Photo: Dolly Faibyshev for New York Magazine
It’s a gray and muggy Sunday afternoon, and Nate Silver had just a few hours earlier republished his widely followed election model. After months of Trump’s being ahead, Kamala Harris was his new front-runner with a 52.8 percent chance of victory. Now, he is sitting in the second deck of Yankee Stadium, along the third-base line, sipping a Goose Island tall boy and explaining how baseball is different from politics.
“The problem is that a lot of people who follow politics are just kind of insane,” he says.
Silver has $500 on the Yankees winning by at least two runs. In his new book, On the Edge, he writes that he can pretty much tell you the eventual winner of any sporting event at any point in the game, and this one feels like a pretty safe bet: The Yankees are the Yankees, and their opponent today is the Toronto Blue Jays, which have traded away a lot of their talent in the name of rebuilding.
Long before he became known as one of Twitter’s most unapologetic and exhausting combatants, or, even before he was the political-modeling wizard known for nailing the result of every single state in the 2012 presidential election, Silver was just another young geek obsessed with baseball stats. That obsession led him to become the de facto CEO of the company that produced The Baseball Prospectus, a bible for fantasy sports fans known for its startlingly accurate player predictions.
Silver was in the vanguard of the Moneyball revolution that transformed the sport. Gone were deference to tradition and managerial intuition. In were big data and novel statistical metrics of success (hard-core fans quickly learned to care about OPS percentage and WHIP). By simply looking at the same numbers in a new way, clubs that couldn’t afford to sign high-priced sluggers were suddenly able to compete terms with rich teams; the trick was signing players who produced value in ways that were underappreciated by the marketplace (say, drawing lots of walks as a hitter or not allowing many as a pitcher).
This data revolution that began with baseball has since spread far beyond the ball field, as basic day-to-day decision-making has gotten increasingly quantified and statistically driven. Tech giants rely on massive algorithmic inputs to recommend content and search results, and retailers have sliced and diced data on consumer behavior to reimagine every aspect of the shopping experience. Nowhere was this transformation felt more deeply than in politics, where voter turnout has become a science and even casual observers know to check the cross-tabs of outlier polls.
In his new book, out August 13 from Penguin Press, Silver chronicles this quantitative revolution by interviewing some of those who led or benefited from it — including poker sharks, professional sports bettors, and venture capitalists. He even chatted with crypto kingpin turned convicted felon Sam Bankman-Fried.
The author shares some key traits with his subjects. “They are all a common personality type: the smart, analytical nerd who is comfortable talking about Bayes’ theorem and expected value and things like that. That is a real person,” he says. “I am kind of that person. And that is a tribe that is very powerful but misunderstood. You don’t have to like Peter Thiel or Elon Musk or Marc Andreessen, and I have ambivalent feelings about them, but it is a book about how they think.”
Photo: Dolly Faibyshev for New York Magazine
Silver divides the world into two types: those, including himself and the people he interviewed in his book, who live in what he calls “the River” and those who live in “the Village.” The River, so named because it is “an ecosystem of people and ideas,” and one where presumably the ethos is sink-or-swim, is the home of those who understand probabilities and calculated risks, are willfully contrarian and comfortable with censure from the Village. Villagers are well credentialed but prone to groupthink, primarily because they are overly concerned with the approval of fellow villagers. To the Villagers, the Riverians are mostly a bunch of arrogant white guys who tend to attribute any success they have in life to their own talent and not societal advantages.
But the Riverians, Silver told me as the Blue Jays took a 2-0 lead, are winning. It’s not just baseball, but it’s figures like Musk who ignored the naysayers to launch his rocket ships and, in buying Twitter and changing how the platform operates, shifted the cultural conversation substantially. It’s the investors in crypto and the engineers behind artificial intelligence who are remaking the world. And it is Silver too, who, after having helped lead a revolution in baseball two decades ago, has since helped lead one in politics and political reporting, training a generation of journalists to be skeptical of narratives and outlying polls. Pre–Nate Silver, how many political observers knew about the median-voter theorem?
But if Moneyball was all about using new or overlooked statistics to build out a high-quality team on the cheap, finding overlooked value in baseball or pretty much any other commercial undertaking is a much harder proposition now that the Riverian view of the world has become relatively commonplace. Where are the inefficiencies in the political marketplace when everyone can look at the same model on Nate Silver’s Substack?
The answer at a personal level, he says, is to be smarter and more aggressive about taking calculated risks; if your plan has only a 40 percent chance of succeeding, it may be worth proceeding anyway. Fail once, and just try again, and see if the odds improve. This doesn’t mean you should ride a motorcycle without a helmet, but if you never miss a flight, it could mean that you are showing up at the airport too early. That is, you are playing it too safe.
“I think our evolutionary training makes us more conservative than we probably should be,” he said. “Most of human history, if you get some infection, you die, and no one was really wealthy except for the monarch, and so it is beaten into us to be pretty cautious and risk averse. You have a whole lifetime of opportunities. You are not going to win every bet, but you can take advantage of optionality.”
For Silver, these risks included giving up his Baseball Prospectus gig in order to become a professional poker player and then, when the Feds shut down online cardplaying, using those skills to build electoral models just as, he says, politics was getting more interesting with the rise of Barack Obama. He built FiveThirtyEight as a rudimentary website ahead of the 2008 election. The New York Times licensed it in 2010 at a moment when his kind of political data analysis was seen as both a novelty and a journalistic opportunity. Not that he was embraced by his new colleagues: The tension between Silver and the regular political reporters at the paper got so bad that he was shunted to a different floor. On the few occasions they were forced to interact, he says, he was treated like he was the geek in the middle-school cafeteria.
He now sees the newspaper as the house organ for the Village mind-set, a place that is both susceptible to being influenced by the reigning ideologies of its staffers but also so aware of this criticism that it can overcorrect. “The Times is a tactical place,” Silver says. “They understand the metadiscussion about the Times, and they are not unaware of what the critics say about them, and it allows them to get worked over by the refs a little bit.”
In 2013, Silver brought his model over to ESPN, where it subsequently became affiliated with ABC. It was, if anything, a worse fit. He was, he says, little more than a hood ornament for a small political and data operation there. “ABC was as mainstream media as it gets. It was the kind of thing that was very popular with 70-year-olds who wake up to watch the news on Sunday morning,” Silver says. “Whereas for me, I have more of a gambler’s mind-set, where you can talk about strategy and probabilities, and it’s actually quite popular with a certain type of person but just not a network-news type of person.”
Had he known then what he knows now about calculated risk-taking, he would have left sooner — but he didn’t split with ABC until last year. He left the FiveThirtyEight brand behind and set up a Substack newsletter that now has more than 125,000 subscribers and a paid subscriber network in what he says is “the low five-figures.” He is making more money than he ever has in his career.
So what is another example of Silver’s taking a big risk? He cites calling on Joe Biden to quit the race back in November 2023 at a point when that argument still made most of the Villagers angry. He also notes his election model was very bearish on Biden — giving him only a 25 percent chance of winning before he dropped out. And Silver says his model was probably overestimating the real odds. “On a gut level, I would have put his chances at zero,” he says as the Yankees came back to take a 3-2 lead. “It’s a lot easier to be hyperhonest when you are on your own.”
Though the view has since become conventional wisdom, being that openly pessimistic on Biden’s chances when he still looked certain to be the Democratic nominee was actually quite a big risk for him, Silver explains. Had Biden not dropped out and had he somehow ended up defeating Trump in November, “It would have been really bad for me,” Silver says. He is still blamed for calling the 2016 election wrong, even though the 30 percent chance that he gave Trump of winning was higher than that of any other major election model. If Biden won with Silver giving him a 20 percent chance, or even lower, Silver says he faced “the risk of being ruined.”
“And I don’t want to be ruined.”
To many of Silver’s haters on the left — and in the Village — he has become a closet Trumpist who hides his preferences behind a thin veil of supposedly objective number-crunching. This, they say, is a moment that requires everyone involved in politics, even professional polling modelers, to recognize the threat Trump poses and react accordingly. Silver’s critics point to the fact that he has equity in Polymarket, a betting platform that Thiel has invested in, as proof of his red-pilled sympathies.
Silver admits that some of the Village groupthink during COVID shifted his politics a bit — for instance, the labeling of the lab-leak theory as misinformation or the way in which certain epidemiologists chased internet clout by whipping up more fear than he thought warranted in a post-vaccine landscape. But, he says, if anyone thinks he has his thumb on the scale for any interest apart from truth and accuracy, they can just check his work, which now stretches back almost two decades.
“There is this notion that ‘Nate’s forecasts are inaccurate,’” he says. “But they are all on the internet, so go take a look. No one has a track record like this.” Just then, the Yankee centerfielder drops an easy fly ball, and the game is tied again. “That could have just cost me $500,” he says, before continuing. “Politics and the media and the internet are combat, and I am a fighter. And I don’t really have too many concerns with being combative with someone I know is arguing in bad faith.”
As Silver sees it, as journalism has increasingly become a part of the Village, he is one of the few mainstream reporters left in that he is willing to objectively report the news without fear or favor, no matter who doesn’t want to hear it. As more and more reporters became convinced that Trump is an existential threat to American democracy, he says, they started pulling punches for the Democrats. The result has been an erosion of credibility for the media, especially among the Riverians who once saw themselves on the same team as the Villagers (see various high-profile Silicon Valley figures).
And so whenever he is not playing poker or betting on sports or building models, Silver is logged on, waging war against political operatives, fellow data analysts, and partisan journalists. Big or small accounts, it doesn’t matter, Silver — with his 3 million followers — battles those who he thinks are misreading (willfully or not) what the data actually says.
“It’s actually okay to be polarizing,” he says. “I think people are much too concerned with being liked by weird strangers on the internet. If I get a subscription for every internet weirdo who says something mean about me, that is actually a fine trade-off.”
Just then, the rain begins to fall, only a little at first and then in giant sheets. The tarps come on the field and Silver checks his weather forecast. It looks like rain for the rest of the afternoon, so he hops on the train back to his home in Chelsea.
Hours later, the game picks up again. After an RBI single, the Yankees take it in the bottom of the 10th, 4-3. A win for the team — but not for Silver.
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