Nate Silver on Kamala Harris’s Chances and the Mistakes of the ‘Indigo Blob’

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

Society & Culture, Government, News

4.6 • 11K Ratings

🗓️ 13 August 2024

⏱️ 67 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Risk has been on my mind this year. For Democrats, the question of whether Joe Biden should drop out was really a question about risk – the risk of keeping him on the ticket versus the risk of the unknown. And it’s hard to think through those kinds of questions when you have incomplete information and so much you can’t predict. After all, few election models forecast that Kamala Harris would have the kind of momentum we’ve seen the last few weeks. Nate Silver’s new book, “On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything,” is all about thinking through risk, and the people who do it professionally, from gamblers to venture capitalists. (Silver is a poker player himself.) And so I wanted to talk to him about how that kind of thinking could help in our politics – and its limits. We discuss how Harris is performing in Silver’s election model; what he means when he talks about “the village” and “the river”; what Silver observed profiling Peter Thiel and Sam Bankman-Fried, two notorious risk-takers, for the book; the trade-offs of Harris’s decision to choose Tim Walz over Josh Shapiro as a running mate; and more. This episode contains strong language. Mentioned: The Contrarian by Max Chafkin “Nancy Pelosi on Joe Biden, Tim Walz and Donald Trump” by The Ezra Klein Show Book Recommendations: The Hour Between Dog and Wolf by John Coates The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes Addiction by Design by Natasha Dow Schüll Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Michelle Harris, Elias Isquith and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From New York Times opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show. Nate Silver came to fame in American politics for election forecasting.
0:26.0	He built models that were pretty damn successful at predicting American politics.
0:32.0	But before Silver was in politics, he was a poker player. And after getting into politics, he went back to being a poker player. He's been running through poker championships and out there on tables, partially because he's been writing a book about risk.
0:45.9	The book is called On the Edge, The Art of Risking Everything.
0:50.0	And it applies the frameworks of, I'd say the gambler maybe say the poker player to politics to AI to venture capital
0:57.9	Nate the way he thinks about politics I find very useful I find that he thinks more clearly
1:02.4	about risk and
1:03.3	probabilities than a lot of people do and maybe more people should follow. So I want to
1:08.3	have a mon to talk about how that thinking has guided him over the past year and how he's thinking about it in the election going forward.
1:16.0	As always, my email as a recline show at NYUtimes.com. Nate Silver, welcome to the show.
1:27.0	Thank you, Ezra.
1:28.0	Happy to be here.
1:29.2	So last I looked, your model is Harris winning the election at around 52%. It might be a little
1:35.7	different today. But this has been an unusual election. So how much stock do you put in
1:41.3	your model right now?
1:43.0	I think the model is balancing these different factors pretty well.
1:45.5	I mean, there are some things you could argue are favorable to Harris, one of which is that
1:48.7	for the past few weeks we've been in what the model thinks is supposed to be
1:52.2	the convention
1:52.9	down period for Republicans, where typically you poll
1:55.6	pretty well after your convention.
1:56.7	There's the afterglow of the new nomination
	...

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