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Ted Cruz received almost 4.5 million votes in the 2012 Texas Senate election, which he won in a landslide. Millions more Americans, outside Texas, agree with his aggressive brand of conservatism. He has been one of the most influential figures in Congress lately, and this week he became the first major candidate to announce an official 2016 presidential campaign.

He also has virtually no chance of winning the Republican nomination, let alone of becoming president.

So what are we in the media supposed to do about Mr. Cruz’s candidacy? He is, on the one hand, a major figure in American politics, with a dedicated following. On the other hand, many leading figures in the Republican Party — people who control money and influence voters — believe Mr. Cruz would severely damage the party’s chances of winning in 2016 and will fight against his candidacy if he becomes a serious threat.

And he probably won’t ever become such a threat anyway. In early polls, Mr. Cruz trails other likely candidates by a wide margin. The prediction markets tracked by PredictWise give Mr. Cruz a 1.9 percent chance — even less, at last check, than Rick Perry’s odds — of being the nominee. Those markets have a strong historical record, with the notable exception that they often exaggerate the chances of long shots.

Of course, the United States is a democracy, and no election is decided until the voters have had their say. Given that simple fact, it’s eminently sensible — and important — for the national media to cover Mr. Cruz’s announcement and forthcoming campaign in a serious fashion.

But our role here at The Upshot is a little different from the rest of the media’s. It’s our job to tell you that Mr. Cruz’s candidacy is in all likelihood a sideshow that, at most, has the potential to influence the standing of stronger candidates. If the Republican campaign continues on its current course, the nominee will probably be Jeb Bush, Scott Walker or, though he has ground to make up, Marco Rubio. And if the campaign takes an unexpected turn, Mr. Cruz still is highly unlikely to be the beneficiary.

“The most interesting question about Mr. Cruz’s candidacy,” Nate Cohn wrote this week, “is whether he has a very small chance to win or no chance at all.”

One thing to remember about the democratic process is that it does not exist solely on Election Day. It also exists in the decisions that thousands of Republican Party voters, volunteers, operatives, donors and elected officials make in the months leading up to the primaries and caucuses. Their preferences profoundly shape the race. They are the reason, for instance, that Mitt Romney abandoned the idea of running for president again, despite an evident wish to do so. He understood that he did not have enough support to make a serious run for the nomination.

(On the Democratic side, a similar version of those decisions is preventing most credible candidates — Elizabeth Warren, Deval Patrick, John Kerry, Joe Biden — from starting a campaign. They understand Hillary Clinton’s support is too strong.)

Mr. Cruz, however, is willing to undertake a campaign even if he has little chance of winning. He has other reasons to run, such as trying to push the other Republican candidates to the right and to establish himself as the national spokesman for hard-core conservatism.

Those are legitimate reasons for running. Indeed, if you share Mr. Cruz’s worldview, you might even say he has a duty to run. I don’t disagree. I would add only that it’s our duty to tell you he isn’t going to win.

UPDATED, March 27, 2015: Several more senators have announced their intention to retire since this article was published, including Barbara Mikulski, a Maryland Democrat; Daniel Coats, an Indiana Republican; and Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, confirming the trend we identified.

If you’re a United States senator thinking about retiring before the November 2016 elections, the clock is ticking.

Since 1991, more than 80 percent of senators who have announced their retirements already did so by January of their election years. From 1920 through 1990, just 46 percent of retiring senators did the same, according to a new paper by David Karol, a professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland.

Barbara Boxer, the California Democrat, announced on Jan. 8 that she would not be seeking re-election, giving candidates seeking to succeed her nearly two years to mount their campaigns.

Why are politicians bowing out so much earlier? Would it surprise you if I told you it was related to money? The price of discouraging challengers and deterring speculation is near-constant fund-raising. Lawmakers elected last November immediately needed to begin raising money, even though the next election is six years off. A Senate candidate in a competitive race needs to raise more than $10 million. Increasingly, Mr. Karol argues, senators considering retirement are reluctant to keep up that pace.

Parties also have an interest in encouraging potential retirees to announce sooner, so that their successors can begin their fund-raising efforts.

Senators have faced this state of permanent campaign for at least 25 years. But Mr. Karol marks the 1971 passage of the Federal Election Campaign Act as a significant demarcation line: His analysis of 205 retirement announcements since 1916 showed that “senators retiring in the era when F.E.C.A. is in force make significantly earlier retirement announcements.”

The law required more frequent and detailed disclosure of fund-raising activity and was amended in 1974 to set limits on contributions by individuals, political action committees and parties. Instead of being able to raise large amounts of money from a small group of donors, candidates had to seek out many more contributors, increasing the time they spent raising money.

Mr. Karol suggests that Congress consider this pattern when drafting campaign finance legislation. “The severing of the electoral connection for senators two years before their term ends and the furthering of the ‘permanent campaign’ were no doubt far from the intentions of the architects of F.E.C.A., but they were a result of that reform,” he wrote.

Other than Marco Rubio, the Florida senator considering a run for the White House, there are only a few potential candidates for retirement in the Senate in the current election cycle. Partly that’s because both parties have little desire to expand the field beyond what is expected to be a very competitive set of races next year. Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican, is 81 years old but is preparing to seek a seventh term. Barbara Mikulski, a Maryland Democrat, is 78 but is also running for re-election, in a heavily Democratic state. John McCain, the Arizona Republican, is also 78 and is running again despite a potential primary challenge.

One other result of the early retirement announcements is that senators who are not seeking re-election spend increasingly greater shares of their final years as lame ducks. Previous research has shown that retiring lawmakers spend less time back home and miss more votes. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat who retired last year, missed 12 percent of Senate votes in his final two years, a higher than normal amount for him.

This year’s N.C.A.A. basketball upsets have ruined many brackets in traditional contests, but readers playing our risk-adjusted bracket game may see the surprises in a more positive light: as well-earned payouts to smart gambles.

The chart shows the results for the highest-scoring brackets among all readers. Each leader’s picks are in order of the most valuable to the least — upsets are on the left, and expected outcomes (like Kentucky victories) on the right. What the leaders have in common is that they’ve picked each of the tournament’s three biggest upsets, with rewards proportional to the risk.

The current leader, Bob Carniaux of North Kingstown, R.I., (whose username is perrfc0), earned as many combined points for three picks — U.A.B.’s win over Iowa State; the victory that sent North Carolina State to the Round of 16; and the victory that sent U.C.L.A. to the Round of 16 — as for picking 26 expected victories elsewhere in the bracket. He missed plenty of calls — Mr. Carniaux admits he “blew the West” — but his upset picks were right on: Mr. Carniaux correctly picked nine of the ten largest upsets thus far in the tournament. In our bracket, that’s more important.

For example, the U.A.B. upset was worth as many points as a Kentucky berth in the Final Four. (A full list of potential points for every possible pick is on our main bracket page.)

Whether their picks represent luck or genius, these readers represent the very top of the distribution of scores in our bracket contest.

Here’s the good news for everyone else: It’s still early. Most later games will matter much more than anything that has happened so far, particularly for anyone who has a lower-seeded team going deep. As a reminder, the more unusual your correct picks, the more points you receive, with later rounds also worth more than earlier ones.

If Wichita State makes the Final Four, for example, that will be worth 474 points, much more than the 129 points that Mr. Carniaux currently has. In short, most of the points in our bracket contest have yet to be scored.

For some context, we’re showing the points the leaders could still get if all their picks are right.

Of course, it’s likely that none of these brackets will reach their maximum potential, as doing so would require picking every remaining game correctly. The winning score will be determined to a great extent by whether Kentucky wins. If the Wildcats are the champion, the winner of our contest will receive just 79 points for that pick. On the other end of the spectrum, a championship by Gonzaga, Notre Dame or North Carolina would be worth more than 1,000 points.

As the next rounds are played this week, we’ll update as the leaders change.

The Villages, Fla., an hour northwest of Orlando, may be the only retirement community that is also the center of its own census-designated statistical area. It also holds another distinction: In 2014, its population rose more quickly than that of any other census area in the United States, climbing 5.4 percent, compared with 0.7 percent for the nation as a whole.

As it turns out, the rapid population growth in the Villages and other high-ranked places in the latest detailed population data issued by the census on Thursday tells a simple, powerful story about where the American population is heading.

Where is the population growing fastest? Places that are warm, places that have ample affordable housing and places that are popular retirement destinations. It is an old story. But during the housing bust, local real estate conditions varied so much that this basic pattern broke down, as people responded to collapsing home prices above all. In 2014, the old pattern reasserted itself.

Besides the Villages, the top places for population gains last year included the metro areas of Myrtle Beach, S.C.; Austin, Tex.; and Fort Myers, Fla. Some of the metro areas with the lowest numbers — in these cases outright contraction of population — included Elmira, N.Y.; Danville, Ill.; and Johnstown, Pa.

In other words, old, established Northeastern and Midwestern cities lost population or barely held even, while Sun Belt places with affordable housing added people, which has been a dominant story in United States demographic change for decades now.

Consider this: If you know how quickly a place added population from 1980 to 2000, you can predict with pretty good confidence how quickly its population grew in 2014. The correlation between those two numbers was a whopping 0.82 (if they correlated perfectly, that number would be 1), according to calculations by Jed Kolko, the chief economist of Trulia.

“What’s striking is how high that correlation is despite all of the effects of the housing market and migration that the housing bubble and bust had,” Mr. Kolko said.

By contrast, in 2009, when the housing bust was underway, the correlation was only 0.56. Knowing a region’s population trend at the end of the 20th century told you something about how it was doing in 2009, just not much compared with 2014, when more of the effects of the housing bust had worked their way through.

What is interesting about seeing the pre-housing crisis trend reassert itself is that it seems to be rooted in a broad shift in how Americans want to live. A close look at the data shows that a warm climate and affordability indeed seem to be the common threads in most of the places growing quickly, particularly because of migration within the United States.

Last year, for example, places where the average January high temperature was over 60 degrees added population at more than six times the rate of places where the average January high was below 35 degrees.

The relationship between home prices and domestic migration exists but is less strong, according to Mr. Kolko’s analysis, with a negative .25 correlation between a metro area’s median home price per square foot and its population change as a result of people moving within the United States. In other words, places that are more expensive have weaker population growth, though with quite a few places that break the trend.

In effect, he found, two big trends support this basic idea of cheaper housing leading to more population, while one worked against it.

Americans really are moving out of some of the most expensive cities for cheaper digs. Think of retirees cashing out in New York for something more affordable in Florida, or families in the industrial Midwest who see good job opportunities and plenty of affordable housing in Texas.

But there are also plenty of places where the local economy has been so weak for so long that there is a combination of inexpensive housing and population outflow, like some of those cities where population fell in 2014.

In other words, it matters a great deal why a place has inexpensive housing. If, like the major cities of Texas, you have affordable housing because building laws allow developers to respond to higher demand by building more, then inexpensive housing is a draw. If, on the other hand, housing is inexpensive because there are so few job opportunities, then cheap housing will tend to coincide with population outflows.

“High home prices are sufficient to push many people out, but affordable housing by itself doesn’t necessarily pull people in,” Mr. Kolko said.

Add this all up, and what do the latest census population numbers tell us?

These longstanding, pre-crisis patterns for how Americans migrate exist for a reason: People want a combination of good weather, affordable housing and good job opportunities. And if a place combines those factors, people will come.

It is difficult to imagine, at least in the current political climate, that the federal government will require paid sick leave for workers, let alone vacation time.

The White House announced Wednesday that senior officials, including the labor secretary, would begin a monthlong roadshow around the country to promote paid leave. And in his State of the Union address, President Obama urged Congress to pass a bill giving workers seven days of paid sick leave. But any federal requirement would need the support of Congress, a tough obstacle.

Yet there is another, emerging model: companies forcing other companies to adopt these policies. On Thursday morning, Microsoft announced that it would require many of its 2,000 contractors and vendors to provide their employees who perform work for Microsoft with 15 paid days off for sick days and vacation time.

In some ways, it’s a uniquely American solution. In the absence of a federal policy, the biggest and wealthiest companies are performing the role of setting workplace policy for other businesses.

As the economy has become more dependent on contract workers, workers’ rights advocates have voiced concern about their working conditions, especially for low-skilled jobs.

The situation is particularly acute in the tech industry, where average full-time employees earn more than $115,000 a year, along with generous benefits like child care, gourmet cafeterias and luxury shuttle rides to work. Many of the contracted service workers — who take care of the children, cook the food or drive the shuttles — earn near poverty-level wages and often do not receive basic benefits like sick leave.

In Santa Clara County, in the heart of Silicon Valley, the median hourly wage for software developers is $64 an hour, and from $11 to $14 for groundskeepers, janitors and security guards, according to Working Partnerships U.S.A., a local labor policy advocacy group. Eighty-eight percent of computer jobs provide paid sick days, compared with 41 percent of building and grounds-cleaning jobs. Three to 4 percent of tech employees are black or Latino, and about 75 percent of janitorial and maintenance workers are.

After pressure from contract workers and labor groups, other tech companies have also made changes. Apple and Google hired security guards as full-time employees instead of contractors, for instance, and Facebook agreed to a new contract with substantial raises after its shuttle drivers unionized.

Bradford L. Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, said the company was in part responding to complaints from contract employees who worked alongside full-time employees but did not have the same benefits.

More broadly, he said, Microsoft decided it was necessary given the company’s dependence on contractors. “The research shows that employees who do get these kinds of benefits are far likelier to be happier, have higher morale and are far more likely to be productive,” he said.

“If people are sick,” he added, “it’s not necessarily good to have them go to work because they can infect their colleagues.”

The United States is the only advanced economy that does not require paid sick leave, and 43 million workers do not have it, the president said in his address.

In the absence of federal action on workplace issues including minimum wage, some companies like Aetna and Starbucks have made changes themselves. Three states (California, Connecticut and Massachusetts) and a smattering of cities have passed paid sick leave policies.

But an approach like Microsoft’s is much more unusual.

Derecka Mehrens, executive director of Working Partnerships U.S.A., said it was the responsibility of the bigger companies that employ the contractors to raise the standards.

“When you follow the money, the money comes from the tech companies, so ultimately they could raise the floor for our contract work force,” she said.

Ruth Milkman, a sociologist of labor at the City University of New York Graduate Center, said she was less optimistic that it would become common for big, wealthy companies to play this role.

“It’s a moral model, but I don’t think there’s a high probability it’s going to become universal through business initiatives,” she said. “The public wants this. The resistance is all from employers. The only way is through public policy.”

Microsoft’s policy will require contractors that employ 50 or more people to provide workers with either 10 paid vacation days and five paid sick days or 15 days of unrestricted paid time off. Only the employees who work with Microsoft will be required to get the leave, if they have worked at the supplier for more than nine months. Mr. Smith said Microsoft expected to pay more for contractors’ services to cover the added costs. (Microsoft’s own employees get 10 sick days and 15 to 25 vacation days, depending on their years at the company.)

Mr. Smith said the company did not know how many contract employees did not already have paid sick leave.

The contractors at Microsoft and many big companies include highly paid engineers, marketers and lawyers as well as lower-paid security guards, cooks and janitors. Professional, educated workers are much more likely to have paid sick leave and other benefits than working-class ones.

“As you get to the lower end of the wage spectrum, it starts to become the exception rather than the norm,” Mr. Smith said.

For their part, lawmakers rarely discuss mandatory paid vacation time. But they are trying again on federal paid sick leave. Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, and Representative Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut, last month reintroduced the Healthy Families Act, which would give employees seven days of paid sick leave a year.

It was first introduced in 2004, and has never made it to the floor.