by Cliston Brown | Dec 5, 2024 | Sports
As I noted on the site formerly known as Twitter yesterday, the College Football Playoff Committee is a joke—a deeply unserious group of people who will bend over backwards to favor “brand-name” programs and the Southeastern Conference while hosing other deserving teams.
But the biggest problem, the one which allows the committee to shaft lesser-name teams in favor of undeserving “name” programs, is the expanded power conferences. When you’re playing in a league of 16 to 18 teams, you can only play about half the teams in your conference, and scheduling can be very uneven. That creates a massive window of subjectivity that the playoff committee can exploit in order to favor its darlings while giving less-favored programs the shaft. (“Well, they didn’t play anybody good.”)
About a year ago, I proposed that the power conferences form a 70-team “Premier League” subdivided into seven conferences of ten teams each. As a refresher, this is the realignment I proposed:
ATLANTIC COAST: Clemson, Duke, Florida State, Georgia Tech, Maryland, North Carolina, North Carolina State, South Carolina, Virginia, Wake Forest
BIG TEN: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Michigan State, Minnesota, Northwestern, Ohio State, Purdue, Wisconsin
EASTERN: Boston College, Central Florida, Miami, Notre Dame, Penn State, Pittsburgh, Rutgers, Syracuse, Virginia Tech, West Virginia
HEARTLAND: BYU, Cincinnati, Colorado, Iowa State, Kansas, Kansas State, Louisville, Missouri, Nebraska, Utah
PACIFIC TEN: Arizona, Arizona State, California, UCLA, Oregon, Oregon State, USC, Stanford, Washington, Washington State
SOUTHEASTERN: Alabama, Auburn, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, LSU, Mississippi, Mississippi State, Tennessee, Vanderbilt
SOUTHWEST: Arkansas, Baylor, Houston, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, SMU, Texas, Texas A&M, TCU, Texas Tech
With this lineup, selecting the 12-team playoff field would be relatively easy and much less subjective. Every team would play every other team in its conference, creating clear tiebreakers where needed. Each power conference team would get an auto-bid, and one auto-bid would be granted to the lesser conferences. All conference champions would either get a bye or host a first-round game as a reward for actually winning something. Four at-large teams would play on the road in the first round.
If this system were in place this year, we could make the following assumptions:
- South Carolina would get the automatic bid as the ACC champion (by virtue of its win at Clemson).
- Ohio State and Indiana would tie for first in the Big Ten, with Ohio State getting the auto-bid on the head-to-head tiebreaker.
- Either Notre Dame or Penn State would get the automatic bid from the Eastern League, with Miami losing out due to its loss at Syracuse, regardless of whether it beat either Notre Dame or Penn State. We will assume Miami would not have beaten both and probably would have lost to both.
- Either BYU or Iowa State would get the automatic bid from the Heartland, with Colorado losing out due to its loss at Nebraska.
- Oregon would go undefeated and get the automatic bid as the Pac-10 champion.
- Georgia and Tennessee would tie for first in the SEC at 7-2, with Georgia getting the automatic bid on the head-to-head tiebreaker. (This assumes Mississippi defeated Alabama, with both teams going 6-3.)
- Texas would get the automatic bid as the SWC champion and would be undefeated, having not played Georgia.
- Boise State would get the bid from the non-power conferences.
- Undefeated Texas would get the top seed.
- Undefeated Oregon would likely be the second seed, unless Penn State went undefeated, with conference wins over Notre Dame and Miami, in which case Penn State would probably get the second seed and Oregon the third seed. But we’ll assume Notre Dame defeated Penn State, which means Ohio State gets the third seed (at 11-1 with a loss to Michigan), Georgia gets the fourth seed (despite two losses), and Notre Dame gets the fifth seed (still hampered, justifiably, by its loss to Northern Illinois).
- South Carolina, Boise State and the BYU-Iowa State winner get seeds 6-8, in that order. South Carolina would likely have no more than one loss if it played in the ACC and might even be undefeated, but would still likely be placed behind Georgia and maybe even one-loss Notre Dame.
- Penn State, with only one loss, gets the ninth seed. SEC co-champ Tennessee gets the tenth seed, Big Ten co-champ Indiana gets the eleventh seed, and either BYU or SMU gets the twelfth seed (with BYU getting in over SMU, but SMU edging out Iowa State, depending on who won the BYU-Iowa State game). We’ll assume BYU defeated Iowa State, but its loss at home to Kansas keeps BYU behind Boise State. (We are also assuming SMU finished second to Texas in the Southwest Conference, which may be a stretch, but we’ll go with it.)
With all these assumptions, here is how a playoff bracket would have worked out under this system:
- Game 1—#9 Penn State at #8 BYU
- Game 2—#12 SMU at #5 Notre Dame
- Game 3—#10 Tennessee at #7 Boise State
- Game 4—#11 Indiana at #6 South Carolina
- Game 5—Game 1 winner vs. #1 Texas (Cotton Bowl)
- Game 6—Game 2 winner vs. #4 Georgia (Sugar Bowl)
- Game 7—Game 3 winner vs. #2 Oregon (Rose Bowl)
- Game 8—Game 4 winner vs. #3 Ohio State (Orange Bowl)
- Game 9—Game 5 winner vs. Game 6 winner
- Game 10—Game 7 winner vs. Game 8 winner
- Game 11—Championship
by Cliston Brown | Nov 6, 2024 | Political Commentary
In 2006, when I was working in Washington, D.C. for a national trade organization, I was deeply consumed with that year’s midterm elections. I began obsessively tracking all the House and Senate races and, toward the end of the cycle, I made some predictions, which, as it turns out, were almost completely spot on. I only missed the House total by three seats and was nearly perfect in the Senate.
I began regularly making predictions, and in almost every election, I was very close, coming within a handful of seats. In 2012, I called every state correctly but one in the presidential race, and missed the House and the Senate by one seat each.
With the advent of the Trump era, I began to lose my touch. And I have never gotten it completely back. After Tuesday’s election, I had to make a very hard reckoning with myself, and I have come to realize something important. For as much as I have always prided myself on my objectivity, I realized I have been unable to be objective when it mattered, and my personal preferences have been clouding my judgment for years.
In the last week before the election, I wrote a column on this website in which I said that I thought both Kamala Harris and Senator Bob Casey were in trouble in Pennsylvania, and that Senator Sherrod Brown was likelier than not to lose his seat in Ohio. I was right. But I switched course just a few days later as soon as I found information that mirrored my biases. I have written for years about how polls were broken and should be disregarded, but as soon as I saw a polling result that showed what I hoped to see, I disregarded what I was clearly seeing—and everything I thought I had learned in the previous eight years.
On Tuesday night, a follower of mine on X.com, distraught by the results, lashed out angrily at me and my incorrect predictions. It made me think. And it made me realize that my inability to separate my wishes from my analysis, once again, was providing false hope to people who I never wished to mislead.
Over the last 15 years, I have earned a following of more than 13,000 people on X.com (formerly Twitter), who have come to trust my judgments. I have been featured in numerous publications and on several television and radio programs around the world. And I have done all of them—all of you—a disservice. I’m sorry.
So I have decided that I am getting out of the election prediction business. Not only do I no longer believe I can do it well or objectively, but I am actively letting down thousands of people who trust what I say. I will not do that anymore.
Going forward on this website and on social media, I will confine my observations to my own views on politics and analyzing election results. In particular, I will write about what I believe politicians will do and what my party, the Democratic Party, should do if it hopes to reverse the obvious disconnect between itself and the median voter in this country.
I fear that our country faces hard times now, and that much of the progress that has been won over the last hundred years will be undone by aggressive conservative populists in the next two years. I worry that the Social Security and Medicare I was hoping to have at some point in the next 15 years will no longer be there for myself or others. I fear the decisions that the conservative-dominated Supreme Court will make for the rest of my lifetime. There is nothing that can be done about any of that now, sadly.
I will likely be much less active on this site and on social media going forward, though I hope to maintain the friendships that I have made over the years. All that any of us can do now is get on with our lives and make the best of it. I have a terrific wife, a great home, an amazing job, good friends, and a master’s degree to pursue, and I am going to turn a much greater focus to all of those things going forward. I wish you all the best of luck in everything you want to do. Thank you for believing in me, and I sincerely apologize to everyone I have let down.
With a tip of the hat to the originator of the phrase, Edward R. Murrow: Good night, and good luck.
by Cliston Brown | Oct 30, 2024 | Election Analysis
There may not be another Democrat alive who knows the Pennsylvania electorate as well as Senator Bob Casey, Jr. He and his father, who served two terms as governor from 1987-95, have been deeply involved in Democratic politics in the Keystone State for decades.
In the last couple of weeks, the Casey camp and its allies have made two very interesting moves. First, it was an ad from the Casey campaign featuring a mixed-politics couple–a Republican wife and Democratic husband–who agreed they were both voting for Casey. The ad highlighted some positions in which Casey aligned himself with Trump-supported policies on fracking, NAFTA and tariffs.
Today, Politico reported that a front group operated by Democrats is trying to boost a third-party candidate to shave off votes from Casey’s Republican opponent, Dave McCormick.
These are curious moves by a three-term incumbent who most people expect to be reelected this fall. Think about this logically for a moment: If a Democrat thinks he is winning, why would he need to court crossover voters or try to siphon off an opponent’s voters to a third-party candidate?
I think it is obvious that Team Casey is seeing something in their data that is trending in a direction they don’t like. They probably wouldn’t be making the moves they’re making if they liked what they were seeing.
And in a time when the correlation between Senate races and presidential races has run at 98.6% in the last two presidential election cycles, if Team Casey is seeing trouble, that means trouble for Kamala Harris, too. If a Democratic Senator is taking pains to point out his areas of agreement with Donald Trump, that doesn’t say much for what he thinks about the prospects of aligning with Harris, does it?
These two moves by the Casey camp and its allies now have me convinced that both Casey and Harris are in trouble in Pennsylvania. I moved both his race and her race in the Keystone State to toss-up status nine days ago. I am not going to change those ratings at this time, but if I were a Republican, I would be feeling fairly optimistic right now about the prospects for winning both Pennsylvania’s crucial 19 electoral votes and its Senate seat.
If Trump wins Pennsylvania, approximately 64% of all possible combinations in the remaining six swing states would get him to at least 269 electoral votes. While 270 are needed to win outright, a 269-269 tie would almost certainly put Trump in the White House. In the event of nobody getting 270 electoral votes, the House of Representatives would elect the president in January, and crucially, each state, not each representative, gets one vote. There is almost no chance whatsoever that Republicans will not control at least 26 of the 50 state delegations to the House, and that would ensure Trump’s election.
Should Harris lose Pennsylvania, she would have little more than a 1-in-3 chance of putting together the combinations she would need to reach at least 270 electoral votes. If Harris is in trouble in Pennsylvania, she is in trouble, period.
As far as the Senate is concerned, if Casey should lose Pennsylvania, it is also likely that Democrats lose Senate races in Michigan, an open seat, and Wisconsin, where there has been a lot of talk recently about Senator Tammy Baldwin’s trends on a downward trajectory. With Republicans already expected to gain at least two and possibly three Senate seats, that would mean at least a 55-45 GOP majority, with potential for Republicans to ultimately win as many as 57 Senate seats–just three short of the threshold required to break a filibuster.
As a Democrat, I am very concerned and I am not liking what I am seeing right now.
by Cliston Brown | Oct 21, 2024 | Election Analysis
To view the full ratings chart, click here.
Readers of my Twitter/X page (@clistonbrown) and my website know that I consider polling to be an untrustworthy means of assessing upcoming elections. Having seen the massive polling errors in several key states over the last two presidential elections, as well as recent midterm elections, I believe we can no longer glean anything of value from polls or polling averages.
In assessing the state of the race, it is important to look at other factors, and at this point in time, there are a number of countervailing factors that make it impossible to honestly say that either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump has the advantage with 15 days to go.
On one hand, some of the signals coming out of the key states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Nevada should be troubling to Harris and the Democrats. Democrats in Michigan, Wisconsin and Nevada over the last few weeks have been warning that they do not like the signs and trends they are seeing in their states. And in Pennsylvania, two things are especially troubling for Democrats. The first concerning point is that Republicans continue to close their gap in registration with Democrats in the Keystone State. The second worrisome data point: Democratic Senator Bob Casey has been running an ad where he points out areas of agreement he has with Trump on certain issues and featuring a married couple, one Republican and one Democrat, supporting Casey.
To be honest, that ad marked the first time in this campaign that I have really thought Democrats might be in trouble. As a rule of thumb, when Democrats are focusing on winning crossover Republicans or getting strong support from young people, that is usually a sign that they don’t think they have enough votes to win without those groups. And because those groups are hard to get—most voters don’t ticket-split anymore, and young people have voted at a lower rate than any other age group in literally every election on record—if Democrats think they need those two groups, they’re in trouble.
On the other hand, we are seeing reports of record early turnout and promising turnout among voters voting by mail. Georgia and North Carolina are seeing record early turnout. Pennsylvania Democrats are building a “firewall” of mail ballots, hoping to withstand an Election Day turnout in the Keystone State that is likely to be heavily Republican.
It would be completely dishonest for me—or anyone—to say we know at this point which indicators are likely to be more important 15 days from now. I have long believed that Vice President Harris, as an African-American woman from California, would be a hard sell to the white voters she needs to win to capture the Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. In those states, traditionalist views hold more sway than they do on the coasts, and residents tend to cast a wary eye toward Democratic politicians from California. On the other hand, it is possible that she may run better than Joe Biden did in North Carolina and perhaps Georgia. If she can win those states, as well as Arizona and Nevada, she could overcome losses in the Rust Belt and still prevail. But it is a dicey proposition. A loss in any of the four Sun Belt swing states, if coupled with losing all three Rust Belt swing states, would doom Harris’s candidacy.
It has also always been my contention—backed up by results in both 2016 and 2020, and trends dating back to the turn of the century—that House and Senate races are likely to mirror almost perfectly the presidential results in those constituencies. My view remains that the Republicans are all but certain to flip control of the Senate—and I am now moving the race in Ohio to “Leans Republican,” which would indicate at least a 52-48 GOP majority in 2025. I have rated Montana at least “Leans Republican” (and now “Likely Republican”) since the beginning of the campaign, and the Senate seat in West Virginia, currently held by former Democrat and current independent Joe Manchin, is certain to flip to the GOP. I believe that whichever candidate wins the presidency, his or her party is nearly certain to win the House as well.
In short, I rate the Senate now as “Likely Republican,” and both the presidency and the House as toss-ups.
Given all of the information available at the moment, I am now moving the presidential and Senate races in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin to toss-up status, and as I noted earlier, I am moving the Senate race in Ohio to “Leans Republican,” with GOP nominee Bernie Moreno now a slight favorite to oust Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown. Additionally, based on some of the early voting totals reported by Jon Ralston in Nevada, and also by statements coming from the powerful Culinary Union that Harris would lose Nevada if the election were held now, I am moving the presidential and Senate races in Nevada to toss-ups as well.
All of these aforementioned changes represent movement away from the Democrats, but I also am making two ratings changes in their direction. After seeing the heavy early turnout in Georgia, and a recent court case that went against the Trumpist-dominated Georgia elections board, I am now moving Georgia from “Leans Republican” to toss-up.
I now show all seven “swing states” as being toss-up states in the presidential race, and five of those states have Senate races this cycle, with the exceptions of North Carolina and Georgia. Of the five Senate races in those states, I rate four as toss-ups. I still consider Democrat Ruben Gallego a slight favorite over Republican Kari Lake in the Arizona Senate race—I believe that a female candidate will run slightly behind Trump due to some of the Trumpist base’s prejudices. Those voters may not vote for Gallego, but they might pass on voting for Lake, too. Nonetheless, I think the Arizona Senate race will be much closer than polling indicates, largely due to the fact that the presidential race in the state is a toss-up.
My only other rating change away from Republicans, since 15 days ago, is an unexpected wild card. The independent Senate candidacy of Dan Osborn in Nebraska is causing a tremendous level of heartburn for incumbent GOP Senator Deb Fischer. I believe that Osborn’s status as an independent candidate is helping him overcome the resistance that most of Nebraska’s electorate would have against a Democratic candidate. One thing I have learned over the last 18 years of prognosticating elections is that when candidates are pleading for more money, they are seeing trends and data points they do not like. (Jon Tester, the incumbent Democratic Senator from Montana, has been almost screeching for help for months, and Sherrod Brown’s level of pleading in the Ohio Senate race has become more intense in recent weeks.) Fischer’s camp has been sounding alarms for several weeks now. I ultimately think that enough of Nebraska’s Republican voters will “come home” to reelect Fischer, but I can no longer dismiss the possibility of an upset out of hand. I am moving that race from “Safe Republican” to “Leans Republican.”
It is often presumed that Osborn, should he upset Fischer, would caucus with the Democrats, but I doubt that, as it would likely doom his reelection bid in ruby-red Nebraska. But even if he did caucus with Team Blue, my view at this time is that Republicans are likely to have a 51-49 majority regardless. Should Osborn win, and if Sherrod Brown were to hold on to his seat in Ohio, we could see a situation where the Senate has 50 Republicans, 47 Democrats and two Democratic-caucusing independents, and Osborn holding the keys to the chamber, possibly forcing the Senate to anoint someone like Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) or Angus King (I-Maine) as majority leader. Of course, that would depend on Harris also winning, thus giving Tim Walz the Senate’s tiebreaking vote. But this is all conjecture, and it is all based on probabilities that I consider to be below 50%.
The bottom line is that nobody knows who is going to win the presidency or the House right now, and anybody who tells you that they do know is full of crap. This race will come down to turnout and intensity. Whoever wants it more will win it. That’s why the heavy early-vote turnout in North Carolina and Georgia, and Democratic successes in mail voting in Pennsylvania, have given me pause. If not for that, at this point, I would likely be moving several of these states to “Leans Republican” and characterizing Trump as the front-runner. At this point, I see a lot of worrisome signs for Harris, but I am not yet convinced that she has any worse than a 50-50 shot.
I will try to make predictions for every state in two weeks, but candidly, I am not sure that I will be able to do so. I will tell you this: out of respect for my readers, and my sense of integrity, I am not going to claim to know something I don’t. I do not want to give anybody any false hope or any false reasons for alarm. The one time I got a presidential election wrong, in 2016, it was an honest error based on what I believed to be the best information available at the time. But to be candid, it was also an error based in hubris and my inability or unwillingness to see something that, in retrospect, was staring me right in the face. I will not make such an error again, even if it means telling you honestly that I just can’t call it.
We will see if developments indicate a decisive break is occurring in one direction or the other between now and November 5th. The decisive break usually comes, but when it doesn’t, you get an election like 1960 or 2000.
by Cliston Brown | Oct 15, 2024 | Election Analysis
With 20 days left before the 2024 elections, a very unexpected U.S. Senate race has popped onto our radar screen. Senator Deb Fischer (R-Nebraska) finds herself in a surprisingly competitive race against Dan Osborn, a blue-collar worker and labor leader who served in the Navy. No Republican expects to be in a dogfight in a statewide race in Nebraska, and if Osborn were running as a Democrat, there is a strong likelihood that Fischer would be far ahead right now.
Osborn, however, is running without any party affiliation, and both polling (which I tend to distrust) and Fischer herself are indicating that he has a real chance to actually win. The Fischer camp has been crying out for a couple of weeks now that they are underfunded and need cash to stave off the surprisingly strong challenge Osborn is giving them.
I still have my doubts about whether Osborn can actually win this race. In the end, with control of the U.S. Senate on the line, I expect most Nebraska Republicans will “come home” and vote for Fischer, and in a heavily red state, that should be enough to get her over the finish line. However, I also believe that if Osborn were running as a Democrat, we would not even be entertaining the possibility that he might win or even come close, and I find this case particularly interesting because I predicted this possibility seven years ago.
In a column published in the Observer on June 26, 2017 (“To Advance In Blood-Red States, Democrats Need To Abandon Them”), I suggested that a number of states were hopeless for Democrats and that the best course of action in such states—like Nebraska—would be for the Democratic Party to stop running candidates in statewide races and instead support independent candidates. I noted that in two states where this approach had been tried, an independent running against a Republican, without a Democratic opponent in the race, had won the governorship in Alaska in 2014. I also mentioned that another independent candidate ran for the U.S. Senate in Kansas the same year and ran the closest race that state had seen in decades. And more recently, in 2022, the same situation happened in Utah, with a Democratic-backed independent coming closer to winning a U.S. Senate race than any Democrat had done in about 50 years.
My view was that it was better for Democrats to get behind a candidate who might give them a chance to defeat a Republican than to keep putting up candidates who were guaranteed to lose in states where a majority of voters simply will not vote for a Democrat, period. An independent who will side with Democrats roughly half of the time is better than a Republican who will almost never vote with Democrats at any time. By taking away the stigma of the Democratic brand, which is toxic in states like Nebraska, a better chance would exist to defeat Republican candidates in general elections.
Based on the results where this approach has been tried, it seems clear that my suggestion was on target, and Osborn’s race may be the crowning example of my theory. Democrats in a number of deeply red states may want to look at Osborn’s example, and the others I have mentioned here, and consider the possibilities. I think there are millions of voters in deeply red states who consistently vote Republican but do not necessarily love the Republican Party—they simply hate Democrats.
As I said, I still do not expect Osborn to win—I expect Nebraska’s Republican tendencies to win out—but I can no longer dismiss the possibility out of hand. Today, I am moving Nebraska’s Senate race to “Leans R” and recharacterizing it as a race to watch closely.
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