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On The Edge of Glory Disconnected Thoughts on Nate Silver’s New Book
TLDR/Judgment: Nate Silver’s latest falls flat in a pale imitation of the kind of thing that is done on the Rat-Adjacent internet. He plods through soft-rock covers of Moldbug, SA, Big Yud on his way to no particular conclusions. Nate strikes me as a man without a country, who doesn’t know who his friends and who his enemies are, able only to observe and unable to understand changing.
I’ve been a Nate Silver fan since the PECOTA days, so I won’t pretend to total neutrality. Nate is, to be simple, my kind of dude. I bought his new book on a trip to the beach and just finished it. I enjoyed it more than my thoughts here will probably imply, but the pop-sociology and science here just doesn’t add up to a cohesive thesis. I’lll comment that I’ve gotten addicted to poker, again, as a result of reading it, evidence of its infectious joy. But the core thesis of the book is so thoroughly muddled, that I’m left agreeing with Hanania that a lot of books could be better as blog posts.
This Would Have Been Better as an Email
At core I agree with Hanania, a lot of nonfiction books I read today seem like blog posts that have been collected, or a special series of blog posts or podcast episodes that have been collated into a book. Much of it has to do with consumer spending habits. Spending on books is in decline, but many consumers (your humble commenter included) will rarely if ever spend money on a blog, but will spend money on a book quite happily. I’ve rarely subscribed to premium on a podcast or substack, and when I have I’ve nearly always unsubscribed within a month or two disappointed with the cost vs the premium content I got access to. Occasionally I’ll get talked into subscribing, but my net spend is pretty low, and to be honest I feel like kind of a dope when I do it, like I’m wasting money. I think it’s just hard for one or a few content producers to make enough standard content to attract subscribers, and then squeeze out enough premium content to make subscribing worth it. On the other hand, at this point in my life, I’m actively happy to spend money at my local small bookstore, I feel good about spending money on a book to support the store, and I’m happy to buy one from a writer I already like. Meanwhile, my subscription to Audible means I end up buying one audiobook a month, and I’m happy to buy something from a creator I like. Perfect example would be Karina Longworth’s Seduction, which was essentially identical to a slightly-longer season of her podcast You Must Remember This, covering similar topics in a similar way. I was happy to buy it, I love Longworth’s podcast and want to support her work, and enjoyed it; even though I’ll probably never pay on her Patreon for the main podcast. So the phenomenon of books that feel like blog posts, for me, ties back to customer willingness to pay for books vs blog posts. I’d be more likely to buy a physical Scott Alexander or Richard Hanania. This strategy makes sense even if you’re already making good money on your premium substack, as the existence of some subset of customers that will buy the book but not the podcast gives you a chance to hit more customers; I’d also imagine that for example Seduction sold well to people who read every book about Howard Hughes who might never have heard of her podcast.
Overall, this book might just not be meant for me, or other Mottizens, in that it is an intro course to so much that I already know about, Effective Altruism and the Trolley Problem and the idea of Expected Value. But as is, I just don’t think it did enough to justify its efforts.
Describing the Elephant
Which brings us back to Silver and On the Edge. This doesn’t feel like Silver’s online work, Silver has always been more small scale and topical in his blogging. But it feels like someone’s blog posts, maybe because of the core conceit of the book, and how it fits into other blogs I’ve read over the years from Moldbug to SA. It felt like a riff on an internet conversation that happens all over the DR and rat-adjacent internet.
Silver’s core thesis is that one can distinguish between two school of thought in American industry and intellectual life: the River and the Village. As near as I can tell, the River consists of Risk Takers; Silver labels everyone from Wall Street traders to professional poker players to sports gamblers to US Army generals and astronauts. The Village is largely coterminous with the Liberal Establishment, the Cathedral, the Blue Tribe elite, all the other terminology that has been mooted around to talk about the media/academia/Democratic Party policy complex. Silver identifies himself as a “Riverian” (a rather unfortunate neologism), while identifying most of those who criticized his election forecasts as Villagers.
The Village is portrayed as more risk-averse. And this is my first problem with Silver’s thesis: one of the archetypal activities of the Village is electoral politics (largely from the D ballot) and nothing is a bigger risk than electoral politics. The average state-house candidate in a coastal-urban state is spending thousands of dollars, and months of their time, on what is often at best a fifty/fifty proposition. This is making bets on a level that would gag a professional poker player, not just the money but the time and the reputation; you risk not just monetary loss but potential disgrace and embarrassment. You’re risking making your family a laughingstock. Friends of mine who ran for local positions, got tangled up in school board politics about trans kids in bathrooms and CRT; you risk not just your money spent running, but that some portion of your neighbors thinking you’re a transphobic nutcase obsessed with genital testing, or another portion thinking you’re in favor of boys committing rape in the girl’s bathroom! The risk goes for safe seats just as well as for contested ones, where the result in the general is already determined then the politics reverts to the primary. Where the primary is fixed by the local party machine, the politics reverts back to maneuvering for years prior to the seat opening up. If you want to be a judge, or a city councilman, or a mayor, you’re often spending years sucking up to the right people, going to the right parties, giving money to the right committees. That’s a series of investments, long term slow bets that might never pay off, that would look absurd on any VC spreadsheet. Similar Villager occupations like Academia and Media are positions that one reaches against vast odds (leaving aside nepotism) with enormous odds of failure, and extremely high variance between successful outcomes. A successful hedge fund investor might hit a few 100x deals and might lose 1x, a popular writer or musician hits, what, 1000000x what an unsuccessful writer or musician gets?
Meanwhile, some of the model Riverians* he cites strike me as rather weak in their risk tolerance or in their calculation of expected value. US Army generals get where they got not through bold risk taking, but mostly through careerism and political maneuvering, though perhaps you could cite their risk-averseness as the problem with US Military performance in the past sixty years. Maybe we need to increase upside for great generals, rather than putting them in situations where the upside to success is largely identical to while the downside to apparent failure is large.He cites Bill Ackman’s twitter tantrums about supposed academic anti-semitism as symbolic of the conflict between the River and the Village; I can think of nothing more Villager (collectivist, tribal, risk averse) and less Riverian (individualistic, analytical, risk neutral) than advocating for your ethnic and tribal interests to be privileged over those of others. Nate doesn’t really talk about Idpol, and where he does reference it he associates it with the Village, but Ackman (and Trump to some extent) are clearly engaging in classic Idpol plays, just for a different team than the Village.
The softness in the categorization, along with the way that Silver’s categories overlap and intersect with other versions, gives me suspicion that we’re dealing with the parable of the blind men and the elephant. Silver’s Village is very like SA’s Blue Tribe, Moldbug’s Cathedral, the various Republican conceptions of the Liberal Establishment and the Woke or of Cultural Marxism, even elements of Richard Florida’s Creative Class. Every version gropes towards a vision of the Them, this great other that is suffocating, strangling the writer. They can feel this out group out there, they can feel Them, but they can’t see Them, they can’t properly describe Them, even if they think they can. The way this out group becomes such a potent Them, the way they describe some things exactly the same but others completely differently, the way it includes or excludes those the writer and his friends, tend to tell me that none of them are exactly accurate, rather that all are grasping at some aspect of the Elephant, and none are really describing it. SA and Yarvin and Silver all want Sillicon Valley in their friends, and outside the Them. Most MAGA Republicans very much categorize Sillicon Valley elites as the core of the Them! Alexander, Yarvin, Silver, and Florida are all Smart Guys, so the fact that they keep trying to come up with a new concept to describe what is largely the same concept rather than building off of each other should tell us that they don’t think the concept has been properly described yet.**
Silver’s River, in turn, has more in common with SA’s Grey Tribe, Moldbug’s Dark Elves, and other elements of Florida’s Creative Class. While Yarvin talks of most people being Hobbits, Silver doesn’t make room for most people at all in his worldview. It might simply be that he doesn’t intend the book to be all encompassing, but at times it feels weird that his map doesn’t include anything outside of these two power centers. Where are the Mountains, or the Deserts, or the Plains? He shares with Florida and SA a tendency to smuggle into his classification system a glorification of a group that he identifies with, places free from the flaws of the rest of the hierarchy. It’s unclear if The River is a classification, or an achievement. At times Silver seems to treat it as a qualification, saying Trump “doesn’t quite make it” on several occasions. So to some extent, it feels as though Silver kicks you out of the River if you lose on too many bets, which is obviously problematic to Silver himself as he points out how randomness can cause even a skilled Poker player or sports gambler to go through long cold streaks. It also calls out a glaring blindspot:
The Only Game in Town
Inasmuch as there is a clear concept at the heart of The River, I’d say that Silver identifies it as a focus on Expected Value, the River is risk-neutral on postive EV bets. If you’re ruthlessly thinking about finding the odds, and happy to make a bet that has only a 5% advantage making it +EV, then you’re a Riverman. Nate’s assumption is that the games are completely fair, if random in nature. Where the odds are unfair or predictably -EV such as slot machines, it is predictably unfair.
There’s one incident which is discussed in the book in which a woman may have cheated on a poker stream. She made an incredibly lucky move, causing her opponent to lose a lot of money to her. As a result, many thought that she cheated. No one ever made it clear exactly how she supposedly cheated, or why, merely that they were certain she had done so because otherwise her actions were irrational. Evidence free, the accusations ultimately flounder, Nate lands on the alternative explanation that she forgot what was in her hand. But I think the implication was that she cheated by knowing what was in her opponents’ hand, and reacting accordingly.
What Nate doesn’t stop to consider, is why he assumes the cards were dealt at random. Why one would go on a poker stream on the internet, or watch one, and assume that it is all fair and on the up-and-up. What stops your host from stacking the decks, marking the cards subtly, rigging the whole room with actors like The Sting to take your money? This grimly appears in the section on VC money, where frauds like Theranos or WeWork are hand-waved as a cost of doing business. Oh, sometimes somebody steals a few billion, but it's fine as long as the whole system keeps rolling along.
Nate’s system can’t conceive of systematic cheating. We get an extensive view of sports gambling, but only the vaguest glance at the idea of cheating. Consider: Kyle Juszczyk, fullback for the 49ers, was a popular prop bet at +/- 4.5 yards receiving Week 1 on Monday night against the Jets. The theory was that Juice was quite likely to get a few extra targets with Christian McCaffrey out for the game, and 4.5 is really low, just one reception could easily break that. But 4.5 is also so low that it would be comically easy for just a few actors to force Juice to get the yards. If Shanahan or Brock Purdy decided to fix that bet, not the game just that prop bet, they could call a few plays designed to get the ball to Juice, and get him the yards pretty easily. Hell, if Saleh from the Jets and a couple linebackers on the defense decided they wanted to give Juice 10 yards, they could leave him open pretty easily. Juszczyk would finish with 2 receptions for 40 yards, winning the bet easily.
He spends a lot of the end of the book examining SBF and FTX, and how overconfident EV calculations about the unknowable are dangerous. But never does he consider the base-rate of unknowability that underlies the simple games he loves. Sports betting lines are no match for a career backup in the NBA with a "sore" knee. Online poker counts on code you can’t see to guarantee fairness, as you play against people you can’t even really prove exist; it could just as easily be a sophisticated slot machine pretending to be an online poker game while slowly taking your money.
Silver tries to cite NFL players as Riverians, but it falls flat again. Football players aren’t making +EV calculations in their decision making, or they never would have dedicated themselves to football in high school and college, knowing that the odds of making it to the NFL after college are just 1.6% while the odds of suffering a chronic injury as a D1 athlete are over 50%. (This calculus probably alters with NIL deals but I don’t follow college sports enough to really say). Rather than taking the odds, NFL players make their own odds. One of the paradoxes of the Moneyball revolution in sports, is that while the analytics are often very useful for analyzing the professional game, every player who arrives in the professional game did so by ignoring the analytics. The core axiom at the heart of most analytical approaches to sports management, the intuitive false hope that is called out over and over again as the core of “dumb” sports fandom is that players don’t really change outside of decline. Analytics is a world of entropy. Players don’t reliably tweak their swing, improve their plate approach, find a new pitch, get in the Best Shape of His Life in the off season, etc. Those stories are the chaff in the mill of traditional sports journalism, and the constant chatter of WIP sports radio call ins sure that if the coach just played this other player who looked good in limited time…
But no player gets to the pros by accepting things as they are. Every player who makes it to the Show believed that he was different, special, and he did change when he needed to. He did get in The Best Shape of His Life, he did adjust his swing or learn a new pitch, he did improve. He did exactly what they said you can’t really do.*** They, by definition, did not accept the odds. Dumb money can drive out smart money. If people are willing to take -EV odds, for reasons outside your model, then you’ll never get the edge you need to make +EV bets. This is the case in many risky professions, acting or athletics or politics, you have to take the long odds, they’re the only game in town.
And of course that brings us to Silver’s most famous project: election prediction. Nate spends a lot of time trying to defend his record on election modeling, pointing out that his “edge” over other models would be huge for a sports gambler or a hedge fund, even if he can’t predict with 100% accuracy. But how useful is it compared to the ability to steal an election? The polls all become so much noise if the vote counts aren’t real, just like calculations figuring out the correct number of yards that Kyle Juszczyk will run after catching a pass from Purdy becomes noise if the team decides they want him to get those points or if they don’t want him to get those points. This is a massive blindspot for his project, and inasmuch as it is coherent for the entire Riverian concept. Positive and negative EV assertions can only be reached by creating a closed universe, analogous to a poker game
Leaders don’t accept polls and determine a +EV path through them. That’s the path of the risk averse, the noise before defeat. Leaders don’t accept the facts, they change them. Trump didn’t accept the issue polling, he changed it. Tariffs were almost dead as a policy tool in a world where the Ds and Rs agreed on free trade, Trump has moved the needle to where the question isn’t whether tariffs will be imposed, it is how many and against whom. Problems are changeable, and then the polling will follow.
And of course leaders and sports stars don’t accept the rules. “If you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’!” Silver can cite to his polls all he wants, and he can try to model them to reality, but they’re little use unless we grapple with the realities: examining the fundamentals of the race doesn’t matter if voters don’t really believe in reality anymore. If the same people look at the same data and see a good economy and a bad economy, what can economic indicators tell us? And if there were widespread cheating, how would Silver ever know? Eventually he’d just adjust the model to show a shift in the vote to mirror the persistent cheating, and have a good enough model, and be satisfied. But that wouldn’t get us much of anywhere here in the real world.
*One of my minor quibbles with Silver: I feel like he does the woke-writer thing of shoehorning in “diverse” characters wherever he can. He’ll say openly that most of his Riverdwellers are male, and hint that they are disproportionately white and asian in many cases; but his examples are plucked disproportionately from women for the group, and his hypotheticals are often female. Just enough to be noticeable, and sticks out to me a little.
**An alternative interpretation is that Silver is engaging in Hidden Power Levels, utilizing what is largely ripped from Yarvin or SA, but not acknowledging their influence to avoid being stoned by association with them.
***This is why fitness is, at some level, inherently associated with Rightism and individualism, by definition anyone who has achieved some level of fitness has personally put in effort and overcome adversity through hard work, in a visceral way, no one else could do the work for you.
Entirely possible, even likely, but don't underestimate the likelihood that it's a branding exercise. You've got to make the idea your own to sell a book on it. Good artists borrow, great artists steal, as the saying goes.
Yascha Mounk and Wesley Yang come to mind too. The local memory banks, superior in recall to my own, can probably come up with a half or full dozen more.
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Great review! Thanks!
That was an interesting feature of Zvi's review:
You've now got me down a rabbit hole, as Zvi linked to other reviewers. I enjoyed this particular passage from one
There's definitely a certain groan-inducing lack of skepticism in the book.
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Thanks for linking Zvi's review. He's a bit more of a joiner than I am, so I suspect it will be a bit more of a River's view of the River.
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Except that he has never actually cared about the election itself. He’s not interested in who wins. What he does is rather like a sports betting oddsmaker— he wants a model that reliably matches with the votes on Election Day so he can tell people who will win. He wants to tell you who wins the electoral Super Bowl, he doesn’t want to understand the game of football, or how the teams are winning.
The neo-reactionary crowd are not trying to tell you who wins the election. They’re trying to understand how the power dynamics work in American politics. They’re interested in the Laws of Power and War as they apply to the inner circle of American elites. Predicting an election wouldn’t impress them, though they’re often very interested in how power is gotten and how the cathedral shapes public opinion.
I suspect the public tends to use informal measures as they always have. If you’re going shopping and things cost more, that’s inflation and probably a sign of a bad economy. If you know of people getting laid off, again, that’s where people get their idea of a good or bad economy. The indicators that are used by silver and other prognosticators are very much lagging indicators because unlike prices at grocery stores or people in a given social circle getting laid off, they’re aggregate statistics and only released quarterly. To be blunt, by the time unemployment is officially up by enough for the economists to see it, it’s been long since noted by the public. I don’t think that’s distrust of official figures, just a reality of the system. He’s using numbers that come out quarterly. The public is using observation of things they see around them.
He's pretty clear on his blog that he wants Kamala to win, though.
It's true. He's been relentlessly pro-Kamala. But I think it's strange. He's trying to do that thing where he says "I'm a Democrat", but then he mostly criticizes Democrats.
If he was brutally honest with himself, he'd be a Trump voter. But that would entail losing his membership to the college of elites. Liberals would ceremonially remove his books from their shelves to avoid contagion. People would spit on the ground before they say his name. Etc...
So he has to stan for Kamala. If he wasn't a public figure, he'd probably be here in the Motte with the rest of us lowlifes.
As Upton Sinclair said "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his
salarysocial standing depends upon his not understanding it."It's definitely tied to his social circles, which have been largely inherited from legacy media.
I thought his departure from 538 was going to be his redpill moment. He's still bitter about it and it comes up every now and again in his substack. I think the fact, however, is that 9/10 of the people he regularly personally interacts with are multi-generational PMC types soaked in deep inky Blue Tribe.
If you do something that alienates 90% of the people you care about, your own identity is going to take a shot. When you start fucking with people's self-constructed identities, you can get wild results.
Yeah we can play at being dissidents on this forum but it’s another thing entirely to actually be one as a public figure. The amount of shit you have to take is just off the charts. I wouldn’t do it for any amount of money.
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Based on twitter I would say…this is already happening. His association with Thiel comes up a LOT
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I don't agree with that. I'm a Centrist, anti-woke Democrat, and as such I spend a lot of time criticizing Democrats. But switching parties is unthinkable to me both due to greater distaste of Trump and fundamentally irreconcilable policy differences. The reason I spend more time criticizing Democrats is because people who have some commonality with me are both more persuadable and more frustrating when not persuadable. Also they are my only viable option when trying to enact change.
This was my take for a long time.
But the best way to change Democrats is to support Republicans. Why is Kamala making anti-immigration and pro-gun noises now? It's because of pressure from the other party. Once the threat is defeated, she will run to the far left again.
The fact is that one party has captured nearly the entire elite. The Democrats are so much stronger than the Republicans, that we are at serious risk of becoming a one party state.
And I understand the aesthetic objection. I'm a blue tribe urbanite. I like ballet. To me, a lot of people in the Republican party are repulsive ogres. But I am okay putting policies ahead of my own purity. And even if I preferred Democratic policies, in the absence of a strong preference, I think it's generally more important to support the weaker party. If you want a sane Democratic party, vote Republican. And if the Republicans ever get too strong again (like in the Bush years) I'll say the opposite.
I also can't say I agree with that. It's election year, and I think both Kamala and Trump are making populist policy claims that seem completely contradictory to past claims. I have 0 reason to trust that they will stick.
I believe we need to do more for pollution control and managing climate change, and Republicans have and will oppose efforts to do that. Especially Conservative Supreme Court
I generally believe in protections for workers being fired for unfair reasons, and Republicans oppose that.
I support taxation used to provide poverty reduction programs, and Republicans oppose that.
I agree with Democrats on maybe 75% of things. Republicans would take active efforts to not just oppose new efforts but reverse direction on that 75%. That does not make sense to me as a strategy to oppose the 25% I disagree with.
I think Trump's at least somewhat sincere on a bunch of the things. That's not the impression I get from Harris.
I think it's more important that we prioritize growth than that we care about the climate—the usual policies aren't that effective, when China, etc. will just ignore them (and they make up a much larger share of global emissions), and technology can do an awful lot to nullify the bad effects, at least in wealthier countries. I generally don't expect climate regulations to be done in a manner that's at all efficient, which makes many of them a net negative—the best plan forward to slash emissions is to reduce regulations on nuclear somewhat and expand our power capacity that way, until it's cheaper than fossil fuels, and Trump seems more likely to push for that I think?
He's talked about clean air and water, but I think it's fair on your part to be skeptical of what that looks like in practice.
But you mentioned the Supreme Court. Did you see the various proposals from the democrats? The No Kings Act, for example, would lead us down a path of destroying the independence of the federal judiciary, which, needless to say, would be extremely bad—they seem to be the only branch that cares to any real extent what the constitution says.
I think workers being fired for unfair reasons isn't all that bad, when there are many other employers doing the same things. Preventing firing people is inefficient, which leads to more expensive goods, which makes us all poorer, including workers. Capitalism makes firing useful people for silly reasons a bad idea economically, so this isn't the hugest concern—the best run, and hence growing, companies will probably avoid doing that too much.
I'm not sure which programs you're worried about, but Trump has, unfortunately, pledged not to touch things like social security.
If you're in a state that matters, could you at least vote for a Republican senator? Should Trump win, Republicans are almost certainly going to take the senate, so additional senators isn't the most important thing. But if Harris wins, the Senate's the best way to stop a trifecta, and a majority-red Senate would force cooperation in decision making, making things more moderate.
Sincere on what though? Trump contradicts himself and makes impulsive decisions so often that I cannot take anything he says seriously. And from the view of someone who leans Democrat, I wouldn't want many of the things he proposes if he were sincere.
Yes, China is a major polluter, but that attitude doesn't solve anything. In fact it makes it worse. It's like saying I should break the law because other people break the law more, which the only result of that philosophy is more net crime. I would support nuclear, but I don't see Republicans taking any tangible action to support nuclear either.
I would absolutely support the No Kings Act. I think the Supreme Court has been making extremely political decisions while pretending they're above it all, and Trump v. United States invented several claims that are not supported by the Constitution at all.
When it comes to firing for unfair reasons, I'm not talking about a heavy hand. For instance, it is only illegal to fire someone for refusing to commit a crime in most but not all states. One of the most common repeat threads in /r/legaladvice is employers telling employees they cannot discuss wages, which is blatantly illegal but it seems like nothing is really done unless an employee actually gets fired and sues over it.
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I’m curious, to what end do you support workers being protected from unfair firing? Is it the principle of the specific issue? Or is that you generally support labor over capital?
I saw people on X today dunking on trumps latest statement on John Deere. He’s proposing a 200% tariff on JD tractors that are made in Mexico and sold in the USA. I guess they just released a plan to build a factory in Mexico. The comments were a bunch of what I assume to be Democrats saying what a mistake trump made attacking an American company like JD and that his plan was idiotic. Trump clearly said:well either make a ton of money on the tariff or more likely, they won’t move your jobs to Mexico.
I bring this up because it seems to be a perfect illustration that mainstream democrats seem to support capital way more than labor these days.
What’s more important to labor these days, offshoring their jobs or unfair firings?
Not trying to “gotcha” here. This has been on my mind for some time and it’s as good a time as any to talk it out.
A curious example of the liberal bubble in action. Farmers have been rather irate with John Deere for years due to their black-box repair and maintenance policy, so I imagine the company in question getting screwed over would result in Farmers cheering.
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I do generally support labor over capital I would say. But I would also say that I think more restrictions should be placed on Mergers & Acquisitions for large companies. I believe in harsher penalties for companies that break laws, and harsher penalties for labor violations and retaliation. I would support a mandatory minimum number of sick days and maximum consecutive work hours. I would support more scrutiny over independent contractor status and using salary to avoid unpaid overtime.
As for Trump's tariffs talks, I don't think much of them. Labor in other countries costs pennies on the dollar. I think the tariffs necessary to dissuade that would cripple the economy. Well, that and I don't trust anything Trump says, and that goes double for Trump campaigning.
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I'd disagree with you about the policies. I think Republicans will do more for workers. And the climate change thing is a wash since the election won't change the amount of world CO2 emitted by more than 0.05%.
But it sounds like you think differently.
If you agree with Democrats about 75% of things, you're probably just a Democrat. That's okay. It's not a surprise that a person who shares 75% of their beliefs with Democrats would vote Kamala. I would if I were you.
I think Nate's beliefs are a little different though.
I think it's also determined by what you base your votes on.
My fellow lefties sometimes still think if they just got the right candidate in the rural parts of the country and really sell the non-college educated populace there on Medicare for all or whatever, they'd look past said candidate being pro-abortion and pro-LGBT or whatever, when that's just not happening, because those rural non-college educated folks legitimately care more about abortion, LGBT rights, immigration, et al than progressive economic policy, even if they'd say they're for union rights or single-payer health care in poll. Those people are conservatives, even if they have some left-leaning views, they just don't vote on those views.
By the same token, if you're a former Democrat PMC and all you deeply care about is transgenderism in schools, COVID rules, and various other Internet culture war issues on the conservative side, and you base you votes on that, and may be pro-choice or pro-union, but don't vote on that, you're just a conservative now. Or at the least, a partisan Republican.
I'm not saying that as an attack or a dunk, but rather I'm treating the college-educated anti-woke centrist with the same respect as a religious pro-life activist when it comes to their political views.
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Right, I got a little sidetracked there. I haven't paid much attention to Nate Silver to know his specific policies. I was more making the general point that there are valid reasons for a Democrat to express more frustration with Democrats, or Republicans with Republicans, than them simply having dismissed the idea of switching parties prematurely.
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The flip side of this is why I'm negative on Kamala's chances: people perceive a good economy by people getting hired, and no significant number of normal Americans who are unemployed are getting jobs between now and November. There is no intuitive way to improve the economy between now and then.
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This is my impression too. Silver strikes me as a guy who has all the facts at his disposal but refuses to utter "that which must not be said". He very much wants to remain relevant in polite circles. But I don't believe he is deliberately hiding his power level so much as he has CrimeStop installed.
If he were savvy, which he seems to be, would you be able to tell the difference?
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