2022 Election

When Democracy Was On The Ballot In 2022, Voters Usually Chose It

Or at least rejected candidates who denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election.

By Kaleigh Rogers

Nov. 29, 2022, at 6:00 AM

Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor of Arizona, made denying the results of the 2020 election central to her campaign this year. And while she hasn’t yet conceded, she lost that race to Democrat Katie Hobbs. It was one of the most high-profile examples of a pattern we saw over and over again in the midterms: When election deniers ran for offices that have significant oversight over elections themselves, voters rejected them.

There was a lot of talk about democracy being on the ballot this midterm cycle, with hundreds of candidates who refused to accept the outcome of the last nationwide election. And while many of those candidates (particularly incumbents) won their races, when it came to those who would have a direct impact on how elections are run and votes counted, the trend was clear. Voters chose democracy. 

While members of Congress obviously have a role to play — 147 Republicans voted not to certify some of the results of the 2020 election, and a handful of Democrats have done so in past cycles as well — state-level officials hold the most immediate authority over elections. In particular, secretaries of state serve as the chief election official in most states, and overseeing elections is a big part of their job. Voters recognize this and, when state-level candidates were adamant election deniers, they not only lost, they typically did worse than other state-level candidates. 

In Pennsylvania, Republican Doug Mastriano lost the governor’s race by more than 14 percentage points to Democrat Josh Shapiro. The governor of the Keystone State appoints its chief election official, so this is a role with an even more direct impact on elections than in other states. Mastriano was one of the most hardline election deniers running for office this year, and even attended the rally on Jan. 6, 2021, which later turned into the attack on the U.S. Capitol. Comparatively, Mehmet Oz, the Republican who ran for Senate in Pennsylvania, lost by less than 5 points. Oz not only ran for a position that would less directly impact elections in the state, but he also didn’t make the 2020 election central to his campaign — he never said it was stolen from Trump, though he did question the results at times. 

In Arizona, though Lake lost by less than 1 percentage point, the Republican candidate for secretary of state, Mark Finchem, performed much worse, losing by nearly 5 points. Like Lake, Finchem equally embraced Trump’s baseless election fraud claims, but unlike Lake, he was running for a position where overseeing elections is arguably the most important part of the job (no shade to keeping records and administering the Uniform Commercial Code, but, let’s be honest). Blake Masters, the Republican candidate for Senate, also lost by about 5 points. He, too, ran on false claims during the primary that Trump won in 2020 and that big tech and the media “conspired” to rig the election — though he later softened his stance ahead of the general election. However, in another statewide race, the Republican comfortably won by a wide margin. Kimberly Yee won reelection for the state treasurer, a role that has no direct impact on elections, by more than 11 points. This is another example of voters in Arizona not simply turning against the GOP this election cycle, but specifically rejecting certain candidates running for particular offices.

New Hampshire provides a similarly apt comparison of statewide races. Like Masters, the Republican candidate for Senate, Don Bolduc, originally campaigned on the false claim that Trump was the rightful winner in 2020 before later pivoting to say the election was not, in fact, stolen. Bolduc lost his race by more than 9 points, while Republican Gov. Chris Sununu — who rejected Trump’s claims from the get-go — won reelection by more than 15 points.

Finchem, Mastriano, and Lake were part of a group of 17 primary candidates endorsed by the America First Secretary of State Coalition, an organization run by a QAnon-supporting influencer that aimed to get election deniers elected to key positions like secretary of state. Of those 17 candidates, only one — Republican candidate for Indiana Secretary of State Diego Morales — prevailed (many of the candidates lost during the primary elections). And despite getting the seal of approval from this group, Morales has said that 2020 was “obviously” a “legitimate election.” 

There are still a lot of reasons to be concerned about the state of democracy in America — 2021 brought a massive wave of new voter restrictions, a disturbingly high share of Americans think political violence is justified, and pending court cases could severely limit efforts to curtail gerrymandering or restrictive election laws. But over and over again this fall, voters in this country made it clear that, given the choice, they’re still picking democracy. 

College Football

College Football's Top Playoff Contenders Can Win Their Way In. Chaos Awaits If They Don't.

By Josh Planos

Nov. 29, 2022, at 6:00 AM

Back in August, the 2022 college football season was expected to be the most top-heavy in recent memory. Instead, six of the top seven teams in the AP preseason poll will likely miss out on the College Football Playoff — including betting favorite Alabama, which dropped two regular season games for just the second time in more than a decade. And in their place, a notoriously oligarchal playoff system could include two first-time participants that rebounded from losing seasons behind new head coaches (USC and TCU) while excluding the four stalwarts with the most all-time appearances (Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State and Oklahoma).¹

The curtains are now drawn on the regular season, but fans shouldn’t leave the theater before the conclusion of championship week. We here at FiveThirtyEight have been known to dabble in chaos-fueled simulations, and the 2022 season will be no exception. With our model as a guide, let’s hop aboard the rollercoaster of possibilities for the ninth iteration of college football’s most exclusive annual attraction.

It’s telling that even getting a new team into the playoff is cause for celebration. So two first-time entries in consecutive seasons — the expected result from the playoff selection committee should the favorites win next weekend — registers as sheer mayhem.

Four power-conference champs, all with one or zero losses, fits the playoff bill most years. That three of the four might enter undefeated is unprecedented.²  But with the assumption that everything comes up chalk on championship weekend based on current team ranking, Michigan, Georgia, TCU and USC would all have at least a 94 percent chance of advancing to the playoff, according to our projections.

The Bulldogs would have an even better chance to become the sixth repeat national champion in the past 50 years and the first to accomplish the feat in the playoff era. They would extend the SEC streak of at least one representative in every playoff, something no other conference can claim. Michigan would advance to the playoff for a second consecutive season after a stunning blowout of archrival Ohio State last weekend. Essentially without the services of Heisman-contending running back Blake Corum, the Wolverines pounded the Buckeyes behind 530 yards of offense. For TCU, it would be the culmination of a journey that started with the team unranked in the AP preseason poll, following two losing seasons in the past three years. In his first season as coach, Sonny Dykes elevated the Horned Frogs to King-of-Texas status and the top of the Big 12 standings. And like Dykes, USC’s Lincoln Riley has launched a program to the top echelon of the sport in his first season at the helm. Alongside marquee transfer quarterback Caleb Williams — the betting favorite to win the 2022 Heisman Trophy — Riley and the Trojans are the class of the Pac-12 and would be conference’s first team to reach the playoff since 2016. That would be a bittersweet pill to swallow for the Pac-12 since it will lose USC and UCLA to the Big Ten in 2024.

ESPN’s Football Power Index has the Trojans listed as the No. 14 team in the nation, below a quartet of three-loss programs and four-loss Texas. This is largely because, as selection committee chair Boo Corrigan said last week, the team’s defense, which ranks 65th in efficiency and would be the second worst of any playoff team since 2014, isn’t what one would expect of a playoff-caliber team. USC also trails playoff contenders Alabama and Ohio State in strength of record. However, that record strength could change if USC beats Utah for a third consecutive win over a ranked opponent and emerges as a major-conference champion.

Now, let’s try on chaos for size.

If three of the four favorites — Michigan, TCU and USC — lose, our model would pencil in the three-loss Kansas State Wildcats as the third team to join Georgia, Michigan and TCU. The Horned Frogs and Buckeyes would each have a 45 percent chance of qualifying in that scenario. That the Big 12 could snag two playoff spots, and that neither would be Oklahoma, would have been unthinkable at the start of the season.

There are currently 10 teams with at least a 5 percent probability of qualifying for the playoff, according to our model. That seems awfully high considering the model still likes two of the four³ to advance regardless of conference championship game outcome. But style points and recency bias matter for a committee comprised of humans. 

Tuesday’s ranking reveal will be instructive, particularly for Ohio State and Alabama, which won’t be seen again by the committee. The Crimson Tide lost two games by a combined four points, while Ohio State got shellacked by 22 in its most lopsided home defeat since 1999, before most of its current roster was born. Will it matter that the Buckeyes have the edge in strength of record if FPI favors the Crimson Tide? It’s unlikely that either could usurp the other on what amounts to a bye week.

Finally, let’s consider the doomsday scenario for the playoff committee: all four current playoff favorites falling during championship weekend, starting with the surprisingly unsurprising upset of the bunch: Our model expects Utah to beat USC for a second time this season. In mid-October, the Utes scored in the final minute and converted a 2-point attempt to down the Trojans by a single point. With Utah given a 53 percent chance to replicate the result, the Pac-12 path to the playoff could once again be torpedoed in the final two weeks of the season (which seems to happen like clockwork every year).

In a purple matchup for the ages, Kansas State and TCU will square off for a second round after the Horned Frogs won the first matchup by double digits. Our model likes the Wildcats, but not enough to give them even a coin flip’s odds of beating the Horned Frogs. LSU inexplicably lost to Texas A&M last weekend, which means if the Tigers manage to topple Georgia, they’d likely become the first SEC champion of the playoff era to not qualify.⁴ With three losses on the season, our model only gives LSU a 21 percent chance to best Georgia. And an unlikely Purdue upset of Michigan likely wouldn’t eliminate the Wolverines from contention. Our model would still give Jim Harbaugh and Co. a 74 percent chance to advance to the playoff if they lose in general, and a 72 percent shot if the other favorites lose as well.

But this ultra-chaotic scenario stands to benefit Michigan’s archrivals from Columbus, a scenario only slightly less appealing to the Buckeyes than losses from Georgia and USC and a win for Kansas State. Ohio State would have a 48 percent chance to make the playoff if the top four teams lose, creating a huge, multi-team dilemma for the selection committee in the process. The model thinks four teams would be piled up between 25 and 60 percent playoff odds, fighting over two spots. 

While it’s unlikely to happen — there’s just a 0.6 percent chance that Michigan, Georgia, TCU and USC all lose during championship weekend — that situation would be the final dose of disarray that the 2022 season deserves, potentially evolving from preseason certainty to a stunning free-for-all in the span of just 14 weeks.

Check out our latest college football predictions.

Election Day in Georgia is just a week away, so the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast crew shook off their turkey hangover to talk about what to expect in Georgia’s second Senate runoff in two years. They also review Democrats’ agenda for the current lame duck session in Congress and hold their first post-midterm 2024 Democratic primary draft.

Election Day in Georgia is just a week away, so the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast crew shook off their turkey hangover to talk about what to expect in Georgia’s second Senate runoff in two years. They also review Democrats’ agenda for the current lame duck session in Congress and hold their first post-midterm 2024 Democratic primary draft.

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

The Jets Have The MVP, The Browns Shouldn't Switch QBs, And We Want An Entire Division In The Playoffs

A FiveThirtyEight Chat

Nov. 28, 2022, at 3:22 PM

maya (Maya Sweedler, editor): Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Before everyone clambers up to their roofs to start stringing up Christmas lights, let’s put Turkey Day to rest and briefly run through all the NFL action of the past two weeks.

Week 11 had some fun outcomes (well, fun for everyone except perhaps the New York Jets’ special teams unit): A Kansas City Chiefs fourth-quarter comeback on the road against an AFC West rival; a dominant Dallas Cowboys performance over the then 8-1 Minnesota Vikings; a Philadelphia Eagles double-digit comeback against the Jeff Saturday-led Indianapolis Colts. And Thanksgiving had some excitement as well, from Dallas’s CeeDee Lamb coming in clutch against the New York Giants to a fantastic debut from Detroit Lions linebacker James Houston IV to Minnesota’s Justin Jefferson passing legendary wide receiver Randy Moss for most receiving yards in a player’s first three seasons (with six games to go!).

Which leads us into the rest of Week 12. We’ll talk about the two overtime games, the Washington Commanders’ mini-win streak, where depth (or lack thereof) is most important, but before we get into all of that, let’s look at the past few weeks of play as a whole. Which teams have stood out in the season’s doldrums? Any teams on the upswing or displaying flashing red lights you’re starting to worry about?

Salfino (Michael Salfino, FiveThirtyEight contributor): The San Francisco 49ers right now are the best team in the NFC. I think that’s the biggest story in the NFC. The Cincinnati Bengals are probably the biggest story in the AFC. Are they better than the Buffalo Bills? Their game against the Chiefs in Cincy is the game I’m most looking forward to in Week 13, especially with Ja’Marr Chase due back.

But of course the biggest story the last two weeks, not just in the NFL but in the entire world, is The White Lotus, Mike White.

joshua.hermsmeyer (Josh Hermsmeyer, NFL analyst): While I’ve been firmly on team #abhortheroar all season, it’s been exciting to see the Lions take advantage of the soft part of their schedule and rack up a few wins and take Buffalo, my pick for the first- or second-best team in football, to the limit. They’re in second place in the NFC North and we give them around a 9 percent shot at making the playoffs. They’re in the hunt!

Salfino: I want the Lions and Seahawks in the NFC playoffs replacing the Giants and Commanders. But it’s not going to happen for Detroit.

neil (Neil Paine, acting sports editor): I have one vindication and two non-vindications: The top three teams in Elo rating points gained over the past 14 days are the Cowboys (who I warned you guys were good) and the Bengals and Raiders (whom I wrote off to varying degrees). Although it’s probably too little, too late for Las Vegas anyway — we still only give them 5 percent playoff odds — the Bengals are alive and well, and maybe playing out a repeat of last year.

joshua.hermsmeyer: The Cowboys are good, and they’re good even while being robbed. It was a catch. Even Dez agrees.

maya: Let’s talk about the Raiders, who beat the Seattle Seahawks (an early season darling of ours) in overtime Sunday. We were all over this team for being awful in every facet earlier this month. But even though a playoff berth is unlikely, this is a much better looking team than just a few weeks ago. What’s changed?

neil: I must admit their crappy luck in one-possession contests has turned the other way for a few games.

Salfino: I feel good for Derek Carr, who like in “Almost Famous” is a midlevel quarterback struggling with his own limitations in the harsh face of stardom. It’s not his fault he’s not great. He really cares. I respect it. And he’s made the plays he had to, especially against Denver, and QBR loved him vs. Seattle. The story there of course was 300 scrimmage yards for Josh Jacobs. Just crazy.

neil: Jacobs had one of those performances we all used to put up against a low-difficulty CPU opponent in Madden.

Salfino: Bo Jackson in Tecmo “Bo”.

joshua.hermsmeyer: Neil I think puts his finger on it. You’re going to get one-score games to go in your favor once in a while. I don’t think this team has fundamentally changed … unless you play games with numbers, like NFL Research did with this stat: “Josh Jacobs is the only player since at least 1950 with 225+ rush yards & 70+ receiving yards in a single game.”

neil: What are you talking about? Those are totally natural cutoffs, Josh! LOL.

maya: I have no problem with that. When you have the fourth-longest overtime touchdown from scrimmage, you can massage all the stats you want to get that “first.”

Salfino: I remember Garrison Hearst beating the Jets in OT with a 96-yard TD in 1998.

joshua.hermsmeyer: I was in Cancun watching that at one of those beach bars. I nearly fell off my stool screaming.

Salfino: I was screaming for different reasons.

neil: And that was probably the last Jets team as good as this year’s Mike White version.

maya: Mike, how all-in are you on the White-led Jets?

Salfino: I think the 2010 team was quite good. But perhaps with White, the true NFL MVP right now. Three hundred-plus yards and multiple TD passes? He’s the 12th ever to do that in at least two of his first four starts. The other active QBs who matched White: Patrick Mahomes and Joe Burrow. The only QB ever with three such games in his first four starts? Kurt Warner.

joshua.hermsmeyer: Wait, is White the best Jets QB since Chad Pennington?

maya: I mean, Brett Favre did technically spend a season in New York somewhere in there …

joshua.hermsmeyer: Favre was on the low cycle by then …

neil: In many ways. (Although we didn’t yet know how low he could sink.)

Salfino: Look, seriously with White, he has a very good arm — he was a pitching prospect. But the big difference is vision and guts, which Zach Wilson lacks. White will stand in the pocket and take a hit to make a play. Wilson I can’t remember ever doing that wittingly. But White has been good-to-great in three of his first four career starts (he was playing hurt the other game vs. Buffalo, I believe).

neil: The Jets’ season is fascinating because they have really been straddling the line between trying to capitalize on a better-than-expected start and letting Wilson develop.

Wilson did them a favor with that disaster game versus the Pats, which gave them permission to actually use a better-in-the-here-and-now QB.

Salfino: I agree, Neil. Robert Saleh had to choose between the quarterback and the team and chose the team, as he needed to. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one.

neil: Let’s just hope Wilson didn’t imprint his Katra into Chris Streveler.

(That’s a “Wrath of Khan” reference, folks. I’ll show myself out.)

Salfino: Very good, Neil!

joshua.hermsmeyer: Saleh deserves consideration for coach of the year. He won’t get it, but he deserves a mention.

Salfino: I think Saleh is a good bet to get it if you think the Jets can finish 11-6, probably a 20 percent chance.

maya: Let’s turn to the other overtime game of the week: the Browns’ 23-17 win over the Buccaneers, which saw Cleveland tie the game on a two-minute drive and win on a Nick Chubb up-the-middle run in overtime. I don’t think the Browns’ 2022 season got a lot of preseason attention for its football potential, but other than losses to the entire AFC East (LOL), this team under Jacoby Brissett has looked pretty complete. With Deshaun Watson set to return from an 11-game suspension due to allegations of sexual misconduct, should Cleveland consider sticking with Brissett? 

joshua.hermsmeyer: The David Njoku one-handed catch on fourth down to send that Cleveland game to overtime was one of the best I’ve ever seen. And I watch Justin Jefferson every week.

neil: Yes! What a gutsy win for Cleveland, even if the Bucs aren’t what they used to be.

Let me make the case very simply for the Browns sticking with Brissett: Brissett’s current QBR (61.2) isn’t that different from Watson’s during his last season in 2020 (63.7). Tack on the rust of missing two whole seasons, and would we even expect Watson to be better? And that’s without even getting into how Brissett’s teammates seem to really respect him as a leader. Not sure what kind of respect Watson could still command after everything.

Salfino: Every metric overrates someone. I have a hard time reconciling Brissett’s eyeball test with his QBR. Maybe it’s me.

joshua.hermsmeyer: I am no fan of Watson, I will be booing his every snap. But there’s no way you pay what the Browns paid for him and don’t start him. Brissett could have played like vintage Joe Montana and Watson would be starting this week.

Salfino: I suspect Brissett’s QBR is lifted by really timely running, even though he’s not really a runner. He seems to be hyperefficient there. I think it’s a very fair question, but there is 0 percent chance that Watson doesn’t start in Houston, ironically.

neil: Oh, I totally know that they will start Watson. It’s just not clear to me that they should. (From a football perspective, not even from an ethical one.)

Salfino: I think if they were 6-5, it would be more of an open question. I respect the stats always, but would anyone rank Brissett this year where he ranks in QBR?

neil: The QBR rankings in general this season show that our ideas about the good and bad QBs are more wrong than we think. (Hello, Geno Smith, etc., etc.)

maya: Hold on, is that fair?

I think QBR rewards a very specific type of quarterback performance — efficient passing, minimal turnovers. It’s not necessarily going to reward the most innovative offenses, as even context-dependent football stats still fail to take the gravity of a running QB into account, but for what it is, I think QBR captures something of value.

Salfino: I have no issue with Geno, even though QBR hated him for some reason vs. the Raiders.

joshua.hermsmeyer: I think the Browns need a more dynamic QB. The defense especially. I’ve been seeing some talk that “analytics” are to blame for the team’s defense being unable to stop the run. Over-investment in stopping the pass or some such. I don’t accept that premise, but assuming it’s true, the way they are built with Brissett (control the clock with the run game and win close games) encourages your opponent to run on you. A more dynamic passing attack will encourage more opposing offenses to attack through the air, and that will play to the defense’s strength.

neil: OK, but I thought we were all about encouraging the offense to run … ? (Particularly to pointlessly “establish” the run.)

Have teams neglected run D to the point that now we want them to pass?

maya: I feel like I can predict what Josh is going to say here …

No, gap-sound defense is and has always been important! No defense coordinator worth his salt would completely neglect the run. 

joshua.hermsmeyer: Yes Maya! Also, I think you’re fine with people running against you when you have a two-score lead. Less fine with getting gashed when you’re also trying to grind out drives.

Salfino: I think you want teams to run but if you can’t stop the run, you just can’t win. It’s just too easy for the opponent to keep pounding you into submission. But few run defenses are that bad generally. You can be Peyton Colts bad. Not this bad.

neil: FWIW, running still generates WAY fewer (i.e., negative) EPA per play this season than passing.

So call me skeptical that a team should want opponents to pass on them instead of running.

joshua.hermsmeyer: I think where we will agree, Neil, is that building a team to win close games is not building a team to win consistently.

maya: Well, let’s run through the five worst run defenses in the league by EPA. From worst to fifth-worst, they are the Cleveland Browns, Green Bay Packers, Detroit Lions, Philadelphia Eagles and Los Angeles Chargers.

There’s still a pretty good amount of winning happening there.

Salfino: All disappointing teams except the Eagles, who still outrush their opponents, generally. Plus the Eagles snapped into action to try to fix that problem, so I believe their analytics considered that deficiency to be grave.

joshua.hermsmeyer: Ehhhh. I’m not sure about that. They always wanted Hurts to rush as much as he felt like it. I think he may be running too much now, though. Or at least, when he does run he needs to slide!

maya: The Eagles make for such an interesting contrast with the post-Week 6 Chicago Bears. The way Hurts is used as an option runner versus the called runs for Justin Fields seem to offer pretty different paths forward for the future of running quarterbacks.

Salfino: Totally agree the Eagles are running too much. My problem with the running QBs is the volume. If you push 200 attempts, there is no way these guys are going to be at the top of their games in December and January, when they must be for their teams to win. Running backs spend all their time building their bodies to withstand the toll of running that much. Quarterbacks can’t do this. They’re not lifting weights and building core strength and leg strength. They’re doing QB things.

joshua.hermsmeyer: I seem to remember a running QB against the Packers defense in the playoffs doing pretty well … 

neil: Another guy who fits that description, Josh, is somebody whose record Hurts broke last night.

joshua.hermsmeyer: Maybe it’s just the Packers.

neil: I think each of us could run for 100 against the Packers in the playoffs. (Or this year, in the regular season.) 

Salfino: Kaepernick had 63 regular-season attempts that year, Josh. This Hurts/Lamar/Fields volume is not a sustainable business model. 

You have to save it for the biggest games like Mahomes does.

maya: LOL. I would very much like to opt out of running against the Packers.

But Mike, that question of volume is key. We’ve already seen backfields get reshaped by injuries, which has produced some pretty unexpected outcomes (the Broncos’ “running back by committee” collapsing, the Chiefs rolling out a three-man system). Whose depth or rotation appears best suited for December/January games?

Salfino: Everything about the Broncos offense has collapsed with Russell Wilson having six straight games with a QBR under 34, which has to be close to a record. The Chiefs just run for show (and pass for dough), but even though Isiah Pacheco got 51 percent of snaps, he got 23 of 31 RB touches (74 percent). I don’t think you have to worry much about RBs being worn out in January if they are reasonably managed. Josh Jacobs maybe is a problem. Again, they’re whole lives are building their bodies to take that punishment.

joshua.hermsmeyer: I’ll be predictable and say the teams with the best passing attacks and innovative schemes will stand the best shot at postseason rushing success. K.C. is one, as Maya mentioned. The Dolphins will trot out anybody who can run a 4.5 and find success. And the Niners have a bevy of talent in the backfield they can call upon when Jimmy G. gets scared and confused.

Salfino: Jimmy G. slander! Sorry, I do think wins largely are a QB stat:

joshua.hermsmeyer: I saw this! I fell off the couch! 

maya: If I were Fred Warner or Nick Bosa (or even Deebo!) and I saw that, I would be seething.

Salfino: Maybe he’s an exception to the rule, but Occam’s razor says you have to sort of stipulate, based on that alone, that Garoppolo is at least good.

My sense, Maya, is that Jimmy G.’s teammates love him.

maya: We have again reached the “defend Jimmy G.” portion of the chat.

neil: Hahaha

Salfino: He’s going to be retired for five years and we’ll still be debating if he was even good.

joshua.hermsmeyer: There’s no doubt that the defense carried the Niners on Sunday. I don’t think it will continue, because it never does, but it was one of the more impressive performances of the season. Even Fred Warner was good!

maya: Let’s use the Niners as a jumping-off point for a quick step back to look at the playoff picture. If we axed the last month and a half of the season, here’s who would be in the playoffs:

• NFC: The entire (!) NFC East, with the division-leading Eagles joined by wild-card teams Cowboys, Giants and Commanders. The other three division leaders are the Vikings, 49ers and Buccaneers (the latter of whom are the only NFC playoff team with a losing record).
• AFC: Division leaders Chiefs, Miami Dolphins, Tennessee Titans and Baltimore Ravens, plus wild-card teams in the Bills, Cincinnati Bengals and Jets.

Of these 14 teams, whom do you least want to match up against? No boring answers, like Kansas City or Philadelphia, allowed!

neil: Buffalo … ?

maya: Mm definitely a boring answer, too. Sorry, Neil!

neil: Haha. You didn’t prohibit them! But they are the best team in football by SRS, so I should have known better.

Salfino: If healthy, the Niners. 

joshua.hermsmeyer: Unless I’m Buffalo or K.C., I would not want to face Miami. Just too much scoring potential.

Salfino: Josh, if Miami is so good, why are they seventh in the conference in point differential? Is this all the Tua missed games? He lost the game against the Bengals, who were going to thump Miami that night regardless.

joshua.hermsmeyer: Mike, Miami is firmly in the second tier of teams. I think they’re legit!

Salfino: Right now, the Jets could definitely beat Miami in the first round. I would not be remotely shocked. They can cover those guys.

joshua.hermsmeyer: I had Sauce Sauce on my wings this weekend. It was good.

maya: Tasted like victory?

Salfino: Sauce is very good but a little overrated. He’s not Revis remotely, not yet. 

joshua.hermsmeyer: He’s a rookie!

Salfino: Right, but even compared to Rookie Revis. Too much contact and not enough turning back to the ball.

neil: I think I would not like to face Baltimore. They are fourth in SRS and above-average in every single schedule-adjusted EPA category. 

Salfino: Baltimore’s pass defense is craptastic. Come on.

neil: Yes, Trevor Lawrence carved up the Ravens Sunday. But before that, they’d held the opposing starter below his usual QB Elo norm in eight straight games!

maya: Personally, I can’t wait for Baltimore’s luck in one-score games to flip. It’s rough out there.

joshua.hermsmeyer: I will second the defense of the Ravens. However there is one part of their defense that is troubling, and it’s exemplified by this stat: They’ve lost three games when leading by multiple scores in the fourth quarter, tied for the most in a season in NFL history.

neil: Yeah, it feels like that is becoming sort of a reputation for them. But before 2022, they had a 31-3 record with Lamar Jackson at QB when leading by two scores at any point in a game. It’s possible this is all noise.

Salfino: But that’s pass defense. It’s bad. They also have little pass rush. The Bengals are winning the North.

maya: I always look forward to Tennessee doing some January bracket busting, so that’s who I’m going with (unless Derrick Henry gets hurt, and until Ryan Tannehill is asked to do just a little too much).

Salfino: The Chiefs and Eagles seem set for No. 1 seeds. The Niners have seized control of the NFC West and I think they’re the best team in the conference when healthy. But the Vikings will hold on to the No. 2 seed because after the Jets in Week 13 their schedule is so easy. The Giants will be the odd man out in the NFC playoff picture due to their schedule and loss to Seattle. The Chargers could replace the Jets but I think the Jets will get to 10 wins and maybe 11. L.A. must win two of their next three at Raiders, Dolphins and Titans. I don’t think they do it.

maya: All I want is an entire division to make the playoffs for the first time ever. The only thing that can improve Wild Card Weekend is a series of interdivisional grudge matches.

joshua.hermsmeyer: I’m starting to get excited for the playoffs, Maya, and you’re helping.

Salfino: Do we really want the Giants and Commanders in the tournament? I’m a hard no on that.

neil: LOL, Mike, I was gonna say. I think I’d rather see all four AFC East teams.

maya: As long as one of them meets Dallas at some point, I’m into it. 

Salfino: The Cowboys have won four playoff games since the 1995 season. FOUR. Look it up. I ain’t lyin’.

neil: That sounds high.

Check out our latest NFL predictions.

2022 Election

Few Midterm Voters Backed Different Parties For Senate And Governor

But they were consequential for some key results.

By Geoffrey Skelley

Nov. 28, 2022, at 2:00 PM

Heading into the 2022 election, one big question was just how many voters would be willing to vote for one party’s candidate for U.S. Senate and the opposing party’s candidate for governor. We’ve known for a while that this voting behavior, known as “split-ticket” voting, has been on the decline in U.S. elections, thanks to forces such as polarization and negative partisanship that influence voters to consistently back one party. But while FiveThirtyEight’s forecast projected a further downtick in split-ticket voting this year, we didn’t know just how things would play out from state to state.

With most results in now, we can safely say that split-ticket voting decreased in 2022 — for the most part. And yet, the few voters who did split their tickets mattered a lot for the outcomes in many states, especially where one party won the Senate race and the other party won the governorship.

Overall, we were able to look at 25 pairs of Senate and gubernatorial elections in 24 of the 26 states with such pairs on the ballot in 2022.¹ Of those, five states elected senators and governors from different parties, with one more — Georgia — possibly joining them, depending on the outcome of a Dec. 6 runoff election. A few states saw sizable differences, especially deep-blue Vermont, where popular Republican Gov. Phil Scott won reelection by a whopping 47 percentage points, while in the Senate contest, Democratic Rep. Peter Welch won by a massive 40 points. But Vermont’s 87-point spread was a clear outlier: Only eight of the other 24 pairs of races had double-digit differences, including three of the five pairings that saw candidates from different parties elected. Broadly speaking, there wasn’t that much variation in many states, as the median difference was 7.8 points, found in New York, which ranked as the smallest in any midterm dating back to 1990.

Still, split-ticket voters wielded significant power — even if they weren’t sizable in number — especially in three closely fought states. Most striking was Nevada, where Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto won reelection by only about 1 point while Republican Joe Lombardo bested Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak by a little over 1 point at the same time. Similarly, the handful of Wisconsin voters who backed both Republican Sen. Ron Johnson and Democratic Gov. Tony Evers helped both win narrow reelection victories. And while Georgia’s Senate race is headed for a runoff, that happened partly because a small group of voters who backed Republican Gov. Brian Kemp also voted for Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock in the latter’s race against Republican Herschel Walker. That kept Walker below 50 percent and gave Warnock about a 1-point edge, although he too fell short of a majority.

Now, a few states besides Vermont had fairly sizable differences that highlighted how the parties split the two races — or at the very least how one race was far more competitive than the other. New Hampshire reelected Republican Gov. Chris Sununu by 15 points while simultaneously giving Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan another six-year term by 9 points. In Kansas, Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly overcame the state’s strong GOP lean to win reelection by about 2 points even as Republican Sen. Jerry Moran handily won by 23 points. And while candidates from the same party won both races in Hawaii, Ohio and Oregon, each state saw a comfortable win for an incumbent in one contest while the open-seat election for the other office was much more competitive. That these incumbents would win more easily isn’t terribly surprising, as they tend to gain at least some advantage from already holding office. 

All in all, though, the results in these Senate and gubernatorial contests suggest that split-ticket voting has continued to decline. The median difference of about 8 points proved to be a new low in Senate-governor results in midterm elections from 1990 to 2022, as the chart below shows:

Still, even with the diminished rate of split-ticket voting, about a quarter of the Senate-governor pairs we looked at had split-ticket outcomes. That share was roughly in line with midterms dating back to 2010, when between about 1-in-6 and 1-in-4 states saw different parties win their Senate and governor contests. In other words, split-ticket voting isn’t so rare — at least today, anyway — that the actual governing outcomes of these votes produce no split results.

However, it’s not hard to imagine us moving further in that direction in the years to come. In 2020, just one state (Maine) voted for different parties for president and Senate, while no state in 2016 produced a split-ticket result in those two races. It’s true that midterms may remain more inclined to lead to split-ticket outcomes between top-tier races like governor and Senate because elections for governor still aren’t as nationalized as races for federal office. That has led some voters to back a party they don’t normally support in elections for a state’s chief executive. But even then, we’re seeing increasingly nationalized gubernatorial elections, which could further reduce the rate of split-ticket voting in midterm years, too.

2022 Election

What Can the 2022 Midterms Tell Us About 2024?

A FiveThirtyEight Chat

Nov. 28, 2022, at 6:00 AM

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, senior elections analyst): The 2022 midterms just ended a couple weeks ago,¹ but the 2024 election has already begun: Just a week after Election Day, former President Donald Trump announced he would run for president again. Given how little of a break we’re getting between the two campaigns, it raises the question: How could the results of the 2022 election influence the results of 2024’s?

To answer that, I’ve convened a meeting of FiveThirtyEight’s brightest political minds. How’s everyone feeling about the campaign whiplash??

geoffrey.skelley (Geoffrey Skelley, senior elections analyst): The permanent campaign is more permanent than ever.  

alex (Alex Samuels, politics reporter): Haha, our jobs are never boring — that’s for sure!

kaleigh (Kaleigh Rogers, technology and politics reporter): People often comment that my job is only busy every other year and I laugh and laugh.

Monica Potts (Monica Potts, senior politics reporter): It seemed like Trump was forever promising an announcement “tomorrow,” so by the time it happened it felt like it had already happened. But yes, it is a never-ending campaign season.

nrakich: OK, let’s get one thing out of the way. Democrats had a surprisingly strong showing in 2022, especially by historical standards: They kept the Senate, and they lost fewer than 10 seats in the House despite the president’s party losing over two dozen House seats in the typical midterm. Is this reason for Democrats to be optimistic about 2024 as well?

alex: I’m hesitant to make sweeping generalizations about 2024 based off Democrats’ performance in 2022. Sure, Democratic victories give President Biden something to brag about in the meantime, but historically, we haven’t been able to predict presidential results based on midterm elections. And I don’t see why this year would be the exception.

geoffrey.skelley: I mean, they might take it as a reason to be optimistic. But as Alex said, historically, there’s been little relationship between the result in a midterm election and the result of the next presidential contest. So what happened in November 2022 probably has little bearing on how November 2024 will pan out, at least in terms of votes. 

And that’s understandable: We don’t know who the candidates will be in 2024, we don’t know what the political environment will be like and the electorate will be different! Right now, the U.S. Election Project’s preliminary turnout figure for this year is around 46 percent of the voting-eligible population. With California still counting a lot of ballots, that’ll probably hit 47 percent. But in 2020, almost 67 percent of the VEP cast a ballot for president! So a lot of people who didn’t participate in 2022 will probably participate in 2024.

kaleigh: Yeah, I mean midterms generally have very little correlation with presidential elections. In addition to the changes in the electorate, people just think differently about voting for president compared to voting for governor or senator. It’s the highest office, and so much depends on what happens in the months leading up to the actual election. I wouldn’t use the midterms to make any predictions about 2024, personally, other than perhaps who else might run. 

Monica Potts: Two of the biggest issues motivating voters this year seemed to be inflation/the economy and abortion rights, and it’s just so hard to say what conditions will be like in two years. I can see red states continuing to push abortion bans or enforce the ones that already exist, but I can also see purple states moderating and blue states working to protect abortion rights. Who knows what the economy will do, but I think it’s safe to say it won’t be in the same place. I think so much depends on those conditions, who’s at the top of the tickets and what happens in the swing states where Democrats won this year, like Pennsylvania and Michigan.

alex: And the issues that motivated voters this fall could be way different than the issues that motivate voters in presidential election years. You might also see, for example, a Democratic backlash toward Trump if he ends up being the GOP’s presidential nominee, similar to what we saw in 2020.

nrakich: Great points all!

Yeah, for every midterm-presidential pairing like 2018-20 (when Democrats had a great midterm and then defeated Trump), there’s one like 2010-12 (when Republicans had a great midterm and then failed to unseat then-President Barack Obama).

geoffrey.skelley: Seriously, Nathaniel. Speaking of whiplash, one of the best examples is 1946-48, when Republicans swamped Democrats in the 1946 midterms to take back the Senate and House, but then former President Harry Truman surprised by winning reelection in 1948, bringing with him sweeping majorities for Democrats in the Senate and House.

nrakich: In fairness, though, 2022 is a different case — the rare example of a midterm where the president’s party did relatively well. What has happened in presidential elections after those midterms?

kaleigh: Ooh, that’s a good question … for Geoff!

(My brain holds very different esoteric knowledge.)

geoffrey.skelley: Nathaniel, a couple examples that come to mind are 1970-72 and 1998-2000. In 1970, Republicans actually gained a seat in the Senate and lost only nine seats in the House, but Democrats retained clear majorities in both chambers. Then in 1972, then-President Richard Nixon won one of the greatest landslide reelections in U.S. history. 

In 1998, Democrats gained five seats in the House and preserved the status quo in the Senate amid a backlash over GOP attempts to impeach then-President Bill Clinton, but then Republican George W. Bush captured the White House in 2000. 

Obviously these are two fairly different circumstances when it comes to an incumbent president running or not, which candidates were running (George McGovern was not the strongest contender for Democrats in ’72), and the events surrounding the election. But that speaks to how hard it is to know what’ll happen next!

nrakich: Yeah, and there’s also 2002-04, when Republicans had a good midterm in the wake of Sept. 11 and then Bush won a narrow reelection. But of course, we’re dealing with a very small sample size here.

Kaleigh, you mentioned that the midterms could influence who jumps into the race for president. Do you guys think the midterms change Biden’s reelection calculus at all?

kaleigh: I don’t know about change, but certainly influence. Biden has a lot of factors to consider and recently said he was going to discuss with family over the holidays. But he’s got to be feeling emboldened after such a strong showing in the midterms. 

Another influential factor has to be Trump’s announcement. Biden won against Trump once before, so there’s this underlying narrative of “he beat him once, he could beat him again,” if Trump wins the nomination.

alex: If Democrats had succumbed to the midterm curse that’s typical for the party in the White House, Biden may have faced outsized pressure to not run in 2024 (as he did before the midterms). But I think, to Kaleigh’s point, you could make the argument that the results of this year’s races, coupled with Trump’s presidential announcement, clear up any doubts over whether Biden is running for reelection.

geoffrey.skelley: Kaleigh, I think that’s right. I’ve said before that Biden’s chances of running again depended in part on whether Trump would run again, and now Trump is running. So I do think Biden may be somewhat more likely to run. 

At the same time, it’s also possible that Biden could decide this is a moment where the Democratic bench of potential candidates is stronger after the success of many big names in the midterms, especially governors of potentially competitive states like Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan or Jared Polis of Colorado.

Monica Potts: I still think it’s worth remembering that Biden remains pretty unpopular (his approval rating is currently below 42 percent), and voters chose their Democratic candidates in House and Senate races for many reasons. I think it would be reading too much into the results to say it boosts Biden’s chances. 

nrakich: Geoffrey, that’s a great point about Whitmer and Polis. Both have been talked about as future presidential contenders, and both absolutely crushed it in their reelection bids: Whitmer won by 11 percentage points, and Polis won by 19! I don’t think they would ever primary Biden, but if Biden doesn’t run, their theories of the case seem stronger than ever, especially if Democratic primary voters are concerned about electability again.

alex: Do we really think Whitmer or Polis stands a chance against Trump, though?

I think winning statewide office is one thing, but winning a presidential election against Trump is another story entirely. Biden already proved that he can beat him in 2020 and can campaign on Democrats’ success during the midterm elections, so I don’t see why he wouldn’t be seen as the strongest Democratic presidential contender (at least at this point in time). 

And if Whitmer thought Biden was a particularly weak president, she wouldn’t have campaigned with him earlier this year.

Monica Potts: Right, I think the really big question for Democrats is who should they nominate if not Biden? A rising star like Whitmer could be risky. Voters don’t really have a favorable opinion of Vice President Kamala Harris, for lots of reasons that include sexism and racism, but she hasn’t been a super visible VP. I’m having flashbacks to the crowded Democratic field in the 2020 presidential election, which didn’t have a clear favorite until House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn endorsed Biden. 

kaleigh: I think Whitmer or Polis could absolutely beat Trump. I think a lot of Biden’s win in 2020 was simply based on him being the “not Trump” candidate. Trump is basically just as unpopular now as he was before the 2020 election, and even some of his supporters are saying they don’t want him to run. There are many capable Democrats who could fill the “not Trump” role and defeat him in 2024 if Biden were to opt against running.

geoffrey.skelley: As Nathaniel said, I don’t think these candidates run if Biden does. But if he doesn’t seek reelection, they’d certainly have a decent shot of defeating Trump in a general election. For one thing, both Whitmer and Polis have put together impressive electoral track records in states that are either real swingy or at least not deep blue. Whitmer could make abortion a major issue, as she did in her reelection campaign, while Polis has a bit of a libertarian streak in him that could expand his appeal in a general election context. Plus, Trump is one of the great unifiers in history — for Democrats, anyway. So that would help the eventual Democratic nominee to some extent. Moreover, the country is starkly divided and close presidential elections are just sort of a matter of course these days, so barring a real catastrophe for one party, we should expect another highly competitive contest in 2024.

Monica Potts: Yes, I think so much depends on whether Trump is the nominee.

alex: I’m not totally convinced by the “not Trump” argument, Kaleigh. I think most of the Democratic field in 2020 campaigned on being the “not Trump” or “I’m best positioned to beat Trump” candidate. But there’s a reason why Biden was the victor in the end.

But I largely agree with your point, Geoff. I think Biden running will stop other Democrats from jumping in, so there’s not a split Democratic field. The flip side, though, is that I don’t think a Trump announcement will stop other prominent Republicans from throwing their hat in the ring.

kaleigh: The name on everybody’s lips is gonna be … Ronny!

nrakich: Haha, indeed, Kaleigh. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was another governor who turned in a really impressive reelection performance earlier this month. He won by 19 points in a state that, until recently at least, was considered the quintessential swing state! Do we think this strengthens his hand ahead of his widely expected presidential bid?

alex: That’s a good point, Nathaniel! With his landslide election in Florida, DeSantis was easily the biggest GOP storyline to come out of the 2022 election. I won’t cite exit poll data directly, but reporting suggests that he performed well with Latino voters and flipped Miami-Dade County, which is historically Democratic. I think his performance this year might convince Republicans that he’s the strongest alternative to Trump — if they’re looking for one. Plus, DeSantis has long been viewed as a rising star within the GOP, so it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that he takes on the challenge.

kaleigh: There’s no doubt: The results in Florida solidified DeSantis’s role as a popular Republican rising star, and at least some polls are now showing him ahead of Trump. An Economist/YouGov poll conducted just after the election found 46 percent of Republicans said they’d prefer to see DeSantis as the GOP nominee in 2024, compared to 39 percent who said they’d prefer Trump. 

And while a majority — 60 percent — of Republicans said they wanted to see Trump run in 2024 when asked before the election, just 47 percent did when asked after the election (but before Trump announced his candidacy).

nrakich: I’d be careful about those polls, though, Kaleigh. We often warn people to wait a while to interpret polls after major news events like debates, and the midterms definitely qualify.

kaleigh: That’s true! We’ll have to wait to see if any of these turn into actual trends.

Monica Potts: I can absolutely see Republican party leaders coalescing around DeSantis because they know Trump motivates Democrats to vote against them. DeSantis’s policies and positions are very similar to Trump’s, and he plays to the base on issues like immigration, education and voter fraud (which, as we know, is not a significant concern). Republican voters seem to like him — even before the midterms, 64 percent of registered Republican voters told Morning Consult they had a favorable opinion of him. And this is anecdotal, but Republican voters where I live seem to know who he is and also like him. 

In 2016, Trump didn’t really have any opponents who could get enough support to really challenge him. Many voters thought of him as a businessman and what he would do as a politician was unknown. Now he’s a known quantity, his successful run is six years in the past and there are alternatives like DeSantis. 

geoffrey.skelley: DeSantis might be in a position to make himself almost a co-favorite, assuming he does what everyone expects and runs. Granted, Trump has been ahead in pretty much all national polls that aren’t testing him and DeSantis head-to-head. 

And remember, if other candidates get into the field, they won’t be going mano-a-mano, at least not initially. The size of the eventual field is not a minor consideration either, considering Trump won with just a plurality in the 2016 Republican presidential primary. It remains to be seen if the many bigwig donors and influencers within the GOP who oppose Trump will rally behind one candidate or not. And it's not like Trump had their backing early in 2016, so even if they are unified, that isn't certain to stop him either.

nrakich: Trump has not emerged from the midterms covered in glory, though. Many of the candidates he endorsed in the primary lost the general election; in fact, The New York Times and Washington Post both calculated they performed 5 points worse than expected. And his intervention may have directly cost the GOP multiple seats. For example, he endorsed far-right Republican Joe Kent in the primary for Washington’s 3rd District over incumbent Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler because Herrera Beutler voted to impeach him. Kent won the primary but ended up losing the general election — which was a big shock, because this seat is pretty red. Now, many Republican elites are grumbling about him costing the party seats, or at least not embracing his presidential campaign. 

On the other hand, recent history is littered with examples of Republicans appearing to break with Trump, only to fall back in line later. Do you guys think that will happen again, or is this time really different?

geoffrey.skelley: I tend to see this as half a 2016 circumstance, if you will. Many party elites don’t want to get behind Trump and will look to DeSantis as a principal alternative. But depending on the contours of the GOP presidential primary, they could definitely come flooding back to Trump if DeSantis struggles against him for some reason. And Trump will start out with far more institutional support than he had previously. You already see various Republicans announcing their support for him, like Sen.-elect J.D. Vance. 

alex: Agreed, Geoff. I think if voters largely continue to back Trump, it’ll be hard for the party to step in and knock him down. To be honest, Trumpism is so ingrained within the GOP today that I almost forgot about all the intraparty grumbling during his 2016 run! 

Monica Potts: Yes, this is tricky because people underestimated Trump in 2016 and then kept declaring his campaign over — but it never was. But I do think this time is really different. Jan. 6 was a real turning point people haven’t forgotten. And as Kaleigh has written, the election denial that drove the insurrection did not win seats for Republican newcomers this cycle. Voters often have short memories, but I think voters remember that and want to move away from that. 

geoffrey.skelley: Monica, I think Jan. 6 might make Trump a weaker general election nominee, but how much it hurts him in the presidential primary on the GOP side is less clear. After all, for months, even years now, a consistent 60-ish percent of Republicans have said in polling that Biden didn’t legitimately win the 2020 election. If Trump didn’t lose in their eyes, they’re not necessarily going to view him as weaker.

Monica Potts: Geoffrey, that’s fair. I just wonder how much this year’s midterms quieted down those beliefs. I was prepared to see losing candidates claiming election fraud or refusing to concede, and that didn’t really happen. I just wonder if the midterm results might weaken those beliefs in all but the true believers, as voters move on to other issues.

kaleigh: There are Republican voters who love Trump but fear he can’t win, and they want the White House more than they want Trump to be the nominee. The question is how big of a contingent those voters are.

2022 World Cup

The World Cup's New High-Tech Ball Will Change Soccer Forever

By Ben Dowsett

Nov. 22, 2022, at 6:00 AM

When the 2022 World Cup made its debut on Sunday, it kicked off one of the most significant in-game uses of technology in sports history.

All tournament long, match balls will contain a sensor that collects spatial positioning data in real time — the first World Cup to employ such a ball-tracking mechanism. This, combined with existing optical tracking tools, will make VAR (video assistant referees) and programs like offside reviews more accurate and streamlined than they’ve ever been. Combining these two forms of tracking has long been a holy grail of sorts in technology circles, and FIFA’s use of the ball sensor in particular will serve as a highly public test case over the next four weeks.

Like so many other parts of the burgeoning world of sports tech, the setup used at the World Cup is both an endpoint and the foundation of a whole new era. Years of research and testing were needed to get here — this particular ball sensor was in development and testing for six years before receiving full FIFA certification — but events like this could quickly catapult emerging technology into the public eye through applications that stretch well beyond officiating.

What went into the development of today’s tracking technology, and what are its key uses at this World Cup? How has the tech been tested, and how can players, teams and fans alike be confident that it’s accurate and consistent? And maybe most importantly, what does this same technology portend for the future of analysis, fan engagement and team data across the world’s most popular sport?

I spoke to people across the world of sports tech to find answers around one of the field’s boldest experiments to date.

Which technology is being used, and how does it work?

FIFA’s application of this technology at the 2022 World Cup is being termed a “semi-automated offside” program – one that’s largely run by AI features, but retains a vital element of human confirmation.

Within every match ball is a device designed by KINEXON, a major player in the performance-tracking world across several sports. Per the company, this device weighs 14 grams (just under 0.5 ounces), and actually houses two separate sensors operating simultaneously:

• Ultra-wideband (UWB) sensor: A type of technology that’s superior to GPS or Bluetooth for precise positional data, plus can transmit data in real time to constantly track the ball’s position.
• Inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensor: A sensor meant to detect nuanced movements of an object in space.

“While the ultra-wideband helps me to have the position of an object, the IMU gives me the granular movement in three dimensions,” said Maximillian Schmidt, co-founder and managing director of KINEXON.

So any time the ball is kicked, headed, thrown or even so much as tapped, the system picks it up at 500 frames per second. Data is sent in real time from sensors to a local positioning system (LPS), which involves a setup of network antennas installed around the playing field that take in and store the data for immediate use. When a ball flies out of bounds during the course of play, and a new ball is thrown or kicked in to replace it, KINEXON’s backend system automatically switches to the new ball’s data input without the need for human intervention.

KINEXON’s in-ball device is supported by suspension technology provided by Adidas, designed to house the sensor at the central interior point of the ball and keep it secure in a consistent location.¹

Paired with this ball sensor is optical camera tracking from Hawk-Eye, a system well known for its work in tennis. Twelve Hawk-Eye cameras are set up around the stadium, tracking both the ball itself and each player 50 times per second. Twenty-nine separate points of the body are tracked for players, including limbs.

When combined, these two data sources allow for offside decisions that are not just highly accurate, but also available much faster than in the past – a major priority for FIFA in this World Cup cycle.

“We debriefed in 2018 after the World Cup,” Nicolas Evans, head of football research and standards for FIFA Technology Innovation, said. Such a debrief is standard after each World Cup, according to Evans. “The biggest area for improvement we saw was the time it took to make offside decisions.”

With that in mind, data from both KINEXON and Hawk-Eye is run through artificial intelligence software that’s programmed to generate automated offside alerts to officials in the match’s video room. Instead of manually combing through plays, a time-consuming process, AI programs auto-generate alerts that can then be confirmed by video match officials.

The software also generates 3D renderings of the spatial data, which will be overlaid onto TV broadcasts and in-stadium monitors to give fans a direct look at how each reviewed call was decided.

How accurate is this data? How is it tested?

Some readers might have an understandable question at this point: “How do I know this data consistently reflects the true positioning of the players and ball?”

The first concept to understand here is refresh rate, which is measured in Hz and refers to the number of times per second that a given display is able to draw a new image. Standard 50Hz video, a common format used for HD monitors today, is generating a new image 50 times per second (or a “frame rate” of 50 frames per second, for those more familiar with that term). Anyone who has slowed a video down to frame-by-frame mode knows the sensation of slight periods of time passing between each frame – and for 50Hz video, that gap is 20 milliseconds per frame (for 60Hz video, it’s 16.66 milliseconds per frame, and so on).

With KINEXON’s ball-tracking system, that data is coming in at 500Hz, meaning any gaps in true positioning are below two milliseconds long – or 10 times shorter than standard 50Hz lags. Furthermore, the use of a PTP master clock allows synchronization between KINEXON and Hawk-Eye data that’s precise down to one-millionth of a second, per Evans, ensuring the two feeds are never out of whack with one another.

To check each component of the system, FIFA has conducted tests in both controlled and live settings.

For both the KINEXON ball sensors and Hawk-Eye’s optical camera setup, a format known as “ground truth testing” is required by FIFA’s Quality Programme for Electronic Performance Testing Systems (EPTS). The approach utilizes a minimum of 36 high-quality Vicon motion-capture cameras, combined with reflective markers designed for these cameras placed on the ball itself and every player for ultra-accurate detection. As players and the ball move around the testing pitch, both these Vicon cameras and the KINEXON/Hawk-Eye setups run simultaneously – and researchers compare the two outputs to assess the accuracy of the latter systems. This testing is augmented by the use of other tools, such as a laser to detect events like high-speed player sprints.

Another kind of test is also vital here, especially for one of the world’s most-watched sporting events: Ensuring that the addition of a sensor inside the ball is imperceptible to the players kicking it. Since it’s all too easy to envision a scenario in which a prominent player blames the feel of the “different” World Cup ball for a missed penalty or some other on-pitch failure — igniting a worldwide controversy — eliminating such concerns is naturally important.

Adidas is the key entity responsible for this kind of testing, which sources familiar with the program² report is done in two ways:

• Blind player testing: With the help of clubs in places like Spain, Germany and England, extensive blind testing was carried out to see if players could tell the difference between “normal” balls and balls infused with the sensor/suspension setup without knowing which was which ahead of time.
• Mechanical shooter testing: In a lab setting, robotic shooting devices can be programmed to “kick” the ball at varying speeds, spins and directions. High-speed cameras then evaluate the flight of the ball, ensuring that the presence of the sensor does not create abnormal flight paths.

This testing was performed in several professional and grassroots settings, such as the 2021 FIFA Arab Cup in Qatar and the 2021 FIFA Club World Cup in Abu Dhabi. In addition, Evans said FIFA ran several of its own additional blind tests, including at a team workshop in Qatar earlier in 2022.

“Together with our partner Adidas, large-scale sample blind tests have been carried out where no differences could be observed by players between the connected ball and the regular ball,” Evans said.

These and similar forms of tech also have been getting real-life test runs for years now. An earlier version of KINEXON’s sensor-infused ball was used alongside jersey tracking in 2018 in Germany’s fourth-tier Regionalliga to bring real-time data to a live TV broadcast; a newer setup was used earlier this year during a German academy club match. The Hawk-Eye camera setup, meanwhile, has been utilized in the UEFA Champions League group-stage matches throughout the early part of this season in the lead-up to the World Cup.

Of course, none of this guarantees an incident-free event. Unforeseen circumstances can come up in the world of tech. Equipment can malfunction. Even in the likely scenario that the tech works perfectly from start to finish, good luck convincing crazed sports fans of that if their country’s top player has trashed the tracked ball or suggested the system isn’t accurate.

Such possibilities are all but unavoidable in the end. But the companies involved are confident they’ve met every important threshold to introduce this new level of technology into the world’s most important soccer competition.

“[It’s] probably as good as it’s ever been in this type of technology,” Evans said.

This is the tip of the technological iceberg

The 2022 World Cup is barely scratching the surface of the potential capabilities of this sort of technology – which go well beyond officiating.

Before long, this combination of ball- and optical-tracking could be a familiar tool to everyone involved with the sport — much like Second Spectrum tracking in the NBA or Hawk-Eye in tennis. Teams and players could use the resulting data for next-generation tactical analysis; broadcasts could use it to visualize the game and draw in new viewers. Fans could eventually have access to a vast ocean of new stats that were never possible until now.³

In fact, this already has started happening.

Earlier in 2022, KINEXON’s ball sensor was used in a Liga Portugal relegation match, along with sensors in player jerseys to track their movements. More than 300 different metrics were collected in multiple categories, including technical data (shot and pass speed, ball possession time, distinct ball actions), performance data (dribbling speed, accelerations and sprints — both with and without the ball — plus measures of athlete “load”) and tactical data (for both teams and players, tactical concepts such as space control, pressing, ball gains/losses and counters can be tracked).

Possible applications of this data, especially once it’s a more standardized part of the game and the parties involved become familiar with using it, are virtually limitless.

“We can use that information in real time to tell new stories,” Schmidt said. “[We can use] them to create virtual worlds, augmented overlays, insights on performance of players.”

For one thing, expect soccer fans to have new ways of enjoying the game based on this advanced tech. The first layer here will be broadcast improvements: More 3D immersive graphics, similar to the offside renderings 2022 World Cup viewers will see, could be used in several new ways – even those that viewers control. We’ll also see overlaid on-screen data, much like the LA Clippers’ “CourtVision” broadcast option that displays tracking information and a digitized view of the court during play.

And the next wave after that is even more exciting to think about. The world of virtual reality offers tantalizing potential; imagine watching plays (or even an entire game) from the direct vantage point of Kylian Mbappe, Karim Benzema or any other player of your choosing. Evans and others in the space also expect this data to eventually make its way into the world of video games, merging real and digital realms.

That’s just on the fan side. As the 2022 World Cup tracking setup becomes more commonplace around soccer, players and teams will now have a wealth of new data, particularly surrounding the ball – the true heartbeat of the sport. Tactics, analytics and even all-important health and performance improvements are all on the table.

Said Schmidt: “More and more leagues are now thinking about, ‘How can we enhance the already existing dataset with new insights from the ball?’ Because it’s the head of the game.”

So as tech continues to change the way we view sports, the 2022 World Cup stands poised to serve as a watershed moment. When you see that first “semi-automated” offside call, remember what it took to get to this point – and daydream about what the near future holds.

Check out our latest World Cup predictions.

In the popular understanding of American history, President Ronald Reagan’s tenure in office marked the beginning of a new era for the Republican Party and American politics. His presidency served as a blueprint for subsequent GOP politicians and even helped inspire a tack to the center amongst the New Democrats.

But in “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics In The 1990s,” historian Nicole Hemmer argues that Reagan’s presidency is better understood as the end of a political era in the GOP.

In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Galen Druke talks to Hemmer about her new book and her study of post-Reagan GOP figures like Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh.

Nate Silver breaks down former President Donald Trump’s odds of securing the 2024 GOP presidential candidacy on “This Week.”

In the popular understanding of American history, President Ronald Reagan’s tenure in office marked the beginning of a new era for the Republican Party and American politics. His presidency served as a blueprint for subsequent GOP politicians and even helped inspire a tack to the center amongst the New Democrats.

But in “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics In The 1990s,” historian Nicole Hemmer argues that Reagan’s presidency is better understood as the end of a political era in the GOP.

In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Galen Druke talks to Hemmer about her new book and her study of post-Reagan GOP figures like Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh.

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.

Soon after the midterm elections, we began our regular process of evaluating how FiveThirtyEight’s forecasts performed. We quickly discovered an error: We were using out-of-date data for one important source used in the Deluxe version of our forecast. Although this had little impact on the topline numbers for each party’s chance of controlling a chamber of Congress, it had modest-to-medium-sized effects on some individual races in the Deluxe forecast. It had no effect on the Lite or Classic forecasts.

The Deluxe forecast differs from the Classic and Lite forecasts in that it accounts for race ratings published by three groups: The Cook Political Report, Sabato’s Crystal Ball and Inside Elections. After adding new Inside Elections ratings for House races in late September, we noticed what we thought was an anomaly in the forecast. To investigate, we disabled automatic updates for that site’s House ratings. We determined that the election model was running correctly, but we neglected to re-enable automatic updates from Inside Elections. As a result, Inside Elections ratings for House races were frozen in time as of late September. (To be clear, this was FiveThirtyEight’s error and there is no fault whatsoever with Inside Elections or their ratings.)

If we had run the model with the updated ratings, the final forecast would still have shown Republicans with a 84 percent chance of winning the House, the same as our final forecast with the out-of-date ratings. And Republicans would have had a 55 percent chance of winning the Senate, instead of 59 percent. (Even though Inside Elections ratings for Senate and gubernatorial races were being updated, because of the way that the model works, there were some very minor, indirect effects on Senate and gubernatorial Deluxe forecasts as well.)¹

Only one individual race forecast shifted by more than one category as a result of the error (e.g., a race shifting from “lean Republican” to “lean Democrat,” skipping over “toss-up”), and a number did have a one-category shift, as listed in the table below. 

Not listed in that table is the House race in Washington’s 3rd Congressional District, which did not see a change in its categorization. It was won by Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who was listed with only a 2 percent chance in the forecast. If updated Inside Elections ratings had been used, she would have had a 4 percent chance instead. So the race was a major upset either way — although one should keep in mind that when a model issues forecasts for 435 House districts, some low-probability upsets are to be expected if the model is calibrated properly.

We are reviewing our internal processes for how to better identify errors of this nature. One lesson is that smaller errors are sometimes harder to detect than larger ones. If our forecast in a high-profile race such as Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate election had differed dramatically from the consensus, we would quickly have investigated it. Small anomalies in a series of mostly low-profile House races are harder to detect with the “eye test,” however. We also strongly appreciate reader feedback, including alerting us to potentially anomalous forecasts. While our models are fairly complex, the forecasts should still follow logically from the inputs. If a given forecast is hard to explain, it may reflect a problem with the underlying data or with the way that we’re processing it.

In evaluating how FiveThirtyEight’s forecasts did — for example, comparing our performance against other forecasts — we would recommend that you use the original, as-published forecasts, even though they were using outdated Inside Elections ratings. We of course would have preferred to use the updated ratings, but we don’t think we should get credit for a mistake that we only identified after the fact. In conducting our own assessment of our forecast once all race calls are finalized, we will show you four versions instead of our usual three: Lite, Classic, Deluxe (as published) and Deluxe (corrected).

A complete set of files showing what our final Deluxe forecast would have shown given updated Inside Elections ratings can be found here.

FiveThirtyEight regrets the error. We appreciate the time you spend on the site, and we hope that you found our midterm elections coverage valuable despite it.

2022 Election

So You Think You Can Explain The Election

By Maggie Koerth

Nov. 18, 2022, at 10:19 AM

The election is over. The results are (mostly) in. Time to decide what it all means.​ That’s a particularly popular activity in a year when Democrats pulled off something of an upset — their successes going against historical expectations and the popular narrative that suggested Republicans were set to sweep the House and Senate in the midterms.

How do we explain these results? Maybe it’s fallout from the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade this summer. Maybe it’s extreme (or extremely silly) Republican candidates who snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Maybe Democrats lost the House because they didn’t embrace Republican-led narratives about crime and punishment – or maybe they lost races because they did, and thus ceded ground. Maybe President Biden is just that beloved. 

This article is not going to tell you which singular answer is correct. That’s because there is no singular answer. I’m not a politics reporter, but the search for election explanations has led me to think about which ones I — a science reporter with an anthropology degree who spends my work days observing the political natives — trust more than others, even as I give all of them a little side-eye.

Politics, I’ve noticed, loves a just-so story. A clear, coherent reason why the zebra got his stripes. But that’s a form of storytelling that isn’t as concerned with scientific accuracy as it is with passing down culturally specific ideas about how people should behave. So what’s a person to do when they care about both? Here are the tips I keep in mind: 

• Don’t eat that hot take until dinner is done cooking 

In general, I’m going to be a lot more interested in the explanations that arise a month or two after Election Day than the ones that popped up the morning after. Trying to explain an outcome before anyone even fully knows what that outcome will be is kind of a dead giveaway that someone is post hoc ergo propter hawking a pet theory, rather than honestly searching for meaning. 

Granted, there are some factors that will make themselves clear before all the final counts are totally in. The Supreme Court’s decision, for example, likely did have an impact on this election. That’s a thing I’m willing to say just based on the fact that votes on abortion-related ballot measures in five different states all swung for the position endorsed by abortion-rights activists. That’s a fairly direct measure of how Americans are thinking and how that informs their votes — at least in those places. But that outcome wasn’t super obvious to all the pundits writing about the election before it happened. Leading up to the election, polls showed concern about abortion remaining relatively low compared to concern about the economy, and a lot of people’s narratives began to turn towards “maybe this just isn’t something Americans care about.” Getting an actual outcome certainly changed the perceived situation. And the more time goes on, the more data points will be collected that will help us understand how to answer questions about this issue and its place in American society — and what the right questions are, to begin with.

• Remember our friend, Occam’s razor 

Hey, didn’t some redistricting happen this year? And didn’t that process leave the country with six more Democratic-leaning seats than had previously existed? Occam’s razor is a principle that urges you to consider the simplest explanations for a result before you start trying to prove a more arcane, tangly hypothesis. And in that spirit, I’m gonna go out on a limb here and suggest that maybe how state governments have chosen to divide up their population — especially when that process is centered around partisan battles that each party hopes to win precisely because they hope it will bring them more power and control of election outcomes — has something to do with how the election played out. 

There are, for example, a lot of ways you could explain the Democratic Party’s losses in Florida. But anyone trying to explain that should probably start with the fact that the state has a new voting map that favors Republicans in a way it previously did not. That’s not to say that other factors aren’t involved. But I’m suspicious of any explanation of election outcomes that doesn’t start with election inputs, or at least acknowledge them. 

• The presence of data doesn’t necessarily mean the presence of truth 

Now, personally, I have no idea whether young voters are responsible for turning the mighty red wave into a pale pink splash. But I do think it’s interesting that people who believe the youth vote mattered in this election AND people who think it did not both have data to back up their assertions. Advocates can point to this being the second-highest youth midterm turnout in 30 years, with 63 percent of them voting Democratic. Detractors, on the other hand, have pointed out that the biggest predictor of whether a county’s voter turnout would decline this year was age — the younger the county, the less likely its residents were to go to the polls. 

Both those data points exist. How you interpret them probably depends on what you expected to happen and what you already believed about the American electorate. That’s a thing to watch out for. When I see dueling statistics, I know it’s time to take a pause. Just because someone can spout a statistic at you doesn’t mean they’re right. 

• Reality is usually messier than a just-so story 

Again, I’m not an expert on politics. But I can tell you that there’s not going to be one single factor that ends up explaining the results of an election. That’s especially true this election year, when states were seeing wildly different outcomes — Michigan going very blue while Florida went very red, for example. Even within states, we saw more split-ticket voting than some poll watchers had predicted. 

Kansas is a good example of how more than one factor can shape an outcome. The state voted against an anti-abotion ballot measure back in the summer and reelected its Democratic governor, Laura Kelly, in the midterms. It could be easy to look at that and assume that this was a state that “Roe’d the vote.” But while the Dobbs decision almost certainly did play a role in some election outcomes, it’s hard to say how much that affected Kelly’s win. She didn’t campaign on abortion. In fact, her anti-abortion opponent kept trying to bring up her abortion rights record — attacks that Kelly mostly responded to by changing the subject to things like education and the economy. And the same state that gave her a second term also elected Kris Kobach — the anti-abortion Republican she beat in the 2018 governor’s race — to be her attorney general. Some of this stuff is just going to be messy. Which brings me to my final point … 

• Our understanding of what Americans think is flawed, so our understanding of why they vote the way they do is complicated

The polls were pretty close to the actual election results this year, but we’re still dealing with human behavior here — something that the scientists who study human behavior are happy to admit is really, really complicated. Then you add to that all the legitimate criticisms and cautions that surround polling, not the least of which being extremely low response rates to traditional phone polls.

The big discussions around problems with polling are usually centered on how those problems affect polls of voter preference between one politician and another, or one party and another. But these ghosts haunt all opinion polls. What issues do voters care the most about? Do they favor one policy over another? How do they translate those concerns into votes? Those questions play a big role in how the media and punditry interpret the results of an election after the fact. But our answers to those questions are only as good as the polls and their biases.

In other words, any time you’re trying to explain what motivated votes after the fact, you have to assume there are details the polls got wrong and nuances they missed. As with vote choice, this reality doesn’t mean it’s time to ignore poll results entirely. But it does mean that one poll in isolation isn’t telling you as much as an aggregate. The biggest takeaway: Anyone who is certain they understand exactly why Americans make the choices they do is probably deluding themselves.

NHL

The New Jersey Devils Are Scorching The NHL Again

By Neil Paine

Nov. 18, 2022, at 9:15 AM

As the wise philosopher David Puddy once said: “Don’t mess with the Devils, buddy. We’re number one, we beat anybody!”

And that was more or less true throughout the 1990s and the 2000s. Across those two decades, only the dynastic Detroit Red Wings racked up more points in the NHL standings or won more Stanley Cups than the three-time champion New Jersey Devils. But after a surprise trip to the Cup final in 2012,¹ New Jersey’s run was nearing its end. With practically all of the stars who powered their success either long gone or on their way out the door,² the Devils would begin a multi-year playoff drought — their first since 1987 — and make just a single appearance (a 4-1 first-round loss to the Tampa Bay Lightning in 2018) between 2013 and 2022.

That futility looks like it could be a thing of the past, however. After winning their 11th consecutive game Thursday night, this year’s Devils are off to a red-hot 14-3 start — good for the NHL’s second-best record — and they rank among the league’s top five in both scoring offense and defense. For a team that went 27-55 last season and hasn’t posted either a winning record or a positive scoring margin in five years, there’s a sense of growing excitement that hasn’t been felt since the glory days of yesteryear.

Of course, a new dawn has seemed to be on the horizon in Newark for a while. Because of all that losing, the Devils held the No. 1 selection in the draft twice in three years from 2017 to 2019, and they did not miss either time. New Jersey spent the first of those top picks on Swiss forward Nico Hischier, a talented two-way pivot who was named team captain and compiled a couple of 20-goal seasons before his 24th birthday. And the second of the No. 1s, center Jack Hughes, may have an even higher ceiling. Hughes³ notched 26 goals in 49 games last season at age 20, giving him the 17th-highest goals-per-game average for that age in NHL history. Along with those high draft picks, New Jersey also snagged a few complete steals in lower rounds during the mid-to-late 2010s, including winger Jesper Bratt (No. 162 overall in 2016) and center Yegor Sharangovich (No. 141 in 2018).

That emerging core gave New Jersey the league’s eighth-youngest roster (26.9 years old) in 2019-20, which then dropped to the second-youngest (25.9) in 2020-21 and the youngest of all (25.8) in 2021-22. The last of those teams was tied for the ninth-youngest roster any NHL club had assembled since 1999 (the earliest season for which Hockey-Reference.com has average roster ages) and the youngest the league had seen in more than a decade.⁴ It also positioned the Devils within a burgeoning youth movement across the league, which saw a handful of teams trying to rebuild through the power of prospects. From 2019-20 up to the present day, six clubs have had rosters ranking among the five youngest in multiple seasons: the New York Rangers, Buffalo Sabres, Columbus Blue Jackets, Ottawa Senators, Detroit Red Wings and, yes, the Devils.

The success of those teams, though, has been mixed at best — and that included the Devils before this season.

New Jersey’s archrival, the Rangers, kick-started their rebuild with a number of high draft picks that culminated in a lucky lottery bounce for the No. 1 selection (and prized left wing Alexis Lafrenière) in 2020. And the Broadway Blueshirts did change their fortunes in a hurry afterward, pushing the eventual conference champion Tampa Bay Lightning to Game 6 of the Eastern Conference finals last season. But almost all of the key ingredients for that turnaround were either acquired from outside the organization — like defenseman Adam Fox and high-scoring forwards Artemi Panarin and Mika Zibanejad — or were late-bloomers like left wing Chris Kreider, who notched his first 50-goal season 13 years after being drafted by New York, or goalie Igor Shesterkin, who finally had his dominant breakout nearly a decade after being selected 118th overall. By contrast, the highly touted kids, such as Lafrenière and 2019 No. 2 overall pick Kaapo Kakko, could generously have been considered bit players (at most).

And aside from New York, the rest of the league’s young roster experiments have failed to make any kind of postseason dent in years. The Red Wings of recent vintage have been a trendy breakout pick every preseason — partly because of general manager Steve Yzerman’s track record as an executive — but Detroit is currently tracking for a seventh straight sub-.500 season, with last year’s rookie duo of Lucas Raymond and Moritz Seider off to a slow start. The Sabres have cooled off considerably after the first three weeks of the season, and the Blue Jackets and (especially) Senators have disappointed in the early going. Both are currently several games below .500 despite loading up on veteran talent over the offseason to complement their developing cores. 

Clearly, the youth-focused path does not automatically pay dividends for any team that tries to follow it. Up until now, even the Devils seemed to be in that cautionary group, as evidenced by the team’s all-around struggles last season. They finished 19th on offense — despite Bratt, Hughes and Hischier combining for 189 points in 195 games — and a ghastly 29th on defense.

But there were nonetheless clues last season that something interesting was bubbling around in the New Jersey swampland. For instance, in terms of puck possession — as measured by Corsi percentage at 5-on-5 with the score close — the Devils were a middle-of-the-road team (16th-best), not one of the league’s worst. Add some improved goaltending (because there was nowhere to go but up), a healthy Hughes and a bounce-back performance from defenseman Dougie Hamilton, who flopped during his first season in red and black, and it wasn’t any harder to envision the Devils breaking out in 2022-23 than, say, the Red Wings or Senators.

What’s impressive about New Jersey is that so far, unlike those other clubs long on potential but still short on results, the Devils have actually gone about making those big dreams come true. The team now ranks third in Corsi and is in the top three across the board in every adjusted goals above replacement⁵ category except goaltending (where ex-Washington Capital Vitek Vanecek is doing a solid job, but Mackenzie Blackwood is struggling for the third straight year). Our Elo model currently gives New Jersey a 69 percent chance of making the playoffs, a number that arguably should be even higher. There isn’t anything in the Devils’ resume to suggest an impending fall to earth, aside from the usual caveats about fishing for meaning in hockey’s vast ocean of randomness.

For now, New Jersey has succeeded where so many others continue to fail. Its young stars are playing fabulously, and things are starting to resemble the rapid progress this franchise made towards the Stanley Cup three decades ago. Indeed, opponents early this season are re-learning a valuable lesson: Don’t mess with the Devils.

Check out our latest NHL predictions.

The Riddler

How Many Turkey Trotters Can You Pass?

By Zach Wissner-Gross

Nov. 18, 2022, 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>">¹ 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.

Due to the holidays, the next column will appear on Dec. 2. See you then!

Riddler Express

I recently competed in a 5-kilometer “turkey trot” race. Before the race began, all the runners (including me) gathered behind the starting line in a random order. Once the race began, everyone started running at their own fixed pace.

I hadn’t run in several years, so I wasn’t sure how my pace would compare to that of the other racers. Nevertheless, once the race began, I found myself passing quite a few other runners — and being passed myself.

On average, what fraction of the other runners could I expect to pass during the race? (Assume that if my pace is faster than that of another runner’s, I will pass them at some point during the race.)

Submit your answer

Riddler Classic

From Michael Branicky comes a challenge involve many, many dice:

I have five kinds of fair Platonic dice: tetrahedra (whose faces are numbered 1-4), cubes (numbered 1-6), octahedra (numbered 1-8), dodecahedra (numbered 1-12) and icosahedra (numbered 1-20).²

When I roll two of the cubes, there is a single most likely sum: seven. But when I roll one cube and two tetrahedra, there is no single most likely sum — eight and nine are both equally likely.

Which whole numbers are never the single most likely sum, no matter which combinations of dice I pick?

Submit your answer

Solution to last week’s Riddler Express

Congratulations to Andrew Busch of London, winner of last week’s Riddler Express.

Last week, in an effort to break open the gates of the city Tinas Mirith, an army of orcs first tried using a battering ram, but to no avail. They next erected a 100-foot pole with a very massive weight at the top (i.e., the weight was much, much heavier than the rest of the pole). The pole was also anchored at the bottom, so that as the weight fell the entire pole rotated around its bottom without slipping.

How far away should the orcs have positioned the vertical pole from the gates so that when the weight came crashing down, its horizontal speed was as great as possible?

First, let’s examine an animation of the falling weight:

As the weight fell, it moved faster. At the same time, due to the rotation, its horizontal motion turns into vertical motion. Now at some point, its horizontal speed was at a maximum. One way to find this maximum was to do what many students do time and again in their first physics course: Write an equation describing conservation of energy.

As the weight came down, its gravitational potential energy became kinetic energy. If we call the pole length L (100 feet in the puzzle), then by the time the pole made an angle 𝜃 with the ground, the weight was at a height Lsin𝜃. That meant the change in the height was L−Lsin𝜃, or L(1−sin𝜃). Therefore, the change in gravitational potential energy was mgL(1−sin𝜃), where m was the mass of the weight and g was the acceleration due to gravity — roughly 32 feet/sec².

This difference in potential energy was what became kinetic energy, which could be expressed as 1/2mv², where v was the speed of the weight. Setting these equal gave you v = √(2gL(1−sin𝜃)). But you didn’t want the velocity, you wanted the horizontal velocity, which was equal to vsin(𝜃). And so the function you were trying to maximize was sin𝜃√(2gL(1−sin𝜃)). Pulling out a few constants that didn’t matter, this became sin𝜃√(1−sin𝜃). To maximize this function, you had to take the derivative with respect to 𝜃 and set that equal to zero. After some friendly cancelation, this left you with sin𝜃 = 2/3.

That was a nice result, but this wasn’t what the riddle was asking for. What was the right distance between the pole and the gates? That was L times the cosine of this optimal angle. If sin𝜃 was 2/3, then cos𝜃 was (√5)/3, which meant the distance was 100/3·√5, or about 74.5 feet.

A few folks, like Ricky Reusser, opted for a more challenging, “bad approach.” As Ricky stated: “This problem is very easily solved with a simple energy argument, but let’s brute force it from the equations of motion instead!” Ricky proceeded to solve second-order differential equations with Jacobi elliptic functions. In the end, the answer was the same.

After placing their pole in just the right spot, the orcs successfully knocked down the gates of Tinas Mirith, securing a victory for Sord Lauron. And that was the end of all things.

Solution to last week’s Riddler Classic

Congratulations to David Cohen of Silver Spring, Maryland, winner of last week’s Riddler Classic.

Last week, I was slicing a square peanut butter and jelly sandwich. But rather than making a standard horizontal or diagonal cut, I instead picked two random points along the perimeter of the sandwich and made a straight cut from one point to the other. (These points could have been on the same side.)

My slice was “reasonable” if I cut the square into two pieces and the smaller resulting piece had an area that was at least one-quarter of the whole area. What was the probability that my slice was reasonable?

To see what’s happening here, we can start by looking at special cases, like when the first point I picked was one of the square’s corners or at the midpoint of one of its sides, as shown below.

When the first point was in a corner, the cut was reasonable whenever the other point was closer to the opposite corner than any other corner, a region that made up a quarter of the square’s perimeter. And when the first point was a midpoint, the cut was reasonable whenever the other point was somewhere on the opposite side, another region that made up a quarter of the square’s perimeter. And so, for both of these special cases, my probability of making a reasonable cut was 1/4. Could the answer then simply have been 1/4?

This being a Classic, that was not the answer. As it turned out, whenever the first point was anywhere else, the probability of making a reasonable cut was greater than 1/4. Solvers Trey Goesh and Starvind made animated graphs suggesting this was the case.

To determine the exact probability, suppose the first point was a distance x from the nearest corner of the square, and let’s assume that the square had side length 1, as shown below. Note here that x was equally likely to be anywhere from 0 to 0.5.

If the second point was on the opposite side, the cut was reasonable if it was within 1/2+x of the opposite corner, creating a trapezoid whose area was at least 1/4. But if the second point was on the other side touching that opposite corner, then the cut was reasonable when that second point was within (1−2x)/(2−2x) of that corner, creating a triangle whose area was at least 1/4.

To find the probability that the cut was reasonable, you had to add these two distances together, divide by 4 (the total perimeter of the square), integrate over x from 0 to 0.5, and finally divide by 0.5 (i.e., multiply by 2), since we wanted the average probability over this range of x. The result of this integral was relatively concise: (7−ln(16))/16, or about 26.4 percent.

In the end, 25 percent was not a bad guess. It seems I am only slightly more reasonable than that.

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.

Polla

Election Denialism Lives On, Even As Candidates Who Support It Concede

By Zoha Qamar

Nov. 18, 2022, at 6:00 AM

Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly polling roundup.

As the dust settles on a vast majority of last Tuesday’s races, splashy headlines have concluded that voters rejected the far-right candidates who baselessly denied the 2020 election results. And while that is partly true, a FiveThirtyEight story from last week explained that election-denying political newcomers suffered the most. In other words, questioning the results of the 2020 election didn’t help fresh-faced GOP candidates, but it also didn’t hurt Republican incumbents. 

The vast majority of election-denying candidates who lost their races have conceded, but this is not necessarily a sign that American politicians are ready to leave election fraud conspiracy theories behind. This week, former President Donald Trump announced his 2024 presidential run, and he’s likely to bring his long-standing claims of fraud back to the campaign trail with him. Meanwhile, data from the past two years shows that trust in the electoral process has stayed consistently low among Republicans — suggesting that some of Trump’s supporters will remain open to those allegations. As long as that’s true, election denial could continue to play a role in American elections. 

On the whole, it appears that a majority of Americans do believe in the integrity of the nation’s elections: An Oct. 3-20 poll conducted by Gallup showed that 63 percent of U.S. adults were at least somewhat confident ballots would be “accurately cast and counted” in this year’s midterms. However, that total figure obscures a wide partisan gap. Nearly all Democrats trust electoral processes (85 percent), but less than half of Republicans (40 percent) agree. And the gap has grown even more exaggerated since 2020 when 76 percent of Democrats and 44 percent of Republicans had faith in accurate ballots numbers. 

But it hasn’t always been this way. Gallup has been tracking election confidence for almost two decades and found in 2004 that 87 percent of Republicans had faith in the system, versus 59 percent of Democrats, due in large part to the aftermath of the 2000 election between President George W. Bush and Al Gore. And notably, the growth of doubt among Republicans began long before Trump, sprouting just before the election of President Barack Obama in 2008. That year, the share of Republicans who trusted the electoral process fell to 57 percent. With the exception of 2018, it’s been headed slowly southward ever since. 

That said, Republicans aren’t a monolith, and the share of distrust wavers across subgroups, such as gender. Sixty percent of Republican men said they see the midterm elections as free and fair, versus just 44 percent of the party’s women, per polling conducted by the Morning Consult last week. That split has held steady in regular polling since January 2021. 

Some Republican candidates, meanwhile, have begun shifting their tone on election integrity. Their responses to this year’s losses were very different compared to those in 2020. The “red wave” that failed to materialize hasn’t incited an immediate eruption of election-denying finger pointers. Some of the most vocal 2020 conspiracy theorists on Americans’ ballots — like Senate candidates Blake Masters in Arizona and Don Bolduc in New Hampshire — have acknowledged their losses with minimal pushback. 

But there’s not yet enough polling data available to tell whether those acceptances are impacting the trust Republican voters place in election outcomes. And simple concessions shouldn’t be used as a proxy for restored confidence in the voting system, even among the candidates doing the conceding. For example, Kim Crockett, who ran unsuccessfully for Minnesota’s Secretary of State, did acknowledge her loss, but with a caveat of unfounded fraud accusations across her website and social media posts. “I gave it my all. But they cheat,” she wrote in a Facebook post last Thursday. 

All of this is to say that election denial is alive and well and still capable of rearing its ugly head in 2024.

Other polling bites 

• Forty-three percent of Americans think that the Republican Party is more divided than united, compared with just half as many (21 percent) who said the same about Democrats, according to YouGov polling conducted on Nov. 16. Notably, equal amounts of Republican respondents (33 percent) said both parties were divided. Meanwhile, more than half of Democrats said Republicans were divided (53 percent), while few considered their own party split (12 percent).
• Overall, Americans are currently optimistic about the state of COVID-19, per an Oct. 11-19 Gallup survey. Roughly two-thirds of Americans (65 percent) consider the national coronavirus situation to be getting better, up markedly from 41 percent in July, while only 11 percent think things are getting worse. A record high of 44 percent also think the pandemic is over, although partisan breakdowns differ widely: 73 percent of Republicans agreed, compared with 21 percent of Democrats.
• A Nov. 10 YouGov survey found that just under half (45 percent) of Americans say they’ve voted “split-ticket” in an election. That breakdown, however, varies widely by age. Fifty-five percent of respondents ages 65 and older reported having cast ballots for candidates of varying parties in at least one election, but only 34 percent under 30 said the same. Party affiliation, on the other hand, didn’t seem to be a telling indicator of how likely someone was to vote-split ticket: Republicans (45 percent), Democrats (46) and independents (49 percent) all reported doing so at similar rates.
• Support for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is on the rise among Republican primary voters, according to a Morning Consult poll conducted Nov. 2-7 that shows a steady uptick in his popularity since June. Twenty-six percent said they’d support him as the 2024 GOP Presidential nominee, up from 19 percent in September. Meanwhile, 48 percent stood behind Donald Trump, a number that hasn’t wavered much over the last year. There are clear demographic splits among supporters of each group: Nearly half of those backing DeSantis (48 percent) have at least a college degree, compared with less than a third (29 percent) of those behind Trump. DeSantis also has a larger share of popularity among voters from an increasingly important part of the country electorally — suburbia: 60 percent of his supporters live in the suburbs, compared with 47 percent of Trump’s.

Biden approval

According to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker,¹ 41.7 percent of Americans approve of the job Biden is doing as president, while 53.1 percent disapprove (a net approval rating of -11.4 points). At this time last week, 41.2 percent approved and 53.5 percent disapproved (a net approval rating of -12.3 points). One month ago, Biden had an approval rating of 42.8 percent and a disapproval rating of 53.2 percent, for a net approval rating of -10.4 points.

NBA

Kyrie Irving's Stats Aren't Worth The Drama

By Santul Nerkar

Nov. 17, 2022, at 11:54 AM

Throughout Kyrie Irving’s many basketball hiatuses over the years — whether due to injuries, refusal to take the COVID-19 vaccine or, most recently, suspension for promoting an anti-Semitic documentary — the mercurial star’s on-court brilliance has rarely been questioned. Contemporaries have often called him the most skilled player in the history of the NBA, with some going as far to say he ranks among the league’s 75 best players ever. And watching Irving certainly leaves you dazzled: You’d be hard-pressed to find a more maddening cover on defense, equipped with an arsenal of how-did-he-think-of-that moves and the slipperiness to evade even the rangiest and most committed of stoppers. 

But Irving’s status as the darling of basketball aesthetes everywhere has obscured his overall contributions to winning basketball — even in the rare cases when he’s on the floor. On a per-possession basis, Irving has cracked the top 25 of FiveThirtyEight’s regular-season Total RAPTOR metric just once since arriving in Brooklyn for the 2019-20 season, and in his career he’s reached that benchmark fewer times (four) than he’s fallen outside of it (five). For a player whose observable skill set has long confounded the advanced metrics, it’s fitting that RAPTOR sees Irving’s impact differently than the conventional wisdom does:

The most obvious culprit for Irving’s less-impressive-than-expected numbers here is his defense. Listed at 6-foot-2, 195 pounds, Irving has always been an easy target for opposing offenses to hunt, and he’s been a net-negative on that end for all but one year of his career during the player-tracking era. Though his defensive impact has trended upward with each successive season in Brooklyn, his numbers remain woefully below-average for a player of his caliber and position: Last season, Irving’s negative-0.9 defensive RAPTOR ranked 41st out of 72 point guards who played at least 1,000 regular-season minutes, and he’s been an above-average defender at his position in just one season of his 12-year career. 

It’s a credit to Irving’s improvement on that end that he no longer ranks among the very worst defenders in the league — his 2016-17 defensive performance ranks 13th-worst among the 652 qualifying guard-seasons since 2013-14 — but he still lags behind his peers in that regard. Compare that to the oft-maligned defense of Warriors guard Stephen Curry, whom RAPTOR has seen as a net-positive defender in all but three years since 2013-14.

But while Irving’s defense has usually left something to be desired, it’s hardly the sole reason for this apparent disconnect between his reputation and observable impact on the game of basketball. (After all, nobody has ever accused Kyrie of being a lockdown defender.) Even on offense, as you’ll notice from the table above, Irving has never consistently ascended to the league’s upper echelon during his professional career.

While he’s finished among the top five a couple of times (2014-15 and 2018-19), Irving’s best season by offensive RAPTOR — 2016-17, in which he recorded a plus-6.3 and sniffed a spot in the coveted 50-40-90 club — ranks as just the 29th-best per-possession offensive performance by a point guard since 2013-14 and the 37th-best overall, while his 2020-21 campaign (which saw him actually record that 50-40-90) ranks 38th and 54th, respectively. Curry (seven times), Chris Paul (five), James Harden (five), Damian Lillard (four), Russell Westbrook (twice), Trae Young (twice), Kyle Lowry (once) and even Isaiah Thomas (once) all posted more impactful offensive seasons than Irving during this time period.

So why doesn’t Irving’s offensive effectiveness line up with what our eyes tell us? A big reason may lie in the divergence between Irving’s traditional numbers and his on-court impact. Take Player Efficiency Rating, for example, a per-minute metric that measures a player’s box score production, as opposed to on-off plus/minus, which measures how a player’s team does when he’s in the game versus not. Irving tends to perform better in PER than in on-off statistics, as shown in the chart below:

As a corollary, Irving’s assist rate isn't in the same ballpark of distributors like Harden and Paul, nor does he move off the ball like Curry. The very attributes that have drawn Kyrie comparisons to dribbling maestros like Rod Strickland¹ and Allen Iverson may also be the ones that keep him from entering the realm of all-time offensive greats. As my colleague Jared Dubin wrote last spring, Irving’s ball-stopping tendencies on offense came to a head against the Boston Celtics during the 2022 playoffs, where his approach of seeking out contested shots against the rangy Boston defense helped stymie any rhythm Brooklyn was hoping to build.

Yes, Brooklyn’s offensive rating of 115.0 with Irving on the floor would have ranked No. 3 as a seasonlong metric in 2021-22, but therein lies the Kyrie conundrum. As a negative defender, you have to hope for an otherworldly offensive explosion from Irving and company to offset the likely defensive drop-off that comes with his presence — and even a rate of 115.0 was not good enough. As it stands, Irving is not the scorer or distributor who can supercharge a team past its glaring defensive deficiencies — and a Brooklyn roster construction that is, shall we say, not exactly defensively inclined. And this year, it’s probably not a coincidence that the Nets are defending much better while Irving has been off the floor. (Even counting the 153-point avalanche the Nets surrendered to the Sacramento Kings Tuesday night, with Irving still suspended.)

Finally, Irving’s numbers have tended to tail off when it counts the most — in the playoffs. Since leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers (where he admittedly drained one of the most famous buckets in NBA history), Irving has managed 21.9 points per game on 43/35/93 shooting splits in 22 postseason contests, a significant decline from both his playoff stats as a Cav and from his regular-season numbers as a Net. At the same time, his team has been outscored with him on the floor in two of his past three postseasons. 

And again, these numbers only show Irving when he’s been on the floor, an all-too-unfamiliar sight dating back to his time at Duke (when a busted-up toe was the only source of missed games). Out of the eight postseasons his teams have played in during his career, Irving has missed substantial parts of four, in addition to playing fewer than 50 percent of regular-season games since 2019-20. If you look at Irving’s RAPTOR wins above replacement, a cumulative statistic, it becomes clear that his (un)availability is his greatest (in)ability: In that category, Irving has ranked among the top 20 most valuable NBA players in a given season just twice since 2013-14. 

None of this is to say that Irving isn’t preternaturally gifted — nor is it to suggest that he doesn’t belong in discussions of the all-time NBA greats. (That 3-pointer he hit to defeat the 73-9 Golden State Warriors is the ultimate trump card in that respect.) Rather, it’s a remark on how arguably the most aesthetically pleasing, mesmerizing and skilled player in the history of arguably the most skill-driven sport has left meat on the bone. (Sound familiar?) 

Of course, a powerful first step to correcting that discrepancy would be to show up on the basketball court, and Irving will soon have that opportunity again, as he nears a return from suspension on Sunday against the Memphis Grizzlies. But we’ll see how long it lasts: Time and time again, even being available to play has often proved unattainable for basketball’s most frustrating star.  

Neil Paine contributed research.

Check out our latest NBA predictions.

NFL

The Bengals Are Following Last Year's Script. But Will Their Turnaround Be The Same?

By Andres Waters

Nov. 17, 2022, at 6:00 AM

Following a season in which the Cincinnati Bengals made a magical playoff run to the franchise’s first Super Bowl appearance since 1988, the team didn’t get off to the fast start many experts anticipated in 2022. The Bengals dropped their first two games and have struggled to get above .500 for most of the year so far. But after its worst loss of the season, a 32-13 road defeat to the Cleveland Browns in Week 8, Cincinnati got a bounce-back win over the rebuilding Carolina Panthers to go into its bye week with a 5-4 record.

That win places the Bengals in the exact same situation they faced a year ago. For the second consecutive season, the team will enter Week 11 coming off a bye and sitting just one game above .500. With last year’s memory still fresh, you can’t blame Bengals fans for thinking their team might do it again. But how realistic is it to expect Cincinnati to flip the switch in the second half of the season again, based on its body of work to this point?

To put it simply — not very. As we noted even before the second-half run last year, Cincinnati had already exceeded all expectations with its young core. Now, after that run, expectations have been much higher — and the Bengals have yet to live up to them. Another run is not impossible, of course, and our model still gives the Bengals a 47 percent chance to make the postseason. But a difficult set of games lies ahead, and the team’s inconsistency could make it tough to piece together the same hot streak that saved Cincinnati’s 2021 campaign.

The first, and likely most difficult, task for the Bengals is winning during their tough slate of upcoming games. According to the average pregame Elo ratings of their opponents,⁷ the Bengals’ schedule through Week 10 ranked fourth-easiest in the NFL. Now, in the second half, the team will have to go through the hardest remaining schedule in the league. That’s easily the largest swing, in terms of strength of schedule differential between halves of a season, for any team this season. (Entering the year, Cincinnati’s schedule ranked 10th-hardest overall.)

Cincinnati is no stranger to this situation, as it faced a back-loaded schedule last season as well. And to their credit, the Bengals went 3-1 against eventual playoff teams during that stretch. However, that team was facing an easier remaining schedule, from a few different perspectives, than this year’s group is. For one thing, based on the current standings, six of Cincinnati’s last eight opponents hold a playoff spot. And if we look again using Elo, the 2021 Bengals’ schedule went from the 27th-most difficult through their bye in Week 10 to the sixth-toughest over the rest of the season.

That meant their differential between future and past schedule strength ranked fifth in the league at this stage of the season — merely a challenging road ahead, not the clear-cut toughest turnaround in football like in 2022.

Up to this point, the toughest opponents for Cincinnati have been their AFC North foes. The Bengals are winless in divisional games (0-3) after going 4-2 last year. But the division also contains a silver lining: Due to their rivals’ inconsistency, Cincinnati sits second in the North with a puncher’s chance at stealing the title from Baltimore. (They have an 11 percent division-win probability in our model, which is admittedly far behind the Ravens’ 85 percent — but hey, it’s not zero.) With a few divisional wins, they might have something.

And at first glance, the Bengals’ production on offense is comparable to what it was through Week 9 last year, which only furthers the notion that the unit will right the ship and make a second-half playoff push. The offense is posting averages in both passing and rushing yards per game that are nearly identical to those of 2021. But, like the rest of the AFC North, Cincinnati has its own issues with consistency, especially on offense. According to Football Outsiders, Cincinnati has the highest DVOA variance in the entire league this season. In other words, the Bengals have statistically been the least consistent team in the NFL on a week-to-week basis.

That variance is most evident when looking at the discrepancy in the team’s performances by game result. In Cincy’s five wins, the offense is averaging more than 32 points per game and 410 total yards per game. In losses, those averages dip all the way down below 17 points per game and just over 300 yards per game. While it’s fair to expect a team to perform worse in losses than in wins, Cincinnati’s 15.5-point average scoring gap between their wins and losses is the third-widest among all teams this season. 

Similarly, quarterback Joe Burrow has had his share of inconsistent play this year as well. In wins, Burrow is averaging a 73.7 Total QBR, sixth-best in football. However, in losses, his QBR is just 36.9, which ranks 20th. And that’s not just a result of having to attempt tougher throws while trailing on the scoreboard. According to NFL Next Gen Stats, which can help us adjust for the difficulty of each pass attempt, Burrow leads the league with a plus-7.4 completion percentage over expected (CPOE) in Bengals wins this season. But he ranks just 18th (at minus-2.8) in losses. 

Whenever you analyze Burrow’s play, the performance of his offensive line has to be considered as well — and even after being rebuilt during the offseason, the unit has again been underwhelming in pass protection. The Bengals’ O-line has allowed Burrow to be sacked 32 times (tied for third-most in the NFL) and has the second-lowest pass block win rate at just 47 percent. The unit is also giving Burrow even less time in the pocket, as the Bengals’ average is down from 2.4 seconds last year to 2.2 seconds. Although that may not seem like a big deal, keep in mind that just a half-second separated the league’s best (Philadelphia, 2.6 seconds) from worst (Pittsburgh, 2.1 seconds) in that metric a year ago. So not having that extra one-fifth of a second could be making all the difference.

Despite all the negatives, Cincinnati does have nearly a coin-flip’s chance to make it back to the postseason. The AFC just isn’t as strong this year as it was in previous years: Only five teams outside of the four division leaders have a winning record (the Los Angeles Chargers, New England Patriots, Buffalo Bills, New York Jets and Cincinnati), and three reside in the AFC East — where one would assume that they will beat up on each other during the rest of the season. Against that backdrop, a team like the Bengals (whose plus-4.8 points-per-game differential actually ranks fifth-best in the league) might not be looking so bad.

But they still need to pile up wins. Since the NFL expanded each conference’s playoffs to seven teams in 2020, the worst seeds have averaged 9.4 wins per season.⁸ The Bengals need a 5-3 finish against the league’s hardest schedule to get to 10 wins — an extra degree of difficulty compared to last season. But if Cincy finds a way to do it, we could see the Bengals work their magic in the postseason again.

Check out our latest NFL predictions.

2022 Election

Why Lauren Boebert's Race Is So Close

By Kaleigh Rogers

Nov. 17, 2022, at 6:00 AM

At a local Republican assembly in Grand Junction, Colorado, last March, I watched Rep. Lauren Boebert receive not one, but two standing ovations: One for her unremarkable five-minute speech, the other just for showing up at all. It was a sympathetic audience, but still, among her base, it was clear she was beloved. That — combined with many indicators, including our own forecast, suggesting the Republican congresswoman would sail into a second term — was why I was shocked to see the race for her seat representing Colorado’s 3rd District turn into one of the closest elections of the midterms.

Colorado’s 3rd District is red and, thanks to redistricting, has gotten redder since the last time Boebert ran — it has a FiveThirtyEight partisan lean⁶ of R+19. As an incumbent Republican in a midterm cycle that looked like it would favor the GOP, Boebert was expectedly to easily win: Our forecast gave Boebert a 97-in-100 chance of winning. As of 5 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday, Boebert had a slim, 1,122-vote lead over Democrat and former Aspen City Council Member Adam Frisch. But even if she prevails, it’ll be a photo finish in a race that was absolutely not expected to be close. So what the heck happened? While Republicans overall performed poorer than expected this midterm cycle, certain things about this race made it particularly susceptible to a potential upset — and help explain why Boebert wasn’t popping Champagne on election night. (Boebert’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)

Part of the story here is the fact that Colorado as a whole was hit with a blue wave this election, which washed out even into Boebert’s red district. Not only did Democrats win big-ticket races for governor and Senate, they also won competitive House races in the 7th District and newly created 8th District and flipped seven seats in the state legislature, giving the state GOP the smallest minority it ever had. Republican state Rep. Colin Larson, who lost his seat, called it an “extinction-level event,” according to Colorado Public Radio: “This was the asteroid that ended the reign of the dinosaur, and in this case, the dinosaur was the Republican Party.” 

Though the district overall is red, there are blue counties and pockets within it, and enthusiasm for Democratic candidates up and down the ballot may have helped buoy Frisch’s campaign. We saw this effect in other red districts in Colorado, too, like the 3rd: Incumbent Rep. Doug Lamborn, a Republican, won his race by 16 points, 4 points less than in 2020. In the 4th District, Rep. Ken Buck won his election by the same margin (24 points) as in 2020, but that was after redistricting made his district even redder. 

But the blue wave clearly isn’t enough to explain such a razor-thin margin in Boebert’s race. She also had some weaknesses that were exploited by a surprisingly strong Democratic candidate. Like the rest of the state, a plurality of voters in the 3rd District — 40 percent — are unaffiliated, according to an analysis by the Colorado Independent Redistricting Commissions. Some of those voters still reliably vote for one party or the other, but a portion are swing voters or moderates who don’t find candidates too far down either end of the political spectrum appealing. After the 2020 election, we noted that Boebert’s district didn’t look like the districts where some of the other more hardline Republicans won: It’s less white, less evangelical Christian and less Republican. This may be why Boebert won with just 51 percent of the vote in 2020 (and why former President Donald Trump carried it by just 5.5 points). Even though the 3rd District has a solid Republican lean, it has been represented by a Democrat as recently as the early 2010s (Democrat John Salazar served 2005-2011), and the last two elections point to some fissures in the Republican stronghold. 

Boebert’s modest win in 2020 is what inspired her challenger, Frisch, to run, he told FiveThirtyEight: “I started to think, ‘If 5 percent of the people had switched their vote in 2020, Boebert would have lost.’” He says he figured he would need to carve away closer to 10 percent of voters to have a shot, given the redistricting changes, but that was a margin he felt confident he could sway. “It was never supposed to be a kamikaze suicide mission,” Frisch said. 

Throughout the campaign, Frisch billed himself as a moderate, “conservative businessman” who would get things done, in an effort to sway more centrist Republicans who were disenchanted with Boebert’s headline-grabbing stunts. Though Boebert has her fans, she is a polarizing figure, said Zack Roday, the campaign manager for Joe O’Dea, the Republican candidate for Senate in Colorado. “A lot of people like her, and a lot of people don’t,” Roday said. “There are a lot of strong opinions about her, and certainly she is seen as a Trump-like figure, and so obviously she’s connected to that brand, for better or for worse.” That includes critics within her party like state Sen. Don Coram, who challenged Boebert in the primary and ended up endorsing Frisch in the general election. Boebert also doesn’t have a strong track record from her first term in Congress. She sponsored a few dozen bills, most of which were stunts and none of which gained any traction. 

The dollars around this race help fill in some of the blanks as well. Frisch and Boebert’s campaigns were pretty evenly funded, with her campaign raising $6.7 million to his $5.2 million, thanks in no small part to Frisch’s own pocketbook: As a millionaire former currency trader, he bankrolled his own campaign to the tune of $2.2 million. Where the funds diverged was in outside spending. In 2020, outside spending against both Boebert and her opponent was fairly even. But this year, over half a million dollars was spent to oppose Boebert, while none was spent opposing Frisch, according to data from OpenSecrets. 

All of this points to one last potential factor: This race may have been overlooked, particularly by pollsters and Republicans who saw Boebert as a shoo-in. Aside from three partisan polls (two of which were sponsored by Frisch’s campaign), pollsters ignored this race. And despite Boebert being a diehard Trump loyalist, the former president never came out to Colorado to campaign for her as he did for candidates in other races, according to Kevin McCarney, the chair of the GOP in Mesa County, the second-most populous county in the 3rd District. “He really wasn’t vocal about Lauren at all. It could have been complacency, that they just thought she was going to win, but it’s a little disappointing,” McCarney said. “

Frisch’s centrist platform and his ability to self fund prodigiously seem to have helped him exploit Boebert’s weaknesses in a district that has a not-inconsequential contingent of moderate voters who were turned off by the congresswoman’s extremism. Regardless of the result, this race has shown that the Colorado Western Slope can be competitive, given the right — or wrong — candidates, and neither party is likely to overlook it in 2024. 

2022 Election

Abortion Was Always Going To Impact The Midterms

The truth was in the polls all along.

By Mary Radcliffe and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux and Mary Radcliffe and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux

Nov. 17, 2022, at 6:00 AM

Abortion turned out to be a driving force in midterm races across the country, helping Democrats maintain control of the Senate and limit their losses in the House. But if you were following news coverage in the lead-up to the election, the impact of abortion may have come as quite a surprise. In the month before the election, multiple major media outlets reported that voters’ outrage over the Supreme Court’s June decision overruling Roe v. Wade was fading. Inflation, not abortion, seemed to be rising in importance, making Democrats’ focus on abortion look like a risky gamble. “The debate over abortion rights has not emerged as a political silver bullet for Democrats,” reporters for The New York Times wrote on November 4.

Why did election results diverge so dramatically from the media narrative in the last month of campaigning? It turns out that clues to this outcome were present in the polling all along. As the election grew closer, several tracking polls showed that abortion was not receding in importance for voters, particularly Democrats. Inflation generally ranked higher when voters were asked which issues were most important for the country, but abortion remained important for Democrats throughout the summer and fall. And the share of voters who said the issue was motivating their vote actually rose between July and September, according to one pollster. Abortion was also an issue where Democrats were especially unwilling to compromise and vote for a candidate with whom they disagreed — unlike inflation. And in places where abortion was directly on the ballot, voters were particularly likely to say they were casting their ballot based on abortion. 

Together, all of this suggests that while most people perceived the economy as a more pressing concern generally, abortion was a motivating issue for a substantial number of voters — and their enthusiasm may have helped give Democrats an edge in the election.

Consistently asking the same question over and over again is one of the best ways to see if public opinion is changing. According to weekly polls by YouGov/The Economist, abortion started growing in importance months ago, particularly after a draft of the opinion overturning Roe v. Wade leaked in early May. 

The polls found that the share of respondents who said abortion was a “very important” issue for the U.S. rose even more after the official ruling in June, particularly among Democrats. Abortion was ranked as “very important” by between 57 and 68 percent of Democrats every single week after the decision came down, suggesting the issue was not fading from voters’ minds. (This was a continuation of a longer trend: Previous FiveThirtyEight analysis showed that abortion started gaining in importance for Democrats as early as September 2021, when Texas banned the procedure after approximately 6 weeks of pregnancy.)

At the same time, the issue of inflation was also important to voters — in fact, it was more consistently rated as “very important” than abortion in the YouGov/The Economist polls. In July, when 51 percent of Americans said abortion was “very important” — the highest level of concern for abortion the survey ever measured — 68 percent of Americans, including 58 percent of Democrats, said that inflation and prices were a “very important” issue. And notably, among Democrats, the two issues were ranked as “very important” by similar numbers of respondents throughout the summer and fall, suggesting that Democratic voters were concerned about both.

Despite talk of inflation overtaking abortion as a priority, the percentage of Americans who ranked it among their top concerns remained pretty steady throughout the fall. For example, in FiveThirtyEight’s own polling conducted with Ipsos, between 9 and 13 percent of respondents ranked abortion as a top three issue in every survey conducted after the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision leaked in May. In those same surveys, the issue of inflation was ranked as a top three issue by between 55 and 63 percent of respondents. Reporting and analysis focused on the fact that concern over inflation was far more widespread than concern over abortion, taking that as a signal that the issue was fading in importance. The fact that there was no substantial change in how respondents viewed either issue from June through October was largely ignored.

But crucially, the share of people who said that abortion was a key reason to vote – rather than just an important issue – seemed to grow as the election season went on. After all, concern about an issue doesn’t necessarily translate into voter enthusiasm, and some Americans who said inflation was their top concern overall may have been more influenced by abortion when they cast their ballot. In September, polling from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that the number of voters who said the Dobbs decision made them more motivated to vote had increased from their previous survey in July, from 43 to 50 percent. The September survey also found that Democrats were more than twice as likely as Republicans to say that the Dobbs decision was motivating their vote. And in KFF’s analysis of midterm exit polls, 38 percent of voters said that the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade had a major impact on their decision to vote — including 57 percent of Democrats — which was much higher than the share of voters who said abortion was their top concern in pre-election polling.

Moreover, abortion was more likely to be a dealbreaker issue for voters — one where they were unwilling to compromise and vote for a candidate with whom they disagreed. In a Fox News survey conducted in mid-October, for example, voters were asked an open-ended question to identify an issue that “is so important to them that they must agree with a candidate on it, or they will NOT vote for them.” Twenty-one percent of registered voters named abortion, while only 6 percent named inflation and 8 percent named the economy more generally. This was especially true among Democrats: 29 percent of Democratic voters said they would not vote for a candidate they disagreed with about abortion, compared with just 15 percent of Republicans.

The idea that abortion is a particularly important issue for Democrats isn’t new. In research conducted between 2019 and 2021, political scientists John Sides, Chris Tausanovitch, and Lynn Vavreck ran a series of experiments to determine which issues voters prioritize. They offered subjects choices between candidates who agreed with some of their positions, but not others, to find where voters might be willing to compromise. According to their surveys, 75 percent of Democrats opposed total abortion bans, and it was one of the issues on which they were least willing to compromise. Only 29 percent of Republicans, meanwhile, supported total abortion bans, and the issue of abortion was much more important to that small group than to the much larger slice of Republicans who opposed total abortion bans, or were unsure. 

And tucked within the pre-election polling is some regional variation that sheds light on how abortion may have played an outsized role in certain states or races. In the September Kaiser Family Foundation survey, voters in states where abortion had been fully or near-fully banned after Dobbs were 19 points more likely to say abortion laws motivated them to turn out than voters in states where abortion was protected.

Emerson College conducted surveys in dozens of states this cycle. In their final October surveys, the issue of abortion access was significantly more salient in some key states, particularly Michigan. Likely voters were asked, “Which of the following issues is most important in determining your vote this November?” Among the 9 options offered to respondents were “abortion access” and “economy (jobs, inflation, taxes).”

Across the board, more voters said that economic issues were most important for determining their vote. But Michigan voters were especially likely to prioritize abortion, and it’s easy to guess why. The state’s abortion laws were up in the air following Dobbs, and a constitutional amendment that would guarantee abortion access was on the ballot, so voters had the opportunity to decide whether abortion would remain legal in their state. Not only did that amendment pass, but Democrats won full control of the state legislature for the first time since the election of 1982, while also winning every statewide race. In New Hampshire, where voters were particularly likely to say that abortion was most important in determining their vote, Democrats successfully defended potentially vulnerable Senate and House seats. In New Mexico, where abortion was also a highly ranked issue, Democrats flipped a House seat that was rated as Likely Republican by our forecast, ousting 2-term incumbent Yvette Herrell in New Mexico’s 2nd District.

Of course, those polls don’t offer clear answers for everything that happened in the election. The economy dramatically overshadowed abortion as a voting issue for Pennsylvania voters in the Emerson survey, even though abortion access was very much at stake, and Democrats made a strong showing, flipping a Senate seat, winning the governor’s race and possibly claiming a majority in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives for the first time since the Republican wave election in 2010 (the outcome is still unknown). But other polls found that abortion was more important for Pennsylvania voters: A Marist poll in late October/early November found 20 percent of registered voters said it was “top of mind” (inflation was higher, at 36 percent), and a Fox News survey in late October found that 24 percent of Pennsylvania voters called it the most important issue for their Senate vote, not far behind inflation (33 percent).

Overall, there was plenty of data indicating that abortion consistently remained an important issue for some Americans in the months after the Supreme Court decision. And even though most voters were more concerned about inflation, abortion was motivating a significant number of them. In a normal midterm year with an unpopular Democratic president, the possibility that Democrats might maintain the Senate — and even narrowly lose the House — might seem outlandish. But the Supreme Court ensured that this would not be a normal year. And despite media skepticism, there were plenty of polls pointing in that direction.