Nate Silver is to me, the pollster of pollsters. He doesn't poll himself but he kind of polls the pollsters and parses their polling to arrive at a wider look. He's now saying Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris are about equally likely to win the Democratic nomination, Bernie Sanders is one tier below them and that no one else stands much of a chance. If that's so, then all the shrieking and moaning about a 24-candidate race was unnecessary because we got down to a four-way contest in record time. Now, we just have to get through debates where Michael Bennet and Andrew Yang get equal time with the actual candidates.
But I also question if the field is really that predictable. The rest of this election sure isn't. We have a volatile political atmosphere and a volatile incumbent and I doubt even Trump's staunchest supporters would be surprised if he said or did something outrageous or if any of the umpteen ongoing investigations turned up more scandals and possible crimes. We may still find out he committed some wild, still-prosecutable financial fraud or that he was born in Kenya or that he really did shoot someone on Fifth Avenue.
That's my position: That things will happen that we can't possibly imagine now. There will be numerous game-changers and some of them may make all conventional political wisdom and polling — the kind Nate Silver employs — irrelevant. Too many things that could never have happened have already happened.