Who’s Winning the Presidential Campaign?
Democrats
Candidate rank
1 3
| Prediction Markets | National Endorse. | Iowa Polls | N.H. Polls | Money Raised | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 | HillaryClinton | #1 | #1 | #1 | #1 | #1 |
 | BernieSanders | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 |
 | MartinO’Malley | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 |
Republicans
Candidate rank
1 15
| Prediction Markets | National Endorse. | Iowa Polls | N.H. Polls | Money Raised | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 | MarcoRubio | #1 | 5 | 3 | 3 | 3 |
 | DonaldTrump | 2 | 11 | 2 | #1 | 12 |
 | TedCruz | 3 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 2 |
 | JebBush | 4 | #1 | 5 | 6 | #1 |
 | BenCarson | 5 | 11 | #1 | 2 | 4 |
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What’s NewPrediction markets now put Ted Cruz ahead of Jeb Bush. In recent Iowa polls, Ben Carson is still at the top, but slips as Donald Trump rises. Mr. Cruz and Marco Rubio are neck and neck there.
The
polls get most of the attention, but they’re not the most important
part of the early stages of a presidential campaign. The better guide to
who’s really winning is known as the “invisible primary,” in which
candidates compete for support from their fellow politicians, from party
leaders and from donors.A candidate who wins the invisible primary usually wins the party nomination. At the least, the eventual nominee tends to be a candidate who was a close runner-up. Why? The support of party leaders is both a sign of a candidate’s long-term strength and a source of future strength.
As for the polls, they’re not irrelevant, even at this early stage. But the national polls matter less than the polls in Iowa and New Hampshire, the first two states to vote and the states where voters are paying more attention to the candidates.
Here, we offer a scoreboard that totes up the factors that matter most, and we’ll update it every day for the remainder of the year. For all the imperfections in his campaign so far, Jeb Bush still leads the Republican field, albeit by a much smaller margin than Hillary Clinton leads the Democratic field.
Prediction Markets
When a campaign still has months remaining, prediction markets — in which traders bet on event outcomes — have a substantially better record than polls at pointing to the eventual nominee. But the markets do have at least one weakness: They sometimes exaggerate the chances of unusual or long-shot candidates, like Donald Trump, perhaps because a few passionate traders can affect prices.
PredictWise
prediction data are based on odds from the Betfair and PredictIt
betting exchanges and markets, and aggregate polling data from HuffPost
Pollster.
National Endorsements
“Since 1980, the single best predictor of a party’s nominee is the number of endorsements from party elites — elected officials and prominent past party leaders — in the months before primaries begin,” as the political scientist Lynn Vavreck put it. Why? Political elites have a better sense of which candidates can endure a long campaign, and they can influence voters and donors by praising or criticizing candidates. One distinguishing feature of the 2016 cycle is how few top Republicans have endorsed any candidate so far — Jeb Bush has received endorsements from less than 10 percent of Republican senators, representatives and governors, compared with Hillary Clinton’s 60 percent of Democratic officials.
National
Republican officials include 31 governors, 54 senators and 246
representatives. National Democratic officials include 19 governors, 44
senators and 188 representatives.
Sources:
Democracy in Action; data gathered by John Sides, George Washington
University, and Lynn Vavreck, U.C.L.A., with help from Luis Rishi Puno.
Iowa Polls
National polls are of dubious value at this stage, because most voters aren’t focusing on the race. But likely caucus goers in Iowa are paying more attention, as the candidates descend on their state. Of course, Iowa has voted for the eventual nominee in only two of the last six Republican nomination fights (George W. Bush in 2000 and Bob Dole in 1996) that did not involve an incumbent president. It has done better in Democratic races, choosing four of the past six nominees.
Source: HuffPost Pollster, based on the average of the five most recent polls by unique pollsters.
New Hampshire Polls
New Hampshire’s Republicans are also starting to pay attention to the race, and they’re more moderate than Iowa’s. New Hampshire has a better recent record of picking the nominee, going four for six starting in 1980 for Republicans and three for six since 1984 for Democrats. Over that span, no candidate has won the nomination without winning at least some delegates in either New Hampshire or Iowa.
Source: HuffPost Pollster, based on the average of the five most recent polls by unique pollsters.
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