I will confess to be a paid subscribed to the Silver Bulletin, as I wanted full access to Silver’s election model and whatnot. As has been discussed here on OTB, there is a growing unease with Silver in the zeitgeist (especially the more liberal corners thereof). Part of this is, in my view, anxiety over his predictions that look Trumpier than many readers would like. And part of it is his growing tech-bro-esque personality (and his over-realiance on poker as a lens through which to see the world–h/t reader SKI for that link). His overall obvious self-importance is also a major contributor.
I will add that the fact that he is now working for Peter Thiel, who owns Polymarket, strikes me as a conflict of interest, since a lot of bettors are going to reply on Silver’s model to make their wagers. This concerns me, and places more doubt on Silver that anything else (and there are other reasons to me wonder, including what I find to be overly cute, and not especially analytical categories like his River v. Village stuff in his latest book).
I have noted several times in the comments that it is clear that Silver has been upping the confrontational nature of his takes on Twitter to drive clicks to his Substack newsletter (and, indeed, it is clear from listening to him on The 538 Podcast prior to his exit from ABC that he has always seen Twitter as a game). As he stated on the Ezra Klein Show a few weeks ago:
To some extent, even like if you run a newsletter, being a little polarizing is. It’s okay, right? If I have 10 random people yelling at me on Twitter. And 10 people sign up to be paid subscribers to Silver Bulletin, then I come out like way ahead. In that deal and so i think i couldn’t do my job without running afoul of these this group of people.
Silver, especially in recent years, has always given off a dorm-room libertarian contrarian vibe to me, and this seems of a piece with his current evolution, including his cleaving to the venture capital world in admiring fashion. He clear wants to be a titan of that ilk, taking smart risks and bestriding the world he has conquered.
One thing that he has alway claimed not to be, and indeed used to sneer at, was being a pundit. But I hate to tell him, but I think he has created his own conditions for punditry: the pressure of creating regular content on a deadline for a Substack newsletter.
This was my immediate thought after reading his piece over the weekend, Alaska, Alaska, Alaska.
The premise?
On NBC, Steve Kornacki holds up a whiteboard, echoing the late, great Tim Russert. On it are written three words: “Alaska, Alaska, Alaska”. The Last Frontier hasn’t finished counting its votes either, but early returns are surprisingly positive for Harris, a state that Democrats have won just once in the state’s history, in 1964. With Arizona and Nevada and Alaska, Harris would win the Electoral College — just barely.
To me this is like columns on Electoral College ties or brokered conventions–dramatic possibilities with very, very low probabilities that help fill column space. (And, BTW, if this year’s drama didn’t get us a brokered convention, can we please stop pretending like it might happen every four years?).
Silver’s justification for this flight of fancy?
Is this some sort of progressive election nerd wet dream? Yeah, probably. But our election model’s job is to think through every plausible scenario. And it thinks this contingency is possible, albeit unlikely.
He goes on to describe some polling from Alaska, which shows Harris only 5 points behind and then he describes the somewhat idiosyncratic politics of the state (which is something I have written about before). To be clear: reporting on polling in Alaska is all well and good, but the click-me! nature of the piece (especially the sub-title: “It’s unlikely, but the Last Frontier could be Harris’s last stand”) is a whole lot less data analysts and whoooole lot more pundit than Silver used to claim to be.
Such is the business model he has chosen, it would seem. And it further erodes, in my mind at least, his data analysis bona fides–not that Silver cares, of course.
