Either way, if Clinton loses today, she’ll have to explain why she’s the favorite nationally despite having won only one out of the first three states (and having won that one state, Iowa, only barely). In New Hampshire, Clinton had some obvious excuses: The state’s Democratic electorate is really white and really liberal and right next to Vermont.

In the event of a Nevada loss, Clinton’s excuses would be much less persuasive. Maybe she’s lost a lot of support among Hispanics, or among union voters, for instance. That might explain why she lost the state. But it wouldn’t excuse it. There are lots of union workers and Hispanic Democrats in other states, and having lost their support would be an enormous problem for Clinton.

MADDOW: As a self-proclaimed liberal, people talk about the liberal media and they say the whole media is liberal and the whole establishment is liberal, it's not true. If you really are a liberal it's been a long time in this country that you felt that mainstream politics had nothing to say to you. That mainstream politics was just not about you.

And I look at all the young people, particularly at this Bernie Sanders event. I was 19 in 1992 when Bill Clinton was running on the Democratic side and at the 1992 Republican convention, Pat Buchanan got up there and gave this culture war speech where he basically declared a crusade against minorities and particularly gay people. And as a gay person watching that in 1992 I didn't feel like Bill Clinton had my back. I didn't feel like the Democratic party had my back.

He was talking about agreeing with Ronald Reagan that government was the problem and all that stuff. If you are a liberal, you are not in the majority in this country and you know it and it always feels that way.

But this Democratic race with Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders campaigning this way against each other, that happened because Bernie Sanders got into this race and all these kids who are enthused about this race, whether or not they're supporting Bernie Sanders directly are never going to feel like mainstream politics isn't about them.

“Senator Sanders is obviously your opponent,” Maddow challenged. “Nobody expects you guys to walk hand-in-hand and come to consensus on who ought to be the nominee. But he also doesn’t have an enemy in the world in the Democratic party… He’s a very well respected figure. Your campaign is essentially fighting with him now in a way that is casting aspersions on his character, calling him dishonest.”

Dynamic scoring predicts the impact of fiscal policy changes by forecasting the effects of economic agents' reactions to incentives created by policy. It is an adaptation of static scoring, the traditional method for analyzing policy changes.

Due to the complexity of modeling economic agents' behavior, applying dynamic scoring to a policy can be difficult. Economists must infer from economic agents' current behavior how the agents would behave under the new policy. Difficulty increases as the proposed policy becomes increasingly unlike current policy. Likewise, the difficulty of dynamic scoring increases as the time horizon under consideration lengthens. This is due to any model's intrinsic inability to account for unforeseen external shocks in the future.

When feasible, the method yields a more accurate prediction of a policy's impact on a country's fiscal balance and economic output.[citation needed]. The potential for heightened accuracy arises from recognition that households and firms will alter their behavior to continue maximizing welfare (households) or profits (firms) under the new policy. Dynamic scoring is more accurate than static scoring when the econometric model correctly captures how households and firms will react to a policy changes.

Further, the reaction to policy changes may not occur quickly, and thus an intrinsic lag in market behavior obscures the real effect of policy changes.

Using dynamic scoring has been promoted by Republican legislators to argue that supply-side tax policy, for example the Bush tax cuts of 2001[1] and 2011 GOP Path to Prosperity proposal,[2] return higher benefits in terms of GDP growth and revenue increases than are predicted from static scoring. Some economists[who?] argue that their dynamic scoring conclusions are overstated,[3] pointing out that CBO practices already include some dynamic scoring elements and that to include more may lead to politicization of the department.[4]

On January 6, 2013, the version of the Pro-Growth Budgeting Act of 2013 included in the Budget and Accounting Transparency Act of 2014 passed the United States House of Representatives as part of their Rules adopted in House Resolution 5 largely along party lines by a vote of 234-172.[5] The bill will require the Congressional Budget Office to use dynamic scoring to provide a macroeconomic impact analysis for bills that are estimated to have a large budgetary effect.[6] The text of the provision reads: