What Went Down At The Nevada Democratic Debate

WHY ARE THERE SO MANY MODERATORS????

Turnout looks like it’s on pace to exceed 2016 by a fair amount. But remember that, in Nevada, early voting is a culture — it’s very possible that not too many more voters will vote on Saturday.

Well, this is certainly a big night for Bloomberg, the candidate I’ll be focusing on tonight.

Even without the debate, Bloomberg’s campaign would arguably be at something of an inflection point. He’s risen to 16 percent in national polls — he was at 8 percent before Iowa — and he’s higher than that in some Super Tuesday states. And lately he’s dominated media coverage of the campaign despite not competing in any of the first four states.

Squint at the numbers in a certain way, however, and you can find signs that Bloomberg’s rise has slowed down, or perhaps even stalled out. He was at 15 percent in our national polling average late last week, so he’s made only incremental gains since then. And this has come in the midst of increasing scrutiny of his campaign, both from his fellow Democrats and from the mainstream media.

I am not trying to identify any sort of market peak here. I’m just saying … empirically, polling averages are basically a random walk, which means that at any given time they’re about equally likely to go up or go down. So Bloomberg continuing to rise, flattening out at about where he is now, or beginning to fall — as part of what is sometimes called a “discovery, scrutiny, decline” cycle — are all distinct possibilities.

The tricky thing for Bloomberg — and for his campaign, which suddenly seems to be getting nervous about his position — is that maintaining the status quo won’t necessarily lead to a satisfactory outcome. Here’s our model’s projection — averaged over 10,000 simulations — for the number of delegates that each candidate will have after Super Tuesday:

• Sanders: 591 (39 percent of delegates so far)
• Bloomberg: 289 (19 percent)
• Biden: 284 (19 percent)
• Buttigieg: 142 (9 percent)
• Warren: 118 (8 percent)
• Klobuchar: 61 (4 percent)

The delegate count will almost certainly not look exactly like this; it’s an average of many scenarios. And it’s also plausible that someone will drop out or someone else will surge. But it serves as a rough benchmark for what the status quo looks like for Bloomberg: He would have perhaps 15 to 25 percent of the delegates after Super Tuesday, but still be well behind Sanders, and also not have cleared the lane of other moderates. It’s not an entirely untenable position, but it would be mediocre, especially as compared to Sanders — and it would mean that any path that led to Bloomberg being nominated would probably require a contested convention.

So as much as his campaign is trying to lower expectations — and to be fair, it really could be difficult for Bloomberg when everyone else on the stage has so much more recent practice at debating — it isn’t necessarily enough for Bloomberg to just hold his own. At some point between now and Super Tuesday, he needs to have another surge. (Or he needs Sanders to come down to earth, in which case the nomination fight would become a true free-for-all, with a contested convention all but inevitable.) He certainly doesn’t need to accomplish all of that tonight, but to repeat myself, there is also no particular guarantee that Bloomberg will continue to rise based on momentum alone. He also has to avoid someone else, like Buttigieg, getting a big surge and pulling off an upset win in Nevada.

My wild, uninformed guess is that Bloomberg may be on the more pugnacious side tonight, especially toward Sanders. He isn’t exactly known for his affability anyway, and he’s trying to pitch himself as the sole alternative to Sanders … so drawing contrasts would be consistent with that game plan. But engaging in too many fights with the other moderates would be a lot for Bloomberg to take on in his first debate — even though some of the moderates will surely be inclined to tangle with Bloomberg.

At the same time, if Bloomberg is in a high-variance phase of his campaign, that very much works in both directions, meaning that he could also have a big night that buoys him to new heights in the polls. Fundamentally, Bloomberg has gotten, so far, pretty favorable treatment from the media, which took his campaign seriously despite its unprecedented strategy and which has focused on Bloomberg to an extent that has driven candidates such as Buttigieg from the front pages.

It doesn’t hurt that Bloomberg is an omnipresent figure in New York media circles, or that his socially liberal, fiscally moderate, technocratic positions tend to match the preferences of the liberal elite. Bloomberg flying too close to the sun and falling after his first debate would make for great copy. But so would a continued Bloomberg surge and a face-off against Sanders for the nomination.