That figure included $94,100 on “clubbing,” $15,800 on “valets,” and $4,837 on “pizza.” To be fair, Jeb, that is exactly the same amount I spent on pizza last year. Please clap. [New York Times]
2.74 billion yuan
A movie I had never heard of until yesterday has taken in the equivalent $420 million in just 11 days. The picture, called “The Mermaid,” directed by Stephen Chow, is now China’s highest-grossing film. It looks … OK? [The Guardian]
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Monday, February 22, 2016
FiveThirtyEight’s Final Oscar Picks
After this weekend’s International Press Academy awards — commonly referred to as the Satellites — the FiveThirtyEight model tracking the Oscar race has its final data, and we can definitively talk about the state of the race for Sunday’s Academy Awards.
Interactive:Our elections-style Oscar model looks at the predictive power of film awards over the past 25 years and tracks this year’s nominees and winners to try to gauge the race in the big six Academy Award categories. See the state of the Oscars race »
Let’s check out how this contest has proceeded so far.
Best supporting actress
Alicia Vikander, who portrayed Gerda Wegener in “The Danish Girl” opposite Eddie Redmayne (last year’s best actor winner), has led this category for all but one week of the race.
Trailing slightly behind her is Kate Winslet, a veteran performer who won a best actress Oscar for 2008’s “The Reader.” Winslet is nominated this year for her turn in “Steve Jobs,” a movie that got a lot of love for its two leads but failed to generate the same kind of support for the film as a whole.
Vikander has pulled in about 43 percent of the points we have on the board in this category after scoring wins at the Screen Actors Guild, Critics’ Choice and Chicago Film Critics Association awards; Winslet has pulled in about 33 percent of the points, mostly from the British Academy awards, known as the BAFTAs, and the Golden Globes. So while Vikander is in the lead and scored some of the most historically predictive awards, Winslet’s recent bump from the BAFTAs could provide some momentum for Oscar votes that our model is too dumb to pick up on.
My pick: I’m sure it’s going to be Winslet or Vikander, most likely the latter. But it’s a legitimately interesting race.
Best supporting actor
This category has confounded our model. Typically, the Screen Actors Guild gives us the best look into the eventual winner; from a points perspective, a SAG win is worth about as much as winning the next two most valuable prizes, the BAFTA and Golden Globe, combined. But because Idris Elba won the SAG award for his turn in “Beasts of No Nation” but was snubbed by the Academy for an Oscar nomination, we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel for new data here.
Sylvester Stallone (“Creed”) won at the Golden Globes and Critics’ Choice awards but wasn’t nominated for a SAG or BAFTA. Mark Rylance (“Bridge of Spies”) pulled off a win at the BAFTA awards, but besides being honored by the New York Film Critics Circle, he hasn’t gotten diddly-squat among the other prizes we track. Rylance has 37 percent of the allocated points, while Stallone has 41 percent.
This race is tight, and in the absence of a consensus, I’d defer to whichever studio is running the better campaign. This year, that’s hard to judge because neither performer is competing for studio resources with nominees from higher-ticket races. “Bridge of Spies” was put out by Disney, and “Creed” was from Warner Bros. — neither of those studios has a whole lot else to campaign for this year, so it’s possible they’re lining up behind their guys behind the scenes. If we get this one right and Stallone wins, I’m not going to take a victory lap; and if we whiff it, I won’t be super surprised.
My pick: My model says Stallone, my brain says Rylance, but my heart says Ruffalo.
Best actress
Of the awards we track, Brie Larson, who anchored “Room,” has won six of the seven prizes for which she was nominated, losing only at the Satellite Awards to Saoirse Ronan (“Brooklyn”). Incidentally, those six awards are also the most predictive awards we follow. Larson has accumulated 60 percent of the points on the board in her category, the highest percentage of any nominee we are tracking, including Leonardo DiCaprio.
My pick: It would be shocking if Larson lost.
Best actor
Leo is undefeated. Of the awards we track, “The Revenant” star has won everything he was nominated for: the Golden Globe for best actor in a drama, best actor at the Screen Actors Guild, the BAFTA, the Critics’ Choice award, the Satellite Award, and the Chicago Film Critics Association award. His closest rival, Michael Fassbender, who had the second-best portrayal of Steve Jobs in the past three years, won the Los Angeles Film Critics Association award (where there are no nominees). That’s it.
My pick: Ugh, Leo.
Best director
When in doubt, roll with the Directors Guild of America. Even though George Miller (“Mad Max: Fury Road”) led in our tracking model for the majority of the race, wins at the highly predictive Directors Guild and moderately predictive BAFTAs have made Alejandro G. Iñárritu a prohibitive favorite. It looks like Iñárritu will win the first back-to-back directing Oscars since Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s victories for 1949 and 1950.
My pick: Iñárritu, but I’m going to have some silvery chrome food coloring spray in my pocket just in case Miller pulls it off.
Best picture
This is a fun year to try to pick the best picture winner.
Two films, “Room” and “Brooklyn,” failed to gain substantial traction at other award shows, earning only six nominations between them. Two of the other nominees, “Bridge of Spies” and “The Martian,” got a few more nominations, but of those, only “The Martian” managed to pull off a win — the Golden Globe for best comedy, which is the least-predictive award in this category.
The remaining films are “Mad Max: Fury Road,” “The Big Short,” “Spotlight” and “The Revenant,” each of which led the field at least once this cycle.
“Mad Max: Fury Road” won the American Cinema Editors award for best edited drama, as well as two awards from critics groups, the National Board of Review and the Chicago Film Critics Association. It has 12 percent of the allocated points from the field as a whole.
“The Big Short” had a burst of wins in the middle of the cycle but couldn’t maintain its momentum. It won the American Cinema Editors award for best edited comedy, took the prize for best adapted screenplay at the Writers Guild Awards, and had its most significant win at the Producers Guild Awards. It has compiled about 22 percent of the allocated points.
“Spotlight” dueled with “The Big Short” for the lead for some time. It won the Writers Guild Award for best original screenplay, the Critics’ Choice and Satellite awards for best film, and most significantly the Screen Actors Guild’s top prize, outstanding performance by a cast. Overall, it has 21 percent of the allocated points.
In the lead is “The Revenant,” which bloomed late. For a while, its only win (for the film) was best drama at the Golden Globes. But in the final weeks of the campaign, a massive win at the Directors Guild for Iñárritu and a best film win at the BAFTAs pushed the movie into front-runner status with 28 percent of the points.
My pick: Yeah, probably “The Revenant,” but I don’t have to like it.
More Predict The Oscars:
Do Your Oscar Predictions Stack Up? Here’s What The Data Says
Can You Read Between The Lines To Pick The Oscar Winners?
How Much Do We Need To Know To Predict The Oscars?
Can The Internet Predict The Oscars?
FiveThirtyEight’s Guide To Predicting The Oscars
Can You Fake The Academy To Predict The Oscars?
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