And there is your Iowa Bounce: Quinnipiac National Poll: Clinton 44, Sanders 42

I have been making a series of delegate projections.  Part of that was an estimate of what would happen if Sanders would win Iowa.  Of course he narrowly lost it.

But if Quinnipiac is right, he won by getting so close.

On December 22nd, they had Clinton up 61-30.  This morning they have it 44-42 Clinton, a massive swing.

In fairness, PPP did not find a similar swing.  We will need more polling to confirm this result.

Below is from my delegate projection diary on January 16th:

So where do the Sanders numbers come from if he wins Iowa? How do you know?

This model builds on work that I did in 2007, and that was subsequently cited by Nate Silver.  This is a pretty significant upgrade both of his and my work, in part because the polling data behind it is significantly more robust.   The polling detail is here.

There are 13 instances since 1976 in which a front runner or someone tied for the lead has been beaten in Iowa in NH. I have excluded a couple (eg 1976 Democratic) for a variety of reasons (in ‘76 the front runner did not contest NH)  If you run a linear regression comparing their national polling before and after the front runner is beaten, you get the following results:

What the hell does that mean?  Well, it means you can model the result of a front runner by multiplying the follows

ADD 16.2 IF THE CANDIDATE UPSETS THE

FRONT RUNNER

Using that information, we can estimate the effect of a Sanders win in Iowa as follows:

CURRENT

NATIONAL POLLING