"So while Biden’s in a reasonably strong and perhaps even slightly underrated position, it’s slightly more likely than not that Biden won’t be the nominee."

"Sen. Bernie Sanders has the next-best shot, with a 22 percent chance at a majority, followed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren at 12 percent and former Mayor Pete Buttigieg at 10 percent. There’s also a 14 percent chance — about 1 in 7 — that no one will win a majority of pledged delegates by June 6, which could lead to a contested convention. The model works by simulating the nomination race thousands of times, accounting for the bounces that candidates may receive by winning or losing states, along with other contingencies — such as candidates dropping out and polls moving in response to debates and news events. Like all of our models, it’s empirically driven, built using data from the 15 competitive nomination races since 1980. Since the primaries themselves are fairly complex process, the model is fairly complex also — which we mean as a warning as much as a brag. Models with more complexity are easier to screw up and can be more sensitive to initial assumptions — so we’d encourage you to read more about how our model works."

Nate Silver explains, using his amazing science.

ADDED: I had to publish this post to click on my "over-complication" tag, which I probably could have used a few more times if I'd kept it in mind. It's the kind of tag I love, specific but abstract, so it collects things from scattered topics that resonate. Today's post is only the 6th time I've used it since I created it in 2009 to observe that I'd "crossed the over-complication line" with a post that had a strange set of tags ("abortion, Althouse + Meade, Beccah Beushausen, beer, blogging, dolls, fake, James Frey, Meade, Oprah, Orson Welles, prayer, writing"). It took me a year to use it again, with this great quote from Gertrude Stein: "She always says she dislikes the abnormal, it is so obvious. She says the normal is so much more simply complicated and interesting." Didn't use it again until 2011 — "A Very Simple Venn Diagram of Where the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street Agree" — and then once in 2017 (a labyrinthine sentence about feminism) and once in 2019 (a New Yorker critic bothered by the complexity of the movie "Joker").