Harris vs. Trump: Nate Silver’s 2024 Election Forecast

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Now, with the U.S. presidential election edging closer, all eyes are seriously focused on candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Nate Silver, the prophetic pollster and poker player who founded the website, 538, has a new bulletin with all the latest analysis. He also has a new book detailing how much like in poker, risk taking could be the key to success. And Nate Silver is joining Walter Isaacson to discuss how bold action could be a game changer in November.

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WALTER ISAACSON, AUTHOR AND JOURNALIST: Thank you, Christiane. And, Nate Silver, welcome to the show.

SILVER: Thank you, Walter.

ISAACSON: You have a great new book out this week called “On The Edge.” And it’s about everything from poker to cryptocurrency to politics. Let me start though with politics. People like me go to your substack, the “Silver Bulletin,” every day to see that election predictor, the election odds type thing. Tell me, what is it showing now in terms of Harris versus Trump. And how do you calculate the probabilities for that?

SILVER: So it shows that right now Harris is about a three-point lead in national polls. That’s a number that Democrats are familiar with. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by two points in 2016. Biden won it by four points in 2020. So she’s kind of right in between those two benchmarks. However, there is a lot of uncertainty. We’ve seen the dramatic events that have been pulled in the campaign so far from Democrats changing their candidate to the assassination attempt against former President Trump. So probabilistically, we have her as about a 55, 45 favorite. If you’re a poker player, you’d rather have the 55 and the 45, but for regular people, it’s a tossup.

ISAACSON: But what goes into that algorithm besides poll numbers?

SILVER: It’s polls, but we also account for the state of the economy and whether the candidate is an incumbent or a challenger. In Harris’s case, there’s no incumbent the election anymore. Biden is not running for another term. So — and the economy is good by some measures, bad by some measures. We have it about average overall. So our model thinks that if you had average candidates, that it would be a tossup in the popular vote, a tie in the popular vote, which means in the Electoral College, which usually favors Republicans recently, she might be a disadvantage. So she has a headwind where, you know, again, in 2016 and 2000, Democrats won the popular vote and lost in Electoral College. That could happen again. It’s about a 12 percent chance of her model that she kind of comes so close to victory that she just comes a little bit short in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, despite winning a popular vote again.

ISAACSON: We’ve seen a lot of what we could call black swan events. Things totally unexpected that disrupt everything, whether it’s an outbreak of COVID from China or Biden dropping out of the race. And we may have a lot more black swan events. Who knows? A war in the Middle East or a Gaza ceasefire. How do you, when you do probabilistic models, calculate in the black swan events?

SILVER: We don’t try to account for black swans, per se, but we do understand that the further out you are from the election, the more uncertainty there is. So you’ll see it’s kind of like a little hurricane track where you kind of go out in time and space and the — and the cone of the hurricane gets wider. That’s basically how our model works. If the election were tomorrow, it would still be uncertain because the polling is close, but less uncertain than it is now. Or less uncertain than an election in three months.

ISAACSON: In terms of calculating risks, one of the big risks the Democratic Party faced was doing that period when Biden was thinking of staying in the race, dropping out of the race. You said that the risk of doing nothing was much stronger. Why?

SILVER: I mean, this is one core lesson from the book, and it’s taken where people like H.R. McMaster that have been in military battles. Standing still is sometimes not a good option. If you’re on the battlefield, you either want to retreat and live to fight another day or charge forward. Staying there as a sitting duck is not a great option. People conflate doing nothing with being the safe choice when sometimes in a lot of walks of life, we have to take bold action, one way or another. In a poker term, it’s you have to raise or fold. Sometimes calling is the worst choice.

ISAACSON: That’s what you’re talking about, what you learn from poker, which is, you know, those of us who are much more amateurs than you are, you’ve won all sorts of tournaments, you know, sometimes we’re like, don’t know what to do. So we don’t — we don’t fold, we don’t raise, we just call. Tell me why that’s a bad strategy.

SILVER: It’s a bad choice because you want to dictate the action in poker, yes. Now and then I’ll feel like a backyard game to friends in Brooklyn who are playing for the first time. And the hallmark of a bad amateur poker player is they just want to call and see what unfolds. And poker is a game about controlled aggression.

ISAACSON: How does that apply to politics then?

SILVER: Well, look, I think politics can be viewed as a strategic game, among other things. It’s much higher stakes in a poker game for sure. But, you know, both parties are intelligent. They both have an incentive to win. And in the long run, both parties win about half the time. I think one mistake that Trump made was to underestimate Democrats’ willingness to change their candidate. Democrats do not have a personality cults around Joe Biden in the same way that the GOP does around Trump. They kind of selected Biden in 2020. Jim Clyburn, and other people came behind Biden to kind of spark into the nomination. And they pushed him aside when it was in their strategic interest to pick another candidate instead.

ISAACSON: Well, in your book, you say your first love is not really politics. Your first love was poker. You’re a great poker player. You played online, then Congress passed some bills saying you couldn’t collect your winnings from online and that drove you into politics. Explain that to me.

SILVER: Yes. I had a boring consulting job coming out of college, a friend of mine at work wanted to start a poker game. I played a little bit in college. And I started practicing a lot. I’m a competitive guy. I started playing free games on the internet. The poker is a game meant to be played for money. So eventually deposited at one of the somewhat sketchy offshore sites. And it was a time when it was called the poker boom, but more like a poker bubble where you had a lot of dumb money in the game, maybe like the crypto bubble from a couple of years ago. So by being kind of mediocre, I was still better relative to competition. The cliche about, you know, if you can’t spot the sucker at the table, then you’re the sucker. It was kind of the reverse of that. It was like everyone was a sucker and I was halfway decent. And so for a time, it was a good way to earn a living.

ISAACSON: Tell me about some of the lessons you learned from poker and how that applies to other things.

SILVER: Yes. Look, the great and late Doyle Brunson, maybe the best poker player of all time, who I talked to before he passed away, preached the gospel of tight aggressive poker, meaning, you’re selective about which hands you play. But when you play them, you play them aggressively and try to win. It’s important to bluff in poker, actually. The reason why poker works is because you have to bluff to induce your opponents to call when you have a strong hand. But there’s also like a lot of emotional discipline that you face when you play poker. If you lose a big pot and lose half your stack, then you still have to battle as best you can for the next big hand that you have or vice versa. Sometimes people go on what’s called tilt, meaning, being emotional and not playing optimally. And that can happen when you’re on a winning streak too. I mean, a lot of people in my world, the kind of the world like all the river of calculated risk taking, they go on a winning streak and then they get overconfident. And that’s a big risk as well.

ISAACSON: And one of the characters in your book that’s pretty big is Elon Musk. And he says that we used to be a nation of risk-takers. But now we become a nation with more referees than risk takers. Do you agree with that?

SILVER: I agree with that, in part. I think. I mean, look, Silicon Valley is still the innovation capital of the world in AI, which might be the most important technology of the next generation and the U.S. as a leader right now. You know, attracting immigrants from all around the world is very important. But at the same time, we saw, I think COVID revealed that there’s a streak maybe on the East Coast, in particular, of risk aversion, instead of trying to weigh risk and rewards. But, yes, look, you know, the book, in some ways, is about American exceptionalism in certain ways. Our economy is still growing, whereas Europe has stagnated, for example. And risk taking countries tend to — tend to win in the long run.

ISAACSON: Tell me about COVID and how we miscalculated, in your mind, risks during that period.

SILVER: Yes, look, it’s a hard problem to solve. It’s the worst pandemic that the world pays in 100 years and maybe where our intuitions weren’t very valuable there. But, you know, sometimes things that are hard to calculate, like the value of being able to have a social life or the value of more importantly being able to send your kids to school, that actually has huge consequences that will be realized years later when you have, you know, half a year of education permanently lost to poor students around the United States. You know, if you try to calculate that and that’s hard, but that has effects on well-being and the GDP and everything else. And so — and so, you know — unfortunately, we have to make decisions, right? We can’t just call again in the poker sense all the time. And I think in that sense, we could have been maybe bolder about shutting down more strictly at the start and then realizing after the first couple of months that we had to open up and pay a prize, but that the consequences of not getting back to normal for education and other such the economy outweighed, you know, the frankly horrible death toll. But that’s a tough choice that you have to make. You can’t avoid — you can’t avoid tough choices sometimes.

ISAACSON: Did the partisan response to COVID, in some ways, shift your own political thinking?

SILVER: Yes. Look, one trend that you’ve seen for the past 15 or 20 years is that more and more people who go to college, or especially have advanced degrees, are liberals and Democrats, which is fine. But when you have communities where 95 percent of people are progressive Democrats, I think there can be more groupthink. And especially in election year, remember COVID happened in 2020, the previous election. You can have a conflation between, you know, expertise for expertise’s sake and using that for a partisan weapon sometimes in terms of, you know, questions like the origins of COVID seem highly ambiguous to me. But because President Trump was kind of on the side of the lab league, I think that suppressed valid discussion about this disease that we don’t know. We still don’t know yet. There’s no scientific consensus on how it emerged. And that seemed to me — I mean, that — you know, that caused to me a loss of trust in these institutions. And part of what the book’s about is in a world where we feel like we have to fend for ourselves because, you know, every institution but the military from the Catholic Church to the media, has declined in perceptions of trust. And that is a, you know, kind of dangerous world in which you maybe have to make choices for yourself and make up your own mind. And that’s what the book’s about.

ISAACSON: To what extent is a taste for risk-taking and ingrained trait?

SILVER: I think it’s pretty genetic. I talked to a man named Victor Vescovo in the book, who’s kind of the ultimate risk-taker. He has climbed the seven summits, the seven highest mountain peaks on every continent. He’s gone to the depths of the five oceans. He’s gone into outer space. He’s been a fighter pilot. And he’s like, when I talk to other people who are taking these risks, because he knows, if you’re on a mountain 28,000 feet high, right, you can’t control every risk. There’s some chance of an avalanche or a misstep. He’s been in accidents before. And he talks to other explorers, he’s like, yes, there’s just something innate genetic. I don’t know if he knows what it is, but some people just have an intrinsic desire to push boundaries, I think.

ISAACSON: Do you think that there’s a fundamental difference between the physical risk-takers, people climb mountains, astronauts, versus say somebody who just loves day trading on cryptocurrency or gambling on the roulette wheel rather than poker?

SILVER: When I started the book, I assumed there was a difference, but by talking to both groups, now I think there probably actually isn’t. In part, because when you play poker, your body, for high stakes, your body perceives the risk. You actually see your heart rate increase. You see — you know, time perception can slow down a little bit. I mean, even in things like — if you ever are giving a public speech, in a high-stakes situation where if you flub the speech, it’s going to look badly on you. It might hurt your career. You can get stage fright on the one hand, but other people become possessed and they become kind of in the zone and they can be better under pressure than other people. Having that skill — and the good news, by the way, is that it can be learned. I think Kamala Harris is an example of a candidate who was not very good in her first campaign in 2020, but had a lot of practice giving speeches all around the world and now it seems like a much better candidate, at least subjectively to me. So you can train yourself to when you’re operating a different operating system and your body has a stress response, you’re actually picking up more information from your environment. And you’ll sometimes see up here people take, like Michael Jordan talk about how I’m in the zone and I see more things and time slows down. I can think really clearly. That’s a rare trait, but if you possess it, and if you — and if you practice in that zone, then you can actually accomplish tremendous things.

ISAACSON: If you were advising, let’s start with the Harris campaign, which risk, calculated risk, would you be willing to take and which would you avoid?

SILVER: I mean, I think there’s a case that she should have picked Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania as her running mate, that’s kind of the percentage played, given how important Pennsylvania is to the outcome. I think now she has to worry a little bit about the risk of complacency. You know, she’s a little bit ahead in the polls right now. She’ll probably continue to be ahead after the convention. But the polls have been wrong before. We saw with Hillary Clinton in 2016, how, you know, having a two or three-point lead is far from the guarantee of success.

ISAACON: And what about the Trump campaign? What risk do you think they should be taking now?

SILVER: Yes. Look, I mean, the term that we use in poker sometimes as a player, like I said, is on tilt where they’re playing emotionally. And some of Trump’s recent decisions are hard to rationalize, I think. Going after Kamala Harris’s race or complaining about AI-enhanced crowd size. When there’s a lot of, you know, low-hanging fruit in terms of voter concerns about inflation and the economy, in terms of immigration and the border, in terms of Harris running very far to her left in 2020. Look, Trump thought he had a winning hand. He thought he had the campaign in the bag. And with Biden as a candidate, he might have, but he has to — he has to adjust and recalibrate. They’ve been very slow on the draw as Democrats redefined J.D. Vance negatively and Tim Walz positively. And, you know, there’s no much — not much more time to make up at this point.

ISAACON: And someone said that all great ideas come from intuition. But he said, all great intuition comes from processing a whole lot of earlier experiences. You talk in the book about quantifying intuitions. Explain that.

SILVER: So in poker, you kind of can actually develop like a sixth sense, based on someone’s mannerisms, the way they’re poshier (ph) or things like that. If you see their heart beating in their neck, for example. You develop an intuition where you correlate that with whether they have a strong or weak handle. It’s very contextual. Some players get more nervous when they’re bluffing. Some players get more nervous when they have a strong hand. And they end up trying to win a huge pot. So we have some maybe semantic vocabulary deep in our brains that we develop over time, but it has to be practiced. Intuition provides us with data if we know how to correlate that with behavioral traits. I mean, another person, you know, Nancy Pelosi talked about her intuition with Ezra Klein for understanding how the democratic caucus behaves. And I believe in her intuition. She understands like nobody else, how Democrats think. Maybe not swing voters, but Democrats. Democratic legislators for sure. But it’s a matter of practice and skill. It’s a matter of not just trusting your gut because you’re being lazy and don’t want to think through a problem, but when you actually have thousands of hours of experience with it, then it can be helpful.

ISAACON: At the end of your book, you talk about certain things we could do to have a better society. You talk about agency, you talk about plurality. And you also have talked about reciprocity. Let me deal with the reciprocity one.

SILVER: Yes.

ISAACON: That seemed the most interesting and what we most need now. Explain that to me.

SILVER: So this comes partly from game theory. And game theory is what evolves when both you and your opponent are playing strategically and roughly rational, roughly optimal in your decision-making. In the United States, both parties win elections roughly half the time because they do adapt. I mean, Donald Trump understood that maybe there were opportunities among white working class voters that were being neglected by the, you know, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan types of candidates. Recently though, I think there’s a risk that both parties had caught up in their own bubble and don’t give the other side credit for adapting intelligently. I think this was, you know, most obviously the case with the Trump campaigns and ability to foresee Democrats switching their candidate, which was the right strategic moves. So I think if you — you know, assume your opponent’s playing their hand well and play your hand as best you can, given that, that’s reciprocity. Sometimes you get lucky and your opponent makes a mistake, but that’s easy to win. Most of the time, it’s hard to actually make good bets. It’s a competitive market. It’s a competitive economy. And so give your opponent’s credit and then adapt from there.

ISAACON: Nate Silver, thank you so much for joining us.

SILVER: Thank you, Walter.