NBA

LeBron’s Path To The NBA’s All-Time Scoring Crown, In 2 Charts

By Neil Paine

Feb. 7, 2023, at 10:19 AM

While it has been far from a banner season for the Los Angeles Lakers, one bright spot has been LeBron James’s pursuit of an NBA record that was once considered unbreakable: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s all-time scoring mark of 38,387 career points. After James notched 27 points against the New Orleans Pelicans on Saturday, his lifetime tally of 38,352 sits just 35 points shy of Abdul-Jabbar’s record. 

Since James has scored at least 35 points in 11 of the 43 games he’s played this season (about 26 percent of the time), there is a decent chance he ties or breaks the record Tuesday night against the Oklahoma City Thunder — and he is all but certain to break it by Thursday’s game against the Milwaukee Bucks.¹ Although NBA players are usually measured more on championships and per-game output than raw totals, the scoring record will regardless be one of the shinier items on James’s long list of career accomplishments — one that truly underscores his longevity, durability and continued production, even at age 38 (and counting).

One way we can see this is by comparing James’s career points with Abdul-Jabbar’s over time, through each game of their careers. It may surprise contemporary fans to know that Abdul-Jabbar had more points through each and every game of their respective careers up until Game No. 1,120; the 33 points LeBron scored then, on Feb. 25, 2018, finally allowed him to overtake Abdul-Jabbar’s pace — and he’s never looked back since. While Abdul-Jabbar’s point total followed a gently arcing path during the late stages of his career, reflecting the normal career trajectory that sees a player’s production tail off as he ages, James’s total has steadily increased along roughly the same straight line it always has, perhaps even getting steeper in recent seasons as he approached the record number.

Thanks to his remarkable ability to defy Father Time, James should be able to chase down Abdul-Jabbar’s career scoring mark in about 150 fewer games than it took the great sky-hooking big man to originally compile it.

There is another important explanation for the difference in scoring pace between the two legends, however. By virtue of being able to skip college basketball and leap straight to the pros out of high school in 2003, James also got a sizable head start on Abdul-Jabbar, who played four years at UCLA (three on the varsity team) before being drafted No. 1 by the Milwaukee Bucks in 1969.² By the time James was the age Abdul-Jabbar was on the day of his NBA debut (22 years and 185 days), LeBron already had 8,439 career NBA points.

That’s also why, by the time Abdul-Jabbar got to James’s current total of 1,409 games, he was nearly two and a half years older than James is now, and his production was seriously slowing. But the head start of skipping college wasn’t exactly an automatic record-breaking cheat code for James, either. It’s worth pointing out that other preps-to-pros stars — such as Kobe Bryant, Kevin Garnett, Tracy McGrady and Dwight Howard — ran out of steam well before the age at which LeBron is currently maintaining his greatness. (Bryant was 37 years and 234 days old on the date of his 60-point career finale — about six months younger than James is right now.)

And besides, if his place on the timeline of basketball history gave James an advantage earlier generations lacked, it also gives him an opportunity. LeBron is currently averaging 30.0 points per game this season — well above his career average of 27.2 — and presumably has a number of good years left in the tank, especially if he plays into his 40s the way Abdul-Jabbar did. That will give him a unique chance to push the NBA's all-time scoring record to even greater heights: If Abdul-Jabbar left it in the stratosphere, James might leave it in the mesosphere or even the thermosphere. And that means this time, the record really, truly might be unbreakable for future generations of NBA stars.

Check out our latest NBA predictions.

Super Bowl LVII

The 5 Most Exciting Super Bowls Ever

Will Super Bowl LVII match up to these classics?

By Elena Mejia, Maya Sweedler and Jay Boice, Elena Mejia, Maya Sweedler and Jay Boice and Elena Mejia, Maya Sweedler and Jay Boice

Feb. 7, 2023, at 6:00 AM

There are plenty of reasons to think Sunday’s Super Bowl between the Philadelphia Eagles and Kansas City Chiefs will be an instant classic. The teams are evenly matched, led by a couple of great quarterbacks, and there is no shortage of star power on either side. But of course, if the history of the Big Game tells us anything, it’s that we have a hard time predicting which Super Bowls will turn out to be thrillers, and which will be duds. Only in retrospect can we truly quantify the games that left us on the edges of our seats until the bitter end.

And to do that, we’re breaking out what is known as the “excitement index,” using data provided by ESPN that contains every play in Super Bowl history and its associated change in win probability. We summed the net changes in win probability associated with each play to rank the Super Bowls by excitability. A full ranking can be found in the table at the bottom of the story.

The top five games are charted below. Because we’re looking at the sum of all swings, the games you see included here might not feature the most exciting individual plays (apologies to anyone who was hoping to see the Helmet Catch) or even the wildest finishes (it’s safe to read on, Atlanta Falcons fans). For the most part, they’re low-scoring, close-fought games that saw late lead changes. But out of these close-fought brawls came some of the most iconic and heart-stopping moments in Super Bowl history.

Two years before Super Bowl XXXVIII, the Panthers and Patriots were in very different places. The 1-15 Panthers, who had joined the NFL as an expansion team less than a decade prior, had one winning season in franchise history; the Patriots had just won their first Super Bowl with a first-year starter named Tom Brady. 

But by February of 2004, both teams had played their way into the big game. Entering the Super Bowl, the Panthers — with a strong ground game and tough defensive front seven — were 7-point underdogs against the Patriots, who had a rangy secondary and an emergent star in Brady. And as you might expect in a battle between two grind-it-out teams, this one didn’t start with a lot of promise. But a torrent of late scoring in both halves would see this matchup turn into the most exciting game in Super Bowl history by our metric. 

The two teams were initially locked in a defensive battle, holding one another scoreless through the first quarter. The Patriots broke open scoring after forcing a fumble at Carolina’s 20-yard line and scoring a touchdown with 3:05 remaining in the first half — the longest scoreless period to open a Super Bowl in history. That unleashed a cascade of points: The Panthers answered with a two-minute, 95-yard touchdown drive, then the Patriots needed less than a minute to drive 78 yards for another touchdown, and Carolina ended the half by kicking a field goal. By the time the dust settled, 24 points had been scored in 185 seconds, and New England had a 14-10 lead going into the game’s infamous halftime show.

The second half started off much the same as the first, with neither team finding the end zone in the third quarter. The Patriots added 7 more points in the opening seconds of the fourth quarter, extending their lead to 11, but after two consecutive touchdowns from the Panthers — the second of which was an 85-yard catch-and-run from Jake Delhomme to Muhsin Muhammad that remains the longest passing touchdown in Super Bowl History (and the biggest play of the game by win-probability swing) — Carolina had both the lead and were favored in win probability for the first time. The teams would trade touchdowns in another feverish final three minutes, and after Delhomme found receiver Ricky Proehl in the end zone from 12 yards out, they were tied at 29 apiece with 1:13 remaining in the game. It was after this touchdown that Panthers kicker John Kasay made an error that swung the win probability by 7 percentage points: He sailed the kickoff out of bounds, giving Brady and crew the ball at the 40-yard line. Brady found receiver Troy Brown on three consecutive completions totaling 46 yards, then tacked on another 17-yard completion to Deion Branch. With each completion, the Patriots’ chances rose, and as kicker Adam Vinateri’s field-goal attempt with 9 seconds left in the game sailed through the uprights, finally reached 100 percent — ending the roller-coaster ride of the most exciting Super Bowl.

If you just watched the beginning of Super Bowl XXIII, you probably wouldn’t have guessed that it ended with an edge-of-your-seat fourth quarter to make this game the second-most thrilling Super Bowl in history.

In fact, the first half was … kind of boring. The Cincinnati Bengals and San Francisco 49ers — who had met in the Super Bowl seven years earlier (in a game the Niners led wire-to-wire) — traded field goals deep into the third quarter. Cincinnati quarterback Boomer Esiason struggled against a muscular San Francisco defense, taking five sacks and passing for just 144 yards on 11 completions. His counterpart, two-time Super Bowl winner Joe Montana, was a much more efficient 23-for-36 for 357 yards, including six completions that went for at least 20 yards, but didn’t throw a touchdown until the final quarter.

It wasn’t until Bengals running back Stanford Jennings broke off a 93-yard kickoff return that either team found the end zone. But within a minute and a half, Montana drove the Niners 85 yards to tie the game at 13. Cincinnati added another field goal after a five-and-a-half minute drive, at which point it had a 3-point lead and a 72 percent chance to win the game. But as the rest of the NFL learned time and time again, any amount of time was too much time for Joe Cool. With 3:04 remaining, Montana and the Niners got the ball on their own 8-yard line and proceeded to march down the field. The drive saw several plays that produced pretty big swings in win probability — most notably a 4-yard rush from running back Roger Craig on third-and-2 and a 27-yard completion to eventual MVP Jerry Rice on second-and-20 — but it wasn’t until Montana found receiver John Taylor in the end zone from 10 yards out that the Niners actually took the lead. The 34 seconds left on the clock weren’t enough for a response from Esiason and Co. Legendary Niners coach Bill Walsh was able to retire after this game as a champion once again.

That this game ranks in the top five should come as no surprise, as it features the game-changing play that launched an entire offseason of think pieces and commentary. In the final 30 seconds of the game, should the Seattle Seahawks, trailing by 4 points and in possession of the ball at the New England Patriots’ 1-yard line, have handed the ball off to likely Hall of Fame running back Marshawn Lynch?

Well, they didn’t, and Patriots cornerback Malcolm Butler made perhaps the most famous end zone interception of all time, denying the Seahawks a second consecutive Super Bowl.

But even before that final thrilling play, Super Bowl XLIX had been pretty exciting. It was a one-possession game throughout most of the first three quarters, with the teams trading the lead. Seattle’s Legion of Boom secondary played a smart game, holding Brady to less than 6.6 yards per attempt. The Seahawks opened up a 10-point lead five minutes left in the third quarter, scoring a touchdown to go up 24-14. But the Patriots scored on consecutive drives in the next quarter, holding the Seahawks to three-and-outs in between, to kick off with a 4-point lead and 2:06 left on the clock. Quarterback Russell Wilson orchestrated a pitch-perfect two-minute drill, completing three of his five attempts (including a would-have-been-iconic 33-yard bobbled catch by Jermaine Kearse) to take the Seahawks from their own 20-yard line to New England’s 5-yard line. After a 4-yard run from Lynch, Seattle was on the 1-yard line with 26 seconds remaining. But instead of handing it off, Wilson tried to find Ricardo Lockette on a slant route that Butler read perfectly, bumping the receiver before stepping in front of the ball at the line of scrimmage. Butler’s pick created an 81-point swing in win probability, making it the single-most-impactful play in Super Bowl history. The Patriots took over, kneeled twice and walked away with the fourth Lombardi Trophy of the Brady-Bill Belichick era.

Raise your hand like Cowboys running back Dan Reeves if you remember this game! The oldest game on the list, Super Bowl V, is as famous for its series of bloopers as it is for being Baltimore Colts legend Johnny Unitas’s only Super Bowl victory.

Dallas and Baltimore both brought solid defenses to the game. The Cowboys’ defense had allowed just one touchdown in the six games leading up to the Super Bowl, while the Colts had picked off opposing quarterbacks 25 times. 

But in the Super Bowl, it was Baltimore that struggled to keep control of the ball. Unitas threw two interceptions and lost a fumble before being knocked out of the game in the second quarter with a rib injury, and replacement Earl Morrall would later throw another pick in the end zone. All in all, the Colts turned the ball over seven times in the game while scoring just one touchdown in the first three quarters. (In keeping with the “Blunder Bowl,” as it came to be known, the Cowboys blocked the Colts’ first extra point attempt.) Dallas, meanwhile, put up two field goals and a touchdown in the first half but also committed 10 penalties for 133 yards, which hamstrung quarterback Craig Morton and company. Dallas held a 13-6 lead throughout the third quarter.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/chaotic-fictional-football-coach-fivethirtyeight-74531599

As odd as the mistake-filled first three quarters were, the fourth quarter got even odder. Five of the game’s record 11 turnovers occurred in this quarter, as did one of the strangest plays in Super Bowl history. The Colts ran a flea-flicker that was tracking to pick up at least 20 yards until receiver Eddie Hinton fumbled the ball, setting off a scramble in the red zone that saw no less than a half-dozen players fail to recover. The ball rolled out of the end zone, giving Dallas the ball at its own 20-yard line. But Morton threw an interception three plays later that Colts safety Rick Volk brought down to the Dallas 3-yard line. The Colts punched it in two plays later, tying the game at 13 and giving them their best odds of winning thus far, at 59 percent.

After trading possessions, the Cowboys drove into Colts territory with less than two minutes on the clock. However, a holding penalty pushed Dallas out of field goal range and cost them 25 percentage points of win probability. The next play was even worse: Morton threw his second interception of the game, a ball that bounced off the hands of Reeves and landed in the arms of Colts linebacker Mike Curtis, who then returned the ball 13 yards to the Cowboys’ 28-yard line. In the final minute of play, it was easy money. The Colts called two runs and booted a 32-yard field goal with nine seconds remaining, finally sealing the game. It wasn’t a masterpiece by any means, but sometimes a series of back-and-forth blunders can also produce big swings in win probability — and an exciting finish.

Surprised to see the second iteration of Giants-Patriots here, rather than the first? We were, too — until we remembered that the biggest upset in NFL history remained within 4 points throughout the entire game. The rematch, four years later, was a much more back-and-forth affair. Scoring opened with a safety (of all things) after Brady was called for intentional grounding six minutes into the game. The Giants notched one more touchdown before the Patriots put up 17 unanswered points in the second and third quarters. With 11:13 remaining in the game, New England had a 82 percent chance to avenge its loss in Super Bowl XLII.

But there was a lot more game to play. The Giants kicked two field goals in the back half of the third quarter, but the fourth quarter was consumed by two long drives that both ended in punts. Down by 2 points with 3:46 remaining, the Giants started their final drive on their own 12-yard line. On the first play of the drive, quarterback Eli Manning uncorked a 38-yard pass to Mario Manningham, who made a toe-tapping catch along the left sideline to improve the Giants’ chances from 30 percent to 47 percent. Four more short completions and two gains on the ground followed; by the time running back Ahmad Bradshaw fell backwards into the end zone to put the Giants up with 1:04 remaining, Giants fans were wondering if they had left too much time on the clock for Brady.

And the Patriots did give them a scare! With under 40 seconds to go, Brady had back-to-back completions that moved the ball 30 yards. But three incompletions later, the clock hit zero and the Giants — 3-point underdogs coming into the game — were once again Super Bowl champions.

Those were just the top five Super Bowls by excitement index. Below is the full list of games, ranging from that Pats-Panthers shootout at the top to the 49ers’ one-sided rout of the San Diego Chargers in Super Bowl XXIX at the bottom. Where will Super Bowl LVII rank on the list? The entire football-following public must watch on Sunday to find out.

Check out our latest NFL predictions.

The Biden Administration

In Defense Of The Mostly Pointless State Of The Union

By Kaleigh Rogers

Feb. 7, 2023, at 6:00 AM

The State of the Union is a little like New Year’s Eve. It’s an annual tradition that’s been practiced for more than a century. It can be a great moment to pause and consider the year to come. And if you expect it to be life-changing, you’re gonna have a bad time. 

As we’ve documented here (and here and here), the State of the Union address has increasingly become ineffective when it comes to achieving its ostensible goals. It doesn’t have much impact on what policies Congress pursues. It isn’t a good opportunity for the president to address all Americans. It doesn’t even impact the president’s approval rating. But there are some caveats to all of these shortcomings, and while it might not fully do what we expect it to, the State of the Union also isn’t causing any harm. Like New Year’s Eve, you might enjoy it a lot more if you adjust your expectations.

Yes, It Rarely Impacts Legislation …

The ostensible purpose of the State of the Union is to communicate the president’s agenda to Congress. Here’s what he thinks is important. Here’s what he would like Congress to prioritize. And while the president will certainly say a lot of those things tonight, whether Congress listens is another story. Political scientists Donna Hoffman and Alison Howard have analyzed legislation passed after every State of the Union address since 1965³ to see which policy requests were partially or fully met by Congress in the year that followed. They’ve found it’s uneven at best, and on average only 24.3 percent of requests were fully enacted by Congress, with another 13.8 percent partially enacted. In some years, none of the requests were met at all. 

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/140-million-americans-live-states-controlled-democrats-fivethirtyeight-95547189

… But It Still Sets Policy Goals

While highlighting a policy goal in a State of the Union address doesn’t guarantee a president a new bill sitting on his desk a few months later, 24 percent is not nothing. Some of those goals do translate into action by Congress, particularly in years when the president’s party controls both chambers. For example, nearly half of the policy requests made by former President Barack Obama in his 2010 address were fully enacted by a Democratic-controlled Congress that year. In most years, at least some of the legislative actions requested by the president have later been enacted. And even in those rare years when they weren’t, the address still may have affected policy in terms of voter awareness — as long as it made the paper the next day. Research has shown that media coverage of the agenda laid out in the State of the Union increases public knowledge of policy initiatives. So even if Congress isn’t listening, voters might be. 

Yes, Fewer And Fewer Americans Actually Watch It …

There was a time when the State of the Union was, if not must-see TV, at least should-probably-tune-in TV. In 1993, an estimated 66.9 million viewers watched then-President Bill Clinton’s joint address to Congress, according to Nielsen. That’s about three-quarters of the more than 91 million people estimated to have tuned in to Super Bowl XXVII just a couple weeks prior. But since then, ratings for State of the Union addresses have mostly trended downward:

And the audience that does tune in is typically highly partisan: Democrats watch when a Democratic president speaks, Republicans watch when a Republican president speaks, but there’s little crossover. This means that during the address, the president is speaking live to an ever-shrinking sliver of the American population.

… But That Doesn’t Mean They Don’t Hear About It

Among the audience that does tune in are, well, journalists, and follow-up coverage of the State of the Union address can reach a wider audience. Fewer Americans get their news from live TV coverage than they used to, as they now use a variety of sources to stay informed. Thirty-nine percent of American adults still get at least some of their news from network broadcasts and cable channels, while a third get news through social media and 12 percent check national newspapers or their websites, according to a YouGov/The Economist poll conducted last year. Twelve percent also said they get at least some of their news from “Other national news websites, like Yahoo News, Axios, Vox.” As many as 13 percent of Americans get some of their news through podcasts or talk radio and 20 percent through YouTube. Preferences tend to differ by age, too. Older Americans are more likely to watch TV news, while younger Americans are more likely to catch up online or through social media.

All this to say that the message of the State of the Union can still trickle down to the American public of all ages and political stripes, even if they’re not tuning in live. 

Yes, It’s Mostly A Formality … But Maybe That’s Okay

Sure, none of these facts mean the State of the Union is a particularly effective American political tradition. The real reason it continues has less to do with any delusions of its influence and more to do with inertia. Every president since Woodrow Wilson has delivered this address to the nation around this time of year, making it one of the country’s most enduring political rituals. That’s not the most compelling reason to keep doing something, but there’s something to be said about continuity and tradition. And there are certainly more contentious political traditions that endure just because that’s the way we’ve always done it (*cough* caucuses *cough*). If the main reason the State of the Union exists is to keep some semblance of consistency in our increasingly chaotic political system, is that really such a bad thing?

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/americans-lonely-political-consequences-fivethirtyeight-politics-96858073

In this installment of “Model Talk” on the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Nate and Galen discuss a recently published assessment of how our 2022 midterm forecast performed. How did the polling averages and seat-gain projections compare with the actual results? If we said there was a 70 percent chance a candidate would win a race, did that actually happen 70 percent of the time?

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

NFL

How Massive The NFL Really Is, In 4 Charts

By Ryan Best

Feb. 6, 2023, at 6:00 AM

The NFL has had quite an eventful year. In fact, the 2022 season has been characterized by a series of controversies that, when taken together, seem like a microcosm of the criticisms and existential threats facing the league as a whole. In just the past year, there have been major stories centered around how the NFL handles (or downplays) sexual assault allegations against its star players, scary concussions, the physical brutality of the sport and the league’s racial regressiveness — especially in disadvantaging Black coaches in a predominantly Black league. 

But while it might be reasonable to expect the league to take a hit from this slew of negative attention, the NFL seems to have a Teflon-like ability to keep scandals from sticking. Fans are still watching games in droves despite all the controversies, even giving the league its highest-rated regular-season game on record this Thanksgiving. So, with the Super Bowl just around the corner, we wanted to take a few different looks at just how massive the NFL really is — and why rumors of its decline continue to be greatly exaggerated.

First, take the Big Game itself. This Sunday, tens of millions of Americans will tune in as the Kansas City Chiefs take on the Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl LVII. Every year, the Super Bowl is by far the biggest cultural event in America — or, maybe more accurately, it is the defining event for American culture. While similar events grapple with fractured media environments and the rise of streaming, millions more Americans still turn on their TVs and sit down on their couch with friends or seven-layer dip (or both) to watch the Super Bowl than any other major sports championship in the country.

But of course, football’s grip on American sports fandom expands well beyond just watching the Super Bowl. More generally, Gallup has been asking Americans about their favorite sport to watch since 1937⁴ — and for the past half-century, American sports fans have come to a pretty clear consensus: Football is king. Football first claimed the top spot from baseball in 1972, and nothing has come close to it ever since. Meanwhile, baseball is on a precipitous decline — only 9 percent of all respondents said it was their favorite sport in 2017, the lowest total since Gallup first asked the question 80 years earlier.

We also can see football’s seemingly unimpeachable position as America’s favorite sport in how many fans it is able to draw to each game. Put simply, NFL games are massively bigger spectacles than contests in any other American sport, with thousands more people showing up to NFL stadiums during football season than we see at MLB, NBA or NHL games.

The Washington Commanders drew the smallest crowds in the NFL in 2022 — with just over 58,000 fans showing up to the average game at FedEx Field — while the Los Angeles Dodgers had the biggest games of any team outside the NFL in the same year. Their games averaged more than 10,000 fewer fans than the Commanders’. Yes, some of this is a function of venue capacity — no basketball or hockey arena can contain even 35 percent as many fans as the NFL’s smallest stadium (Soldier Field in Chicago) — as well as the NFL’s once-a-week business model, which stands in contrast with other leagues’ more daily scheduling rhythms. But even so, the NFL draws big enough crowds to justify massive stadiums and make its once-a-week model worth it. Simply put, the sheer drawing power of pro football is undeniable.

And these unencumbered decades of unwavering attention and butts-in-seats have helped NFL franchises themselves grow to enormous proportions, too. Of the 50 most valuable sports franchises in the world according to Forbes’ 2022 rankings, 30 are NFL teams.⁵ The Dallas Cowboys top the list as the most valuable team in the world, with an estimated worth around $8 billion — $1.6 billion higher than the second-ranked New England Patriots. Combined, all the NFL teams on the list are worth a staggering $136.8 billion.

Any way you slice it, the NFL is simply America’s No. 1 obsession. And while it does face some real existential threats (including reports of declining popularity among the next generation of would-be fans), it’s still a behemoth that dominates America’s culture and economy. The NFL is so far out ahead of any other sport that a competitor usurping its title as America’s favorite league probably won’t happen for decades — if at all.

Check out our latest NFL predictions.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/chaotic-fictional-football-coach-fivethirtyeight-74531599

Gun Violence

Most Gun Laws Aren't Backed Up By Evidence. Here's Why.

By Maggie Koerth

Feb. 6, 2023, at 6:00 AM

In the first month of 2023, 25 people lost their lives in four mass shootings in California over just eight days. It’s a grim statistic, made all the more distressing when you consider the fact that California has one of the lowest gun death rates in the entire country. This is what a safe state looks like. 

California also has some of the strictest gun control laws in the country. And in the aftermath of those four mass shootings, new House Speaker Kevin McCarthy — who represents a district in southern California — took the opportunity to poke at the state’s firearms restrictions, saying in a press conference that federal gun control legislation would not be an automatic response to these tragedies because such laws “apparently … did not work in this situation.” 

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/tyre-nicholss-murder-finally-make-congress-police-reform-96801092

So, did California’s gun laws succeed at making it one of the safest states … or did they fail to stop a string of mass shootings? Questions about the efficacy of gun laws have gotten easier to answer in recent years as changes to federal policy have helped to bring money and people back to the field of gun violence research. But decades of neglect mean there are still lots of blank spaces — policies that don’t yet have good quality data backing them up. A recent report from the Rand Corporation that reviewed the evidence behind a variety of gun policies found just three that were supported by evidence that met the report’s quality standards.⁶ 

That fact, however, doesn’t mean other gun laws don’t work — just that the research proving it doesn’t yet exist. Scientists I spoke to saw it as an “absence of evidence” problem, stemming from long-standing, intentional roadblocks in the path of gun violence research. Even the authors of the Rand report say lawmakers should still be putting policies aimed at preventing gun violence into practice now — regardless of what the science does or doesn’t say.

“I think that the goal of the lawmaker is to pick laws that they have a reasonable hope will be better than the status quo,” said Andrew Morral, a senior behavioral scientist at the Rand Corporation. “And there’s lots of ways of persuading oneself that that may be true, that don’t have to do with appealing to strict scientific evidence.”

California doesn’t just have some of the nation’s strictest gun laws and lowest gun death rates, it’s also maybe the best state to study gun laws in, said Dr. Garen Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at University of California, Davis Medical Center. That’s because of both the way the state makes data available to researchers and its willingness to work with researchers to further the science. Wintemute is currently part of a team that is working on a randomized controlled trial of one particular California gun law — an initiative that tracks legal gun owners over time and dispatches authorities to remove their weapons if those people later break a law or develop a condition that would make them ineligible to own guns in the state. 

It’s hard to oversell what a big deal this is. Frequently referred to as the “gold standard” of evidence-based medicine, randomized controlled trials split participants randomly (natch) into groups of people who get the treatment and groups that don’t. Because of that, it’s easier for researchers to figure out if a medication is actually working — or if it just appears to be working because of some other factor the people in the study happen to share. These kinds of studies are crucial, but almost impossible to do with public policy because, after all, how often can you randomly apply a law? 

But California has been willing to try. It took cooperation from many different levels of state leadership, Wintemute said. The government was always going to slowly expand this particular program statewide, but in this case legislators were willing to work with scientists and randomize that expansion across more than 1,000 communities, so that some randomly became part of the program earlier and some later. When the study finally concludes, researchers will be able to compare these two groups and see how joining the program affected gun violence in those places with a high level of confidence. 

Most of the time, however, the scientists who study gun laws aren’t working with the kind of research methodology like this that produces strong results. Morral, along with his Rand colleague, economist Rosanna Smart, have reviewed the vast majority of the research on gun control policies done between 1995 and 2020. Their research synthesis found that a lot of what is out there are cross-sectional studies — observational research that basically just compares gun violence statistics at one point in time in a state that has a specific law to those in a state that doesn’t. That type of study is prone to mixing up correlation and causation, Smart said. There could be lots of reasons why California has lower rates of gun violence than Alabama, but studies like this don’t try to tease apart what’s going on. They end up being interpreted by the public as proof a law works when all they’ve really done is identified differences between states. 

The Rand analysis threw out these kinds of studies and only looks at research that is, at least, quasi-experimental — studies that tracked changes in outcomes over time between comparison groups. Even then, the analysis ranked some studies as lower quality than others, based on factors such as how broadly the results could be applied. For instance, a study that only looked at the effects of minimum age requirements for gun ownership in one state would be ranked lower than a study that looked at those effects in every state where a law like that existed.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/americans-view-crime-gun-violence-issues-fivethirtyeight-88152853

Following these rules, the Rand team found just three policies that have strong evidence supporting outcomes — and two of these are about the negative outcomes of policies that increase gun access. Stand-your-ground laws, which allow gun owners to use deadly force without trying to leave or deescalate a situation, appear to increase firearm homicides. Meanwhile, conceal-carry laws, which allow gun owners to carry a gun in public places, appear to increase the number of all homicides and increase the number of firearm homicides, specifically. The only laws restricting gun ownership that have this level of evidence behind them are child-access prevention laws, which have been shown to reduce firearm suicide, unintentional self-injuries and death, and homicides among young people. 

That makes gun control laws seem flimsy, but it shouldn’t, Morral said. Instead, the lack of evidence ought to be understood as a product of political decisions that have taken the already challenging job of social science and made it even harder. The Dickey Amendment, first attached to the 1996 omnibus spending bill, for example, famously prevented the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from funding gun violence studies for decades. A new interpretation of that amendment in 2018 changed that, but Dickey wasn’t the only thing making it hard to study gun violence. 

Instead, the researchers told me, the biggest impediment to demonstrating whether gun control policies work is the way politicians have intentionally blocked access to the data that would be necessary to do that research. 

“So for instance, the federal government has this massive, great survey of behavioral risk indicators that they do every year in every state,” Morral said. “And you can get fantastic information on Americans’ fruit juice consumption as a risk factor for diabetes. But you can’t get whether or not they own guns.” Not knowing gun ownership rates at the state level makes it hard to evaluate causality of some gun control policies, he explained. “And it’s not because anyone thinks [gun ownership] is not a risk factor for various outcomes. It’s because it’s guns.”

The missing data problem also includes the 2003 Tiahrt Amendment that prevents the sharing of data tracing the origins of guns used in crimes with researchers, said Cassandra Crifasi, co-director of the Center for Gun Violence Solutions at Johns Hopkins University. “So now all we can see are these sort of aggregate-level state statistics,” she said. “We can no longer look at things like, when a gun is recovered in a crime, was the purchaser the same person who was in possession of the gun at the time of the crime?” 

Recently, researchers have even been missing basic crime data that used to be reported by the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting program. Law enforcement agencies and states were supposed to be shifting to the relatively new, much more detailed National Incident-Based Reporting System, but the transition has been a catastrophe, with some of the biggest law enforcement agencies in the country not yet making the switch because of financial and logistical complications, Smart said. “The FBI has not been able to report for the last eight quarters whether homicide rates are up or down,” Morral added. 

But much of the data that’s not available at a national level is available in California, Wintemute said. “Unlike researchers in any other state, we have access to individual firearm purchaser records,” he told me — the very data the Tiahrt Amendment blocks at the national level. “We do studies involving 100,000 gun purchasers, individually known to us, and we follow them forward in time to look for evidence of criminal activity or death or whatever the outcome might be that we’re studying,” Wintemute said. 

Unfortunately, because the data is only available in California, the results of those studies would only be applicable to California — making it data that wouldn’t be considered high-quality in the Rand report. Wintemute can demonstrate if a policy is working in his home state, but not whether it works in a big, broad, existential sense. It wouldn’t count towards expanding the number of policies Rand has found evidence to support. This is something researchers like Crifasi see as a flaw in the Rand analysis, but it’s also a reason why Morral and Smart don’t think evidence-based policy is a good standard to apply to gun control to begin with. 

It’s useful to know what there is evidence to support, Morral said. “But we don’t at all believe that legislation should rest on strong scientific evidence,” he said. Instead, the researchers from Rand described scientific evidence as a luxury that legislators don’t yet have. 

“There’s always gonna be somebody who’s the first person to implement the law,” said Smart. “And they’re going to have to derive their decision based on theory and other considerations that are not empirical scientific evidence.”

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/supreme-courts-gun-ruling-remakes-gun-control-americans-85660014

Education

Why More States Don't Have Universal Pre-K

By Monica Potts

Feb. 3, 2023, at 1:07 PM

California is in the middle of implementing a plan that will create a free, universal pre-K program (known as transitional kindergarten) for every 4-year-old in the state by the 2025-2026 school year. It sounds like a big, blue state priority, but it’s also a red state one. California will join states like West Virginia, Alabama and Oklahoma in aiming to provide universal preschool programs that serve all of their states’ 4-year-olds.

Welcome to the weird, patchwork world of preschool politics. 

Both parties seem to agree that spending money to educate young children is a worthwhile mission, and there’s plenty of evidence that it is. Yet national plans for preschool programs have stalled in Congress. So, governors and state legislatures are taking the lead. During the current legislative term, at least 14 states are discussing preschool expansion.⁷ But how states choose to do that can vary widely, making uneven contributions to an already uneven system.

Over the past decade, more and more research has found that investing in early childhood education can provide long-term benefits for children that far outweigh its short-term costs. That’s especially true for children from families who cannot currently afford to send them to preschool. Policymakers, advocates and researchers hope that making these programs universal and attaching them to existing public school systems will improve their reach, prove easier for families to enroll in and improve educational quality and teacher pay.

It’s the universal part that is at issue. All but four states — Idaho, Montana, South Dakota and Wyoming — have a state-run preschool program that reaches some students, but the scope of each varies. The programs usually target specific populations, either in certain cities or certain populations of students, like children from low-income families or with special education needs.

There are several different measures of how many kids are in preschool, but each shows there are many more kids who could be there. The National Institute for Early Education Research said that approximately 39 percent of 4-year-olds were enrolled across Head Start, state-funded preschool and early childhood special education public programs nationwide during the 2020-2021 school year.  NIEER and other research and advocate groups consider a program to be universal when its enrollment reaches 70 percent of all 4-year-olds in the state.⁸

Not all preschool programs are the same, of course. In general, as with other levels of education, the advocates and researchers I spoke with defined high-quality as having:

• Teachers who are educated at least through college; 
• Opportunities for continued professional development so they can stay updated on the latest education research; 
• Small class sizes and teaching assistants so that classroom student to teacher ratios remain low; 
• And quality materials and curriculum. 

Usually, that means more money, which makes hitting those targets even more difficult for states. Especially since there won’t be a new spigot of money specifically for preschool coming from the federal government. State budgets have been recently bolstered by COVID-19 stimulus packages, but that funding will disappear over the next few fiscal years. 

From the start of his tenure, President Biden has championed early childhood education. Universal, publicly funded pre-K for 3- and 4-year-olds became part of the “social infrastructure” priorities that were included in his Build Back Better Plan. The plan initially proposed funding preschool programs through the public school systems, with the federal government picking up the entire tab in the program’s first three years. The size and scope of the plan was whittled down as it worked its way through the House, passing in November 2021 before dying in the Senate. 

Now, many governors are pressing ahead, and Democrats are using Biden’s unpassed plan as a guide. Last spring, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis signed a universal preschool bill into law. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer announced a plan for pre-K for all 4-year-olds in her state-of-the-state address last week. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker promised state-funded preschool for every 3- and 4-year-old during his inauguration in January. Similar promises have come from governors in Arizona, Hawaii, Maryland, and New Mexico. Most of these plans are in the early stages, and governors say that increasing funding and classroom capacity for the new grades is a multi-year process. 

Build Back Better was an inspiration for California’s design, as well. “In California, people were looking to what was in that package and what was coming from the federal government and decided, like a lot of other states, that we were going to make this a priority,” said Hanna Melnick, a senior policy advisor at the Learning Policy Institute. “There was long standing support and pressure from advocates in the legislature, and then the governor's office, that all came together to make that possible, even without federal funding.” The state already has a state-funded preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds that is smaller and more targeted, as well as the federally funded Head Start, which is limited to children from families living in poverty. This new program will exist alongside those.

Republican governors are taking up the cause in many states, as well. Alabama, which earns top marks from NIEER for the quality of its programs, is opening up new classrooms this year as it moves toward a goal of 70 percent enrollment. A Mississippi lawmaker has vowed to introduce a bill to expand his state’s small preschool program over the next five years. Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders listed early childhood education as one of her education priorities, the subject of an executive order she signed on her first day in office.

All this action from Republicans comes despite their party resistance to Biden’s nationwide proposal. Federalism, as always, has been the issue. Republicans did not like the quality standards that would have been mandated by Biden’s plan, as well as the shift from federal to state funding over the years of the proposal. Now, as states cobble together their own plans, state programs are likely to be quite different from one another.

Money will be one reason why. Programs that would aim to recreate Biden’s plan will be very expensive for states implementing them on their own. Alabama has been able to meet NIEER’s quality benchmarks by starting small and slowly expanding, while a program like California’s is instead focused on bringing in as many children as possible, said Allison Friedman-Krauss, as assistant research professor at NIEER. “The smaller programs are sometimes able to meet more of the benchmarks in that they're investing in fewer kids.” More of these states are trying to improve quality over time, she said.

Staffing and teacher pay will be a problem nationwide. Gov. Gavin Newsom did increase California’s education spending by 13 percent in his most recent budget, but the increase is spread across priorities that range from raises in teacher pay to boosting state college financial aid. Some districts have said it is stretching resources.

“What we're looking at is no matter how you cut it, there's just a major workforce expansion that needs to happen,” Melnick said of the California program. There’s also the question of how the expansion of California’s new transitional kindergarten program will affect an already strained workforce in other early childhood education and childcare programs, since the new program’s teachers will earn more, she said.

All of this is why many advocates hope to see the return of some or all of the components of Build Back Better. The COVID-19 recovery plans created additional money for education, but that extra money is waning just as states face a possible economic slowdown. 

The Riddler

Can You Take Down All The Bottles Of Beer?

By Zach Wissner-Gross

Feb. 3, 2023, at 8:00 AM

Welcome to The Riddler. Every week, I offer up problems related to the things we hold dear around here: math, logic and probability. Two puzzles are presented each week: the Riddler Express for those of you who want something bite-size and the Riddler Classic for those of you in the slow-puzzle movement. Submit a correct answer for either, win , I need to receive your correct answer before 11:59 p.m. Eastern time on Monday. Have a great weekend!</p> </p>">⁹ and you may get a shoutout in the next column. Please wait until Monday to publicly share your answers! If you need a hint or have a favorite puzzle collecting dust in your attic, find me on Twitter or send me an email.

Riddler Express

This week’s Express comes just in time for Super Bowl LVII:

In football, a touchdown is worth six points, a one-point conversion is worth one point, a two-point conversion is worth two points, a field goal is worth three points and a safety is worth two points.¹⁰ A team may attempt a conversion only after it has scored a touchdown, and it must decide whether to attempt a one-point conversion or a two-point conversion.

Some methods of scoring points are more common than others. So when a team has scored 14 points, it’s safe to assume that they scored two touchdowns and two one-point conversions. But that’s not necessarily how those 14 points were scored.

Using the aforementioned methods of scoring, how many distinct ways can a team score 14 points? Note that the sequence in which a team scores these points doesn’t matter here. So scoring a field goal and then a safety is the same as a safety and then a field goal (i.e., there is only one distinct way a team can score 5 points).

Extra credit: Using the aforementioned methods of scoring, how many distinct ways can a team score 28 points?

Submit your answer

Riddler Classic

From Steven Brown comes a puzzle to take down and pass around:

You and your friends are singing the traditional song, “99 Bottles of Beer.” With each verse, you count down the number of bottles. The first verse contains the lyrics “99 bottles of beer,” the second verse contains the lyrics “98 bottles of beer,” and so on. The last verse contains the lyrics “1 bottle of beer.”

There’s just one problem. When completing any given verse, your group of friends has a tendency to forget which verse they’re on. When this happens, you finish the verse you are currently singing and then go back to the beginning of the song (with 99 bottles) on the next verse.

For each verse, suppose you have a 1 percent chance of forgetting which verse you are currently singing. On average, how many total verses will you sing in the song?

Extra credit: Instead of “99 Bottles of Beer,” suppose you and your friends are singing “N Bottles of Beer,” where N is some very, very large number. And suppose your collective probability of forgetting where you are in the song is 1/N for each verse. If it takes you an average of K verses to finish the song, what value does the ratio of K/N approach?

Submit your answer

Solution to the last Riddler Express

Congratulations to Ryan Calkin of Lathrup Village, Michigan, winner of last week’s Riddler Express.

Last week, you were playing darts and trying to maximize the number of points you earned with each throw. You were deciding which sector to aim for. Your dart had a 50 percent chance of landing in that sector and a 25 percent chance of landing in one of the two neighboring sectors. Reading clockwise, the sectors were worth 20, 1, 18, 4, 13, 6, 10, 15, 2, 17, 3, 19, 7, 16, 8, 11, 14, 9, 12 and 5 points, as shown below. (For the purposes of this puzzle, you didn’t have to worry about the bullseye, the outer ring that was worth double or the inner ring that was worth triple.)

Which sector should you have aimed for to maximize your expected score?

This was a relatively straightforward computation. You could have targeted any of the 20 sectors, and for each sector you had to add 50 percent of that sector’s value plus 25 percent of the values for both neighboring sectors.

Now the average value of all the sectors was the sum of the numbers from 1 to 20 divided by 20, or 1/20*20(21)/2, or 10.5. Surely it was possible to do better than that. 

Aiming for the 16-point sector did fairly well. Half of 16 plus a quarter of 7 plus a quarter of 8 resulted in an expected score of 11.75 points. Meanwhile, both the 19-point and 14-point sectors were better targets. Half of 19 plus a quarter of 3 plus a quarter of 7 resulted in an expected score of 12 points. And half of 14 plus a quarter of 9 plus a quarter of 11 similarly resulted in 12 points.

But the best sector to aim for was the 7-point sector. Half of 7 plus a quarter of 16 plus a quarter of 19 resulted in an expected score of 12.25 points. While the individual sectors ranged from 1 to 20 points, the expected scores formed a much tighter distribution around the mean of 10.5, ranging only from 8.75 to 12.25 points.

For extra credit, you had to “fairly” (by some definition of fair for you to define) assign the point values around a dartboard in some other way. Solver Michael Greenberg worked under the assumption that you still had a 50 percent chance of hitting your target sector and a 25 percent chance of hitting either neighbor. Michael then sought to have all 20 expected values be as close as possible to the average of 10.5.

He immediately realized they couldn’t all equal 10.5, since targeting the 20-point sector (with minimal neighbors worth 1 and 2 points) resulted in an expected score of 10.75 points. But Michael still came up with the following ordering of sectors: 20, 1, 19, 3, 17, 5, 15, 7, 13, 9, 11, 10, 12, 8, 14, 6, 16, 4, 18 and 2. The 20-point and 10-point sectors both had an expected score of 10.75 points, while the 11-point and 1-point sectors both had an expected score of 10.25 points. The remaining 16 sectors were right on target, with an expected score of 10.5 points. As noted by solver Emily Kelly, this arrangement decreased the standard deviation of the expected scores by an order of magnitude. Not bad!

Solution to the last Riddler Classic

Congratulations to Bill Neagle of Springfield, Missouri, winner of last week’s Riddler Classic.

Last week, you took TikTok’s #blindletterchallenge. You were presented with five letters, one at a time. Letters were picked randomly, but you could assume that no two letters were the same (i.e., letters were picked without replacement). As each letter was presented, you had to identify which of five slots you’d place it in. The goal was for the letters in all five slots to be in alphabetical order at the end.

For example, consider an attempt at the challenge by Michael DiCostanzo. The first letter is X. Since this occurs relatively late in the alphabet, he puts this in the fifth slot. The second letter is U. He puts that in the fourth slot, since it also comes relatively late (and the fifth slot is already occupied). Next, the third letter is E. He takes a gamble, and places E in the first slot. The fourth letter is D. Since D comes before E alphabetically, but no slots prior to E are now available, Michael loses this attempt.

If you played with an optimal strategy, always placing letters in slots to maximize your chances of victory, what was your probability of winning?

Solvers Izumihara Ryoma, Austin Shapiro and Mark Girard all started with a more general version of the problem. Instead of 26 letters and five slots, they considered L letters and S slots. Let’s write P(L, S) as the probability of winning this general version of the game using the optimal strategy. Suppose the first letter presented to you is x^th in the sequence of letters, so that x = 1 for A, x = 2 for B, and so on. If you were to put this letter in the i^th slot, what would be your probability of winning?

Well, you would need a few things to go right. First, among the remaining S-1 letters to be picked, you needed i-1 of those to come earlier in the alphabet than x^th to occupy the first i−1 slots, noting that there were x−1 such letters. You also needed S–i letters to come later in the alphabet than x^th to occupy the last S−i slots, noting that there were L–x such letters. The probability of both of these occurring was x−1 choose i−1 multiplied by L−x choose S−i, divided by L−1 choose S−1 — i.e., all the ways to choose among the L−1 letters for the remaining S−1 slots.

But that wasn’t all you needed to go right. Placing this first letter correctly did not guarantee victory. You still had to correctly place the remaining S−1 letters appropriately. In other words, you had to correctly place letters in the first i−1 slots (among x−1 potential letters) and you had to correctly place letters in the last S−i slots (among L−x potential letters). The probability of the former was P(x−1, i−1) and the probability of the latter was P(L−x, S−i). The probability of them both happening was the product of these.

Returning to the first letter you were presented with, we had said you placed it in the i^th slot. But what was the optimal value of i? It was the one that maximized your overall probability of winning from that point on, i.e., the value of i that maximized (x−1 choose i−1) × (L−x choose S−i) / (L−1 choose S−1) × P(x−1, i−1) × P(L−x, S−i).

But wait, there’s more! You didn’t know what letter you would be presented with, which meant x was equally likely to be anywhere from 1 to L. Summing that previous expression over all values of x and dividing by L gave your optimized probability of winning the challenge.

With this formula in hand, you could use recursion or dynamic programming to calculate P(L, S) for small values of L and S, making use of edge cases like P(n, n) = 1 and P(L, 1) = 1. The TikTok #blindletterchallenge had 26 letters and five slots. Therefore, the probability of winning with the optimal strategy was P(26, 5), or about 25.43 percent.

If you enjoyed this puzzle, check out some of the extra credit proposed by the puzzle’s submitter, Angela Zhou (a few of which have been answered by Mark):

Want more puzzles?

Well, aren’t you lucky? There’s a whole book full of the best puzzles from this column and some never-before-seen head-scratchers. It’s called “The Riddler,” and it’s in stores now!

Want to submit a riddle?

Email Zach Wissner-Gross at riddlercolumn@gmail.com.

NBA

Aaron Gordon's Career-Year Recipe? All The Dunks.

By Jared Dubin

Feb. 3, 2023, at 8:00 AM

Typically, when an NBA player finally puts together the best season of his career, it’s the result of some sort of expansion in his game. He adds some stretch to his jumper, improves his ball-handling, finds the balance between scoring and playmaking, or at long last masters the nuances of team defense.

Such is not the case with Denver Nuggets forward Aaron Gordon, who in the ninth year of his career is doing the most, mostly by doing less than ever before. According to most all-in-one metrics, Gordon has been a top-30 player in the league this season: He checks in 23rd in Estimated Plus-Minus, 28th in ESPN’s Real Plus-Minus and 29th in FiveThirtyEight’s RAPTOR plus/minus — each of which peg him as being worth between 3.9 and 4.6 points per 100 possessions to the Nuggets’ scoring margin so far this season. In the cases of EPM and RAPTOR, the figures also are by far the best of Gordon’s career to date.

As mentioned, though, Gordon has achieved these results not through an increase in his role, but by narrowing its focus.

Back in 2016, when Gordon was still with the Orlando Magic, he practically gushed about the possibility of expanding his game under then-incoming head coach Frank Vogel. He told ESPN’s Zach Lowe, “I’m gonna be like a third guard. I’ll have a much bigger ball-handling responsibility, and I’m all for that.”

That’s a far cry from what he told The Denver Post last month: “If I need to hit threes, I’ll hit threes. If I need to post up, I’ll post up. If I need to make plays, I’ll make plays. If I need to just rebound and do dirty work and play defense, I’ll do that. I’m here to do anything that I can to help this team win a championship, to help [Nikola Jokić] win a championship, to help Jamal [Murray] win a championship, to help Michael Malone win a championship. That’s it. Winning is the end-all, be-all, so I’ll do whatever it takes to win.”

To his credit, Gordon has put his money where his mouth is. According to Second Spectrum tracking data, for example, Gordon has been directly involved in fewer actions per 100 possessions this season than at any time in his career.

The Nuggets hardly ever run plays for him. Instead, Gordon makes a living offensively by lurking on the edges of the action. He slices through the defense with perfectly-timed cuts. He has become extremely adept at ducking deep into the lane, sealing his man and giving Jokić a huge target to hit with a pass. When on the weak side, he spaces properly and punishes closing-out defenders by making quick shoot-pass-drive decisions.

And at the tail end of his plays, he finishes quite often with dunks. Sooooo many dunks. Like, an absurd number of dunks. So far this year, an incredible 27.8 percent of Gordon’s shot attempts have been dunks. How outlandish is that? Consider the following: Last season, when Gordon established a new career high with 130 slams (far surpassing his previous mark of 104, set back in 2018-19), dunks accounted for 17.3 percent of his shot attempts.

Gordon accumulated those 130 jams in 75 games, meaning he powered the ball through the rim 1.73 times per night. Again, that was his career high. So far this season, the Nuggets have played 52 games, of which Gordon has participated in 46. And he already has 125 (ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE!) dunks. That is almost a full dunk more per game (2.72) than he had last year. He’ll soon set a new career high once again, perhaps by the time you’re reading this sentence.

Unsurprisingly, a fair number of those dunks have been created by Jokić. According to Second Spectrum, no player has assisted a teammate on more dunks than the 60 on which Jokić has assisted Gordon.¹¹ If those 60 dunks were Gordon’s only dunks of the season, he would still be tied with LeBron James and sit ahead of Jayson Tatum (57) in total dunks. That’s how often Jokić is finding Gordon for the easiest finishes. 

So it’s no wonder that this has been (by far) the most efficient shooting season of Gordon’s career: Shots within 3 feet of the basket (i.e., dunks and layups) make up a majority of his attempts for the first time ever, while he now rarely attempts long or even medium-length midrange shots.

Gordon has benefited greatly from being attached to Jokić in the Nuggets’ rotation. Denver used to match Jokić and Murray, but the chemistry between Jokić and Gordon has led to a change, and you now rarely see Gordon on the floor without the two-time reigning MVP. He has been on the floor sans Jokić for just 16.1 percent of his minutes played this season, according to PBP Stats, and a significant share of those minutes have come in the games when Jokić has sat out.

It makes sense that Denver would pair the duo together. The Nuggets have absolutely demolished their opponents with Jokić and Gordon on the floor at the same time. Across 1,165 minutes, they have a plus-14.3 net rating, according to PBP Stats. That’s compared with plus-3.5 in Jokić-only minutes, plus-3.0 in Gordon-only minutes, and minus-12.9 in the minutes with both on the bench.

The reason they fit so well is that they accentuate each other’s strengths while mitigating each other’s weaknesses. When Gordon was tasked with creating his own offense, his efficiency suffered. But there is perhaps no greater creator of efficient offense in the league today than Jokić, and he has weaponized Gordon as an elite play-finisher.

Meanwhile, Jokić is not a particularly mobile, nimble or versatile defender. But Gordon is one of the NBA’s most athletic players, and one who can handle just about any defensive assignment the Nuggets throw his way. According to Bball-Index, Gordon ranks 37th out of 306 players who have played 500 or more minutes this season in Matchup Difficulty, and is one of just 25 players who has guarded point guards, shooting guards, small forwards, power forwards and centers on at least 12 percent of his half-court defensive possessions each. He’s also one of just seven players¹² who appears on both of those lists.

That type of synergy between frontcourt players is enviable, and it makes Gordon fit like a glove alongside the most important player on his team. His versatile skill set also means he can fit equally as well alongside Denver’s supersized 3-point sniper Michael Porter Jr. as he does with miniature Swiss Army knife Bruce Brown. He and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope can smother opposing scorers. He and Brown and Bones Hyland can get out on the break, while he and Murray can provide disparately challenging inverted pick-and-roll partners for Jokić. Michael Malone has been reluctant to use Gordon as a small-ball center (only 15 non-garbage-time possessions this season, according to Cleaning the Glass), but probably could against certain opponents if he wanted to. 

Such is the benefit of a player with Gordon’s skill and athleticism and, now, willingness to do whatever is asked of him. While his All-Star candidacy ultimately fell short, that doesn't diminish what he's accomplished this year. It sometimes takes a while for hyper-competent role players on contenders to get their recognition, after all. But if Gordon continues to play at this level, the Nuggets will continue to win — and the accolades will eventually follow. Even if they don't, there's something to be said for recognizing that the best way you can contribute is by doing only the things you do best, as best as you can, and then doing exactly that.

Check out our latest NBA predictions.

Scandals

New Yorkers Aren’t The Only Ones Who Really Dislike George Santos

By Geoffrey Skelley

Feb. 3, 2023, at 6:00 AM

Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly polling roundup.

In one of America’s most enduring myths, President George Washington damaged his father’s cherry tree with a hatchet when he was a small child. When his father confronted him, Washington admitted to what he had done, saying “I cannot tell a lie.” 

Alas, not all Georges have followed the legendary example of our most famous founding father. Freshman Republican Rep. George Santos of New York has been in the headlines (and on the minds of pollsters) since late December, thanks to intense scrutiny over his fabrication of many parts of his background. Santos was back in the news again this week after he told fellow House Republicans that he would recuse himself from serving on his two assigned committees in the face of ongoing investigations into his personal and campaign finances. Santos’s recusal comes as poll after poll suggests he is an unusually toxic figure — both in his district and more broadly. 

Let’s start with the feelings of voters in New York’s 3rd District, Santos’s Long Island-based seat. Two January surveys found that a majority of the voters want him to resign the seat they just elected him to in November. First, Democratic pollster Public Policy Polling surveyed the district in early January on behalf of Unrig Our Economy and found that 60 percent of voters thought Santos should leave office. Then earlier this week, a poll from nonpartisan outfit Siena College on behalf of Newsday found that 78 percent of registered voters in the district wanted Santos to resign. Few polls have ever found such a large share of constituent support for the resignation of a scandalized politician. The Washington Post only found one poll that outdistanced the 78 percent calling for Santos’s resignation: An Ipsos/McClatchy survey from December 2008 that found 95 percent of Illinois adults supported the resignation of Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich, whom the Illinois legislature impeached and removed from office the following month.

Santos has said he won’t resign, but polling from his district suggests he’s losing support even among voters from his own party. The earlier poll from PPP found that 38 percent of Republican voters thought Santos should resign. But in the more recent survey from Siena College, 71 percent of Republican voters said the same.

We must be cautious about deciphering trends from two surveys conducted by different pollsters, but it makes sense that more Republicans (and voters overall) now want Santos to resign. The PPP survey predated a Jan. 11 news conference in which Nassau County GOP officials called for Santos to resign, a clear illustration of intraparty opposition to the freshman congressman. And additional scandals involving Santos have surfaced since that presser, including records indicating that Santos’s mother wasn’t in New York on Sept. 11, 2001 — contrary to Santos’s claim that she’d been at the World Trade Center when terrorists attacked.

Santos’s announcement that he wouldn’t serve on his committees followed a meeting with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who must consider how Santos’s myriad problems could affect the House GOP’s image. It’s especially easy to imagine McCarthy wanting Santos to decline his committee assignments in the context of McCarthy’s ongoing efforts to block Democratic Reps. Ilhan Omar, Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell from taking their committee posts — none of whom face criminal charges, unlike Santos. (Republicans removed Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee on Thursday afternoon.) After all, 40 percent of Americans told YouGov/The Economist in mid-January that Santos should be denied a committee post, the largest percentage among the six representatives the survey asked about.¹³ And while a large share of respondents were unsure about whether to block representatives’ committee assignment, Santos was the only one of the six whom both Democrats and Republicans were more likely to say shouldn’t be able to serve on a committee than should.

Beyond the committee issue, though, there’s no doubt that Santos’s myriad problems are gaining public notice — and that Santos is unpopular everywhere, not just in his district. In mid-January, about 3 in 5 registered voters across New York state told Siena College that Santos should resign, and majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents held an unfavorable view of him. And Santos’s infamy has made him unusually well-known nationally (as well as unpopular) for a House member who’s only served a month in office. In a YouGov/The Economist survey released last week, 52 percent of Americans held an unfavorable opinion of Santos, compared with only 14 percent who had a favorable opinion, far worse numbers than those for a divisive figure like Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia in recent YouGov/The Economist polling.

It’s impossible to know if the intensely negative views of Santos will eventually precipitate his resignation. Only a two-thirds vote of the House can force him to exit, unless he decides on his own to resign. Given the GOP’s narrow House majority, such a vote is unlikely to happen anytime soon, especially considering Santos occupies a swing seat that Democrats could win in a special election. But the more the public has learned about Santos, the worse his numbers have become. And for better or worse, Santos’s decision to decline his committee assignments will almost certainly not be the last time we hear about him in 2023.

Other polling bites

• Pew Research Center recently found that Democrats are more open to compromise between President Biden and the GOP-led House. Overall, 58 percent of Democrats¹⁴ wanted Biden to work with Republican congressional leaders, even if some of the outcomes disappoint Democrats, while 41 percent preferred Biden to stand up to the GOP, even if that created conflict. By comparison, 64 percent of Republicans¹⁵ wanted GOP leaders to stand up to Biden, while only 34 percent preferred they work with the president. This isn’t a new pattern, as voters from the party in the White House seem likelier to prefer compromise: Back in 2018, Pew found more Republicans wanted former President Donald Trump to work with Democrats in Congress than not, while more Democrats preferred their congressional leaders stand up to Trump.
• Biden seems increasingly likely to seek a second term as president, and a new poll of Black voters from HIT Strategies found 59 percent backed such a bid. Black voters 50 years or older were more likely to support a Biden reelection campaign (66 percent), though a majority of those under 50 (55 percent) also preferred Biden run again. Black support proved critical for Biden in winning the 2020 Democratic nomination race, and he has pushed for South Carolina, with its majority Black primary electorate, to become the lead-off state in the 2024 Democratic primary.
• Monmouth University took a look at Americans’ attitudes toward current and former U.S. officials’ possession of classified documents, a group that includes Biden, Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence. Overall, 80 percent of Americans thought Trump knew he had classified documents in his possession, whereas 58 percent believed Biden knew and 50 percent thought Pence knew. But only about 2 in 5 Americans said the documents in Trump or Biden’s homes would pose a threat to national security (1 in 5 said this of Pence’s documents). Democrats were far more likely to believe the documents in Trump’s possession would endanger national security, while Republicans were much more inclined to say the same of the files in Biden’s home.
• Life satisfaction among Americans remained relatively low at the start of 2023, according to Gallup. Across seven different aspects of U.S. society ranging from the moral and ethical climate to the size and influence of major corporations, an average of 41 percent expressed satisfaction with how things were going. This matched the 2022 average and only slightly exceeded the record low of 39 percent in 2021, the first result in this data set during the COVID-19 pandemic. (Gallup has regularly polled this question in January since 2001.) The average had since 2011 hovered around 50 percent, and had always exceeded 50 percent before the 2008 financial crisis.
• In another January poll, Pew found that a slight majority of Americans remains supportive of providing assistance to Ukraine in its conflict with Russia, but an increasing share thinks the U.S. is giving Ukraine too much support. Overall, 31 percent said the U.S. was providing the right amount of support and 20 percent said not enough. But 26 percent said the U.S. was providing too much assistance to Ukraine, an uptick from 20 percent who said the same in September. A plurality of Republicans (40 percent) said the U.S. was giving Ukraine too much support, while a plurality of Democrats (40 percent) said the U.S. was providing the right amount of assistance.
• A new poll from Normington Petts on behalf of Progress Arizona, LUCHA and Replace Sinema PAC suggests independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona will face an uphill climb if she seeks reelection in 2024. In one hypothetical matchup, Sinema earned 24 percent of the vote but trailed both Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego and Republican Kari Lake, who each attracted 36 percent. In another test, Sinema received 27 percent, but trailed Gallego (37 percent) and former GOP Gov. Doug Ducey (31 percent). Although the poll’s sponsors oppose Sinema, she performed better in this survey than in two previous polls of the Arizona race, which each put her support in the mid-teens in a theoretical three-way contest.

Biden approval

According to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker,¹⁶ 41.9 percent of Americans approve of the job Biden is doing as president, while 52.9 percent disapprove (a net approval rating of -11.0 points). At this time last week, 42.0 percent approved and 52.4 percent disapproved (a net approval rating of -10.4 points). One month ago, Biden had an approval rating of 43.3 percent and a disapproval rating of 51.3 percent, for a net approval rating of -8.0 points.

Americans are spending more and more time alone, and more than a third reported experiencing “serious loneliness” in 2021. The director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development — the longest study of human life ever conducted — concluded in a new book that close personal relationships are the “one crucial factor [that] stands out for the consistency and power of its ties to physical health, mental health and longevity.”

A lack of those relationships can actually have an impact on political behavior and interest in extreme ideologies. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Galen Druke speaks with the director of the Harvard study, Robert Waldinger, about the lessons his findings have for politics in America.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

2022 Election

How Our 2022 Midterm Forecasts Performed

Our model was always skeptical of the “red wave.”

By Nate Silver

Graphics by Ryan Best

Feb. 2, 2023, at 11:30 AM

Let’s get this out of the way up front: There was a wide gap between the perception of how well polls and data-driven forecasts did in 2022 and the reality of how they did … and the reality is that they did pretty well.

While some polling firms badly missed the mark, in the aggregate the polls had one of their most accurate cycles in recent history. As a result, FiveThirtyEight’s forecasts had a pretty good year, too. Media proclamations of a “red wave” occurred largely despite polls that showed a close race for the U.S. Senate and a close generic congressional ballot. It was the pundits who made the red wave narrative, not the data.

With that said, the polls weren’t perfect.

• Polling averages and forecasts did slightly underestimate Democrats, though the differences were modest — certainly less than the extent to which they underestimated Republicans in 2016 and 2020.
• Some pollsters — such as Trafalgar Group and Rasmussen Reports, which have a history of Republican-leaning polling — had a conspicuously poor year. 
• There are different methods of polling aggregation and forecasting. The margins in the polling averages from RealClearPolitics were on average 1.3 percentage points more favorable to Republicans in the most competitive Senate races¹⁷ than those published by FiveThirtyEight. Similarly, RCP’s generic ballot polling average was 1.3 points more favorable to the GOP than FiveThirtyEight’s. In this article, I’ll only be evaluating FiveThirtyEight’s forecasts, but methodological choices made a difference.
• Finally, Democrats’ relatively strong year — although there were some precedents for it — defied a lot of midterm history. It’s not just that the polls did better than the conventional wisdom; they also did well relative to political science or “fundamentals”-based forecasting methods.

So let’s dig into the FiveThirtyEight forecast. As you may know if you follow our work closely, we publish three different versions of our congressional and gubernatorial forecasts. Version one is a Lite forecast that sticks as much as possible to the polls themselves. (In races that have little polling, Lite makes inferences from the generic ballot and from polls of other races.) Our Classic forecast blends the polls with other data — for instance, information on candidate fundraising, incumbency and the voting history of the state or district. Finally, our Deluxe forecast adds in another layer, namely race ratings from outside groups such as The Cook Political Report. Deluxe is the default when you pull up our forecast interactive and the version that we use most often when describing our forecasts.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/red-wave-happen-fivethirtyeight-politics-podcast-92956144

But there was, in some ways, a fourth version of our model this year. Because of a data processing error, our Deluxe version was using outdated race ratings for House ratings from one of the expert groups, Inside Elections. Essentially, those ratings were frozen in time as of late September. The impact on the forecast was minor, but not to the point of being trivial. In this article, I’ll evaluate our Deluxe forecasts both as published (that is, with outdated Inside Elections ratings) and as revised with the correct ratings. (Ironically, the as-published forecasts were actually slightly more accurate than revised ones — more about that below.) 

But first, here were the topline numbers for the various versions of our forecast:

Both the Democrats’ one-seat gain in the Senate and Republicans’ nine-seat gain in the House were well within the 80 percent confidence intervals established by our various models.¹⁸ True, the actual results were not in the dead center of the range: Democrats did somewhat better than the average forecasted result in both chambers. But it’s hard to hit an exact bullseye (although we get lucky and come close now and then) — that’s the whole reason to express uncertainty in a forecast.

In percentage terms, the forecasts gave Democrats somewhere between a 41 and 50 percent chance of keeping control of the Senate. Even using the 41 percent number, you would have had a decent-sized (and ultimately winning) bet on Democrats relative to prediction market odds, which put their chances at 32 percent. That is to say, the FiveThirtyEight forecasts were more bullish on Democrats than the conventional wisdom. And the Lite and Classic forecasts — which rely entirely on objective indicators and not expert ratings — saw the Senate as a true dead heat.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/2020-election-deniers-2022-elections-fivethirtyeight-93072681

Meanwhile, Republicans won the aggregate popular vote for the House by 2.8 percentage points. That is pretty close to the target established by our forecasts, which projected Republicans to win it by margins ranging from 2.4 to 4.0 points.

In other words, Republicans won about as many national votes as expected. There was not any sort of disproportionate youth turnout wave or other Democratic turnout surge. Instead, according to exit polls, more Republican-identified than Democratic-identified voters turned out in November. 

However, Democrats did an especially good job of translating votes into seats. How? Republicans ran up the score in uncompetitive races while Democrats eked out tight ones. A big part of the story is candidate quality. In many swing states and districts, Republicans offered voters far-right, inexperienced and/or scandal-plagued candidates, turning off independent voters. It may also have been that Democrats did a better job of directing financial and other resources to the highest-stakes races. Differences on the margin mattered: Democrats won four of the six Senate races and four of the five gubernatorial races decided by 5 percentage points or fewer.

Next, let’s check the calibration of the FiveThirtyEight forecasts, which is a way to see if the leading candidate won about as often as advertised. (For instance, did candidates who had a 70 percent chance win around 70 percent of the time?) We break our forecasts down into four categories: toss-up (where the leader had between a 50 and 60 percent chance of winning); lean (a 60 to 75 percent chance); likely (a 75 to 95 percent chance) and solid (a 95 percent or greater chance). Here were the numbers for the various versions of the forecasts — first splitting the results by whether Democrats or Republicans were favored, then showing all races combined.

Overall, calibration of the Lite forecast was pretty good, but with some asymmetries between the parties. Based on our forecast, Republicans were supposed to win 252 races (combining House, Senate and gubernatorial contests) and they in fact won exactly 252. Democrats were supposed to win 220 races and instead won 230. In the aggregate, the Lite forecasts were slightly underconfident — meaning there were somewhat fewer upsets than expected — although that’s what you might expect in a cycle where the polls had a strong year.

The calibration story is basically the same story for our Classic forecasts. Note that there were very few long-shot upsets. In races labeled as “likely,” the favorite won 55 out of 56 races. And they won 389 out of the 390 “solid” races.

And last but not least, Deluxe followed more or less the same script. I’ll present both the published and revised versions of Deluxe together since they make for a fun comparison:

Note that the as-published version of the Deluxe model actually made more correct “calls” (488) than the revised version did (481), even though the published version was using out-of-date Inside Elections ratings! Some of this probably just reflects luck in the closest contests. Deluxe (as published) identified the winners correctly in 32 of 43 “toss-up” and “lean” races (74 percent), while Deluxe (revised) went 30-of-53 (57 percent) in these categories.

However, the published version of the Deluxe ratings was also somewhat more optimistic for Democrats than the revised version. Since Democrats had a pretty good night overall, this helped it get a few more calls right. Mostly this reflects that the conventional wisdom grew more bearish on Democrats between late September and Election Day — and the conventional wisdom in September was closer to what actually transpired. So in some ways it was a blessing in disguise to use the late September version of the Inside Elections ratings.

Next up, a chart you’ll love if you want to give us a hard time: the biggest upsets of the year.

The major upset here is in Washington’s 3rd Congressional District, where Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez defeated Republican Joe Kent despite having only a 2 percent chance in Deluxe (as published) and a 4 percent chance in Classic and Deluxe (revised). That’s a big upset, but it’s also about what you’d expect. As you can see from the calibration charts, an upset or two like this is par for the course given that we made forecasts for more than 500 races. So this is a sign of solid calibration.

What we might change — and what we don’t think we’ll change — for 2024 and 2026

I typically close these forecast reviews by considering what modifications I might make to our models in the future. In certain ways, though, this election lowered my stress level a bit. The polls had a relatively good year, even if that by no means rules out problems going forward. 

Moreover, one of the core hypotheses of our forecast is that polling bias is unpredictable: Polls will be biased against Republicans in some years and biased against Democrats in other years, but it’s hard to predict the direction of the bias in advance. That was the case in 2022, where Democrats were modestly underrated by the polls in 2022 — albeit with some misses in both directions — after Republicans considerably overperformed their polls in 2016 and 2020.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/learned-2022-midterms-fivethirtyeight-politics-podcast-95568339

However, there are a few things that I’m thinking about:

1. Given that the Deluxe forecasts haven’t really outperformed Lite or Classic since we introduced the current version of the model in 2018, there’s a question of what utility they serve. In principle, the expert ratings used in Deluxe can add a lot of value by considering measures of candidate quality that may be hard to spot in objective indicators, or because the groups that publish these ratings have access to inside information such as internal polling. But they can also introduce a subjective or “vibes”-based element, which certainly didn’t help in 2022.

There’s also a potential issue of recursiveness. If the expert groups partly look to the FiveThirtyEight forecast for guidance in how they rate races, but the FiveThirtyEight model in turn uses the expert ratings, the two methods become less independent from one another.

I’m not sure what we’ll do about Deluxe quite yet, but it’s a fairly close call between keeping things as is, scrapping the Deluxe forecast, and keeping Deluxe but making it a secondary version and Classic the default version.

2. Our model has a pretty sophisticated method for considering how the results in different states and districts are correlated — for instance, it understands that demographically similar states and districts tend to move in the same direction. But it likely understates intrastate correlations.

That was an issue this cycle as Republicans experienced a localized “red wave” in Florida and New York despite having a disappointing election nationally. These effects were partly the result of turnout differentials caused by upballot candidates, such as the tailwinds for Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis in Florida or the lack of enthusiasm for Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul in New York.

The problems come because our model underestimates the degree to which a district in upstate New York and one in downstate New York are potentially correlated with one another, even if the districts are fairly different from one another demographically. Conversely, it slightly overestimates the degree to which a district in New York and one in Pennsylvania are correlated. We will do some due diligence on how common these patterns have been in past elections — and how much practical effect they have on the model.¹⁹

3. Finally, this is more in the category of “note to ourselves,” but we need to review our internal processes for double-checking that data inputs are working properly, given the error involving the Inside Elections ratings. Our models combine and aggregate a lot of different data sources, and that’s part of what makes them robust — but complex models can also introduce more opportunities for error.

There’s also one department where I’m not considering major changes, which is our process for determining which polls we include in our averages and forecasts.

Despite complaints both before and after the election about Republican-leaning polling firms “flooding the zone,” our overall forecasts and polling averages were both fairly accurate and relatively unbiased in 2022. It doesn’t seem prudent to me to have continued to “trust the process” after 2016 and 2020, when polling averages had a strong pro-Democratic bias, but then to panic and radically revise our method after polling averages had a slight pro-Republican bias in 2022.

That doesn’t mean we won’t consider changes around the margin. But I’ve been thinking about these issues for a long time, and our polling averages and our model already have a lot of defense mechanisms against zone-flooding. The most important is our house-effects adjustment: if a polling firm consistently shows Democratic or Republican-leaning results, the model detects that and adjusts the results accordingly. Expressly partisan polls (such as an internal poll for a campaign or the RNC) also receive special handling: basically the model assumes they are biased until proven otherwise. And our pollster ratings are designed to be self-correcting. When we update our ratings later this year with results from 2022, pollsters such as Trafaglar and Rasmussen will take a hit, which will give them less influence in the polling averages in 2024.

Finally, we don’t want to have to make a lot of ad-hoc decisions about which polls to include or not, both because that would be extremely time-consuming and because it would introduce avenues for bias when everyone is stressed out in the middle of an election campaign.

Keep in mind that this is a long-term process: It takes many election cycles to determine which polling firms are most reliable. For instance, some of the polling firms that were least accurate in 2022 were actually the most accurate in 2020. I think it’s an enormous mistake in forecasting to constantly “fight the last war” when you have many years or a larger batch of data to evaluate. It’s exactly the sort of mistake that vibes-driven pundits make: They assume that whatever happened in the previous election or two will happen again. Our approach is to create a good process and to play the long game — and it works out pretty well more often than not.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/big-elections-happening-2023-96780613

Skiing

Mikaela Shiffrin Is The Greatest — And She Has Time To Become Even Greater

By Josh Planos

Feb. 2, 2023, at 6:00 AM

Last weekend in the Czech Republic, appropriately as most of her countrymen and women slept, Mikaela Shiffrin moved one snow-propelled ski run closer to “resetting” a 34-year-old record when she became the second alpine skier (male or female) to win 85 World Cup races. After topping the slalom Saturday at the same resort where she made her professional debut 12 years ago, Shiffrin then came within six-hundredths of a second Sunday of matching the all-time record for World Cup victories, set by Sweden’s Ingemar Stenmark.

Not that Shiffrin needed to vanquish another stopwatch, claim another medal or pop another bottle of Champagne to have a legitimate case as the best ever to glide into the starting blocks. That is already apparent from her overall body of work — a resume Shiffrin has compiled by age 27.

Shiffrin emerged on the professional circuit in 2011 as a teenage prodigy, her abilities honed by ski-obsessed parents on Colorado and New England slopes. From Mickey Mouse skis to international mountains, a data-driven approach helped Shiffrin develop into a transcendent tactician. She is unparalleled in the slalom, a discipline that requires two runs, hairpin turns and dozens of gates to navigate. But the breadth of Shiffrin’s skill set is what sets her apart: She stands as the only skier to win a race in all six World Cup disciplines — combined, downhill, giant slalom, parallel, super-G and slalom. For comparison, Lindsey Vonn won World Cup events in five disciplines, while Stenmark won his 86 World Cup races across only two disciplines.²⁰

And such World Cup records form the backbone of any skier’s claim to greatness. When they hear her name, American sports fans might only remember Shiffrin’s pair of gold medals, which she won at the 2014 and 2018 Olympics. But while the Olympics serve as the lone opportunity for competitors in numerous sports to garner mainstream coverage, a more accurate appraisal of a skier’s performance is found on the global circuit. Each year, the best skiers on Earth compete in a five-month World Cup season in events that are mostly hosted in Europe. Those who finish in the top 30 at these events earn points toward seasonlong championships, and the best in each discipline contend for an overall title. Shiffrin has competed in more than 240 World Cup races over 13 seasons. Her aggregate performance is staggering: Shiffrin has podiumed in more than half and won more than a third of those starts. In events that involve slalom²¹, Shiffrin has podiumed in 59 percent and won 38 percent. 

Even as Vonn rocketed up various leaderboards as the greatest American alpine skier of all time, Shiffrin’s brilliance was widely anticipated. Back in 2019, my FiveThirtyEight colleague Neil Paine suggested that it was only a matter of time before the torch of greatest American skier was passed to Shiffrin. “She’s the best skier who has ever lived,” Vonn said in December. But Shiffrin’s success hasn’t always been linear. It was only a year ago that she entered the Beijing Olympics with the chance to win an unprecedented three individual gold medals and five medals overall. She left without any, an experience that forced her to “second-guess, like, the last 15 years, everything I thought I knew about my own skiing and slalom and racing mentality.” 

But in the year following her “fantastically failed” Olympics, Shiffrin has reclaimed her dominant form, winning nine of her last 15 races. She has a commanding 700-point lead in the race for the biggest prize in ski racing, the World Cup overall title, which would give her her fifth career overall crown. Despite a narrow second-place finish in Spindleruv over the weekend, Shiffrin accomplished another historic feat when she cemented her 2023 slalom title with two races still on the schedule. With it, Shiffrin became the first woman to bank seven slalom titles; she’ll have a chance to tie Vonn’s record for most titles in single discipline (eight; in Vonn’s case, in downhill) next season.

More impressive is the reality that, at 27, Shiffrin potentially has years to add to her total.²² Stenmark was 32 when the record was set, and Vonn was 33 when she earned her final World Cup victory. In a perilous sport, injury risk is substantially lower for slalom specialists than it is for the high-speed downhill enthusiasts.²³ Shiffrin figures to race for years to come, with her eyes reportedly trained on the 2026 Olympics at the well-known Cortina d’Ampezzo Italian resort — a place where Shiffrin has won once and podiumed twice.

“Anything could happen, and I could decide to retire,” Shiffrin told NBC Sports. “But I don’t see it happening before the [next] Olympics.”

In a sport where racers carve near identical lines in the snow and results are separated by hundredths of a second, Shiffrin has made a habit of charting a unique path to reach the finish line well before her contemporaries. Last weekend’s win materialized like so many others before it: a wire-to-wire tactical exhibition of angles and velocity unmatched by the field. Hers is a record of sustained dominance across continents and disciplines. Shiffrin will need to wait until the World Championships conclude in late February for her next chance to match Stenmark, but the subtext of the feat — becoming the greatest competitive skier of all time — has already been accomplished.

2024 Republican Primary

How Donald Trump’s Unusual Presidential Comeback Could Go

History presents three possible paths.

“I am not a candidate.
I will not become a candidate.
I will support the nominee of my party with all the energy I have.”

With this, former President Gerald Ford announced in March 1980 that he would not make a late entrance into the Republican presidential nomination race after long teasing a potential bid. For decades, this marked the nearest any former president had come to seeking a return to the White House in the modern political era — until former President Donald Trump announced his presidential bid in November.

Trump’s comeback campaign is unprecedented since the contemporary nomination system took shape in the 1970s.²⁴ Yet in the broader history of presidential elections, his comeback effort is unusual — but not unheard of. Former presidents like Martin Van Buren, Ulysses Grant, Grover Cleveland and Theodore Roosevelt each mounted serious post-presidency campaigns to return to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue between 1844 and 1912. In fact, five former presidents have won at least some delegates at major-party national conventions, as the table below shows.²⁵

The American political system has changed enough, at a structural level, that Trump can’t expect to retread the paths that any of these men took. And why would he want to? Only one of them successfully made it back to the White House. Still, the broad circumstances surrounding a trio of presidential comeback attempts offer three paths for Trump’s 2024 campaign. Like Grant in 1880, Trump could attract ample support for his party’s nomination but ultimately fall short after a majority of Republicans coalesce around an opponent. Alternatively, after seeking his party’s nomination, Trump could abandon the GOP and launch a third-party bid, as Roosevelt did in 1912. Or Trump could win his party’s nomination, as Cleveland did in 1892 — and maybe even reclaim the White House.

Trump’s Best-Case Scenario

Grover Cleveland

If Trump could choose to be in the same shoes as anyone come January 2025, it’d be those of Grover Cleveland, the only person ever elected to two nonconsecutive terms as president. Cleveland won the presidency in 1884, lost reelection in 1888, then won back the White House in 1892. It’s very hard to say how likely Trump is to win the GOP nomination at this early vantage point, but compared with Cleveland, Trump could have much greater trouble coalescing support from across different factions of his party.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/gop-leaders-trump-2024-fivethirtyeight-politics-podcast-96780505

Cleveland’s comeback developed thanks to a vindication of his views on economic policies. Cleveland, a conservative Democrat, narrowly lost reelection to Republican Benjamin Harrison in 1888 partly because of his support for lower tariff rates, which Republicans criticized. Two years later, though, Democrats won massive majorities in the House after slamming the excesses of the “Billion Dollar Congress” and connecting rising prices to higher tariffs.²⁶ Buoyed by the role his core issues played in the 1890 midterm campaign, Cleveland began a comeback bid. His main rival for the Democratic nomination would be Sen. David Hill, a fellow New Yorker who embraced a more pro-silver, inflationary approach to monetary policy — a key divide within the party — whereas Cleveland opposed weakening gold as the prime guarantor of the dollar’s value.

But Cleveland’s profile as a reformer in an era of graft and machine politics also contrasted sharply with Hill, whose reputation as a machine politician loomed as a potential weakness with general-election voters. By the time of the June national convention, Cleveland had become the front-runner, and on the convention’s first ballot, he won enough to surpass the two-thirds share necessary to win the nomination.²⁷ Cleveland went on to defeat Harrison in a rematch of the previous general election, albeit with just 46 percent of the national popular vote, as Harrison led a divided GOP — he’d struggled to win renomination — and third-party efforts by the Populist and Prohibition parties combined to win 11 percent, somewhat scrambling the electoral map.

Cleveland’s successful comeback offers a precedent — and hope — for Trump’s 2024 campaign. One broad similarity between the two is that Trump, like Cleveland, has remained his party’s most high-profile leader after losing a close presidential election. Trump’s reshaping of the GOP may not win him the 2024 Republican nomination — but it’s certainly not to the detriment of his candidacy. Under and since Trump’s presidency, the Republican Party’s congressional membership has changed substantially, and its members are more aligned with Trump’s style of politics. Similarly, more than half of the Republican National Committee’s membership has changed since Trump won the GOP nod in 2016, thanks to an exodus of old-school “establishment” Republicans. Among the broader electorate, a tad less than 40 percent of Republicans have told The Economist/YouGov in most recent surveys that they identify as a “MAGA Republican,” compared with a little more than 45 percent who didn’t. While larger, that latter group may still embrace some of Trump’s anti-establishment and combative approach that other Republicans have used to great effect. 

However, Trump and Cleveland do differ in some critical respects. For one thing, Cleveland’s standing ahead of the 1892 election improved after his party’s showing in the 1890 midterms; by contrast, Trump’s image has taken a hit in the wake of the GOP’s underwhelming performance in the 2022 midterms — highlighted by the defeat of many Trump-endorsed candidates in key Senate races. Additionally, concerns about Hill’s electability in the general election also helped Cleveland build widespread support — even among pro-silver southern and western Democrats — but Trump might suffer because of worries about his general-election chances. Recent polls suggest another Republican, such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, might be a stronger general-election contender against President Biden; although the value of such polls this far from November 2024 is highly suspect, donors and party activists are certainly looking at them.

At the same time, Trump has something going for him that Cleveland didn’t: the primary process. Trump doesn’t necessarily need to even win electoral majorities in presidential primaries to win a majority of his party’s delegates. In 2016, the GOP’s preference for primaries and caucuses that were “winner-take-all” — or at least “winner-take-most” — helped Trump win the Republican nomination even though he won only pluralities of the vote in most contests against a crowded field of opponents. We might be headed for a sequel if a sizable number of candidates decide to run in the 2024 Republican contest.

Falling Just Short

Ulysses Grant

It is entirely possible, on the other hand, that a majority — or larger plurality — of Republicans will coalesce around one of Trump’s opponents, an outcome that would broadly parallel Ulysses Grant’s failed bid for the GOP nomination in 1880. Given the two politicians’ factional support and critics’ concerns about electability, it is the Grant comparison that arguably looms largest for Trump among those we’re examining here.

The preeminent hero of the Civil War, Grant left the White House in 1877 after serving two terms. But his image had suffered from his administration’s myriad corruption scandals as well as his association with the turbulent Reconstruction era and a deep economic depression. Grant’s successor, Republican Rutherford Hayes, didn’t seek reelection, and favorable press coverage of Grant’s two-year world tour resuscitated his profile as the 1880 election neared. Grant had support from a faction of the GOP led by a group of political bosses, but he also faced substantial opposition within a party that had lost its once-dominant position following the Civil War. Many Republicans worried that he would struggle to unify the GOP, given his administration’s scandals and the fractures that had developed within the party during his presidency.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/whats-deal-freedom-caucus-fivethirtyeight-96551491

Like Grant, Trump remains relatively popular among those in his party: His favorability among Republicans sits in the low 70s in Civiqs’s tracking poll, while only around 15 percent have an unfavorable view of him. While he’s lost ground in recent national primary polls, Trump still leads DeSantis and former Vice President Mike Pence — Trump’s most-polled potential opponents — with a plurality across most surveys. And again like Grant, Trump also has received some early backing from Republican officials in Congress and around the country, a departure from Trump’s first run back in 2016.

But one potentially critical difference is that Trump could benefit from his party’s delegate rules — just as he did winning pluralities in the 2016 primaries — whereas Grant ended up losing in part because a pivotal rules decision went against him. At the 1880 Republican National Convention, the anti-Grant faction — which was larger than the pro-Grant group — defeated implementation of the “unit rule,” which would’ve required delegates to vote for the candidate preferred by most of their state’s delegation. Grant’s backers had supported the proposal, which would’ve been analogous to a winner-take-all primary in some delegate-rich states where Grant had the most support, putting him close to the majority necessary for the nomination.

And unlike in modern times, the classic convention setting also gave Grant’s opponents a chance to find an alternative choice — even one who wasn’t actively seeking the presidency. After 35 ballots, as no candidate managed to overtake Grant, some delegates began turning to Ohio Rep. James Garfield, who had earlier made a strong impression when he gave a nominating speech for another candidate. Sensing things were turning toward Garfield and wanting to avoid Grant’s nomination at all costs, Grant’s main opponents called for their delegates to back Garfield on the 36th ballot. As the vote came down, Grant again captured more than 300 votes, but Garfield won 399, a majority that earned him the party’s nomination and blocked Grant’s comeback.

However, as with Grant, many current Republican leaders, donors and voters would like to turn the page on the Trump era in the face of the former president’s struggles in the 2022 midterms, as well as legal proceedings concerning his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, his business interests, his personal life and his alleged mishandling of classified documents. Similarly, a majority of Republicans could rally around a Trump alternative, such as DeSantis, whose strengthening poll numbers, support from party leaders and plaudits from conservative media could make him the most likely preference for Trump opponents.

The Third-Party Option

Theodore Roosevelt

Last and definitely least likely, Trump could leave the Republican primary race and run as a third-party candidate in 2024. Such a move would undoubtedly bring to mind comparisons with another former president who opted to run outside the two-party system after losing his party’s nomination: Teddy Roosevelt, whose unsuccessful run in 1912 remains the strongest performance by a third-party presidential candidate in U.S. history.²⁸

Roosevelt became president following the assassination of William McKinley in 1901, and then won four more years in 1904. But having promised not to run again, Roosevelt positioned his handpicked successor, William Howard Taft, to win the Republican nomination and the presidency in 1908. Out of office, however, Roosevelt became frustrated with Taft’s more conservative governing approach, and the Republican Party’s divisions and losses in the 1910 midterms created space for a Taft opponent — one Roosevelt filled when he decided to challenge Taft in the 1912 Republican nomination race.

The ensuing campaign broke new ground as some states (13 in all) would select most of their convention delegates via a presidential primary. Roosevelt had previously expressed skepticism toward primaries, but he embraced the popular movement to create direct primaries and encouraged many states to implement them as it became apparent they were the only way he could gain more delegates than Taft, whose allies controlled the party machinery in states where delegates would be picked by local and state conventions. In an unprecedented, popular campaign for president, Roosevelt ended up dominating at the ballot box: He won the popular vote in nine of the 12 primaries that had results, garnering 52 percent to Taft’s 34 percent overall.²⁹ However, heading into the 1912 GOP convention, Roosevelt’s primary success couldn’t win the nomination on its own: Only about 2 in 5 Republican delegates came from the primary states (in 2016, that figure was about 4 in 5). Taft’s allies also controlled the convention committees, including the credentials committee, which backed the Taft-supporting delegates on most of the numerous credentials challenges that had resulted from the contentious campaign. Taft narrowly won the nomination on the first ballot, so Roosevelt’s campaign decided to implement the third-party option.

Third-party bids usually struggle, but Roosevelt’s Progressive Party — often called the Bull Moose Party — had both serious financial support and proof of popular support demonstrated by his showing in the GOP primaries. In November, Roosevelt went on to win 27 percent of the popular vote to Taft’s 23 percent. But because Roosevelt and Taft largely split the Republican vote, Democrat Woodrow Wilson easily won the presidency with just 42 percent.

As with Cleveland and Grant, the political circumstances surrounding Trump and Roosevelt differ on many fronts. For one thing, in the 2024 campaign, Trump won’t face an incumbent from his own party like Roosevelt did. Trump will also have far more access than Roosevelt to winning support through primaries, as those contests determined only a minority of delegates at the 1912 GOP convention. But if Trump were to actually pursue a third-party bid, he’d likely have to make that choice much earlier in 2024 than Roosevelt had to in 1912, thanks to more rigorous and time-sensitive requirements for qualifying for the general-election ballot across the 50 states and Washington, D.C.

But while the idea of a Trump third-party bid is unlikely, we can’t completely laugh it off. After all, he has repeatedly raised the prospect himself, most recently in late December when he shared on his social media platform an article from a pro-Trump website advocating such a move. This is in keeping with a long-running pattern: Following the 2020 election, Trump talked of a new “Patriot Party” or “MAGA Party,” and during the 2016 cycle, Trump complained of being treated unfairly by the GOP hierarchy and suggested he might attempt an independent bid. Although this has perhaps been a bargaining tactic — a split GOP vote would all but guarantee victory for Democrats — it’s also true that a Trump third-party bid could win a significant number of votes. More plainly, Trump has often claimed that political opponents are conspiring against him. Roosevelt may have had more cause for such feelings in the face of Taft’s control of the convention in 1912, but Roosevelt famously summed up his new party’s platform as “thou shalt not steal.”

Today’s presidential primary is night and day from the smoke-filled rooms and convention politics that decided the nominations 100-plus years ago. However, one thing remains true: The rules of the nomination, and how campaigns respond to them, matter. Cleveland won because he managed to unify the party sufficiently — including support from those who disagreed with him on silver — to win the two-thirds majority required by the Democrats. Grant failed in large part because his campaign couldn’t outplay the anti-Grant faction to enact the “unit rule.” And while Roosevelt won smashing victories in the primaries, that wasn’t the main mode of delegate selection yet, and his campaign’s inability to make sufficient inroads in caucus-convention states cost him the nomination. For Trump in 2024, the party’s delegate rules necessitate winning (at least) pluralities in primaries in the early and middle part of the nomination calendar to build up a delegate lead and to push out rivals. He did it once before — it remains to be seen whether the GOP’s anti-Trump forces can outmaneuver him this time around.

Story editing by Maya Sweedler. Copy editing by Andrew Mangan. Photo research by Emily Scherer.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/140-million-americans-live-states-controlled-democrats-fivethirtyeight-95547189

House Republicans

The 5 Main Factions Of The House GOP

And how they’re likely to govern for the next two years.

By Alex Samuels

Feb. 1, 2023, at 6:00 AM

In the first few years after former President Donald Trump assumed office, he essentially became a one-man litmus test for the Republican Party. Conservatives’ bona fides hinged less on their voting records, and more on their fealty to him.  

Then something weird happened. Rep. Kevin McCarthy, who worked hard over the years to establish his loyalty to Trump, was suddenly being called a “moderate” as he suffered through more than a dozen unsuccessful votes for House speaker. The defectors who initially refused to vote for him were now part of the “hardline” or “extremist” faction of the party — depending on which news article you read. That group also included Trump boosters who nevertheless said when it came to the speaker vote, the former president should be taking cues from them. 

So what does it actually mean to be a “moderate” or “conservative” U.S. House member in the Republican Party of 2023? Don’t look for big policy divides to explain the difference — members are largely unified around an agenda of cutting certain spending programs, limiting abortion and keeping a lid on taxes. That’s not a new phenomenon: Four years ago, when my former colleague Perry Bacon Jr. analyzed what he believed were the five wings of the Republican Party, the categorizations revolved around Trump because, well, Trump defined the party.

The goalposts for what makes a “moderate” versus “conservative” lawmaker are always shifting. But as Republicans settle back into control of the House of Representatives, I set out to update Perry’s analysis — and concluded that while Trump still holds outsized influence over the party, he’s no longer its central pivot point.

Instead, I’d argue that a number of important fissures define the current House congressional GOP — and the embrace of Trump and Trumpism is just one of them. Voting records, ties to the establishment and caucus membership, for instance, all played a role in how I measured Republican House members against one another, drawing on data as well as expert opinion.

I’ll be honest and say that these categories may not be perfect and that there’s a potential for change in just a few years (Perry’s article was only written in 2019!) as loyalties switch and new issues come to the fore. And, as I’ll explain in more detail below, some members have their feet in multiple camps — or at least a pinky toe. Still, I’d put congressional Republicans in five main camps. I’ve ordered from most moderate to most conservative — or extreme:

Moderate establishment

• These Republicans side with the broader GOP on most issues but are the members most likely to find common ground with Democrats. They’ve been known to attack leadership or their colleagues who are further to the right — or at least disagree with them. They’re often members of bipartisan groups like the Problem Solvers Caucus.
• Prominent members: Reps. David Joyce of Ohio, Young Kim of California, Nancy Mace of South Carolina. 

Don’t expect members of this shrinking, often quiet group to rise into notable positions of party leadership anytime soon. “It seems like they’re increasingly becoming an incredibly endangered species,” said Julia Azari, a FiveThirtyEight contributor and political science professor at Marquette University.

Case in point: If I were writing this story last year, I probably would have put former Ohio Rep. Anthony Gonzalez or Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger in this camp. But after both publicly assailed the former president and advocated for his impeachment, neither ran for another term.

These members have to toe a fine line to keep their jobs. They likely won’t agree with the mainstream GOP on everything — just look at how Mace spoke about abortion messaging costing Republicans in the 2022 midterms, or how Joyce said that he’s on the fence about kicking certain Democrats off of Republican-led committees — but expect to see them largely in line with Republicans’ anti-Biden messaging, or be outspoken about things important to their base, like preserving “family values” or slowing inflation. In short, the people I’d put in this category are those who are willing to buck party leadership sometimes — but not so much that they’re in imminent danger of losing their seats. And, in general, their voting records tend to be more moderate compared with other Republicans. 

Conservative establishment

• They’re part of the establishment and/or party leadership but still boast conservative records. They’re sometimes willing to speak out against members to their right, but generally try to be peacekeepers. In a nutshell: These Republicans straddle the line between the moderate and pro-Trump wings of the party.
• Prominent members: Reps. Elise Stefanik of New York, Tom Emmer of Minnesota and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

I would put most Republicans in prominent leadership positions (regardless of whether they’re in the House or Senate) in this group. While they do adhere to some tenets of Trumpism — like admonishing the “fake news” media, at least in Stefanik’s case — they simultaneously need to be seen as having the best interests of the GOP’s ideologically diverse caucus at heart. You likely won’t see these members attacking the former president like more moderate Republicans, or driving a wedge within the caucus like the pro-Trump insurgent wing does. But it’s clear that these members still espouse some type of loyalty to Trump, as they’ve been known to broker deals for him — or on his behalf.

Part of getting to a position of leadership in the first place is moderating your views so that a larger swath of members think you’ll prioritize their interests. In practice, that could mean pushing a fairly traditional Republican agenda, like cutting taxes or entitlements, without wading too much into the culture wars that have animated the furthest right House members. McCarthy is a great example of this. The current House speaker entered Congress as a conservative “Young Gun” but moved toward the middle to help get the position he’s in now, according to Hans Noel, a professor of government at Georgetown University who has researched how Trump shifted the meaning of what it meant to be a conservative. 

“At first, [McCarthy] was the upstart person who was challenging things,” Noel told me. “But now he’s been around for a while, and he’s likely realized that, in order to have a career, you have to moderate your positions a bit.” The shift was cosmetic — his policy positions remained largely the same — but his stature within the party grew. 

You might be wondering, too, why I put Stefanik in this category, given that she has a fairly moderate voting record. That’s largely because, since entering the lower chamber ahead of the 114th Congress, Stefanik has gotten more conservative. According to ideology metrics based on her voting record, Stefanik went from a fairly moderate member of Congress between 2015 and 2021, to a more conservative one from 2021 to 2023. Plus, she’s explicitly embraced Trump as she’s climbed into leadership roles over the past few years — which means she arguably embodies elements of both this wing and the pro-Trump insurgent wings. 

One difficulty I ran into in writing about this group, though, was in pinpointing where its loyalties really lie. Are they loyal to Trump? Or to the GOP as a whole? Politicians often take their cues from leadership in their own party, and if Trump were no longer in the picture, it’s unclear where members of this faction would swing.

Far-right establishment 

• These are the conservatives who likely align with the Freedom Caucus ideologically but make fewer waves. They’re the preferred leaders of the Tea party conservatives and pro-Trump insurgent factions.
• Prominent members: Reps. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, Patrick McHenry of North Carolina.

Here, you have the members whom far-right members are comfortable with in leadership roles. In fact, I’d go one step further and argue that they’re the glue that holds Freedom Caucus and the conservative establishment together, as this wing won’t broker all that much with Democrats and/or the more moderate GOP House members. 

That dynamic was on full display during the House speaker fight, when Scalise was floated as a possible consensus speaker who could speak to the 20 anti-McCarthy Republicans. On average, these members’ voting records tend to be more conservative compared with Republicans in other top leadership positions. 

These members might not agree with everything the Freedom Caucus proposes, though. For example, Scalise, for his part, has sometimes quietly staked out neutral or mainstream positions when his colleagues have gone the other way. For example, he broke with most other top House leaders when he didn’t get involved in Cheney’s GOP primary. And, perhaps most notably, as Freedom Caucus members continued to promote the false claim that it was fraudulent, McHenry voted to certify the 2020 election’s results.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/whats-deal-freedom-caucus-fivethirtyeight-96551491

Tea party conservative 

• Here are the Freedom Caucus members who are driven by ideology. They’re often associated with conservative groups like the Club for Growth.
• Prominent members: Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio, Byron Donalds of Florida, Chip Roy of Texas.

Members of this group are some of the most conservative in the House. In fact, I’d lump a good chunk of the Freedom Caucus into this wing. But what I think differentiates these members from, say, the pro-Trump insurgent (more on them below) is that Tea party conservatives are more clearly motivated by ideology — e.g., supporting less government spending — than by grievance.

Tea party conservatives can veer between fiery House floor speeches, wonky strategizing over procedural quirks and breezy talks with members of the various GOP factions. Their brand of conservatism, at times, might compel them to break form with Republican allies. For example, when Trump said in a tweet that four Democratic members of Congress — all women of color — should “go back” to “where they came from,” Roy denounced his actions. Jordan has had streaks of independence, too, including, in June when he broke from Freedom Caucus members and voted to honor Capitol police for their response to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Members of this group support Trump, too, but their loyalties aren’t tied to a specific leader. And they often strategically show their support for the former president (i.e., vociferously defending him during impeachment hearings), since they arguably also want to increase their power in the House. Yes, members of this group can be obstructionists at times, but their politics are often guided by a strong adherence to their ideas — regardless of whether it is politically expedient or in line with Trump’s wishes. 

Pro-Trump insurgent

• These are the rabble-rousers. They’re led by Trump but largely avoid criticizing him publicly, even if they don’t fully embrace his views. Most of them voted against certifying President Biden’s 2020 electoral victory. Their beliefs are malleable, and more motivated by grievance more than ideology. 
• Prominent members: Reps. Matt Gaetz of Florida, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. 

This might not be the biggest wing, but it’s definitely the loudest — and wields a lot of power given the GOP’s narrow House majority. In fact, it’s the members in this camp who made it so difficult for McCarthy to attain the speakership in the first place. 

That’s in part because the politicians in this bloc are primarily motivated by grievance and, as such, are not afraid to take on the establishment even if it means being seen as unserious lawmakers by the rest of the caucus and GOP voters. Moreover, since this wing is defined by a fealty to Trump, these members are the most likely to defend anything the former president says or does. Of course, during the vote for House speaker, many in this camp — specifically Gaetz and Boebert — initially refused to vote for McCarthy, even though he was Trump’s chosen candidate. But many of these members had personal quibbles with McCarthy that led to them not wanting him to be speaker. And those intraparty arguments, I’d argue, stand separate from members’ support for Trump. Plus, reporting suggests that Trump helped encourage at least some defectors to come around to voting for McCarthy— or at least voting “present.” 

This group’s loyalty to the former president was arguably displayed most prominently during the Jan. 6 investigations. Its members not only diminished the events of that day but have been steadfast in promoting the debunked narrative that the 2020 election was stolen from the former president. 

But this bloc is more flexible than it appears. In fact, I’d argue that Greene, at least as of late, is trying to teeter between this category and the far-right establishment (or, at least, I think that’s where she wants to be). This tension was on full display during the House speaker vote, when she publicly chastised ideologically aligned members (like Boebert) for refusing to back McCarthy’s bid.

Azari told me that continued infighting among this group might be a good thing for the larger party. There’s also no incentive for the GOP, she said, to have this insurgent bloc grow in size. “It’s not to Republicans’ benefit for them to be at the forefront of the party,” she said. “They are really not super popular figures with the broader population.”

The speaker fight was just the beginning. I’d expect the fissures between these groups to become more noticeable as long as Republicans hold onto a narrow majority in the House. Up next, we’re likely to see debates over things like whether Democrats should be allowed to have committee seats, whether McCarthy should negotiate with Biden and Democrats over raising the debt ceiling and much more. 

But don’t get too cozy with these (albeit imperfect) categorizations. “Over time, conservatives have become more conservative on a number of more nativist, social and racial issues. And they’ve become slightly more moderate on at least some economic issues,” Noel said. “But there could be lots of new issues that come in, and those could become the cleavages that start to shake things up again.”

NFL

Which Stars Are Going To Blow Up In Super Bowl LVII?

By Neil Paine and Josh Hermsmeyer and Neil Paine and Josh Hermsmeyer

Feb. 1, 2023, at 6:00 AM

The teams are set for Super Bowl LVII, and now it’s time for the longest two weeks in sports — the wait between the NFL’s conference championships and the Big Game itself. One upside of the layoff, however, is the chance it will give fans to get to know the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles inside and out. So with that in mind, we wanted to highlight a handful of the key players on each side of this matchup who are certain to play a central role in determining the outcome.

Philadelphia Eagles

QB Jalen Hurts

Any discussion of the Eagles’ Super Bowl flight has to begin with Hurts, Philadelphia’s field general and one of the league’s five MVP finalists. The Eagles are 16-1 in games Hurts has started this season (including playoffs) and they are scoring a league-best 29.5 points per game in those starts.³⁰ But what really has enabled Philadelphia’s rise to the edge of a championship has been Hurts’s individual passing improvement this season, one of the largest year-over-year leaps in performance by any young Super Bowl QB since the merger:

Before this season, Hurts was merely a solid starter, with roughly a league-average passer rating index (according to Pro-Football-Reference.com), and the Eagles went 8-7 in his starts. But in 2022, Hurts improved his index by nearly 25 points, rising to become one of the league’s most efficient passers — and in turn, Philadelphia’s offense, which had been decent but not great last year, ended up ranking second in scoring. (This mirrors the same sudden, championship-caliber improvement we’ve seen from other young Super Bowl signal-callers over the years, most recently with Cincinnati’s Joe Burrow last season.) Add in Hurts’s 760 rushing yards with 13 rushing TDs — easily the most among QBs — and you can see why he made this Philly offense nearly impossible to defend all season long. Without Hurts giving the Eagles such a dramatic upgrade under center, it’s hard to imagine them soaring anywhere near as high as they have this year.

WR A.J. Brown

As impressive as Hurts’s growth has been in leading Philadelphia’s offense, he has hardly done it alone. For one thing, he was supported by a balanced system that featured the league’s second-best run-blocking offensive line (according to ESPN’s win rate statistics) and a multi-pronged rushing attack led by Miles Sanders — one of only five runners with at least 1,200 yards and double-digit TDs this year. Even more importantly, Hurts had an improved group of receivers to target, headlined by the huge addition of A.J. Brown in a trade from the Tennessee Titans. During his first season as an Eagle, all Brown did was tie for third in the league in receiving TDs (11) and rank fourth in yards (1,496), giving Philly its most prolific receiver by yards per game since Mike Quick in 1983. But that’s only scratching the surface of what Brown brought to this offense.

If you look at yards per route run — a great measure of production per opportunity for receivers, since it blends the ability to get downfield, get open and reliably catch the ball — only Miami’s Tyreek Hill ranked ahead of Brown this season. And what sets Brown apart is that he is also one of the best at running after the catch, particularly after adjusting for where he is catching it. According to NFL Next Gen Stats, Brown was fifth-best in the NFL at gaining more yards after the catch than expected per reception. Basically, Brown gave Philadelphia a unique threat that defenses needed to respect before, during and after the ball was thrown — and that opened up chances for his teammates to shine. For instance, fellow wideout DeVonta Smith continued to blossom alongside Brown, notching 1,196 yards while using the extra operating space to post one of the highest catch rates ever for a player with that many yards. And for his part, Hurts went from completing a smaller share of his passes than expected to ranking fourth in completion percentage above expected while throwing to his revamped receiving corps.

DE Haason Reddick

When the Arizona Cardinals drafted Haason Reddick with the 13th pick in 2017, they did so assuming Reddick was too small to rush the quarterback. Instead they envisioned him as an inside linebacker, a position Reddick had never played in college, and one of the least valuable position groups in the NFL. It took Reddick demanding a position change back to edge rusher in his final season in Arizona³¹ for his career to finally flourish. Since 2020 Reddick has registered 39.5 regular-season sacks, third most in the NFL over that span behind only Myles Garrett and T.J. Watt.

When the Eagles signed him as a free agent prior to this season,³² making him the 17th-highest-paid edge rusher in the NFL, they certainly expected him to get after the quarterback. But they couldn’t have expected the season Reddick and the rest of the defensive line put together in 2022. 

The Eagles improved from 31st in the league (29) in sacks in 2021 all the way to first (70), the largest year-to-year improvement in NFL history. Four different Eagles finished the regular season with 10 or more sacks — also an NFL record. For his part, Reddick led the league with 18.5 sacks created, was tied for second in sacks (16) and finished the season second in overall pass rush win rate. And despite the prolific totals put up by his teammates, Reddick wasn’t just padding his numbers: He was out there beating double-teams at a near league-leading rate.

CB Darius Slay

The Eagles run a version of Vic Fangio’s defense and rely heavily on Cover 4 — or Quarters — coverage, where four defensive backs split the responsibilities for covering the deep part of the field. In those coverages Slay was typically asked to play man-to-man, or “man match”³³ on the left side, and he did a good job: Slay ranked 17th in the league in man coverage on 101 snaps, according to Pro Football Focus. 

But where Big Play Slay really shined was when he was asked to play zone and cover a full third of the deep part of the field. In these Cover 3 defensive looks, Slay was the best defender in the NFL, according to PFF.

Slay is dangerous when he can keep his eyes on the quarterback while dropping into coverage, and the Eagles like to run “inverted” coverages where deep defenders switch roles. On these calls, the Eagles turn what looks like a four-deep, three-under coverage pre-snap into a three-deep, four-under coverage post-snap to help take away the short and intermediate routes. With Patrick Mahomes’s ankle injured and the Eagles pass rush elite, Philly may want that extra defender underneath in the Super Bowl to defend against short, quick passes. If they do, they can rely on Slay to do his job and lock down his third of the field.

Kansas City Chiefs

QB Patrick Mahomes

For the next few weeks, the entire focus of the football world will be on one body part: Patrick Mahomes’s right ankle. The 2022 MVP favorite sprained it against the Jacksonville Jaguars during the divisional round, hobbled to the finish of that game, and then gritted his way through the pain in the AFC title contest. But while Mahomes picked up the most important gain of the game with his feet, he was limited to eight rushing yards in the game and it’s a safe bet that his trademark mobility could be hampered against the Eagles as well. But will that matter? One of the many special things about Mahomes is that he can beat you as a pocket passer every bit as well as he can using his improvisational magic. Since his debut as a starter in 2018, Mahomes’s overall wizardry has made him the NFL’s best quarterback by Total QBR — but he actually ranks higher in QBR from within the pocket (No. 2) than outside the pocket (No. 3) over that span, and his raw QBR between the two categories has been essentially identical.

Perhaps that helps explain why the Chiefs’ record when Mahomes isn’t a factor with his legs — an .818 winning percentage when he is their primary QB but has single-digit rushing yards — is actually slightly better than their .776 winning percentage when he cracks double digits on the ground. The best part of having Mahomes at QB is that when a defense (or an injury) limits one aspect of his brilliance, his Plan B is still better than just about anyone else’s Plan A.

C Creed Humphrey (and friends)

Of course, we have seen the limits of Mahomes’s greatness when the protection in front of him completely breaks down. (The highlights from Super Bowl LV can be hard to watch for that reason.) And the Eagles pose a particular risk for a repeat of that performance, given that they recorded the third-most sacks in a season in NFL history. But for a team known for its explosive skill-position talent, one of the Chiefs’ most important weapons is their ability to block would-be pass-rushers in the trenches, starting up the middle.

According to ESPN’s pass block win rate metric, the highest overall success rate for any pass blocker in the entire league this season belonged to center Creed Humphrey, who sustained his block for at least 2.5 seconds in 97.9 percent of encounters with opposing pass-rushers. But Humphrey was merely the strongest link in a very strong chain, as the second-best pass block win rate (96.9 percent) also belonged to a K.C. lineman — guard Joe Thuney. And so did the seventh-best, for that matter, with guard Trey Smith (95.9 percent). The NFL average for tackles is lower than for centers and guards, but both bookends on the Chiefs line — Orlando Brown Jr. and Andrew Wylie — were above average for their position as well.

As a result, the Chiefs’ offensive line had the No. 1 pass block win rate in the league, with the gap between them and the No. 2 Chicago Bears roughly equaling the gap between the Bears and the No. 12 Eagles (of all teams). And with Mahomes hobbled against the fearsome Philadelphia pass rush, the stalwart Kansas City blockers could be the antidote to one of K.C.’s biggest potential trouble spots.

DE Chris Jones

As impressive as Reddick’s 2022 season was, Chris Jones’s might have been better. Why? Well, for one he plays a different position (interior defensive line), which typically doesn’t lend itself to sacks — unless your name is Aaron Donald. Yet Jones notched just a half-sack less (15.5) than Reddick on the season. 

Second, Jones did it without the supporting cast that Reddick enjoyed: Rather than four rushers with 11 or more sacks, the Chiefs trotted out Jones and three other players with six or fewer.³⁴. Teams could game plan for Jones in ways they couldn’t against Reddick.

But perhaps most impressively, Jones nearly matched Reddick’s production while being double-teamed over five times more often (251 vs. 48 for Reddick). In fact Jones was double-teamed more than any other player in the league. 

It wasn’t like teams had much of a choice, either. They doubled Jones because they had to — because when they didn’t, he wrecked the game. Jones’s pass rush win rate versus single-teams was the fourth-highest in the league. That kind of production from the middle of the line is rare, and against a Philly offensive line that’s one of the league’s best, the Chiefs will need “the most unstoppable man in football” to show up big.

CB L’Jarius Sneed

Chiefs cornerback L’Jarius Sneed was a key part of an underrated Chiefs defense all season. Typically lining up across the opposing team’s top receiver, Sneed tied for the team lead in interceptions with three, and led all Chiefs in passes defensed with 11. Among NFL cornerbacks, Sneed ranked seventh in PFF WAR, a measure of how many wins a player adds to the team.

What may surprise, particularly given Jones’s exploits in 2022, is that Sneed was the third-most valuable Chief this season according to PFF WAR, trailing only Patrick Mahomes (shocker) and tight end Travis Kelce.

In the AFC championship game, Sneed suffered a concussion while tackling Bengals running back Samaje Perine early in the first quarter, leaving his availability for the Super Bowl in question. If PFF WAR is any indication, losing Sneed is no small thing. If he’s able to play, his skills will surely help the Chiefs game plan to stop A.J. Brown and the rest of the Eagles passing attack. And if he can’t go, Jones and the rest of the Kansas City pass rush is going to have to conjure up a repeat of their performance in the AFC championship game, where they pressured Joe Burrow relentlessly to help cover for the loss of their best defensive back. Only this time they’ll be going against one of the most dangerous mobile quarterbacks in the league, potentially without one of their most valuable players.

Check out our latest NFL predictions.

Alex Samuels: The brutal body cam footage showing 29-year-old Tyre Nichols being beaten to death by Memphis, Tennessee, police officers was released late Friday. The videos prompted outrage from all corners of D.C. since its release. But whether it will spark action is another question.

The video has revived some bipartisan calls for police reform legislation.The chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus also said that he and his group requested to meet with President Biden this week to quote “push for negotiations on much-needed national reforms to our justice system – specifically, the actions and conduct of our law enforcement.”

But the negotiations aren’t necessarily starting from a hopeful place. After George Floyd’s murder in 2020, both Democrats and Republicans drafted police reform bills. The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act passed the House, but stalled out in the Senate in September 2021 after months of bipartisan negotiations. Essentially, the two sides couldn’t get past concerns about union involvement or qualified immunity — that’s the policy that often protects police officers from being held personally liable for their actions. And those sticking points haven’t necessarily been resolved.

And while there’s not a lot of recent polling gauging American’s views on policing, a spring 2022 study from the Gallup Center on Black Voices found overwhelming support for some level of change to how police officers do their jobs among Americans of multiple races and ethnicities.

But even if the public wants to see policing change, it’s not clear that lawmakers are on the same page. Let’s not forget, Republicans now control the U.S. House and reform legislation is likely not high on their to-do list. In fact, over the weekend, Republican representative Jim Jordan said the following:

Rep. Jim Jordan: I don’t know if there’s anything you can do to stop the kind of evil we saw in that video.

Samuels: In the meantime, reporting suggests that Sen. Cory Booker will re-introduce a version of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act as soon as this week — and negotiations should begin in earnest from there. So we’ll be keeping an eye on the police reform efforts and whether Congress makes any headway on this go-around.

2024 Election

Adam Schiff's Unlikely To Be The Last Major Democrat To Join California's U.S. Senate Race

By Geoffrey Skelley

Jan. 31, 2023, at 6:00 AM

During Donald Trump’s presidency, few U.S. House members grabbed more headlines than Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California. Schiff’s lead role in Trump’s first impeachment trial and work as the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee made him a hero to many liberals and a villain to many conservatives. Now Schiff is looking to parlay his notoriety and accomplishments into a promotion: On Thursday, he announced a bid for California’s safe Democratic Senate seat, held by Sen. Dianne Feinstein since 1992. 

While Feinstein hasn’t announced her own plans, the possibility that the 89-year-old might retire has all but guaranteed that Schiff won’t be the only Democrat looking to win the solidly blue seat. Rep. Katie Porter announced her own bid earlier this month, and the field of contenders may only grow: Rep. Barbara Lee reportedly plans to run and Rep. Ro Khanna has publicly expressed interest, too. We wouldn’t normally be this interested in a federal race in a strongly blue state with an undeclared incumbent and a small field (for now), but the developing Senate race in California has a number of wrinkles that will make it pretty interesting, from the primary structure and how expensive the race will be to the state’s geographical and ideological divides.

First, California primaries are set up such that the Senate race could come down to two Democrats. Dating back to 2012, all candidates in California, regardless of party, run on the same ballot and the leading two vote-getters advance to the general election. We don’t yet know how many credible candidates will run from either party, but that could affect who advances to the November election in 2024. Historically, the most likely outcome is that one of these Democrats will meet a Republican in the general election, but that’s not a given: Over the past decade, California’s statewide primaries have sent a pair of Democrats to the general election three times. Of those, two were Senate races: In 2016, now-Vice President Kamala Harris (then California’s attorney general) and Rep. Loretta Sanchez advanced (Harris won the general), and in 2018, Feinstein and then-state Sen. Kevin de León advanced (Feinstein won).

A number of strong Democratic candidates in 2024 could possibly split up the Democratic-leaning vote and the same could fragment the GOP-leaning vote. Over the past decade, Democratic candidates have won an average of 57 percent of the top-two vote across all statewide primaries, compared with the GOP’s 36 percent,³⁵ so you could have a couple of Democratic candidates win the vast majority of the Democratic primary vote and finish above a splintered field of Republican contenders. In an indication of what’s possible, de León won a spot in the 2018 general election with only 12 percent of the vote, the lowest percentage for a second-place candidate in a statewide top-two primary.

Another factor that will undoubtedly be important is campaign fundraising. Buying television ads isn’t the end-all, be-all in our digital age, but it’s costly in California, which has the second-largest (Los Angeles), 10th-largest (Bay Area)³⁶ and 20th-largest (Sacramento)³⁷ television markets in the country, according to Nielsen. Not to mention, California is a huge state in terms of population and geography, so building a statewide campaign won’t be cheap. 

This is an area where Schiff has an early edge: He had more than $20 million in his federal campaign account at the end of the 2022 election, thanks to his star power and an easy reelection campaign in his deep-blue seat that didn’t require him to spend most of his campaign war chest.

This isn’t to say that Schiff’s opponents — declared or potential — can’t raise beaucoup money. Porter brought in more than $25 million for her reelection campaign, second only to now-Speaker Kevin McCarthy among House candidates in the 2022 cycle. But unlike Schiff, Porter had to spend $28 million to narrowly win her competitive district last November. For his part, Khanna hasn’t raised that kind of money, but he represents much of Silicon Valley, America’s technology epicenter and home to a great deal of wealth. Lee may struggle to compete in fundraising terms, but she’s well-known in progressive circles and might be the only prominent Black candidate in the race.

Naturally, ideological divisions could play a role in this race, too. Porter, Khanna and Lee are members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, while Schiff is part of the more centrist New Democratic Coalition. This is mostly reflected in voting records: Schiff falls largely in the middle of the House Democratic caucus, while Khanna and Lee both sit clearly on the left side. Porter, though, is harder to pin down. She’s drawn many eyeballs (and donations) with her withering questioning of corporate honchos in congressional hearings, and she’s campaigning as a progressive. But that profile overshadows a pretty moderate voting record, which probably speaks to the realities of representing a highly competitive district — a challenge faced by none of the other three House members. In theory, the three progressives could split the more left-leaning vote in the primary, improving Schiff’s chances of advancing to the general election. What’s more, California Democrats may be dominant, but they aren’t necessarily that progressive, which means Schiff may be playing to a larger part of the electorate to begin with.

Another wrinkle is California’s northern-southern split in Democratic circles, with the northern region’s population centered around the Bay Area and the southern’s around Los Angeles. In recent years, California’s statewide political offices have been dominated by northern Democrats, including Feinstein, longtime former Sen. Barbara Boxer, Gov. Gavin Newsom, former Gov. Jerry Brown and former Sen. Harris.³⁸ Within this north-south dichotomy, Schiff and Porter both represent parts of Greater Los Angeles while Lee and Khanna represent the Bay Area, so whether both northerners run could matter for how the primary vote shakes out. After all, the tendency for candidates to win votes from their regionally aligned “friends and neighbors” remains a factor in primaries.

But Northern California Democrats’ edge may be diminishing, which could redound to the benefit of Schiff or Porter. After Harris became vice president, Newsom appointed Sen. Alex Padilla — the former California secretary of state and Los Angeles native — who won a full term in 2022. And if you look at the trajectory of primary votes in California, Southern California has recently cast a larger share of Democratic votes in top-two primaries. That hasn’t yet paid huge dividends for statewide candidates from the south, but it could affect the 2024 primary.

At this point, there are a lot more questions than answers about the state of play in California’s much-anticipated 2024 Senate race. But in the months to come, we will be closely monitoring key aspects of the contest.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/californias-senate-primary-doozy-fivethirtyeight-politics-podcast-96493536