Bernie's Nevada Bump

FiveThirtyEight is now showing a significant bump in Bernie's chances to secure the nomination at the convention.

For the first time (at least to my recollection), the aggregate polling at that site shows Sanders at an average of 1,824 delegates at the end of the primary/caucus contests. Bernie had maxed out around 1,750 in the past, and was usually below that. Second-place finishers like Bloomberg or Biden were up in the 900-1,000 delegate range a few days ago, but are now in the 700-800 delegate range.

Oddly enough, the site shows Biden just barely winning South Carolina now, although he and Bernie have been swapping the lead back-and-forth for the past couple of weeks. They'll both likely come away from SC with equal delegates because it is so close.

Sanders is expected to crush in California now come SuperTuesday, which is just over a week away. His expected pledged delegate count is nearing 210, whereas a couple months ago it was in the 170 area. He should end up with 139 more delegates than expected second-place finisher Biden.

Texas should go heavily Sanders now on SuperTuesday. Bernie has a 40 delegate lead over Biden.

Bloomberg is still in second place in North Carolina and Virginia, although Bernie has an expected 15 delegate and 10 delegate lead over him in those races, respectively.

Warren is expected to finish second in Massachusetts, where Sanders should have an 11 delegate lead over her.

Klobuchar is expected to win Minnesota by 1 delegate over Sanders.

Sanders is expected to win Colorado by 26 delegates over Warren and Biden, who are essentially tied for second place. Both of them are likely to get delegates there.

Tennessee is tougher. Sanders is expected to win, but with only a 5 delegate lead over Biden.

Biden will likely win Alabama, with a 6 delegate lead over Sanders, who is almost tied with Bloomberg in that state.

Sanders is ahead of Bloomberg by 5 delegates in Oklahoma, which is actually pretty good because there aren't a ton of delegates there.

Arkansas is another close one, with Sanders expected to beat Bloomberg by 2 delegates.

Utah is a Sanders stronghold, and he is expected to win by 14 delegates there over Warren and Bloomberg.

Bernie also is expected to take Maine by 7 delegates over both Bloomberg and Warren.

He will also probably take all the delegates in Vermont--16 in total. Buttigieg is Bernie's main competition there, and Buttigieg may pick up a delegate if Bernie has an off day.

In American Samoa, Bernie and Biden are pretty much neck-and-neck, with Bernie expected to win by a single delegate.

Sanders will destroy everyone in Michigan, with a 39 delegate lead over second place Biden.

That's what is expected through SuperTuesday. Bernie may lose 4 states, and perhaps the American Samoa territory, but he is expected to win 12 states including all the big ones. In the states he might lose, he will essentially tie in 3 of them, as well as in American Samoa--so in those contests it is not such a big deal. He might end up winning some of those as well.

Also, note what has happened over the past week--since the debate and since Nevada. Biden is replacing Bloomberg as a likely second-place finisher, with the net effect of depressing all of Bernie's competition's delegates as Bloomberg loses steam. Buttigieg has not made inroads.

Remember, 1,990 delegates are needed to win the first-round voting at the convention. At an average now of 1,824, with second-place Biden at only 817, it's gonna be very difficult for the DNC to justify not nominating Sanders as the Democratic nominee for president in 2020. Also, for those still despairing, remember that as Sanders wins more and more states and it becomes obvious that he is the front runner, the more likely that votes for other candidates will be depressed and their constituency will not turn out or will choose to support the front runner.

In other words--excepting some disaster--Bernie can only go up from here.

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Wally's picture

BTW, I really appreciate your posting the detail on these state-by-state electoral projections, Apenultimate! Also isn't the magic number 1991????

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@Wally

I'm just condensing them a bit here. But you're welcome! Happy to do it (I'm a statistics person . . .).

The number I've seen is 1,990 delegates *is* the majority. That's what is posted at both FiveThirtyEight and Wikipedia.

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@apenultimate We'll party like it's 1999!

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Wally's picture

"To win the Democratic nomination, a presidential candidate must receive support from a majority of the pledged delegates on the first ballot: 1,991 pledged delegates"

See: https://ballotpedia.org/Democratic_delegate_rules,_2020

I wonder why 538 and Wiki say otherwise?

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mimi's picture

@Wally
in my love letter to Bernie Sanders.

48fb9570a8413fe83053df7c3599e7eb--math-jokes-math-humor.jpg

Otherwise just pray. This one works. Wink
prayer to.jpg

Bingo.

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12 users have voted.

I watched Bernie on 60 Minutes last night and his comments on Castro/Cuba could provide a huge bump in the road.

I've been trying to contact the campaign and suggest that he nip this in the bud by pointing out that the US had backed the corrupt dictator Batista which is why the Cubans initially welcomed Castro.

Already the headlines in Florida are damning to Bernie.

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"Without the right to offend, freedom of speech does not exist." Taslima Nasrin

@Fishtroller 02 Yes to that. Battista was nothing but a mob front man, and the economy stank of the most humiliating forms of sex tourism, not to mention the rampant illiteracy and peasant labor.

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"Fear is the mind-killer" - Frank Herbert, Dune

WoodsDweller's picture

@Fishtroller 02
just how much effect this particular attack is going to have. Aren't the Cuban/American Floridians mostly Republicans? Isn't Castro-phobia concentrated among the older generations?
Will this actually affect the primary significantly? In other words, how much will this influence younger Cuban/Americans and non-Cuban Latinos who may participate in the primary?
As to the general, isn't the focus the 1.4 million Floridians newly enfranchised by Amendment 4? And will they give two hoots about Castro?

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"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Albert Bartlett
"A species that is hurtling toward extinction has no business promoting slow incremental change." -- Caitlin Johnstone

@WoodsDweller

But if you google Bernie Sanders and Castro, you can see the MSM having a field day with his comments.

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"Without the right to offend, freedom of speech does not exist." Taslima Nasrin

edg's picture

@Fishtroller 02

If Bernie called for having Fidel Castro exhumed and hung from a lamppost in Havana's town square, the MSM would be having a field day lambasting him for not being tough enough on Castro and Cuba. It doesn't matter what he says on any topic -- they'll still be out to get him.

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@edg
land commandos during the Bay of Pigs raid.

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

Wally's picture

@WoodsDweller

Younger Cubans will vote in favor of Bernie.

The right wingers are indeed GOP. Dems like social welfare nets just fine.

Bloomberg will pose a problem in Fla for Bernie but not primarily because of the Cuban vote.

The Cuba stuff is a straw that the establishment is grabbing at to try to dampen Hispanic support for Bernie nationwide. It's not gonna work. The results in Nevada show how formidable a force Bernie is with Hispanics. That's not going to be reversed.

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@Wally The old anti-Castro Cuban exiles are dying off, and the younger generations just aren't nearly as invested in anti-Castroism as their parents/grandparents.

Besides, what Bernie said was not only truthful but echoed comments made a few yrs ago by this non-socialist democrat,

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Wally's picture

@wokkamile

. . . if travel restrictions and our embargo and other sanctions against Cuba ended and we got the hell out of Guantanamo.

(Not a criticism of your take but of Obama's in the video clip).

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@wokkamile @wokkamile maybe not. I for one have become extremely suspicious about talk of any other leader who "executed dissidents" since it is by now very well known just what our CIA does inducing "dissidents" to overthrow governments in countries the US is having trouble with, particularly socialist or communist ones. If a dissident is really an American CIA mole, then of course a government under siege by the CIA will jail or execute those dissidents - they all see by now that is merely a matter of survival for them. I'd read somewhere about Stalin's purges and how our CIA was indeed over in the USSR working to destabilize it, not to mention the aborted military attack planned by the US back in the early days of the USSR. Without our CIA going in to disrupt, would these supposed autocrats have felt the need to jail and execute "dissidents?"

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Only a fool lets someone else tell him who his enemy is. Assata Shakur

@Fishtroller 02 Not sure how much of a factor, but might matter.

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snoopydawg's picture

@Fishtroller 02

Bernie first qualified his comment by putting Castro down and then he only praised Cuba's literacy programs. Big whoop. Bloomberg is still making shit up on what Bernie has done.

Between his flooding the air with his constant ads and attacking Bernie in many of them he is turning people off big time.

Apparently someone posted a sign on his campaign office in Flint, MIsaying eat the rich and people are tweeting back how he promoted Snyder and could fix the water situation with a tenth of what he's spending on his ads.

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3 users have voted.

Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

Granma's picture

Protection yet? Does anyone know?

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earthling1's picture

@Granma
Granma.
Rfk was 3 damn generations before. The newest gen puts him on the same plane as Lincoln, too long ago to ever happen in this day and age.
Not fearmongering, just being real.

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8 users have voted.

Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.

Granma's picture

@earthling1 at what point protection is supposed to kick in. I realize there are a lot of candidates, but they could certainly manage to protect one front runner.

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Hawkfish's picture

@Granma

I saw some beefy dude with an earpiece following him off the stage the other night.

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We can’t save the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed.
- Greta Thunberg

@Hawkfish is the beefy dude usually with Bernie.

He's a Senior adviser who looks like he could be ex-Mossad.

Or maybe you saw a different beefy guy

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NYCVG

mhagle's picture

@NYCVG

There was security at the Mesquite, TX rally but not as strict as at the 2015 Grand Prairie rally.

And last week I didn't see any big dudes around him at all.

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Marilyn

"Make dirt, not war." eyo

Hawkfish's picture

@NYCVG

To see Joe Rogan following him around!

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2 users have voted.

We can’t save the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed.
- Greta Thunberg

@Granma
there are rarely announcements about who is given a SS detail. Due to actual threats, Obama was given SS protection early inn the 2008 election cycle. Of course, HRC retains a permanent detail for life. In the 2016 election, Trump got his early, during the primary, and demanded and got one for Ivanka. Obama had to convince Sanders that he should accept SS protection. McCain in 2008 and Cruz in 2016 declined the offer, but that was not public information at the time. Biden's daughter declined protection and of course, that was never public information when she automatically qualified for it.

The Secret Service is far more stretched today than it was in '16 with the large Trump family. So, they may not be as liberal in interpreting threats as they were in '16.

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3 users have voted.

@Granma I figure once he's surrounded by Secret Service agents, he's a dead man.

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As a preface, note that what I do for a living involves wallowing around in masses of statistical analyses of data from a particular scientific domain. Something that happens during all that wallowing, with disturbing frequency, is that one gets results that, per the statistics, are simply impossible. One discovers a data item, for example, that based on our understanding of the underlying physics/chemistry/biology, had only a 0.0000000000000000000000001% likelihood of ever appearing in our results.
When this happens, there are really only three possibilities:
a. The researcher has misunderstood the system under study, and so applied the entirely wrong statistical analysis
b. The system under study has underlying but unknown mechanisms that bias the results
c. The statistician has applied the correct (or at least, best) analysis, but has "modeled" the system imprecisely and/or inaccurately

You can detect the existence of such problems when an analysis provides predictions that are simply out of bounds. For example, 538 currently gives Biden a 7% chance of receiving the most votes in California. The problem is, barring Bernie withdrawing from the race before Super Tuesday, or at least 3 other candidates dropping out, Biden has a ZERO percent chance of such a victory. ZERO. So whatever "stochastic fuzz" they've built into their simulations is just wrong.

The problem is that, generally, neither they nor we know whether their simulations are generally biased for or against any given candidate. They seem generally a bit over enthusiastic about biden, but other than that I don't know. Their model clearly allows for a few really low delegate totals for Sanders -- visual inspection of their charts makes it look like some of their simulations have bernie finishing with fewer delegates than he will actually have by the end of super tuesday. but overall? Feh. They're trying to simulate a system riddled with unknown parameters (e.g., and critically, how/when/why will any given candidate drop out?).

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4 users have voted.

The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

smiley7's picture

that data; poured over it last night. In addition to STues. He's significant polling leads in most non STues. states as well, think he's down in four and close in a few, but wider margins in the majority.

Looking to see the choice Warren makes in next debate; Charlie Cooke said this weekend, 'it's over for her,' but, will she make trouble with her newfound wealth? I see Pelosi's leadership team or some of them flailing away about losing the House and senate, blah, blah, blah; anyways better to be Bernie than all the others.

Thanks again and onward ...

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Hawkfish's picture

@smiley7

Is to point out that only Bernie has the organization necessary to run a national campaign. The rest of them are too small, and would have to rely on the DNC - which is still broke and disorganised. Bloomer might have the money, but you can’t build an organization like that by simply throwing money at the problem: you either need a certain amount of enthusiasm or time to grow, and he has neither.

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We can’t save the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed.
- Greta Thunberg

smiley7's picture

@Hawkfish

Warren bothers me still; which way will she go and i have not trusted her for a long time, years, though she's many qualities i admire and plans needing consideration; the trust issue ...

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