FiveThirtyEight reports: Sanders passes Biden

[ismnotwasm]

10. ...

But the big winner is … nobody. The chance of there being no delegate majority has increased substantially, to 27 percent from 17 percent before Iowa. For reasons we’ve explained previously, the no-majority scenario isn’t quite the same thing as a contested convention, but the two concepts are closely related.

In running the model, we’re relying on Iowa results as currently reported (as of 5:15 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday afternoon) plus estimates from our friends at The Upshot on the probability that each candidate eventually wins the various vote measures that Iowa tracks. The Upshot now gives Buttigieg about a 98 percent chance of winning the most state delegate equivalents (SDEs) — the measure that the media has traditionally used to declare Iowa winners (and the only measure that Iowa has reported before this year), although it creates a bias toward candidates who perform well in rural areas.

Meanwhile, The Upshot gives Sanders a greater than 99 percent chance to win the first alignment vote — the candidate that voters initially lined up with when they entered their caucus sites. They regard the final alignment popular vote — the candidate that voters wound up with after supporters of nonviable candidates were allowed to realign — as a tossup between Buttigieg and Sanders.

As I explained on Wednesday, we hadn’t totally thought through how to handle the case where different candidates won by different metrics in Iowa. We were slightly surprised, however, at how much emphasis the media put on SDEs as opposed to the popular vote metrics. Since post-primary bounces are largely the result of media coverage, we decided that our formula for predicting bounces should reflect that.