Nate Silver Gets Candid On 538 Regrets, Elon Musk, And Democrats' Missteps

Really?

What's it stand for?

Good to see you, Galen. By the way, since I'm listening, you don't drink beer, right? You're gluten resistant.

Just trying to keep you on your toes.

I'm good. To full disclosure for the audience, we see each other reasonably often.

No. Remember the last show at the Bell House where the writing seemed very much on the wall. I think we all knew something big and bad was going to happen.

Well, I knew something was up because I had invited all of the people who worked with us at ABC, and every single person came up with an excuse for why they couldn't come to the live show. And I was like, that's awfully strange. None of these people are coming to the live show. And then a few days later, they laid off most of the site. And so, yeah, we haven't been in front of microphones together since then.

I have my own podcast, Risky Business. I'm going to have you on Substack Live or something where we do a Democratic presidential candidates draft for 2028. So, that topic is off limits.

Yes. It's like you can't, if I order the steak at dinner, you can't get the exact same steak. It's that kind of thing.

Experiences I feel comfortable sharing in a public forum. I mean, you know, you work in a place for a long time and there are a lot of ups and downs, but you know, probably the first, the emblematic story, right, was we relaunched under ESPN actually almost exactly 11 years ago today because we did it right during March Madness. So we paid a lot of attention to like designing the site quite beautifully, right? I don't know, I did a lot of like bragging on Twitter about we're hiring an intern who graduated from Dartmouth College with a minor in it. It was so stupid and braggy. It was like inevitably setting a target on your back. But anyway, our goal, and this was a mistaken goal, like the goal should have been to have this, this is a year or two before you're there, right? Our goal should have been to have really good content and have proof of concept with like a bunch of stuff that just like kicked ass, right? Instead we had like a really pretty website that didn't break and we were proud of ourselves and we didn't really have enough experience. But anyway, the site went up, nothing broke, the traffic was, I don't know, pretty good in line with our expectations and we're having beers and we're like, that was nice, right? And like, oh [__], we have to do this every day. We have to go back every day and populate the site with content. And then, yeah, look, I'll be honest, I think the first couple years were kind of difficult, right, to scale up from a founder's brand to a larger thing, and it took a while, I think, to get our stride. But like one thing I'd say is like, I think that the mistakes that were made, and this is also true by the way of presidents, right, the mistakes that like Joe Biden made, they were set in early, or the things that Trump is doing now and Elon are doing now, right? You know, I mean, you can't necessarily put the cat back in the bag, but like, yeah, from the start, it was never really a business model around it, right? From the start, we had the incentive, or I'd had the incentive, when ESPN buys you, there was like a little bidding war and like I'm like, 'Okay, now is the only time we can like actually ask for stuff, right? We can actually ask for like headcounts and resources.' You know, at first, it was funny how you like get invited to different types of events within the ESPN universe, right? At first, you're getting invited to like the Super Bowl and like the owners' boxes and things like that, right? And then by the end, you're in an ESPN radio box at MSG with people you don't know.

It declined. That was for regular... it declined, I think. Right. But like, so we hired a lot of people very quickly without really much of an editorial plan or a business plan apart from like to expand the scope of what we were covering. By 2016, and then 2016 I thought editorially and design-wise and his interactives, the site was like much more itself, right? But then a certain Mr. Donald J. Trump won the presidency. I'm not sure if you want to rehash that. 2018 and 2019 were pretty good, right? Like 2017 to 2019 was like kind of like the glory years. I thought we performed very well as a site in like 2020, but like, you know, then the pandemic hit, so it was just a miserable year for I think anybody who's alive. I guess there's some people who like have the, what's the verb for like cozy, like it's like a five-letter, hygge, the Danish word. I... yeah, those days.

No, no, no, no way. No way. No way. No way. In a million years. But like, okay, but that's having had that experience. So, this is kind of with the benefit of hindsight. I would have built things differently, right? First of all, I mean, again, the original sin is like I would have found a way to like actually have a, this is with perfect hindsight, right, have a business model which is primarily oriented around subscriptions. Number one, right? Number two, I would subscribe to gdpolitics.com. Thank you very much. Or Silver Bulletin. Or at Silver Bulletin, of course, I would hire more slowly. Number three, I would like, a lot of stuff that didn't really work at the site was stuff like there's a school shooting somewhere, how do we cover this with data? I thought the kind of conception of like data journalism was like a little bit too narrow and kind of blinkered, right? I mean, like what kind of, what works? I mean, actually a lot of things do work, right? Like some of the things that worked well were like Clare Malone or like Perry Bacon writing with distinct voices about politics and like that somehow works better because it's like more rigorous than like a factoid about here's a chart with school shootings or things like that, right? And so like, you know, but letting things emerge a bit more organically. I mean, certainly like having like, you know, we didn't launch the, this is 100% my fault, didn't launch like the House model or the midterm model in 2014, which kind of, you know, was a relatively boring election, right, until like September or October. Actually didn't have a House model, which had like a Senate model, right? But like, you know, focusing more on like things that we had high reason to believe would work and then iterating from there and developing. But like, but it's, you, it's almost a reverse problem. It's like, okay, you get a big blank check, not a blank check, you get a budget from Disney and you're like, we have to spend all this money, right? And it's like if you watch like Supermarket Sweep, you know what I mean? This is, I don't know if I'm dating myself or like gayifying myself or both, right? But both, what is it? You have to like spend the most you can. I don't know what constraints there are. You have to like run around the aisles and like spend the most you can in like a 30-minute like shopping spree, right? And like it was a little bit like that. So yeah, not having a business model was tough. And then there's maybe more kind of like, I really go back and forth. Like one other problem you have when you're a founder, right, is like how much to like stick to people who kind of like share your ethos and your values versus saying I don't want like 30 clones of myself, right? And I'm not sure, not sure if we ever... it's hard to do. I'm not sure what the right answer was exactly.

No.

I'm not sure I kind of recognize like some of the things that I stood for necessarily apart from how I'm trying to... I think there were more like implicit political divides within the newsroom between, for lack of a better term, more left-wing and more centrist staffers. And probably, by the way, on the scale of like other media properties, this is probably like a four and a half out of 10 where the average is very high, right? Like every newsroom like has these arguments, right? But like, you know, like I'm coming from a point of view where like I care about like sports and like poker and like if it were up to me, we'd probably cover more like tech and I guess it was a little soon for AI stuff like 10 years ago, right? But the attitude would be like a little bit different, you know?

To a first approximation, it should inherently be a part of news gathering, right? Like I believe in like rigorousness. I think being a little bit more mature now, I think that like the line between rigorous and non-rigorous and using numbers or not using numbers is, that's not a perfect correlation to put it... you can use numbers and be full of [__]. And you can be rigorous. I mean, someone was pointing out on Twitter, right? The people who, unlike me, saw like Trump coming in 2016 in the GOP primary, right, were more of the historians, more of the people who were not being like, well, empirically Republican candidates have the smoke in the sun and then they fade. And in, you know, the institution, the party decides, you know, I mean, that was important. And that was certainly like the biggest substantive mistake in my career was being dismissive of Trump in the GOP primary for like a year until like, oops, he's won all the states now, he's probably going to win, you know, or maybe a little bit before that. But yeah, look, I stand for like a journalism that's truth-driven. I stand for journalism that's nonpartisan. I stand for journalism that's rigorous. I stand for journalism though also, which is confusing, that can have a little voice. Right. I think having voice is part of being transparent and open, right? And kind of part of the skill of being a good writer or a good podcaster is like, I call it like different fonts, right? There's like one font where you're like, I am just kind of stating the fact, and then there's kind of another font where it's like, this is an opinion. Maybe this is like a, you know, a serif font, right? And there's like a Comic Sans font where you're like trolling, and like if you're a good communicator then you can like have those different modes at once. Which is why it kind of feels like the factoid pieces where you put a graph up with school shootings felt like a misexecution of the vision, whereas like the podcast felt like a proper execution of it. But by the way, like, but look, the New York Times is much more savvy about, I mean, they always were. They always had this like interactive team that was the, you know, best in the business except maybe 538, and they are now going to start doing some of the work that 538 had been doing to collect public polling averages. You know, we are doing some of the work at Silver Bulletin. I mean, we are running literally the 538 models that I still have IP of, of the ones that I designed, right? And so like, I don't like, we're going to get to those. The average political news story is like much more data-driven, quote-unquote, than it was 10 years ago. Or certainly like go back and like read New York Times campaign dispatches from like the 1980s. It's just like a crazy man. It's just totally subjective. And so it's come a long way.

Yeah. And by the way, if you extrapolate that trend out to 2028, he'll have a negative 17 approval rating, which I don't think. No. So, so far the decline in Trump's numbers is about typical for recent first-term presidents, right, where he's lost. Disapproval is up about, I guess, now 10 points, right? Approval is down by a couple points. It's like actually like a little on the worst side of average, but it's pretty average. It's like honeymoon effect period. There used to be, the honeymoon effect was like longer, right? I mean, Biden took until September or August 2021 to go into the red, at least in our retrospectively calculated numbers, right? And Trump, it took him whatever, like 45, 50 days or something. So, what's happened now is like he started from a higher point. I mean, he, you know, he started with a below 50 approval rating in 2017. This time he was above 50. But like, but okay, so that's one mechanical way to answer it. I mean, look, I do think that like the stuff, the executive orders he issued in the first week, right? It's a lot of DEI stuff. It's a lot of like immigration stuff. It's a lot of, you know, whatever. Like I thought that was all, I probably disagree with three-quarters of the executive orders as a, you know, classic liberal, lowercase L, but like, but you know, that is kind of stuff that was earned by winning the election and campaigning on those issues, right? But like, I just think the two things are like the tariffs and the, and the Elon and the general lack of restraint, which is not surprising in the least, right? But like, it's just a sense of like, I mean, the economy is the probably most important part of it.

We had this article called 113 predictions for Trump's second term or something, right? And so I actually kind of, some of those will be right, some of the 113 will be wrong, right? So I actually thought that like the tariff thing needed to be taken more seriously than like Wall Street was taking it, right? Because he had made this commitment and like he seems to think it's a good idea and like he would at least do it in a tokenish sense to like not have to lose face, right? But no, I thought that Elon would get bored and that DOGE would be, I just thought there wouldn't be... It's this weird in-between area, right, where like the critique was always that like, well, Trump might talk a big game, but they're like not competent enough to actually do all that because they're kind of lazy. Elon might be intellectually lazy. He's definitely not like a lazy person, and he gets a lot done. And if you don't like what he's doing, it's bad that you'd rather have him be lazy. But like, I didn't think they would... They're in this like kind of uncanny valley where they're like competent enough to like break things but maybe not competent enough to fix them.

Yeah. I mean, his approval ratings are 13 or 14 underwater or something like that.

Right. I mean, look, I don't know what to... I mean, I don't, as someone who went from having a lot of respect for Elon to like a grudging respect for Elon to kind of, I think he's a very smart, industrious person, right? I think it's impressive what he's accomplished, but like we're evaluating the person as it is right now, right? An NBA player who was great at age 25 who gets into some weird life situation and now is like, it's just so much like, he's just retweeting every like, is there any conspiracy theory that he will not retweet? It's just cringe. It's like so cringe. And like, have some respect, Elon, have some respect. And like, pick and choose because there's lots, I mean, I write lots of stuff that's critical of like the left, right? But like, having judgment, like pick and choose.

Like I don't have much sympathy for, you know, for suing universities for not consistently enforcing the Civil Rights Act, or I mean, you know, there's like, there's like that that I can get on board with, you know, tax Harvard's endowment, I'm excited with that, ban gain-of-function research because now, you know, more and more governments think there was a lab leak, but like, but like to have [__] discernment and like it just, I don't know, I don't know, I just kind of... And like one of the groups that moved toward them were the people that I call in the book On the Edge, available at local bookstores, was called the river, right? So it's kind of Wall Street types and Silicon Valley types and the more friendly, cuddly like poker players and things like that, right? And like I'm just wondering like, come on, you guys, you are about high human capital among other things, and like, and Elon's like retweeting like CatTurd and like, I mean, come on.

I'm an advisor to Polymarket, I should disclose that.

And I didn't choose Polymarket as the betting market because of that. It is a leading portal, Galen, for political...

I buy. I mean, it's only March 20th when we're taping this, and like, yeah, I mean, because there are two ways it can work. Elon can quit or Trump can fire him. I mean, you already see, when you see, to decode things, you have like these detailed reports from like the New York Times and other news organizations of these very contentious cabinet meetings where the, again, if you're a longtime media watcher, the level of granularity, it's like Elon Musk had like a booger in his nose. It's like very small things. That means it's like people that were directly in the room, meaning the principal. So the cabinet is already, through the New York Times, which they might hate, right? They're already trying to get rid of Elon, right? And the fact that like, you know, if Trump struggles or his popularity goes down, right, he could get fired. There's the fact that like, you know, Elon is pretty tempestuous. He's shifted from kind of center to quite, I think, right-wing on some issues, like pretty fast, right? And like, I think Elon Musk is a net drag on Trump, and I think Trump is maybe smart enough in that particular way to... I mean, he's an obvious fall guy. I mean, at the very least it's like, okay, you know, if things aren't working then you fire the manager.

It's not that much money really. In the grand scheme of politics, it's not that much money.

I mean, Elon's worth what, I mean, his net worth has fluctuated, right? But like, it's like a thousandth of his net worth roughly. Not all of which is liquid, but like, it's not that much money. Trump's not running again anyway.

55.

Sell. Yeah, that whole quadrant of like Panama, Greenland. By the way, I think it'd be totally fine if Greenland voluntarily wanted to join the United States. I mean, it's worth more to us than if Denmark...

I mean, maybe a 1.6% chance. I don't think 16. I mean, it's like, look, he's been willing... it is true that he's been willing to like... Okay, the thing about tariffs, right, is that like even if they're stupid ideas, then you can just kind of like fiat them from the White House. Like mobilizing for a military operation, even if Trump were stupid enough to do it, then like the deep state would resist it, and like men on the front lines and women on the front lines would resist it, I think, right? Like, it just seems like that requires a lot, an invasion. I mean, that would be...

Yeah, look, people are learning their lesson. I mean, you know, Trump and even more so Elon are really radioactive internationally. I mean, because like, for good reason. I mean, like the United States is like, is like on its allies. Like, why? I mean, they're being sane and strategic. And like, yeah, you know, I have not looked at the Canadian data and figured out, like, I hold because I'm looking at the polls and I haven't done any deeper meta-analysis, right? But like, yeah, I mean, the world is like all fascinated by American politics and like, yeah, they're paying attention. And like, Trump tending to see like other countries except Xi and Putin as kind of like non-player characters. It's like now they're people that like kind of rationally follow their incentives. And unlike some spineless Republican congressman who will tell you off the record over a whiskey sour that like he'd secretly detest Donald Trump, 'Nothing I can do.' Unlike them, their electoral incentives run the other way to like knee Trump in the balls every chance they get because Trump is seen as an unreliable, you know, NATO partner now, which he is.

I mean, look, I'm all in favor of like invading allies, making fun of Canada. I'm in favor of making... I mean, they haven't won a Stanley Cup since 1993, right? And like, but it's, you know what, it's because I'm kind of secretly jealous.

I think it has to do with the fact that like he does a certain amount of trolling, and I mean, look, you can... I think it's 78% like backward rationalization. Well, he's looking at McKinley, and like, you know, I'm a big, by the way, I'm a big pro-Pan-American guy, right? I like the Americas. I like us better than Europe and better than Asia, right? And like, I like Canada, I like Mexico, I like Costa Rica, I like Brazil, you know?