An Election Day Special With Nate Silver

内特·席尔瓦选举日特别访谈 内特·席尔瓦（Nate Silver）深入分析了中期选举局势。他指出，尽管唐纳德·特朗普37%的支持率以及高油价等大环境对民主党极为有利，但要夺取参议院控制权，民主党必须在深红州取得艰难的胜利。他认为，因民调机构极力避免重蹈以往预测失误的覆辙，现代民调正日益变成受数据辅助支撑的谨慎“主观判断”；同时，由于AI“数字孪生”容易产生人口学刻板印象且无法预测真实选民投票率，他对其可行性予以否定。此外，席尔瓦还评估了 Polymarket 等预测市场、巨额广告投放收益递减的现象，以及民主党在密歇根和堪萨斯等风向标州所面临的意识形态考验。 内特·席尔瓦将2026年中期选举形容为一场“进退维谷”的选战：民主党面临的极为有利的宏观环境，与其在深红州翻盘所需的严苛参议院选区版图形成了尖锐冲突。 (3:32) 唐纳德·特朗普总统的支持率约为37%（仅有19%表示强烈支持），追平了二战后历任总统进入中期选举周期时的历史最低纪录。 (10:00) Silver Bulletin 的预测模型（“Flipper”）测算民主党掌控参议院的概率在75%至80%的高位区间，而 Kalshi 和 Polymarket 等预测市场则徘徊在68%左右。 (12:35) 席尔瓦反对用 AI“数字孪生”替代实际调查受访者，认为大语言模型会将复杂的细分人口群体扁平化为合成的原型，且无法预测现实中的实际投票行为。 (23:45)

[20:00] Nate Silver: Election polls are made in an environment where pollsters are actively fearful of missing, particularly missing high on Democrats, right? [23:45] Nate Silver: Polling cannot be outsourced to AI agents, right? Because it's one of the few sources of ground truth that we have anymore [40:00] Nate Silver: The models keep missing low on Florida because you have a steady flow of red voters into the state. And we're using benchmarks based in the last election, but like Florida is a moving target for that. [3:32] Nate Silver: At this point it would be a really bad night for pollsters if Democrats don't win the Senate.

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She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. from past jobs, and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw, innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting and hiring practices, but according to recruiters, advisors, and those who've interviewed for jobs there, it's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company, and Musk invokes that dream regularly to remind workers why they're there. Prospective hires are told that the job will require including in job ads that candidates, quote, must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed. One major perk for all that hard work? Employees' access to equity, either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChachiPT. Get started at ChachiPT.com. Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Laws podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal. And I'm Tracy Allaway. Tracy, I often say I'm kind of I'm really glad. We're not political reporters. Oh, I know. I know. I'm glad that I wake up every morning and thank God that we didn't go down that fast. But here's the problem. I've said this many times. Here's the problem. And we've been writing about this. We didn't. We were in Chicago. We had that conversation with James Robinson and stuff like that. I sort of think politics, unfortunately, does matter. And actually, even if we wanted to say, like, no, look, I just covered markets. I just covered the economy. Unfortunately. I'm coming to the conclusion that not only do politics matter, they're probably going to keep mattering more and more. Everything is politics now. You can't get away from it. Yeah. And certainly this week. So we're recording this on October 29th. The episode is going to come out on November 3rd. It's Election Day special. That's right. It's a pretty big election day special. It's a pretty big week for politics. So we should talk to put it mildly. I know. I know. Everyone knows him. Founder of the Silver Bulletin newsletter, famous for FiveThirtyEight, modeling elections, knowing a lot about polling and data and all that stuff. Nate, thank you for joining our Election Day special. Of course. Thanks, Joe. Thanks, Tracy. Let's just talk about how unpopular is President Trump right now as of October 29th or Election Day and to what degree. I mean, midterm is historically pretty bad for the party and power, but just get a big picture. How historically unpopular is President Trump and what is the effects for various Republican candidates in competitive races. Yeah. So Trump's approval rating is at about 37%. By some measures, that's the worst approval rating for a president at a midterm since Harry Truman, I think, in 1946. I'm getting that right. And remember, we had a midterm in 2018 where Trump and Republicans lost 41 House seats when he was somewhat less unpopular and where gas didn't cost $430 a gallon or whatever it is. So look, I kind of call this conditions, like couldn't be better for Democrats, right? The historical trends in midterms, voter anxiety about the economy, the Iran war, Trump's a lame duck and 80 years old, they've done really well. And with turnout, they're doing well in early voting so far. They had a very good year in 2025 with New Jersey and Virginia. It's really very consistent indicators. I mean, they might have a couple of problems. Some of their candidates are seen as too far left, right? So that's kind of the rock. And the hard place is, yeah, they'll probably win the House. They'll probably pick up some governorships and state legislatures, but they do have to win in some really red states. Just how the math works to win the Senate. Right. States as red as Texas. Yeah. [5:00] Kansas, Alaska, South Carolina is in play, if you believe the polls. So it's kind of this big – this is why I like – I would say I'm a little bit – anxious, not just for the implications for the country, but because like, it's kind of become a tricky race for like, models and polls and forecasts, right? There's no, there's no gimme, you either have to lie and say it's a toss up. It's not, you can't, that's not an honest answer at this point, right? That's hedging. at this point it would be a really bad night for pollsters if Democrats don't win the Senate. Okay. Just to sort of test our priors a little bit, everyone's treating this as a referendum on Trump, which kind of like, makes me nervous when everyone's doing the same thing. But in your view, is that an accurate way to measure it? Like, do we have hardcore evidence that people are voting on Trump rather than voting on a local representative? I think the best evidence is that Trump is no longer featured on Republican podcasts. However, Trump himself is trying to make himself like the main character of this story when I don't think very many Republicans want that, right? Ironically, they had this Republican convention. Was it in Dallas just after Labor Day? And like, that's when Republican polls kind of went from bad to worse. I don't think that's the main cause or necessarily even the secondary cause. But yeah, I mean, the behavior you'd expect if people are being kind of game theory optimal is that Trump is taking a backseat and trying to let candidates distance themselves a little bit. And instead, we've seen the opposite, right? I mean, if Trump hadn't endorsed Ken Paxton in Texas, I'm not sure that James Tallarico would have a slight lead there. If Trump hadn't chosen to go to war with Iran, I tend to think the Senate would be a toss up and not lean D. So no, he's the central character. And it's also kind of like, it's kind of like the last time Trump is on the ballot, barring extra constitutional shenanigans. Who knows? Now... This gets to the question of like, could it be a bad night for pollsters? And there is this seems to this view has congealed in the general public that starting at least since 2016, pollsters always overestimate Democrats. Yeah, I think your view is that that's actually just factually incorrect. But why don't you tell us about what we know about polling error? state like Kansas or Nebraska, all three states are competitive this year, good chance you'll have a correlated error. Okay. So therefore, you cannot look at individual races as a Monte Carlo random goal. Yeah. But A, they're less correlated in midterms than in presidential years because you have different candidates on the ballot in every state. That's important. In 2022, we saw this kind of really big red wave in like New York, New Jersey, tri-state area. And we're focused really well on Florida. The rest of the map was relatively good for Democrats. John Fetterman won and people like that, given that Biden had like a 39% approval rating. You know, number two, we have had... systematic polling errors that underestimated Trump in 2016, 2020, 2024, a little bit more modest, but still direction the same, right? In every election in the Trump era where Trump is not on the ballot, you have not had that error. And in fact, in like New Jersey and Virginia last year, you had a massive underestimation of Democrats in governor's races. And so like, first of all, it could all be noise, right? If you like code up a, you know, have Claude or Like in the past 20 elections, it looks kind of like, you know, it's impossible to distinguish it. Right. But one story might be that, like, Trump has this kind of magical power to attract low turnout voters that also happen to be hard for pollsters to reach. Yeah. and where they get screened out as being unlikely voters, those voters don't seem to want to show up for like a Roger Marshall and Kansas or Ken Paxton in Texas, right? It seems very, you know, Trump got a lot of young men last year who flipped to 2024, who flipped to him. Young men don't usually turn out in terms of watching the NFL or whatever, right? And like, there's a consistent story where like, conveniently, this problem of like, these missing voters aren't an issue if they don't vote. This was actually going to be my next question. But like, what are you seeing in terms of early voter actually votes Democrat rather than just decides not to show up. As compared to general elections or presidential elections, turnout is relatively speaking, more important in midterms. Differential turnout is almost always a factor in some of these bigger waves. I'm not an early [10:00] voting expert, but there are people who are pretty good at it, right? It can be very ad hoc if you don't kind of set clear rules ahead of time. And they seem to be seeing good numbers for Democrats, better numbers in the polls. I don't know, because the polls are really good for Democrats, right? But it provides some more consensus evidence for it, particularly high turnout among black voters who may fear being disenfranchised, comparatively high turnout among unlikely voters, people who in the voter files have voted no more than one in the past four elections. Democrats are getting a lot of those, but they're getting more than Republicans, right? I think some polls are finding there's very little D to R crossover. If you're any type of Democrat at all, this is not a year to indulge in a moderate Republican, right? Maybe a little bit of the reverse. But like, I mean, things tell a consistent story. It's just kind of this existential thing about whether people believe the story or not. Why is Trump so unpopular? Like, is it just gas and diesel prices? Like, break down the drivers of his unpopularity. Trump is kind of well, people are bored of him and tired of him. Right. I think people are just like he's been president for, I guess, six years. Right But it feels like 10 years because he was still kind of the dominant figure of that kind of Biden interregnum You know he 80 years old But no look I think the basic story is that he has broken promises most prominently on cheaper gas and on no more stupid wars. We can talk about how much the Epstein stuff affects him, too. But yeah, one of the things about Trump's proofreading number is like, all that 37% approval, like only 19% of it is like strong approval. I think there are permission structures that have opened up for Republicans to kind of distance themselves from Trump and incentives. Right. You know, Trump has the endorsement will still matter after 2026. But like, you know, J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio, who are nominally leading candidates, have a problem that they kind of are when Bush was this unpopular in 2026 and it got worse, by the way, after the 06 midterm. You didn't have Dick Cheney trying to run for president, right? You had a rebellious Republican in John McCain who ultimately got nominated instead. And so, you know, when you're a lame duck, the bottom can drop out potentially. So at the moment when we're recording this, if you look at, I guess, the polling consensus and prediction markets, it seems like the House is pretty much a lock. Senate is a toss up at the moment. What the actual range of outcomes for a democratic win here Like what are the extremes that you could possibly see on both sides I would push back on the Senate being a toss up I think at Polly Market and Cal she Democrats are up to like 68 percent or something as when we're recording this. And in our model, they're at 70 high 70s now to win the Senate for the Senate. OK, well, there's this kind of both a blessing and a curse is to actually have to put out a forecast in the form of a probability, right? Because it'd be easy to say, oh, things are looking good for Democrats, but don't get your hopes up too much because polls can be wrong. And yeah, I guess it leans down, right? Like that's chickening out though. The thing is, it's like, we could all do that. This is, I guess, like part of what's interesting about modelers and what's interesting about prediction markets. We could all say, yeah, it looks like Democrats, like if they're going to provide value as the creator of a model. Right. You got to be able to say something beyond it looks like a good night for Democrats. But who knows? And look, in 2024, like our model literally was 50 50, like literally we ran 80,000 simulations and it took like the 71st thousand simulation for one candidate to go ahead. Right. So there are times when the correct modeling position is like oh people are too sure of themselves I not sure if this is that election right If you go and look at Republican sponsored polls or go look at where Republicans are spending their time and their resources and they're bracing for a landslide, right? They are having doing telehauls and the Louisiana Senate race and things like that, right? And seem concerned about South Carolina, let alone Texas, who people kind of knew would be a competitive race. But, you know, Democrats, I think, felt like they have been betrayed. Is there a Senate race in Louisiana this year? There is. I don't think there's been a single poll of it. But prediction markets say there's a 10 percent chance that Democrats will win that race. I think it's a little ridiculous. But like. But that's not nothing like that's the point is that's far from trivial. No, we've had to learn these details about these very red states like, oh, South Carolina is it was a Trump plus 18 state. That's what I'm a little bit more skeptical about. Right. But the the strictitudes between what differentiates Kansas from Nebraska and things like that. If the national environment is as polls say it is, Democrats are ahead by about nine points on the generic ballot, which are national polls, essentially, right? At nine points, Republicans, there's too much of a headwind for Republicans, right? You can predict exactly which winning tickets Democrats would draw, but the GOP has to be that spread, right? [15:00] just gets too difficult. And like, I think part of the problem with mental models versus actual models, right? People say, well, I can easily see this case where there's a bust again in the polls in the Midwest, right? And I can see this case where sure the polls are basically right and polls are a little cautious and Democrats have a sweep, right? And people kind of like weight those 50-50. But first of all, there are the messy... middle in between stories and like if you have a lead in the polls then you kind of muddle through half the time right it's like an nfl game where you have a field goal lead at halftime and then lots of penalties and turnovers right and you end up winning by a field goal right so it's ugly but democrats tend to win the ugly races and like there is more evidence including non-polling evidence consistent with the democrats have a big night story like if you just talked about the things you already talked about in the first 15 minutes about gas and trump approval ratings and stuff, right? You know, it's not a case where you have this clash, really, between indicators. What's next for virtual assets? I'm Jacob Greaves, host of Economy Scale, a series exploring growth in key global sectors. And in this episode, we're diving into the digital forces shaping finance. Sean McHugh from Dubai-based Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority has this to say. We're seeing a lot of institutional players come in, digital asset dedicated hedge funds, high frequency traders and that sort of thing, and folks who service institutional clients. key. Rhys Merrick of Ripple says a lot of regulators globally would like to keep the industry at arm's length. That's the opposite here. I think also what you'll find is that regulation and frameworks can come out, but some of them are maybe a slight iteration on some 80 year old policy and not actually in line with what the technology can do and offer. And again, that's very different in Dubai. Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts. 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I feel like we've been talking about this for many, many years now, but there's this persistent tension between all the consumer sentiment surveys where people report how they're feeling about the economy. Those have been very bad. for many years now versus the actual numbers in the economy on consumer spending and other things that look pretty good. Do you have a story you tell yourself as a forecaster, a story to explain that discrepancy? slightly hot take i think some of the consumer confidence polling is not very good you know the good thing about election i don't think that's a hot take by the way like we've been talking about it for a while the methodology are not good they're not doing best practices of polling we had an article that's a little bulletin by a guest author named joel bertheimer who joel's been on our podcast he's great yeah and clearly i think the university of michigan survey changed the composition to online in a way that just has like way too many democrats in the sample so like make about election pollsters, which is more or less false, we can talk about that more, is kind of true of these consumer sentiment surveys that like, for better or worse, election polls get a dose of reality every two years. Election polls are made in an environment where pollsters are actively fearful of missing, particularly missing high on Democrats, right? So that's why like, that's why people talk about like, what's the difference between like polls are at least. A poll is a data-informed opinion at this point right yeah there are because this is because you have to wait the pollster has to do so much modeling right is this what you're getting at that so like maris released a poll of maine last week and the top line number let me see i'm getting this right in my head said said troy jackson the democrat in maine is up nine points which would be a very good result for democrats the average our average had been like d plus three in that state right that's their Plus two. People self-correct for the democratic bias. Yeah, there's no way there. First of all, the math. Just I don't want to get too deep in the weeds, even though it's odd lots. Like the math doesn't there. The math doesn't make sense. Right. They decided what result they felt comfortable with and reverse engineered. You see, we just OK, we don't have to get into the math. But what you're saying is they had a poll that said Troy Jackson was up nine percent. But in our likely voter model, it's two percent. And what you're saying, what Nate Silver is saying is like. I don't know how you got from nine to two. No, in the governor's race, they went from 11 to zero. Like, the math literally doesn't add up. And, like, so it's like, okay, so this is your poll, and this is your opinion, is the way I see it. And, like, and we're aggregating opinions. And so, like, on the one hand, when you see a poll like that, I'm like, I have existential doubt about the accuracy of polling, for sure, right? On the other hand, if you have a model that's, like, a consensus thermometer that looks at the correlations and translates polls into probabilities, like, that's really what flipper my model. And like, so like, oh, actually, I kind of like that from a modeling standpoint, because it proves the kind of underlying hypothesis that like pollsters are rational actors. And therefore, although polls are imprecise instruments, there is a lot of incentive not to systematically miss. and creates a model, that can give you some sort of confidence that, Like confidence that the errors in the long run, if you have elections every two or four years, we'll never get approved. But confident that the errors are symmetric. Yeah, I get I get exactly what you're saying. So, OK, people don't pick up the phone like they used to. Yeah. You know, certainly they don't recognize it. And if someone calls me and asks for my political opinion, I'm. No way. So then there's this vision. Well, why don't we just create an AI replica of Tracy Halloway and an AI replica of Joe Weisenthal and AI replica of a high school educated oil worker in Texas and an AI replicated version of a HR professional who works for General Motors in the Detroit suburbs. And we just pull them and then we don't know. And they're always going to pick up the phone. What's wrong with this? This is the digital twin idea. Yeah, the digital twin. Why don't we just create a digital twin of all Americans? So the problem is like, and by the way, I think these companies are smart. I know some people that work for them, right? But like polling cannot be outsourced to AI agents, right? Because it's one of the few sources of ground truth that we have anymore, number one. And also the models are kind of... So if you... ask a poll to create like a synthetic, uh, Hispanic respondent. Yeah, right. 99% of their synthetic Hispanic respondents [25:00] love soccer. It's a bit like if you ask, like, Claude to pick a number from zero to ten, like always pick seven. Yeah, yeah. It's a bit like, I mean, this gets into the whole existential thing about how like large language models work and like they're kind of it's kind of the ideal type or something. But like, but no, we need original data, right? Models like Flipper or prediction markets can aggregate that data. But but, you know, because like voters aren't all that. predictable you know i don't even like the kind of slicing and dicing that you see oh the hispanic vote right well the hispanic vote is younger hispanics and older hispanics people who are relatively new to the country and people who have been here for a long time right cuban americans and puerto ricans and and mexican americans and dominicans and everything else and like those groups don't always agree with one another sure and people miss it like the hispanic vote is one of the most swingy demographics in in the united states and so like yeah it just it just a snake eating its tail a little bit. I feel like turnout in particular would be difficult for a digital twin to model. Like maybe you can come up with political preference based on demographics, but like predicting whether someone is actually going to leave the house and vote seems particularly difficult to me. But tell me if I'm wrong. Yeah, we did a little simulation in South Carolina, which is one of the more surprising races to be polling closely and, you know, and one more frankly, be a bit more surprised Democrats won. Right. But like, you know, what if black voters in South Carolina turned out at 2024 rates and white voters turned out at 2022 rates like that shifts the top lines by like 10 points. Right. It's a deliberately extreme example. And in South Carolina, the white vote is very conservative. But, you know, that's an example of like, you know, because you have had turnout. But if it's differential turnout, that would you need that for a state like South Carolina to flip. The Democrats at 14 percent in Mississippi on poly market. Yeah, that one's a little weird. These are funny states. These southern states are pretty funny. Yeah. Right. Because the top line votes are actually offered frequently fairly close. It's just that every white is a Republican and all the non whites are not Republicans. And so while it looks really close, it's just like purely demographics. No. So we have a concept in our model that we call elasticity, which is how sensitive is a state to changes in the national race. And that's based on voter level micro data where we see people clustered at the tails or more in the middle. And South Carolina, but especially like Louisiana, Mississippi have very low elasticity. So that's why. So we are lower than polymarket and Democrats in those states. Actually, since you mentioned demographics, Do you see that, I guess, backfiring on the Republicans at this point? So, yeah, a gerrymander where you wind up with fewer seats than you would have under the original maps is a dummymander is a term for it. This is an actual term. It's a term. We have terms for everything in politics. Only poker players have more terms in politics. In Florida, Ron DeSantis drew a map for kind of the presidential year baseline and presidential years. I expect Florida to remain a pretty red state, right? Florida goes from R plus 13 to R plus four or something, right? It wasn't designed for that. And if Democrats kind of run the table in Florida, then they could actually wind up with more seats than they would have under the old map, right? In Texas, Republicans hope to make a lot of their gains from, I guess, just maybe like the arrogant presumption that, oh, now Hispanics in South Texas are now our voters instead of being swingy. And so like that probably won't be a dummy mander, but could be a case where. The places they hope to maintain gains, you'll have Democratic incumbents holding on. Intuitively, if you're a mapmaker and your only goal is to maximize the number of seats that your party wins, you have to take some risks, right? Is this the key idea here? Correct. I don't even think they necessarily played it wrong, right? So, you know, again, the House is... not quite a sure thing. There is a 5% chance. The way that 5% comes up is that if there is a systematic polling error and the map winds up being a little bit less blue, then the gerrymanders become more effective again. It's probably not enough for Republicans, but there's this inflection point at which gerrymandering goes from not very helpful to helpful for Republicans. There's definitely some analogy here to the options market and convexity. But there's clear someone smart enough will be able to come up with some what what we're really what would we be talking about in the financial version of this conversation? Yeah. Is there a potential upset that you're particularly interested in at the moment or that you think people aren't paying enough attention to? I think governor's races don't get enough attention in general. According to our modeling, we could wind up with almost two thirds of the country being represented by a Democrat, but there are... [30:00] Lots of big gubernatorial races where, unlike in the Senate, in the Senate you have lots of these one or two point Democratic leads. In governorships, it's the opposite. Abbott is ahead in Texas, but only by... a couple of points. I don't think I'd been against Abbott given the odds that Flipper gives, but I think that governor race is really important, in part because Abbott is the most prolifically pro data center governor, I think in the country. And one of the big things I think, and even he's not that pro data center anymore. No, I, so I, let's say you have at least one democratic chamber of Congress, maybe, you know, even if Democrats only got to 50 Senate seats, you don't have the Senate, but like, you're going to have a lot of gridlock. I think the one policy area where you could see action before 28 is on AI, right? I mean, timelines are even a third as aggressive as the labs bank. Then they'll kind of be forced to take action. But like, I'll be looking for like, is there evidence that AI had a big effect in this race and that people were seeing this too pro AI got punished for it? Thank you. This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Masser. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume. So writes Bloomberg Businessweek's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. from past jobs, and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw, innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting and hiring practices, but according to recruiters, advisors, and those who've interviewed for jobs there, it's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company, and Musk invokes that dream regularly to remind workers why they're there. Prospective hires are told that the job will require including in job ads that candidates, quote, must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed. One major perk for all that hard work? Employees' access to equity, either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChachiPT. Get started at ChachiPT.com. you For big business, AI opened up a world of promise, but that world of promise turned into a world of pain. 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We were watching a University of Texas football game the other. [35:00] And there was this ad for the Abbott campaign. I don't know if it was the official Abbott campaign or one of these outside groups. And it said, Gina Hinojosa's income tax plan will cost your family thousands of dollars. And my son turns to me. He's like... dad we're not voting for her right like it's just oh no it's so funny and i was like i was like this is like you are exactly who this ad was targeted towards my seven-year-old you know it's like he's just like dad we're not gonna vote for her right this put this candidate that costs uh thousands of dollars no i was watching the world series and there were like three straight ads in the michael lawler the westchester county district right i'm like no even in new york you can't The view of, well, should campaigns invest more on like things like turnout and knocking on doors, et cetera, or should they just spend a bunch of money on ads? Do you have in your any of your research? Do you have views on some of these questions? I think with ads, you guys, I think like David Shores says, just just buy ads. I think you get pretty sharply diminishing returns with ads. I like David a lot. But everyone in the system has an incentive to say that advertising really works. I think it's better to buy ads to improve voter awareness and expand the map, potentially. But look, there's a famous story about Sam Beckman-Fried, talked about this in my book, where for some reason Sam Beckman-Fried wanted to back an effective altruist candidate in an Oregon House primary a couple of years ago, or not didn't give him right spent 10 million dollars or something without his permission on his behalf and that candidate who at one point was leading the polls wound up losing the election badly because i talked to him for my book and he's like well voters just got so much male and who is this odd crypto billionaire funding my campaign right it wind up backfiring a little bit this is the flaw in all of advertising right like you're just annoying me with your product placements and your ads and your intrusion into my life and it doesn't make me want to buy things from you that's why you need you know subscription businesses like terminals and yeah up having a very good night. What will we watch... Within that, to know what the future of the Democratic Party is, whether the future is going to be a more DSA inflected one, etc. You know, give us what we might learn about what works for successful Democratic Party politicians. For the internal policy of the Democratic Party, the most important race is probably Michigan, where Abdul El-Sayed beat the more moderate Haley Stevens in the primary. Not by much. Not by much. By much. That was not a great race for polls, by the way. race is called on election night right then that will be like a feather in progressives cap maybe people like me will say well he won by four and the baseline is nine so oh my gosh he underperformed his work very bad candidate i like i like this is your impression of yourself yeah it's made silver squared right you know on the other hand like if i kind of think of democrats have like a really really really good night and it's like well we could dominate all these moderate white guys kind of woke progressive, right? But he kind of has managed to brand himself differently. It might have helped him to have Jasmine Crockett in that primary. He got to define himself as the sensible middle ground. But you talk about the Hamilton race in Kansas and what that would... So Kansas, I have family in Overland Park, right? And for years it's been like, you know, Roger Marshall could be in trouble. And I kind of never really believed him. Like, yo, it's Kansas. Kansas has low-key gotten a bit more... Democratic. It voted Democratic on the subversion referendum. It has elected Laura Kelly as governor twice. You know, Roger Marshall has these medical billing practices that are very unflattering. And like Adam Hamilton would be like, oh, we just want cheaper gas and integrity in Kansas. Right. And like that pitch might catch kind of the opposite. It's a relatively elastic state. Right. There are there are opinions that can change. It's pretty well educated. So like, yeah. And, you know, last week, CNN had a poll showing Hamilton up four points in Kansas. But like, yeah, Kansas is one. Like, I have more trouble with believing the South Carolina polling than the Kansas. But basically, there is certainly a possibility that the day after Election Day, you're going to be like, look, you and Matt Iglesias are going to be like, look at Kansas. Democrats are right to nominate the middle ground white guy. And the DSA people are going to say, look, we are right to nominate. AES wins by nine points. He has a great night. Like the polls say, and you just keep fighting. No, this is like, it's a fairly clean national experiment. Yeah. Natural experiment. Michigan. I went to there, you know, there's not been a Muslim American elected to the U.S. Senate. [40:00] So there are reasons apart from his progressivism why Elsa could struggle or be good. I mean, you know, he's bro-y, right? He doesn't come across as like, he's bro-y in a very Michigan way. He doesn't come across as like- I was going to say, also it's Michigan versus Kansas, right? It might be that you like fit the, the candidate onto the state, right? And Michigan's a, a, They have a strong gubernatorial nominee and are favored in that race. I don't know if there's some degree of coattails or something. But yeah, from November 4th, onward the story of the next year and a half is going to be party infighting do you what about this like uh isn't there something going on like florida ag or there's some race in florida right where some socialist seems to be pulling well do you know anything about that well i mean in the in the senate race is senate what is it what's happening in florida in the senate race you had a dsa democrat angie nixon angie nixon oh she's running for senate she's running for senate and she's not pulling that well i mean she's yeah florida one thing we should probably count for is net domestic migration, right? Okay. The models keep missing low on Florida because you have a steady flow of red voters into the state. And we're using benchmarks based in the last election, but like Florida is a moving target for that. It's interesting if you look at Polymarket, because I keep pulling them up as we mentioned them. And everyone has shown a little bit of a bump for the Democrat in the last several weeks. So Mississippi, South Carolina, quite a big one. Annie Andrews at 28 percent, which is way higher than she was just a few weeks ago when it was at 13 percent. No bump at all in Florida. Angie Nixon is at 10 percent. And that's actually lower than where she was there much of the summer. Yeah. And this follows polling, right? The New York Times had some polling that was very strong for Democrats, but not in Florida. They had Ashley Moody ahead by six or seven or something. To what degree are prediction markets just like reflecting polling now? Talk to us about that. I think they're reflecting. Yeah. polling plus sentiment in kind of a, it's somewhere between smart and midwit. Right. So again, people in prediction markets do have to, quantify ultimately their price. Right. And I think that exercise is, is helpful when they go play poker. They can be like, Oh, I think that guy might be bluffing. I'm saying, I say, well, I'm getting two to one from the pot. Right. Less decision has to make, do I think is a greater than a 33% chance or not? Like, I think the prediction markets, have a slightly Republican... Leaning clientele, right? Like, Democrats are a little preachy about them Sometimes Republicans have more Money, right? Well, we saw the famous, like, huge whiff in the L.A. mayor race for, like, Like Spencer Pratt, like who in their right mind thought a Republican was going to win a mayorship at a major U.S. city? Yeah, but like they have like these like the recognition that. polling error is correlated like we talked about at the top of the show that's an important recognition to have the markets were actually overconfident relative to my model in 2016 on hillary clinton right so everyone knows that but like i think the belief that oh polls always underestimate republicans is not the most sophisticated version of that necessarily is there anyone who So systematically making money, I mean, I'm going to put you on the spot here or silver bulletin on the spot, but do you feel that someone could make money betting on prediction markets anytime there's a deviation between silver bulletin model for a given race in the prediction markets? incorporate... some degree of vibes are not helpful. They can also just get to things faster, right? If there's a scandal, the New York Times reports on Thursday morning, then it will take several days to show up in the polling, right? And so like, yeah, I mean, I went through recently and looked at every race where you have a gap between Flipper, my model, and Polymarket. And like, I agree with Polymarket on half of those, you know, although ironically, some of the ones I agreed with, I'm like, oh, yeah, Flipper's way too high in South Carolina. And then there's this good poll for them at South bit, but like, yeah, so the test would be like, you have to create like some type of laboratory environment where prediction markets aren't allowed to look at polls. And my expectation is that prediction markets would be Extremely terrible. It seems like actually the test would be you would want to have prediction markets that aren't allowed to look at models, right? Because of course they're going to look at – Fair enough. Right? Because ideally you wouldn't want – The day the silver bulletin numbers dropped to influence the prediction markets, ideally, you're looking at polls and creating a model and prediction market traders are looking at polls and creating a price. And the question is, which is the better way to derive a probability? Yeah, look, and like building a simulation with all these regional correlations is tricky, right? We are like, as of when we're recording this, we are like literally like 0.995 correlated with polymarket. Yeah. [45:00] states. We have the overall Democratic win probability a bit higher, you know, I don't know that's because it's attracting... a different type of traitor, right? Like that, like you get maybe more of the... you know, the whales, right? Not like the French whale from 2024, but like whales, like degenerate rich guys with a lot of money to burn, right? The dream. Whereas they're maybe less likely to invest in individual races, but there's really not that much of a gap, right? You've been building models for a really long time. And of course, you first sort of became a household name in 2008. So that's election that were like born during the Obama administration. Some of these things freak me out a little bit. Can you talk objectively about like Is it unambiguous in your mind that AI has made it easier for you to build models and to do your job? Yeah, for sure. Look, I get to hire two world-class programmers, coders, for whatever I pay for the max plans, right? 100 or 200 bucks a month. So I have these complex projects that you definitely couldn't one-shot or even come close to it. But I know this really well, and I've coded these things myself. And I know when you feed... GPT or Clyde, a 10,000 word program and say, carefully audit this. It's, quite sharp about it. Now, I would still say on, like, two-thirds of prompts, I have to provide quite a bit of guidance, right? It's not like, oh, cool, man, next step, right? But, like, it's... great, it's a great teammate, you know, to take something in a more obscure example. So we have an NFL model. The NFL has all these complex playoff tiebreakers, right? They're purely algorithmic. And last year, when I built our model, it took me two and a half days to code them up and, like, some of the code was buggy. We skipped a couple of tiebreakers. It was very slow, right? You know, now you have GPT or Cloud do it, and they do it in 15 minutes while you're at the gym, right? And code is 10 times faster. Now, again, there are dangers, like, they can introduce bugs and kind of hide them from you. We built a soccer model, too, and like in one version of soccer model, it had the ratings like looping back around. So like the 2026 rating would inform like the 1900 rating and it got, it would do things that were quite weird. But the combination of having a lot of initiative and entrepreneurial spirit and expertise, there's a certain type of person I meet. You guys are probably in that category where it's like people are saying to me, I feel like I'm the most productive I've ever been. I feel like I'm getting two days of work done in a 10-hour day sometimes. And I feel like that some of the time. But again, I'm probably in the 99.9th percentile of these models are – helpful with the exact... I'm not really a coder, right? I understand model architecture. I'm an empiricist. I understand probabilities, but my coding was always the weak point. So it's like, this exact thing they're really good at and is really exactly valuable to me is the exact thing that they do very well. Your FIFA World Cup model did have Spain versus Argentina in the final day. We had a really good... Yeah. So NFL, you know, you have good weeks and bad weeks, and that's why... You know, maybe if Republicans... when the house, with the Senate, we'd say, "Well, 25% things happen, right? It'd be great." If they win the House, maybe we'll just make Silver Bulletin AI in a sports blog. Just give up. Nate Silver, thank you so much for joining us on our Election Day special. Thank you, Joe. That was a fun conversation, Tracy. Nate. preemptively parodying how he will sound if Abdul Al-Sayed slightly underperforms. It was a good impression of himself. And Nate Silver doing the impression of an annoying white moderate guy. was good. But that was fun. I'm glad. Happy Election Day, people. I'm glad Nate joined us. Yeah. By the time this comes out, I guess maybe some of the polls will have changed. Maybe some of the polls. We'll have some additional data, maybe. We'll have some more early voting data. Yeah, exactly. One thing I thought was really interesting was this idea of polls basically all becoming models now. Yeah. Right. And like after years and years and years of being accused of, I guess, overestimating Democrats in the self-correcting and so the question is like how big is that self-correction yeah and it's interesting and I guess we didn't go into the math specifically but if you can empirically establish that your self-correction here makes no sense yeah then what you do learn is is [50:00] Nate said pollsters are self-interested players because who is it? What was the famous pollster in Iowa? Seltzer and Seltzer, who actually, you know, right before the 2024 election actually had Kamala Harris winning Iowa. Yeah. No one wants to pull a Seltzer. It was so off that she retired from the game. And that's kind of I guess what Nate was saying, too, which is that if Republicans win the House, it's like, you know what, I think we're done. I think we're done trying to go into sports. we're done trying to understand anything about them because we have nothing. We have no usable information on them. Go ask your digital twin. All right. Shall we leave it there? Yeah, let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway. And I'm Jill Weisenthal. You can follow me at The Stalwart. Follow our guest, Nate Silver. He's at NateSilver538. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at CarmenArmin, Dashiell Bennett at Dashbot, Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks, Kevin Lloyd Lozano. And of course, you can chat about all of these topics 24-7 in our Discord. discord.gg slash oddlots. And for more oddlots content, you can check out our daily newsletter. which you can find at Bloomberg.com slash oddlots. And if you enjoyed this conversation, if you like it when we do our Election Day specials, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And if you're watching on video, then please leave a comment or like or better yet, subscribe. And remember, if you're an OddLots subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad-free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for joining. Thank you. With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. Whether you're leading a big project, planning an elaborate trip, or trying to balance work and life, ChatGPT can help. Give it a goal, plus things like files, notes, or project plans, develop a trip itinerary with daily updates, or create a prioritized schedule, so you can spend less energy sorting out the details and more on bringing your biggest ideas to life. Get started at ChatGPT.com. In business, there's the easy way with staples or the hard way. Hard means... Jen, did you get the weekend specials menus from the printer by any chance? No, they said they'll be done on Monday. 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