PUBLISHED Aug. 20, 2019, at 2:15 PM

Pop Quiz: Can You Tell Political Pundits From Sports Commentators?

Test yourself and see if you can do better than FiveThirtyEight staffers.

By Tony Chow and Julia Wolfe

Politics is more complicated than a quarterback’s playbook, and it can be tough to break it down for people who aren’t following the day-to-day drama. So, like a golfer aiming for a hole-in-one, political pundits are always searching for the perfect metaphor. When they want to explain all that inside baseball, they often turn to sports, because what is politics if not a grand competition?

In fact, they turn to sports metaphors so often that it can sometimes be tough to tell the difference between sports commentary and political punditry. We recently asked FiveThirtyEight staffers if they could guess whether a particular quote came from a sports broadcast or a political show that was talking about one of the two recent Democratic debates.

Obviously these quotations are cherry-picked. Some of them are so vague that they could be about almost anything. We felt bad even including some of the tougher ones, but not quite bad enough to take it easy on you. Think you can tell which is which? Read the quotes below and take the test for yourself. Good luck!