- Nate Silver is famous for his election predictions.
- Over the last year, he predicted Democrats would lose if Joe Biden was at the top of the ticket.
- Now that Biden is out, he sees the race as a toss-up, with Kamala Harris having a slight edge.
Nate Silver may be the best-known oddsmaker in the world: He first rose to fame for correctly predicting almost all of the 2008 election and repeating the feat again in 2012. And when Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election, after Silver gave her a 71% chance of winning, he became the subject of much (misplaced) scorn.
Now Silver has a new book — On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything — which focuses on people like himself, who make a living by calculating odds and placing bets. That includes professional gamblers, as well as entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and crypto speculators. (Silver, by the way, is a big gambler, too: He’s a serious poker player, and also spent $1.8 million over a year betting on NBA games, which netted him a grand profit of $5,242.)
Silver wants his book to teach you about risk-taking and how it applies to the likes of both Sam Bankman-Fried and Sam Altman — and why he thinks people in fields like government, academia, and media are uncomfortable with risk.
But the rest of the world wants to know who Silver thinks is going to win the 2024 election. He scratches that itch by running a Substack that offers detailed models to subscribers and more general updates to freeloaders.
We talked about all of that in a recent conversation. But I’m playing the odds here, too, by focusing these edited excerpts on his election thoughts. Plus a look back, and forward, on his career.
I know you don’t want to be known as “the political forecast guy” but I do want to know how you see the election. Your most recent projection has a Trump-Harris toss-up, though Kamala Harris seems to have momentum. You’ve also written that normally you’d expect her recent surge to stall, but given how close we are to the election, that might not happen. How are you thinking about it right now?
If it were November [Silver’s election model] would be really aggressive. You’d say Harris is moving up, and there’s not enough time for reversal.
Since it’s just August, it’s more cautious, because we’ve already seen big momentum swings.
I think it’s reasonably safe to assume that the next several weeks will look good for her in the polls. She’s having her convention, and Harris and Tim Walz are relative unknowns, so it might be a little bit more exciting than usual.
More than half of older voters, known as Baby Boomers, hold an unfavorable opinion of Ohio Senator JD Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee, according to a poll.
A Big Village survey of 1,001 adults shows that 40.5 percent said they have an unfavorable view of Donald Trump’s running mate while 37.7 percent hold a favorable view of him, giving the vice presidential hopeful a net rating of minus 2.8 percent.
When broken down further, the survey shows that respondents aged 59-77 are the demographic which have the worst opinion [52.2 percent unfavorable] of Vance, including 46.3 percent who hold a “very unfavorable” view of him. In comparison, 40.5 percent of Boomers hold a favorable view of Vance, giving him a total net favorable rating of minus 11.7 percent in the key voting demographic.
