What if March Madness Were Played With Presidential Candidates?

It’s rare, even this far out from the first votes being cast, to have enough potential presidential candidates to fill out a 16-team bracket full of them. But this year, you can do it, and even have to apologize to John Kasich and Bobby Jindal for not being able to sneak them in.

And of course, it's irresistible, if not exactly scientific, to find parallels between the presidential brackets and those of the NCAA tournament. Both politics and college basketball are stories of personality—habits, tendencies, predilections, fatal flaws and triumphal virtues, reputations that they fulfill or transcend. The politicians, along with the teams, have highly specific roles to play in the drama. Herewith, in honor of March Madness, a political/basketball playoff parsing, matching the contestants across the brackets. They fit surprisingly neatly—though, in the case of politics, the madness will last another 20 months.