Welcome!
The day we’ve all been waiting for has finally arrived: Groundhog Day Eve, aka, the Iowa caucuses. Gird your loins, readers — it’s bound to be an interesting ride. We here at FiveThirtyEight will be following the democratic processes unfolding in the Middle West on this live blog, so stay tuned throughout the night. OK, here’s the logistical stuff: Caucusing begins at 7 p.m. Iowa Time (that would be the good old Central time zone). In 2012, 96 percent of precincts had reported their results by midnight, but we’re likely to get results faster this year because both Democrats and Republicans have partnered with Microsoft on an app to replace the old phone-keypad-based system of reporting results.
So what about the actual meat and potatoes of all this, the junk that fuels all you political junkies?
Things are looking tight on the Democratic side of things. Hillary Clinton is up on Bernie Sanders 48 percent to 44 percent, according to the FiveThirtyEight Iowa polling average. A big turnout of new Democratic voters would, in all likelihood, be good for Sanders, but our very own Nate Silver cautions that the Sanders momentum might have stalled.
On the GOP side, there’s the Donald Trump/Ted Cruz fisticuffs that have been bloodying the political news for the past few days, and Trump remains the favorite. But there’s a new narrative in town, too: Rubio surge! Well, maybe more like a steady, incremental rise, if we’re being realistic. He’s up over 16 percent in our average.
Besides the results coming in throughout the night, the other thing to watch for is us, the media! How the “expectations game” narratives play on television sets from Des Moines to New York to D.C. might just determine the headlines of tomorrow and how we view the candidates. All the world’s a stage, after all, and we, twitter-heads, mere players.