Nate Silver on Kamala Harris’s Chances and the Mistakes of the ‘Indigo Blob’
Risk has been on my mind this year. For Democrats, the question of whether Joe Biden should drop out was really a question about risk – the risk of keeping him on the ticket versus the risk of the unknown. And it’s hard to think through those kinds of questions when you have incomplete information and so much you can’t predict. After all, few election models forecast that Kamala Harris would have the kind of momentum we’ve seen the last few weeks.
Nate Silver’s new book, “On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything,” is all about thinking through risk, and the people who do it professionally, from gamblers to venture capitalists. (Silver is a poker player himself.) And so I wanted to talk to him about how that kind of thinking could help in our politics – and its limits.
We discuss how Harris is performing in Silver’s election model; what he means when he talks about “the village” and “the river”; what Silver observed profiling Peter Thiel and Sam Bankman-Fried, two notorious risk-takers, for the book; the trade-offs of Harris’s decision to choose Tim Walz over Josh Shapiro as a running mate; and more.