Tag: predictions

More primaries today!  Let’s wantonly speculate!  I’m not getting paid for this, so it doesn’t matter if I’m right!

• The Republican race is what it is.  I hear Kasich might come in first in Ohio, with Rubio winning in fourth.  Whatever.  That race is their problem; I’m not worrying about it right now.
• Now, obviously, I’m basing just about all of this on the polls, and the polls shit the bed last week in rather spectacular fashion in Michigan.  It will be very interesting to see if they’re useful today or not.  I suspect part of the problem (PART!) with Michigan was Democrats who thought the election was in the bag for Hillary crossing party lines to vote against Trump.  I’m fully aware that anecdotes are not data, but my own aunt did precisely that, voting for Kasich; I’m sure she was not the only one. There was also probably a real late surge in people either switching to vote for Bernie or committing late.  One way or another, I don’t expect the first effect to be as strong this time around so I’m suspecting the polls to reflect reality a bit more closely.  But we’ll see.
• Also, keep in mind that the nature of polling guarantees that occasionally it’s gonna shit the bed.  99% chance of yes means 1% chance of no.  That ain’t likely but it’s still gonna happen once in a while.
• That said, if I wasn’t looking at polls, I’d say Hillary was in for a sweep today.  The Democrats vote in Illinois, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, and Missouri, which are all underneath the currently 86.2% white threshold where Bernie does best– he’s only won two contests in states with fewer white people than Minnesota.  Hillary has won eleven.  Illinois is 77.7% white, Ohio 83.2%, Florida 78.1%, North Carolina 71.7%, and Missouri 83.7%.  Further, Hillary is from Illinois, so I’d expect her to do quite well there.
• That said: right now it looks like Hillary is going to win Florida and North Carolina quite handily.  Ohio and Illinois are both leaning toward her but are closer, and Missouri looks to be in tossup territory.  Illinois surprises me.  Best guess:  most of the Dem votes in Illinois are going to come out of Chicago, obviously, and Chicago’s a pretty young town.  Hillary tends to win young black millennials, but Chicago may prove to be the exception here.  We’ll see.
• Every single poll aggregate shows motion in Bernie’s direction lately.
• Now, here’s the thing:  CNN and the rest of the idiots will pay attention to the number of states won here, but this is all proportional.  All of it.  If Hillary rolls up big margins in FL and NC and it’s close, regardless of the winner, in the other states, that means Hillary wins.  Bernie has a gap of about 220 delegates to close, and that’s without counting the superdelegates, who are still hugely in Hillary’s corner but will move if the momentum switches.  If Bernie loses two states big and ties or wins slightly in the other three, he still ends the night farther behind.  And we’re taking three big-delegate states off the map today.  Looking ahead, I see no chance that Bernie wins New York, so that leaves him Pennsylvania, California and New Jersey as states where he could potentially try and run up big margins to catch up.  The rest of the states don’t have the delegates to produce big swings in his way even if he wins them.  I don’t see how it happens.
• But I am wrong all the time.
• I just don’t think this will be one of those times.  The math really, really isn’t in his favor.  But we’ll see how today goes.

Wheeeee!