Joe Biden's path to the nomination

Data offer us some clues about Biden's prospects, but we really need new polls to know what comes next

Being a data-driven journalist is tough some times. Usually, I get stuck for two reasons. Often, it’s that I don’t have the data I need to answer a question. But sometimes the problem is that I have too much data to look at. Signals get crossed. Narratives conflict. Finding my way out of the data cave proves time-intensive.

There are also times when, paradoxically, I encounter both of these issues. Today is one of those days.

Last night, Joe Biden won a series of surprise victories across 14 Super Tuesday states (and 1 territory). Depending on how you frame it, Biden has either staged one of the most remarkable comebacks in modern political history (no one has prior lost the first three states and survived), or he has simply lucked out that the latter states were his strong ones.

Yet despite the urgency of the moment, we don’t have a lot of new data to gauge the impacts of Biden’s upset last night. Naively, we might reckon that he’s destined for the nomination. Some political pundits …