I don’t think the national polling at this stage is elucidating. It’s like Biden’s numbers in the Democratic primary. Once the campaigning and debates started, and people became familiar with the candidate, his poll numbers collapsed.

That’s why I’m pointing to the polling for socialism. My projection is that Trump will be very effective at making the election a referendum on socialism. It’s going to be wall to wall ads of Sanders’ praise of the USSR, Venezuela, etc. When that starts, I think Sanders’ poll numbers are going to collapse.

Oh hey, you raise a good point here. When it was Trump vs. Hillary I remember thinking this was a great test of pg's charisma theory, since it predicted Trump while nearly everything and everyone else was predicting Hillary. (Alan Lichtman's "keys" test also predicted Trump: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/23/tr...)

But what would the charisma test say about Trump vs. Sanders? I hadn't thought about that one. If it's Trump vs. Bloomberg, that's as much a no-brainer as last time. But Trump vs. Sanders? Not so clear. You say Sanders is more charismatic than Trump, but many people would disagree. In an all-American context, I think Trump is probably more charismatic than Sanders, though by a smaller margin than with Hillary or Bloomberg. To really decide that, though, we'd have to get into definitions of charisma.

Lichtman's system is interesting since, like pg's theory, it depends on fundamentals and ignores polls. Lichtman also includes charisma as one of his keys. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/05/12/th.... A quick look at his "13 keys" list suggests to me that Lichtman will probably predict a Trump win this year (even though he despises Trump), whether or not the challenger is charismatic. That's mostly because of economic indicators. If those change, the prediction probably changes. It will be interesting to see how Lichtman interprets his list this year.

Right, it's like if you found a poll asking "would you vote for a pro-Russia game show host who mocks disabled people?" with predictably negative results, ignored polls asking directly "would you vote for Trump?", and then tried to claim that as evidence that Trump could never win.

I’m extrapolating from Iowa because it provides concrete data about the nature of Sander’s plurality support. He’s clearly the #1 choice of a significant minority of democrats. But is he the #2 choice of a sufficient number of others? Or is he only winning a plurality because the anti-Sanders candidates can’t pick an alternative? (On this front, it’s critical to note that Biden was leading Sanders by large margins until he fell apart in Iowa.)

Matchups against Trump this far out are not helpful. In the months before the nomination, Clinton had up to a 10 point lead on Trump. That closed significantly once the campaigning started. The nomination is when the rubber hits the road. That’s when the attack ads will start, going into Sanders’ lengthy record of anti-Amrrican, communist sympathizing statements. That’s not baked into the poll numbers for Sanders yet. (Meanwhile, all of Trump’s bad statements are already baked into his poll numbers.)

Your own link shows that people went to Buttigieg more than 2:1 over Sanders in the second alignment.

Apart from that, the movement in vote total between the first and second rounds combines two effects, but we’re interested in just one of those. Your analysis of the second round data marks a positive count for a candidate where someone moves to that candidate in the second round from a candidate that didn’t hit the 15% threshold in the first round. (That’s the only way for someone to switch.) But it also marks a negative count where a candidate doesn’t meet the 15% threshold in a precinct and his or her supporters have to move to another candidate. We don’t really care about that second effect, because that just measures whether a candidate is able to consistently get above 15%.

What we want to predict is, as you knock out Biden, Warren, etc., where do their supporters go? You can find that out directly from the released caucus data, by looking at where supporters of those candidates go in precincts where those candidates don’t hit the 15% threshold. Most of those supporters don’t go to Bernie, which means Bernie is not their first choice or their second choice.

Polling backs that up: https://civiqs.com/documents/Civiqs_ISU_banner_book_2020_01_.... Right before the Iowa caucuses, Sanders was the first or second choice of 37% of eligible Iowa primary voters. That means for 2/3 of the party, Sanders was neither the first nor the second choice.

"Need" isn't really the issue, or, for example, Trump would have divested from his businesses. Instead, he raised prices and has attempted to host the G7 on his own property. Does he NEED that money? No. He WANTS it.

One does not become a billionaire if one believes "I have plenty of money already" is a good reason to stop accumulating wealth.

He bought all of his mayoral re-elections by ensuring his opponents were patsies. He hates talking to regular people, not to mention the poor and the brown, and from the outside would appear to be operating primarily in terms of ego. He's certainly not inclined to justify any of his positions, all of which are why he hides out in TV commercials. When he deigns to appear in public we see him get a critical beatdown like we did in last week's debates, effortlessly.

Frankly I see him as a stalking horse for Trump, a research project to see how Dems are strategizing against rich, ego-bound, New York jackasses. Rich people are bound to each other before they are bound to politics, choosing a party is just a matter of personal quirks. They got theirs, the rest is just scorekeeping and princely follies. You can bet Mark Zuckerberg is paying attention, though. He's definitely going to be bored enough to stick a plank out in 5-10 years or so.