- 18 Dec, 2023

- 12 Dec, 2023

- 7 Dec, 2023

- 30 Nov, 2023

18 Dec, 2023

- Nikki Haley could be the new John McCain

Nikki Haley could be the new John McCain

Nate Silver  18 Dec, 2023

I’ve always thought that American presidential primaries are more interesting than general elections. Rather than being one-and-done affairs, they’re held sequentially, so results from one state can shift the momentum in subsequent ones. And because primaries are, by definition, held among just one party’s voters, they tend to be highly dynamic affairs. Instead of the 10 to 15 percent of the country that constitute swing voters in general elections, the majority of primary voters usually have multiple choices they like and would at least consider voting for — so voter preferences can shift quickly.

So primaries are almost always exciting. Except, I’m afraid to say, this year’s primaries.

Sorry, but there’s little that’s changed since September, when I wrote that Joe Biden and Donald Trump were the highly likely nominees. That’s not exactly an unconventional take, I know, although I would note that Trump has “only” an 83 percent chance of being the Republican nominee at prediction markets, and Biden has only about a 72 percent chance. Both those figures seem low. Maybe Joe Biden should step aside — I’ve written about that a lot. But that’s not a prediction of what he will do — he’s running again, and nobody more prominent than Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips is challenging him.

Meanwhile, the national Republican race isn’t remotely competitive, and it hasn’t really been since this spring since Ron DeSantis began to flop. Trump leads his nearest rivals nationally, DeSantis and Nikki Haley, by around 50 points (!), and has more than 60 percent of Republican voters listing him as their first choice:

Seriously, what more is there for us to analyze here? Yes, primaries are unpredictable and the polls can change in a hurry. But 50-point (!) leads are hard to lose. Usually if there’s movement against a heavy frontrunner, we’ll have seen more signs of it by now. By December 2015, for instance, Bernie Sanders had closed to within 20 points of Hillary Clinton nationally and within 10 to 15 points in Iowa.1

You can find better parallels in the 2000 nomination campaigns. In December 1999, Al Gore led Bill Bradley by around 20 points nationally, but the center held for Gore in Iowa and New Hampshire and he wound up winning all 50 states.

Meanwhile, these numbers from the 2000 GOP nomination race look familiar:

George W. Bush’s lead over his Republican rivals in 2000 was pretty Trump-like, and anti-Trump Republicans can take at least a little bit of comfort from the fact that the race at least wound up being interesting, if not exactly competitive.

Bush won Iowa by 10 points that year, with Steve Forbes finishing in second. But then he lost to John McCain in New Hampshire — and McCain wound up winning seven states in total. This did have important downstream impacts, boosting McCain’s national profile, which culminated in him being the GOP nominee in 2008.

McCain’s New Hampshire win in 2000 bought him great headlines — but not the GOP nomination. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/2000/02/02/issue.html

Still, Bush was probably never in that much danger. McCain’s appeal was regional; five of his seven wins came in New England, another in his home state of Arizona, and the final one in Michigan, a state that has a long history of doing maverick-y things in presidential primaries.

You could argue that Nikki Haley is on a McCain-in-2000-like trajectory. Whereas Trump has actually been expanding his lead lately in Iowa, New Hampshire is closer, with a YouGov poll this weekend showing Haley at 29 percent to 44 percent for Trump. Other polls don’t show as tight of a race, but there haven’t actually been any other high-quality non-partisan polls in New Hampshire in the past several weeks.

It’s not impossible to imagine Haley winning New Hampshire. Chris Christie has 10 percent of the vote in the YouGov poll, and if he were to pledge his support to Haley, that might make things a little closer. And the polls are notoriously swingy in New Hampshire. The problem is, it’s not clear where Haley would go from there. As Bill Scher points out, around half the Republican primary voters in the YouGov poll support abortion rights, a consequence of the fact that i) New Hampshire Republicans an unusual bunch, more secular and libertarian than Republicans in the rest of the country and ii) independent voters in New Hampshire can vote in the presidential primary of their choosing and many of them will vote in the GOP race without Joe Biden on the Democratic ballot there.

Now, it isn’t quite fair to say New Hampshire’s track record at picking winners is poor. In fact, the winner of the Republican primary in New Hampshire has won the GOP nomination in all years but 1996 and 2000:

However, if you look more closely, you’ll see that New Hampshire marches somewhat to a different drummer. It was Pat Buchanan’s best state in 1992 and one of his best in 1996. Wonky candidates like John Huntsman and Lamar Alexander also did relatively well there without becoming major factors elsewhere.

And after his win in New Hampshire, McCain got a boost in the polls — but still only enough to bring him within about 20 or 25 points of Bush nationally. Indeed, I’m sure if you plugged this year’s numbers into the primary model I designed four years ago, which attempts to account for potential momentum from primary wins, Trump would be a prohibitive favorite to win the nomination — perhaps well into the 90 percent range — even if the model did assign Haley some shot of winning New Hampshire. As with McCain in 2000, a win there might make the race interesting, but probably not truly competitive.

And Trump is a far more entrenched figure than Bush ever was. Would a Haley win in the Granite State really cause Republican voters to rethink the race when they’ve had every opportunity to rethink Trump since 2015 and have never done so? Haley has a strong electability argument — with high-quality polls often showing her trouncing Biden — but it’s a hard case to make when Trump also leads Biden in most polls2.

That doesn’t mean there’s nothing at stake. A low chance doesn’t mean no chance. And even if she doesn’t win, a strong Haley showing could set her up as the frontrunner in 2028, or perhaps to be Trump’s VP nominee. Greater signs of resistance to Trump could also encourage third-party bids if such candidates figured they could form a coalition from both disaffected Republicans and disaffected Democrats. And u nlike DeSantis, Haley actually has been critical of Trump at times, so if you’re an anti-Trump Republican — or a Democrat or independent who thinks Trump is uniquely bad — some signs of resistance to Trump with the GOP electorate are probably better than none.

There are also some contingencies that are hard to model — like Trump’s legal risks, though it’s not clear how much those would hurt him in a primary. Plus, there are actuarial risks because of Trump’s advanced age. If you gave me a few bucks to wager on a long-shot, I’d bet them on Haley before DeSantis. But I’ve exhausted the amount of ass-covering that I’m willing to do. We’ve reached the point where the nominee being someone other than Trump would be perhaps the most surprising development in the history of the presidential primaries.

1

And of course, although Sanders gave Clinton a run for her money, he didn’t come that close to winning the nomination in the end.

2

And when many Republicans believe his false claims about the 2020 election being stolen.

12 Dec, 2023

- Why liberalism and leftism are increasingly at odds

Why liberalism and leftism are increasingly at odds

Nate Silver  12 Dec, 2023

Last week, the presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT testified before Congress. In a clip widely shared by the hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, the presidents backpedaled and offered a series of legalistic defenses when asked by Rep. Elise Stefanik about whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated their respective bullying and harassment policies.

You might not expect Stefanik, a once-moderate Republican who became a loyal Trump supporter, to garner much sympathy from liberals. But there was initially an intensively negative reaction to the presidents from nearly everyone save the left wing. That included people who I’d normally consider to be partisan Democrats who rarely criticize their own “team” — indeed, even the White House condemned the presidents. By the weekend, Liz Magill, the president of Penn, resigned under pressure from Ackman and the board.

Part of the problem for Magill, Harvard president Claudine Gay and MIT president Sally Kornbluth is that you could criticize them from several different directions: because they didn’t sufficiently condemn anti-Semitism, because they didn’t sufficiently defend free speech, and because the hearing was a PR disaster.1 That can lead to some weird coalitions — such as between people who want to see additional consideration for Jewish students within university speech codes and DEI frameworks, and others who want to see those frameworks dismantled.

Eventually, the politics retreated to more of a familiar Blue Team vs. Red Team standoff, because Ackman — not a sympathetic figure to begin with — overplayed his hand in too aggressively looking for scalps and because he was joined in this by conservatives like Stefanik and Chris Rufo that the Blue Team dislikes. So Gay and Kornbluth are safe for now, although Gay also faces credible plagiarism accusations.

Still, as much as I think too much attention is often paid to elite universities, I’m fascinated any time that new political fault lines are potentially exposed. A New York Times headline, for instance, expressed surprise that “many on the left” were sympathetic to Stefanik. But this isn’t properly described as a battle between left and right. Rather, it’s a three-way tug-of-war between the left, the right, and liberals.

The American political spectrum is not a straight line

The essay “Why I Am Not A Conservative” by the Nobel Prize winning economist F.A. Hayek is a must-read for anybody who wants to understand how liberalism was traditionally defined in the Enlightenment political tradition and how the term came to be used in a rather different way in the United States. To simplify: liberalism is a political philosophy that’s centered around individual rights, equality2, the rule of law, democracy, and free-market economics. There are many flavors of liberalism that emphasize these components in different ratios, running from more libertarian variants to others that see a much larger role for government.

In Europe, liberalism arose in opposition to a more conservative social hierarchy — usually, feudal monarchies backed by incredibly powerful churches. So if you were looking toward Europe, it made sense to think of liberalism as denoting change. As Hayek points out, however, the United States was founded on liberal, Enlightenment ideas. Appeals to classical liberalism are in some ways appeals to American tradition, therefore. Nonetheless, left-wing “American radicals and socialists” began calling themselves “liberal” because they wanted a departure from these traditions, Hayek wrote. Thus, in the United States, we wound up in a confusing position where “liberal” can either be a synonym for “left-wing” or can refer to European-style liberalism.

The mainstream media almost always uses the former definition (“liberal” just means left). However, in Hayek’s view — and mine — we should return to the original definition of liberalism. That’s because liberalism describes something distinctive. It doesn’t suffice to view liberalism as a halfway point between socialism and conservatism, Hayek thought, because in important ways it differs from both, namely in its elevation of individual rights and suspicion of central authority. Instead, he imagined a triangle that looked like this, with socialism and conservatism as two flanks and liberalism in the third corner:

In the years following the fall of the Soviet Union, the distinction between “socialism” and “liberalism” gradually came to seem less necessary. Instead, the connotation of “socialism” shifted from “something adjacent to Communism” to “countries like Sweden with high taxes, free health care and tasteful furniture”. If you’re a moderate liberal like me, then Sweden-style democratic socialism might be somewhat to the left of your ideal point. But it’s still well within the acceptable range of outcomes — particularly since Sweden is a canonically individualistic, culturally liberal, WEIRD country.

However, the purpose of this essay is to argue that socialism now has a worthy successor in the Hayekian triangle — what for purposes of this essay I’ll call Social Justice Leftism (SJL) but is more commonly referred to as “wokeism”.

Wokeism and classical liberalism are not very compatible

Proponents of SJL usually dislike variations on the term “woke”, but the problem is that they dislike almost every other term as well. And we need some term for this ideology, because it encompasses quite a few distinctive features that differentiate it both from liberalism and from traditional, socialist-inflected leftism. In particular, SJL is much less concerned with the material condition of the working class, or with class in general. Instead, it is concerned with identity — especially identity categories involving race, gender and sexuality, but sometimes also many others as part of a sort of intersectional kaleidoscope. The focus on identity isn’t the only distinctive feature of SJL, but it is at the core of it.

SJLs and liberals have some interests in common. Both are “culturally liberal” on questions like abortion and gay marriage. And both disdain Donald Trump and the modern, MAGA-fied version of the Republican Party. But I’d suggest we’ve reached a point where they disagree in at least as many ways as they agree. Here are a few dimensions of conflict:

1. SJL’s focus on group identity contrasts sharply with liberalism’s individualism.

2. SJL, like other critical theories that emerged from the Marxist tradition, tends to be totalizing. The whole idea of systemic racism, for instance, is that the entire system is rigged to oppress nonwhite people. Liberalism is less totalizing. This is in part because it is the entrenched status quo and so often is well-served by incremental changes. But it’s also because liberalism’s focus on democracy makes it intrinsically pluralistic.

3. SJL, with its academic roots, often makes appeals to authority and expertise as opposed to entrusting individuals to make their own decisions and take their own risks. This is a complicated axis of conflict because there are certainly technocratic strains of liberalism, whereas like Hayek I tend to see experts and central planners as error-prone and instead prefer more decentralized mechanisms (e.g. markets, votes, revealed preferences) for making decisions.

4. Finally, SJL has a radically more constrained view on free speech than liberalism, for which free speech is a sacred principle. The SJL intolerance for speech that could be harmful, hateful or which could spread “misinformation” has gained traction, however. It is the predominant view among college students and it is becoming more popular in certain corners of the media and even among many mainstream Democrats.

October 7 polarized liberals and the left away from one another

Since the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza, I’ve sometimes heard people express surprise that other people they knew (whether in their real lives or on social media) turned out to be more pro-Israel or pro-Palestine than they thought. To me, it’s almost been the opposite: the reactions have been highly predictable. Leftists tend to take the Palestinian side, and liberals the Israeli one; I think it was easier for me to see this because I’ve long been sensitive to the difference between leftists and liberals. Furthermore, these views tend to be correlated with other issues that divide liberals and leftists, such as free speech and even COVID restrictions.3

Why is this? In some sense maybe it shouldn’t be this way — there should be more heterodox pro-Israel leftists and heterodox pro-Palestine liberal centrists. From a liberal’s perspective, however, especially from a Jewish liberal’s perspective4 — which is to say my perspective — it’s easy to see why October 7 was so divisive.

SJL has an elaborate matrix of racial and identity categories, which Jewishness has always fit awkwardly into. Jewishness is both an ethnicity and a religion. Jews in the United States are quite successful despite the extremely high historic incidence of anti-Semitism, including of course the Holocaust. Meanwhile, there’s the distinction between the Jewish people and the Israeli state. And race and ethnicity within Israel are complicated; many Israeli Jews are Mizrahi, meaning they have ancestry from the Middle East rather than Europe. So Jewishness is an edge case that makes the entire identity politics architecture look kind of dubious, if we’re being honest.

So what was the reaction from SJLs after an anti-Semitic terrorist attack that killed thousands of Jews? Well, there certainly wasn’t much sympathy. Instead, we got Harvard students defending Hamas. We got people tearing down portraits of hostages, hanging Palestinian flags on menorahs and polls showing an alarming rise in Holocaust denial among young people.

Now, if liberal Jews didn’t get any SJL sympathy, maybe we’d at least get some reconsideration of illiberal SJL attitudes? You know, university presidents saying: Yeah, you’re right, actually the world is a complicated place and probably it was a bad idea to divide people into 16 intersectional categories of oppressed and oppressor, good and evil, and now that I think about it I can even see how this could contribute to anti-Semitic hatred — sorry about all that!

Nope, not that either. Instead, the compromise Jews were offered — begrudgingly at every turn — was that we might have our scores slightly raised in the DEI spreadsheet and that universities would crack down on pro-Palestinian speech. As a liberal Jew, I don’t want any of that, which just entrenches the SJL view of the world.

Now, for me, I’m good at decoupling, so the intense anger I feel at some of this doesn’t translate into having any particularly radical view about what should actually be done in the Middle East, or for that matter something like who I plan to vote for as president. But it’s all been incredibly polarizing. Many people are going to be radicalized. Certainly both Jewish people and Muslims will be, in ways that will make life tougher for Joe Biden.

But also, I suspect that an increasing number of liberals will a) more clearly recognize that they belong to a different political tribe than the SJLs and even b) will see SJLs as being just as bad as conservatives. And this will cut both ways; some SJLs will regard liberals as just as bad as conservatives — enough so that they might even be willing to deny a vote to Biden. All of this is quite bad for the progressive coalition between liberals and the left that’s won the popular vote for president four times in a row.

Now, maybe the progressive coalition will get lucky because MAGA-flavored conservatism remains such an unappealing alternative to people outside the Trumpiest 30 percent of the country. But both liberals and SJLs might find temptations: for instance, liberals will be tempted by MAGA pledges to dismantle DEI on campus, even if conservatives are also quite terrible about protecting academic freedom. Meanwhile, one of Hayek’s points was that socialists and conservatives shared a tolerance, if not even a reverence, for authoritarianism. SJL and MAGA could align there as well. SJL has already moved away from the liberal tradition of entrusting people to make their own decisions — think of the since-scuttled Disinformation Governance Board, or the draconian COVID restrictions on college campuses. If Trump wins next year, this tendency will get worse, and SJLs may more openly question whether democracy works at all.

The old left-right coalitions have long been under strain as America has moved away from materialist politics to the politics of cultural grievance. The clearest manifestation of this has been intense polarization based on educational attainment (the more years of schooling, the more likely you are to vote Democrat). If, however, higher educational institutions and the ideas associated with them continue to become more and more unpopular, I’m not sure what happens next.

In the short run, this may be excellent news for conservatives — most voters aren’t college graduates to begin with, and even college-educated liberals are increasingly coming to see SJL ideas as cringey and unappealing. In the long run, as anger over October 7 and the pandemic era fades, conservatives will have to offer a more appealing alternative, as the current version of the GOP espouses lots of highly unpopular ideas of its own and only the most polarizing, MAGA-iest Republicans can reliably win Republican primaries. The past 20 years of American politics have mostly been characterized by stability: the 2020 electoral map didn’t look much different than the 2000 one. If the progressive coalition is breaking up, the next 20 could be much more fluid.

1

Were Steafnik’s questions a little slippery? Sure, I guess. But this was a Congressional hearing on a subject of intense political sensitivity, not a Tuesday night book club. To have been surprised by these questions is like to complain that you went to a poker tournament and some of your opponents were bluffing.

2

Not equity.

3

The reasons for it are beyond the scope of this essay, but SJLs have been much more hawkish on COVID.

4

I am secular but have Jewish ancestry; my dad is Jewish although my mom is not.

7 Dec, 2023

- The incumbency advantage is disappearing. Maybe it's the algorithms' fault.

The incumbency advantage is disappearing. Maybe it's the algorithms' fault.

Nate Silver  7 Dec, 2023

Take a look at the following set of numbers.

-5.6

+8.5

+2.4

+3.7

-4.5

What might you say about these? Well, they look pretty darn random, fluctuating haphazardly around zero. Any guesses? Actually, if you looked at the title of this post, you probably figured it out. These numbers reflect the performance of the last five incumbent presidents to run for reelection: respectively, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Bush 41, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. This is what’s left of the vaunted “incumbency advantage”.

Of course, I’m cutting off the data at a convenient place. Here are the incumbent presidents who ran between 1948 and 1984:

+4.4 (Truman)

+15.4 (Eisenhower)

+22.6 (Johnson)

+23.2 (Nixon)

-2.1 (Ford)

-9.7 (Carter)

+18.2 (Reagan)

The variance is much higher — which reflects an era of lower partisanship and therefore more swing voters— but the average is substantially positive: +10.3. Here’s what you get if you plot incumbent reelection margins on a chart:

Again, you can cut the data in different ways; whenever we’re analyzing historical election results, we’re unavoidably doomed to jump to conclusions based on small sample sizes. But for what it’s worth, if you plot a linear trend on this data — as in the faint purple line — the incumbency advantage has dipped into negative territory by 2020, meaning you’d rather not be an incumbent than be one.

That’s crazy, right? Don’t incumbents normally have a big advantage? Well, actually I’m not so sure. Earlier this week, Matt Yglesias wrote of the “vast global tide against incumbents”:

I have some theories of my own, but relevant context for any theory is that Justin Trudeau’s polling in Canada is much worse. That could support a story about how political currents in the Anglophone world are tilting sharply against progressives, perhaps a backlash to wokeness and the welfare state. But a Conservative Party is in office in the UK, and their polling is, if anything, even worse than Trudeau’s. Back in October, New Zealand turned out their governing center-left party and the right scored a big win. But in the spring of 2022, Australian voters kicked out a conservative incumbent government and brought the center-left to power.

Arguably this trend is clearer in English-speaking countries, and arguably its clearer for left/liberal/progressive parties.1 But plenty of incumbents of all ideological orientations are unpopular and have been losing elections all around the world — so Joe Biden’s unpopularity doesn’t stand out by comparison. People are pissed off, and they’re taking it out on the people in charge.

What about races for Congress, you might ask? Aren’t the vast majority of incumbents still re-elected? Yes — but a big reason for that is that there are fewer and fewer competitive states and districts.2 There are also selection effects. Members of Congress — say, Joe Manchin — often quit when they think they’re going to lose, and the number of Congressional retirements has been high lately. Without getting too technical here, if you look carefully — such as by running a regression analysis to control for these different factors — you’ll find that the Congressional incumbency advantage has declined quite a bit too.

Blame the media — or the algorithms?

There’s a big debate in political nerd circles right now about why subjective consumer perceptions about the economy are so mediocre even though some of the objective data — especially with respect to the labor market — is strong. One camp says this can be explained by the objective data after all — in particular, lingering voter concerns about inflation, which has abated now but has been very high through Biden’s time in office overall. The other camp says it’s mostly “vibes”: the media spins mixed news in a negative direction. I lean more toward the “this is explicable through fundamentals” side of the argument — I even have a novel theory that algorithmic optimization is sucking more money out of consumers without increasing their utility, basically taking consumer surplus and converting it to corporate profits.

But there’s no doubt that media coverage is relentlessly negative, and I also don’t doubt that this plays a role in the unpopularity of Biden and other incumbents around the world. My beef with the vibes people is that i) the bad vibes are certainly not unique to the economy and ii) nor are they unique to Biden — in fact the mainstream media generally has a left-leaning bias, albeit in a complicated way.

Indeed, some of the people3 who are the captains of Team Vibes have been polemicists on other issues — they’d be among the first people to slam you if you suggested that the COVID data was taking a favorable turn, for instance, or if you didn’t preface every reference to Donald Trump by calling him a fascist or some other epitaph. What’s really going on is that Team Vibes attracts its share of political partisans, and now that we’re entering an election year, they want the media to be at least if not outright friendly to Biden but relentlessly hostile toward Trump.

However, I’m not sure that would actually produce the outcome (Biden’s reelection) Team Vibes desires. Even if the 30 most important editors and producers in the center-left media — at The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, etc. — got together and said we must ensure Biden wins by any means necessarily, our credibility be damned — the power isn’t necessarily in their hands:

- First, there’s a lot of competition. If certain media outlets were in the tank for a certain candidate — frankly, it’s not usually that hard to tell — some voters would lose trust in them and seek out alternatives.

- Second, a lot of decisions are made by algorithm or assisted by data. Even if the party line is “promote good news about the economy”, an editor might notice that an article on the rising cost of child care was performing fantastically well and promote it higher on the home page. In general, stories that promote negative emotionality tend to click better than those that give off positive vibes.

- Third, there are the effects of social media, which can take people to very dark places. Social media outlets — not The New York Times — is where most young people get their news.

- Fourth, there are the political campaigns and expressly partisan actors, and they know that polemicism sells, too. Donald Trump’s acceptance speeches at the 2016 and 2020 Republican Conventions were extremely dark, telling Americans of a country that was being overrun by and crime, immigration and ruined by corrupt elites. But Biden’s messaging in 2020 was also highly polemical, speaking of four historic crises (COVID, the economy, racism and climate change) at once.

Meanwhile, all of this might get worse because of artificial intelligence which can microtarget and misinform voters — this is something the now-restored CEO of OpenAI CEO, has been worried about. Personally, I don’t know that I see this as a step-change so much as the continuation of a trend: algorithms are constantly getting smarter and more efficient. Because negative sentiment tends to motivate people to vote and motivate them to click on news articles, more efficiency means more negative sentiment — and that has to be bad news for incumbents.

DALL*E’s imagination of digital yellow journalism

Indeed, if you go back to that chart of how incumbent presidents performed, the incumbency advantage tracks a change in the composition of the media landscape. The period from the end of Wold War II through the early 1990s is generally considered (very much for better or worse) the heyday of “objective” nonpartisan American journalism, before the widespread adaptation of cable news, talk radio or the Internet. There wasn’t much competition, and profit margins were higher, so there wasn’t as much need to optimize around every story (and publishers didn’t have the data to do it anyway). Back then, if the 30 most important editors and producers got together to push a certain party line, perhaps they would have been effective at doing it. News was more curated, more driven by editorial decisions. But that isn’t true of the modern era — which is more ruled by revealed consumer preferences. Nor really is it true of the period that preceded it (incumbent margins tended to be low during the yellow journalism era).

This isn’t to take responsibility entirely out of individual journalists’ hands. Newsrooms tend to be staffed by people who are young, college-educated and liberal, characteristics that are associated with negative emotionality — a polite way to say neuroticism. But even if they mistake pessimism for wisdom, they’re right about one thing: negativity does tend to click well.

1

Neither of which, I should note, helps Joe Biden as the head of a progressive party in an English-speaking country.

2

If, for instance, 10 incumbents lose out of 60 competitive districts, that’s different than when 10 incumbents lose out of 120 such districts, even though the overall number of incumbents turned out of office is the same.

3

Illway Ancilstay

30 Nov, 2023

- SBSQ #3: Forget the polls — has Joe Biden been a good president?

SBSQ #3: Forget the polls — has Joe Biden been a good president?

Nate Silver  30 Nov, 2023

Welcome to the November edition of Silver Bulletin Subscriber Questions! Quick reminder of the rules: this is an opportunity for paid Silver Bulletin subscribers to ask me questions about pretty much anything. In the comments, you should feel welcome to riff on this month’s answers or to ask questions for the December edition. To upgrade to a paid subscription, you can use the button below.

We have some fun questions in this month’s edition of SBSQ:

- What does Nate think of Joe Biden’s performance as president?

- What are your 7 favorite American cities?

- Should you bet on another large popular vote – Electoral College split?

- Do you buy that algorithms are ruining sports and everything else?

- What is your favorite way to study poker?

What does Nate think of Joe Biden’s performance as president?

Theo M. asks:

You've been slowly shifting to team "mystery Democrat" in your words. I'm curious about your view of Biden generally in line with your political philosophy. Were you rooting for Biden to win the Democratic primary in 2020 and how do you view his presidency?

So let me do some throat-clearing first.

- It’s extremely important to my work to be able to decouple my personal political preferences from my forecast of how things might turn out. I don’t want to be one of those people who is tacitly advertising their political views by way of conducting ostensibly neutral electoral analysis.

- ^^^ I also acknowledge this is extremely hard to avoid sometimes.

- I’m not sure it should be particularly important to you what I think of Joe Biden’s presidency. In terms of discussing my political preferences, I prefer to work in broad strokes – i.e. outlining the general principles I abide by – rather than advocating for or critiquing particular politicians.

With all that said, if a pollster called me and asked whether I approve of Joe Biden’s performance as president, I’d say “approve”. He’s passed a lot of bills in his first two years in office that I’d probably vote for, such as a climate bill, an infrastructure bill, the Electoral Count Reform Act, a same-sex marriage bill and a gun control bill. Several of these are notable bipartisan accomplishments given, for instance, the longstanding GOP opposition to gun control.

Meanwhile, on some issues where I’ve publicly broken with the left, I think the White House has actually been reasonable. They’ve taken the possibility of a COVID lab leak quite seriously, for instance. I’m not going to get too much into the Israel-Palestine stuff but personally I think Biden probably deserves more credit than he’s getting for his diplomatic work.

Now, a very, very big question is how much blame Biden and his progressive brand of economics bears for inflation. But voters weigh inflation so heavily that I’m not sure that should let that dominate my personal assessment of Biden.

I do think Biden’s age is an extremely salient issue for his second term — I’d really, really rather not have an 82-year-old president. Apparently unlike most Americans, though, I also think that Trump is way too old.

So all of this is just to say: I think I am doing a good job of decoupling here, of separating my personal preferences from my electoral analysis. My personal political preferences haven’t changed that much, or to the extent they have, it’s not in a way that would suddenly make me prefer Gavin Newsom to Biden from a policy and governance standpoint. To the extent I’d vote for someone other than Biden in the primary, it would be less about policy and more about age and/or electability.

What are your 7 favorite American cities?

HR Huber-Rodriguez asks:

Five favorite metro areas in the US outside of New York and Las Vegas (where I know you spend a lot of time)? (To hang out for a while, visit, maybe try living in in the short run, attend a conference, etc. Maybe long term/setting down roots if you you feel like you could comment in an intelligent way but I understand this is more difficult.).

I’m going to rely pretty heavily on revealed preferences here – places I go a lot, or maybe I don’t go to that often but when I do go, I feel like “gee, I ought to spend more time here”. There are cities like Houston and Denver that I have a favorable impression of, but just haven’t spent enough time in to put on the list. Really, I see redeeming qualities in most of the places I visit. But here are a top five – or really a top seven because as you correctly deduced, New York and Las Vegas would definitely rank toward the top.

- Chicago. I moved to Chicago college in 1996 and stayed until 2009. A truly great American city. Great food, great sports town, good music scene, the lakeshore is beautiful, the architecture is great, the” L” is a great way to get around, people are unpretentious and know how to have a good time, and it’s generally quite affordable. Negatives: It’s cold as fuck in the winter. It’s not a city that’s on the cutting edge of new trends in art and fashion, if you care about that. Like Matt Ygelsias, I’m not sure how well Chicago will fare with work-from-home. The violent crime rate is indeed quite high relative to other great American cities. And it’s fairly segregated. But I’ll always love Chicago.

- Los Angeles. You’ve got the beach, you’ve got the mountains, you’ve got great weather for much of the year, great art, and food that rivals New York for being the best in the country and the world. I really love LA’s architecture and how its aging gracefully, both from its Art Deco period and some of its vintage looks from the 1950s and 1960s. So what’s not to like? Well, the traffic, and the fact that you often have to plan nearly your entire day around getting from place to place. And from friends who have moved there, LA doesn’t seem to have the sort of intellectual life that you’ll get in New York. And California has a cluster of governance issues in general. But c’mon, LA is iconic.

- Miami. Sorry, no apologies. Because with Miami, there are so many obvious negatives. The topology of Miami and Miami Beach makes it very hard to get around, to the point that it can be quite LA-like in terms of needing to plan your day around traffic. I’m very sensitive to humidity, so the weather is hard to bear for much of the year. It’s kind of a shitshow. There are good restaurants, but not enough of them, and there are some nice hotels, but they’ve very expensive. And yet I love it! I love the YOLO-ness, I love that Miami is a gateway to Latin America, it’s the city with the highest share of immigrants in the country, I’m intrigued by its purple-ish politics, I love the beach, it’s got a good art scene, and the Seminole Hard Rock (granted, a ways away from downtown Miami) is probably the best casino East of the Mississippi.

- Philadelphia. OK, maybe I’m being a little hipsterish with this pick. I basically had two candidates for the last three slots: Philadelphia, Kansas City and Austin. Austin loses the tiebreaker, because while I mostly think it’s great (outside of when it gets overrun during SxSW) it’s also a very trendy pick. Philadelphia is anything but trendy. But when I go there, I’m always surprised that it doesn’t loom larger in the American consciousness. It reminds me a lot of Chicago: down-to-earth, good food, good sports, very affordable especially for the East Coast. Plus lots of American history and lots of highly distinctive architecture. If you ask me, we should have kept the capital there instead of moving it to DC.

- Kansas City. This is a slightly more sentimental pick; my partner’s family is from Kansas City so we go there a lot. But KC has really grown on me — I think of it as the perfect realization of the mid-sized Midwestern city that the St. Louises and Clevelands and Indianapolises of the world are all a little jealous of. Kansas City is known for its many fountains and parks. It has great BBQ – and good food in general. It’s affordable. The housing stock is very nice with lots of well-maintained homes. Kauffman Stadium and Arrowhead are cool. Even the airport has finally been upgraded, though I secretly liked the weird old one. Now, truth be told, if I had to live out the rest of my days in one city, I’d sooner do it in LA or somewhere that there’s a little more going on. But I think KC is a big overperformer relative to its peer group.

The Holy Trinity at Char Bar in Kansas City

Should you bet on another large popular vote – Electoral College split?

Michael asks:

Subscriber question: Betfair has the 'Winning Party' market around 50/50 for US Prez election but Dems favoured almost 80/20 to win the popular vote. With Trump seeming in decent shape vs Biden and his Electoral College edge potentially fading does that spread seem right to you? Is buying GOP at 20% to win PV a great bet?

All right, since we’re getting directly into gambling advice, we’re turning the paywall on at this point. Free subscribers, love ‘ya and see you soon.

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Table of Contents

Nate Silver: 18 Dec, 2023

18 Dec, 2023

Nikki Haley could be the new John McCain

12 Dec, 2023

Why liberalism and leftism are increasingly at odds

7 Dec, 2023

The incumbency advantage is disappearing. Maybe it's the algorithms' fault.

30 Nov, 2023

SBSQ #3: Forget the polls — has Joe Biden been a good president?