OK, Here's What Happened With Nate Silver

Over the past winter and spring, I linked pretty frequently to Nate Silver's Substacks, especially the February essay where he listed a series of tasks Joe Biden needed to undertake to turn his electoral prospects around. Back then, he was especially worried that Joe wasn't doing interviews:

This is bad, folks. Biden’s doing a lot fewer interviews than even the media-hostile Trump. And when he does them, his performance is still just mediocre. That’s why something like turning down a Super Bowl interview ought to be highly concerning.

His prescription:

Over the course of the next several weeks, Biden should do four lengthy sitdown interviews with “non-friendly” sources. “Non-friendly” doesn't mean hostile: nonpartisan reporters with a track record of asking tough questions would work great. A complete recording of the interviews should be made public. The interviews ought to include a mix of different media (e.g. television and print) and journalistic perspectives.

I've revisited this essay several times, especially in light of Joe's withdrawal from the race. What strikes me now is that Silver saw this at the time as a simple question of strategy: all his handlers needed to do was make a simple adjustment and set him up for some interviews. His reasoning was that yeah, there would be some gaffes, but statistically, they could be discounted, and the fact that he'd actually done some interviews would count in his favor. Or somethong like that.

In hindsight, it's become clear that Joe's condition was far worse than we'd been led to believe, and his handlers' main task was simply covering this up. The idea of having Joe do "four lengthy sit-down interviews" over the next several weeks was vain fancy, and by four months later, we saw the inevitable outcome. It's a little peculiar that anyone, certainly including me, ever saw this as a reasonable suggestion.

So in any case, it's maybe time to reassess Nate Silver as a reader of omens, even before we get to his more recent assessments of the race involving Kamala Harris. But as of June 26, he said, "The presidential election isn't a toss-up":

it was certainly a close race, but we’d reached the point where it would be dishonest to call it a toss-up.

. . . if we’re being honest, pundits who obsess over whether Biden is 1 point ahead or behind in national polls are kind of missing the point. Because national polls being tied don’t make for a toss-up race — but instead one where Trump has a material advantage in the Electoral College.

Except that as of August 1, with Kamala now in the formula, he'd changed his mind:

Now that the election is in kamala_mode, however, it’s far from clear whose position you’d rather be in, and I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to bet either on Harris or on Trump. At FiveThirtyEight, we actually had a formal definition of a “toss-up”, which is an election where each candidate had at least a 40 percent chance of winning. We’re now quite comfortably into that territory. As of this afternoon’s model run, Harris’s odds had improved to 44.6 percent, as compared to 54.9 percent for Trump and a 0.5 percent chance of an Electoral College deadlock. It’s not exactly 50/50, but close enough that a poker player would call it a “flip”: Democrats have ace-king suited, and Republicans have pocket jacks.

And two days later, he was esplaining Why she should pick Shapiro:

Why Shapiro? What’s the positive case? Well, Shapiro is the extremely popular governor of what is by far the most important swing state. He’s highly charismatic and he’s qualified. He seems to want the job. This is about as obvious as things get in politics. You need a good reason to not pick Shapiro[.]

Well, for good or ill, and for whatever reason, obvious or not, she didn't go with Shapiro. By August 5, the day before Kamala didn't pick Shapiro, Silver was even more bullish:

Harris rose again in our forecast today: in the span of a week, she’s gone from a 37 percent chance of winning the Electoral College to a 53 percent chance. The race is still a toss-up for all intents and purposes, but if you’re sweating the details, you’d rather have the 53 percent side of a bet than the 47 percent half.

But by August 10, his most recent take on the election, he's begun to back off again:

And yet there’s a part of me — just a part — . . . . That thinks it was probably a mistake for Harris to pick Tim Walz instead of Josh Shapiro, but that not wanting to disrupt the campaign’s favorable trajectory with a higher-risk pick was a valid consideration.

. . . The Harris campaign is going to need more cushion, because it could very, very easily lose the Electoral College in an election held today — outside of that NYT polling, the race still looks pretty close to a toss-up — and it still faces headwinds like economic volatility, immigration, and Biden’s baggage.

It's worth remembering that Silver sees himself as a statistical modeler, not a campaign consultant. His background is in playing professional poker, which boils down to passively predicting outcomes, not trying to influence them. Still, he's been giving advice. In February, he told Biden to do four sit-down interviews in the next several weeks. Two weeks ago, he told Kamala to pick Shapiro. The man is not clairvoyant -- if you want someone who's currently a lot luckier, go for Trump.

But at least for now, Silver seems to have dropped prognosticating the election, because he's on a book tour.

Today is publication day for On The Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, my new book about gambling and risk, and a lot of other things. And if we’re being honest, I’m feeling a little overwhelmed. Traditional publishers like mine believe in a cluster marketing strategy — having their authors do a lot of media in short succession, which is carefully timed to the launch. So suddenly, you’re probably seeing a lot of Nate everywhere you look.

The last thing he's going to do is talk realistically about Kamala, because that would spoil all the puffery on the talking-head shows his publisher has him booked to pitch his book. What's a little strange is this all puts him right back where he says he doesn't want to be:

Three-and-a-half years ago, when I first conceived of On The Edge, I was feeling discontented — maybe even lost. . . . I wasn’t sure the whole Quasi-Celebrity Election Forecaster Guy thing was working. As I wrote in the book proposal, I felt like “Shamu on exhibit at SeaWorld”, performing tricks for people but not on my own terms.

So now he's on a book tour set up by his publisher saying things his publisher tells him to say, because he doesn't want to perform tricks for people on someone else's terms. And the very last thing he's ever going to do is depart from the media line on Kamala.

But how much insight does he really have into what's going on if he couldn't discern that there was no way Joe Biden could do four sit-down interviews, while at the same time Kamala is avoiding interviews just as much as Joe? What does he think is behind this, especially if the reason neither wants interviews is the same? What does he think the effect will be that Kamala didn't choose Shapiro -- or indeed, that maybe Shapiro, on reflection, didn't choose Kamala?

I doubt if he'd place a serious bet on Kamala winning the election now, but of course, he can't say that.