Nate Silver Predicts: Democrats Take the House, Newsom Is Fading & AOC Might Win It All in 2028

Partisanship is the gravity that dictates every election in the U.S., right? Like my job, don't worry, I will get criticized if we say, oh, whatever, Gavin Newsom or AOC is a 55% favorite and they lose. But 43 of the 50 states stated, we could probably predict right now with 97% confidence who they'll vote for in 2028. And it's not because of reading. It's because polarization and partisanship are very powerful forces that we can't seem to escape from. Starting a business usually means juggling a bunch of different services just to look legit. Not anymore. With Northwest Registered Agent, you get a complete business identity all in one place. a business address, domain, website, phone number, and more. With privacy protection built in from day one, don't spend hundreds or thousands on services you can get from Northwest for free. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com slash all in free and start using free resources to build your business today. All right, everybody, welcome back to the All In interview program. We are delighted today to have the one, the only Nate Silver on the program. Gambler, statistician, podcaster, sub stacker. Go subscribe right now for a hundy, quick hundy at Silver Bulletin over at sub stack. It's a great sub stack. How are you doing, brother? Nice to see you with your Knicks hat on. I'm good. You know, I think I have like one more week to wear the Knicks hat. It's a little bulky, not super podcast video friendly. But, you know, once in 53 years, once in my lifetime at least. Did you go to any of the playoff games? I went to a bunch of the Philly series. I went to, I think as Jason did, I was in Philly for like the New York City takeover of Wells Fargo. We know where the hell it's called now, Infinity or something. I went to the Trump game, which was not the right game to go to. But I wanted to be there. I wanted to kind of cover it for my readers. I felt like it was a moment where New York might triumph out of the shit show that it was to get into the arena. It was a little different. You had to show up, what, two hours early to get in? Three hours? I am not a particularly prompt person. No, I'm not. So I got there at like 6, 6.05 for an 8.30 game. Lined up. You're supposed to get in on 6th Avenue and 33rd. And I was like on 6th and 30th or 29th. It wasn't the worst. It wasn't the least efficient process I've ever seen. New York has a way of getting things done, and you just kind of follow people. Once you get in, it was literally TSA security. They literally look at your wallet by hand, and they take your lighters and your pens and your vapes and everything like that. Once you get in, it was pretty normal. I did feel like the crowd was a little bit fatigued by the second half, which was a choppy second half where there were some questionable officiating decisions. Did you bet any of the games? and did you find the odds were off anywhere? I had the Knicks to win the Eastern Conference Finals, and then after they wrapped up their series, I bet them to win the finals against either OKC or San Antonio. So I actually, the ticket was not cheap. I paid, it would not cover Jason's tickets, but I was able to cover my 200-level bowl seat with the profits from those non-homer bets. I thought the Knicks were legitimately overlooked in the East, and when you see a team that wins, like that game against Atlanta where we were up like literally like 77 to 22 at some point or something like I'm like as somebody who like studies this stuff and builds models to see that kind of signature significance for that level of dominance over whatever it was four rounds the playoffs like that's that's real that's like not noise do you bet prediction markets or how do you bet big tony if if you are I don't bet you're big tony if you are someone who's perceived so I've been limited by draft kings and and mgm a lot of the uh traditional retail sports books limit you the prediction markets do not i consult for polymarket i should say so if you're a sharp better i have other issues believe me with the prediction markets but if you are a sharp better then it becomes easier to concentrate your activity on the prediction markets where you know you have very smart people you have hedge funds you're probably making bets in these markets more and more but yeah more more and more i don't want to go through the rigmarole of like can i even get my money down. So I will admit I've gravitated toward those. Yes. And when you look at this team, what do you attribute? Because obviously during the season, it was up and down. We were 15 games from the end of the season. People were like, hey, we got to trade for Giannis. We got to get Kat out of here. But in January, February, we had this incredible run where we had used Kat as the set point center. And then we backed off of it. And I was on KnicksFanTV talking with like the real deep folks and there was speculation like they figured it out and they're like let's hold this play mike brown said let's hold cat at the point from you know until the playoffs because we know it works so good but what makes this team so special is it the the wings is it just brunson's grit is it the three-point shooting across the team selflessness ball movement there's so many things people talk about here with this team i think it's mike brown and cat i'm not saying of the most important components of the Knicks. I'm saying those are the deltas where things changed the most. On defense, a couple of things. Number one, you have, I love Jalen Brunson, might be my favorite player. He's not a terrific one-on-one defender. He gets a few steals, but he's undersized. The low center of gravity somehow doesn't work on defense as well. But every other defender of the Knicks, including Towns, which is a dissented point of view, are at least average, if not better. And so, like, kind of figuring out that system. By the way, when you rely on a defensive system that requires high effort and transition play, not playing your guys 37 minutes per game against, like, the Charlotte Hornets in the regular season, probably a smart move. Yeah, this is why Tibbs had to go. When you look back on it, Tibbs going, who ground these guys into submission for three seasons, and they were, yeah, it was like we were down one, two, or three starters for every round of the previous playoffs. Yeah, I remember going to the Indiana, I guess, Game 7 of the semifinals against Indiana in 2024. You kind of see, like, OG was hobbling around out there. I guess Josh Hart kind of valiantly played. And you're like, these guys are like an infirmary ward. And especially because you're relying on smart, high-effort defense. So that part of defense, and low-key, they became like a much better defensive team in the second half, right? I remember also going this year to the Knicks-Nets game in December or January, not the most fun part of the year, in New York, where they had lost like seven out of nine games, and there was all the talk about like Cat being traded. And I just wanted to go and check out the vibe. I actually bet on the Knicks to win by like 15 points or more, because I thought this is either going to be like the beginning of the end for this regime, or it's going to be a turnaround game against a team that's trying to lose, frankly, a crosstown rival is trying to lose. And the fans were pretty tolerant of Cat. They wound up winning by 60 points or something totally absurd or held the nets of one of the lowest scores in the modern NBA era. And that team from there, by the way, they won the NBA Cup. Yep. But in the second half, they had something like the fifth best defense in the NBA. They had the best defense in the NBA in the playoffs, maybe not sustainable, But that on defense and then Cat presenting, again, I love Jalen Brunson. The offense can be a little bit predictable. Maybe in clutch possessions. Yeah, right. And it's amazing that Jalen Brunson, he shot like 53% between 16 and 22 feet, which is kind of insane, given that you know what's coming. It's like Marian Rivera's cut fastball. You know what's coming. But just to have more optionality and variety in the offense and to have more ball movement. So to have those two spontaneous things happen, the coaching system-led improvement on defense, plus, like, Cat having a revelation, like, I think he's, like, one of the 15 best players in the league. He was raised, like, yeah, he's a really good player. And so those two things combined, you know, a little bit unusual for a veteran team, granted, but spontaneous improvement on both sides of the ball, coupled with the Knicks, by the way, have the most playoff games out of any team in the past four years more than boston more than okc a lot more than san antonio there is empirical evidence that playoff experience does matter yes this comes up in poker too if you are in your first big tournament and maybe you're rated the gpi number one player and you're playing in the main event of the world series of poker nerves are a thing even in golf nerves are a huge thing it's a physical ordeal almost and like You're operating on a different operating system. And to have had experience in a lot of high-stakes games, not all of which were wins, but it really does help. And Wemby... Those two comebacks from the Boston games, where we just broke their backs last year, that, I think, made it obvious to anybody. When we're down 10, 15 points, that's not a lead against the Knicks. The Knicks are going to come back. We're just that good. and it's just fantastic now that the entire league has to plan how do they beat the Knicks we spent the last like five or six years how do we get through Boston how do we get through this team now the entire league has to do that all right we should get started here we got so much to talk about and obviously you specialize in elections we have the midterms coming up we're going to talk about 2028 post-Trump world all of that but we just concluded an election an election which I I don't want to speak for Dave, but you may have seen or heard the podcast where he was like, hey, this is not illegal, but it doesn't feel like a real election. Take us through what happened in your estimation in California with Spencer Pratt. Fraud, just mail-in ballots. Yeah, that was just the L.A. election, Jason, just to be clear. Yeah, just to go with L.A., but go ahead, build on it. The question that I wanted to talk to you about, Nate, is when you look at the in-person return data and then you look at the early mail-in data and then the late mail-in data where suddenly Nipya Raman has this massive surge and there's this huge statistical difference as the ballots start to get counted in the days and weeks that follow, she wins. it seems very improbable that there's a true statistical difference in the population that might you know be in person mail in early and mail in late and i just wanted to get your read on that so i'd say i think there's no evidence of fraud is the short summary version the mistake that can be made is to assume that each ballot like comes in independently when there are systematic differences between groups and when they tend to cast their ballots so democrats have long been encouraged to vote by mail actually it used to be more of a republican thing but like under trump who discouraged mail voting in 2016 and 2020 um and 2024 to some extent like that shifted so look i think california's system is completely unacceptable i've done um some consulting work on like the indian election where you like literally have polling stations in the himalayas and they actually stagger their elections but once election day happens they count their vote within 24 hours. I think it's ridiculous and very failed state that California takes longer than that. But if you have one party who systematically tends to vote later, also Democrats in both the LA race and the governorship had more of a choice to make. It wasn't clear for a while. It looked like Eric Swalwell was going to win and then Katie Porter and then Becerra finally emerges. like look my dad is from la i spent a lot of time in california and i am all on board with the criticisms of how the state is being governed at least in parts of the state i was in um san diego for new years and beautiful time of year to be in san diego and like you can like literally run on the sand and the beach and everyone's kind of like hot and you have good fish tacos and everything else like that i kind of understood the california of like my youth or my dad's youth or whatever else understand the appeal of the state and i understand why la and sf i think la in particular kind of never really recovered from the pandemic we can talk about that at the same time it's a very partisan state we have very partisan democrats like kamala harris and gavin newsom who emerged in the state we saw in the registering referendum i guess it was in 2025 five how like you can debate what's a good idea or not but like that traced with the democratic margin in presidential years very strongly even though for many years democrats had been the party against gerrymandering um it's a capital d democratic state it's not an idiosyncratic blue state like maine or something and like so like to expect even a very talented republican like spencer pratt to win the mayor's ship i mean even in new york we have a bit more heterodoxy historically. We've had a, you know, socialist mayor. We've had Michael Bloomberg and really Giuliani in recent years, too. California is not that way. It's much more of a machine state. But when you look at that statistical difference, I get the idea that Democrats mail in ballots and they show up late. But when you look at the overwhelming votes for Nipia Rahman over Karen Bass that happened late in the counting cycle versus early in the counting cycle and the statistical kind of shift over that happened. And you look at the difference between in-person and mail-in being so statistically different. And I get your point about Republicans are more likely to go in person and maybe you can make that leap there. But the difference in accounting that happened over time, the ratio just seemed so different between ramen and bass. And then people bring up this idea of ballot harvesting where there were homeless people from Skid Row and the number of ballots that came from that particular region in the late mail-in was kind of concentrated for Nitya Raman, do you get a sense that that actually is a true representation of individual voters and how they individually voted in that election? I think the California vote count is an accurate tally of the votes that were cast. I mean, yeah, look, I think mail-in... Were they cast by the individuals that were supposed to cast them, right? This is one of the theories is that there's ballots that are getting filled out en masse in these ballot harvesting efforts, or people walk around and they say, hey, fill out this ballot for this person and here's a free lunch or I don't know what's going on but like there's all these videos I don't know if they're true or not I think there is propaganda around this I also think that like mail-in voting provides some verification challenges in different ways uh you know I don inherently see anything that wrong with a system where you go to a physical place to vote and you sign um you sign your voter log and whether you show ID or not And then if you have like a disability or you really in bad straits or you traveling in Albania or something, then you can mail it. That makes sense. But I just want to ask you the empirical question. What is the difference in states or districts or cities that don't have voter ID and those that do politically? Like, is that basically create a huge overweighting for Democrats. Can you just help us understand the politics behind this from an empirical perspective, not putting on a spin hat or anything? So the theory used to be that Democrats benefit from higher turnout by kind of any means at all. And that was an era when Democrats tended to dominate among non-collegiate voters, whereas Republicans were like the, you know, country club, Kiwanis club, people who like show up in the first day of voting. That has shifted. Look where Democrats have really, really overperformed. It's in special elections. It's in midterms as opposed to high turnout races like when Trump's been on the ballot. And so I think if Trump... I think voter ID would be pretty reasonable. I'm not against voter ID. You show your ID to do... If you show ID even at mid-40s to get into a bar, you can probably show it to vote. But at the same time, I don't think that explains what we saw in California. I think it's a system that is much too slow. We have different tranches of ballots that are kind of differently and where younger people that might be more progressive tend to vote later and or by mail. And again, it's not like this happened in Alabama or something. The prior on Pratt advancing probably would be pretty low potentially. And I wish that people were were less partisan. I have been critical on the newsletter, silver bulletin about Graham Plattner, for example, because I think he's somebody who has not proven a reliable figure, so to speak. And I was critical of Joe Biden. And I'm not even registered as a Democrat, by the way, despite what people assume. But if you're going to have five different ways to vote, and I say this as someone with experience, like actually trying to build election night models and being on national TV on election nights, these blue shifts or red shifts are somewhat predictable and are going to be an inevitable consequence of having different mechanisms to vote where you have like different cues in a line. If you're at MSG and you have a VIP line, the cohort that arrives through the VIP line is going to be different than the one that arrives through the main gates on 7th Avenue or whatever. And I think the system should be simplified. By the way, also things like ranked choice voting, which I, again, as an election wonk, I support giving voters more choice. You shouldn't need, like Maine or New York City take, an extra two weeks to count ranked choice voting where I could clod code. a rank choice voting algorithm that would resolve itself in seven minutes, even with 100 million votes in Maine or half a million or whatever it was. It's a core issue, Nate, that we have the appearance of impropriety and we have a highly politicized system. I don't want to lead the witness here too much, but we do find isolated cases like this woman, Annika, Brenda Lee Brown Armstrong. wrong, she was paying people three bucks or giving them cigarettes to register them. You have these on the margin, fraudulent looking behaviors. And then if it takes this long, that gives another appearance of impropriety. But I keep bringing up the Heritage Foundation. I'm sure you've looked at their data. They have a lot of people trying to figure out where fraud exists, investigating it. And it's de minimis. It's a couple of thousands of cases they can find. So even if you extrapolated them 10x or 20x, pick your multiple, it would never swing a major election. In fact, the number of elections that have been swung, based on what they told me, is like the most local smallest election, where there's tens of thousands of votes or thousands of votes. So is that the issue that we're seeing here, this collection of appearances of impropriety? Yes. Look, the the American election system is very decentralized, which, you know, as kind of like an old school liberal in some ways who I'm kind of against centralized power, I think is quite brilliant in some respects. But yeah, the scale, there is certainly, there are certainly cases of fraud. When Al Franken won, what was it, 2006, right? That came down to like a recount of like 200 votes. We're never going to know that with any degree of certainty. There is like a margin of error. But in practice, and we know this too, when you do have recounts, again, I've studied this a lot, you have an 0.5% recount threshold in most states. Almost never have you had a margin larger than 0.05% or so overturned. The errors can also cancel out. Again, the notion that someone can vote without physically being like the ward of their ballot, understand why that bothers people, and I think California has been complacent about this, and I think perception does matter, and I think there's a kind of certain arrogance, I guess, is the term that comes to mind, about saying, well, we want everyone to vote, and so we're just going to do things our way, and it takes a long time because we're taking time to verify things, Again, you know, having studied elections all around the world, it's very unusual. Most countries would count much, much faster than the U.S. because we have an electoral college system. It's decentralized. But like in most elections in France or the U.K., where they keep having elections or wherever else or Japan or India, even, you know, the result of the vote within a few hours. And the fact that the United States, the technological leader of the world and the supposed like of democracy can't do that, I think is a sign of atrophy of the efficacy of the system. Or is it by design, Nate? Let me ask you a question. If voter ID laws don't change, and mail-in ballot laws don't change, and the system doesn't change, is there a chance, do you think, from the data you've seen, for a Republican governor to be elected again in California, or for Republicans to win more seats in the House, or have a shot at winning a Senate seat in california i mean fundamentally does this system not get set up in such a way that it creates a irreversible model for democrat establishment to maintain its control over elected seats in the state i mean democrats have lost plenty of elections recently but not in california partisanship is the gravity that dictates every election in the u.s right like my job don't worry I will get criticized if if we say, oh, whatever, Gavin Newsom or AOC is a 55 percent favorite and they lose. But like but 43 of the 50 states stated we could probably predict right now with 97 percent confidence who they'll vote for in 2028. And it's not because of reading. It's because polarization and partisanship are very powerful forces that we can't seem to to escape from. You know, again, I would love you see a little bit of this in New England, actually. Right. You see like a Charlie Baker or as Phil Scott in Vermont. Right. You see a little bit of like cross partisanship in New England. You see even the South like Bashir in Kentucky is a moderate but Democratic governor. For some reason, you don't see it as much in California. I don't know why. Like, California has like always been like the laboratory of weird and eccentric political ideas. But it's come it's become a machine state, maybe because it's so large that voters can't kind of touch the candidates up close and don't have a lot of like directly relatable experience. Maybe California is just kind of like too large in general. But I look, I am very concerned about polarization and partisanship. I think it leads to lower quality of governance. I think it's exacerbated by gerrymandering, this gerrymandering kind of war to the bottom. And Democrats have paid the price where like the triangulation, you pick the least worst nominee, works perfectly fine in blue states. They're going to win the general election. It hasn't given the Democrats very effective general election nominees. Right. Between, you know, I consider like, you know, they're one of the last four. I consider Biden to have lost in 2024 before Harris lost instead. You know, the one election that did win was during a once in a century pandemic that, although I have my critiques of liberal handling of covid, was kind of objectively handled. Well, I know you can talk about Operation Warp Sheet. I understand my voters were very unhappy with 2020, the 2020 version of Trump and the greatest economic disruption since the 1930s. So they kind of won the gimme. They haven't won the close elections recently except for Obama, who conspicuously at least kind of made rhetoric to trying to bridge a divide between the parties. You know, Obama still has a look at this today, a 57 percent approval rating post facto with with independence. Biden is at 20 percent. and like look I think a lot of Democrats and Republicans certainly maybe even more so Republicans frankly under Trump feel as though you don't even have to try to turn out the other side or persuade people it's just a numbers game and in California if you're Democrats you win the numbers game you run back-to-back calls all day decisions get made then the details slip Claude fixes that clip Claude Note Pro to your phone hit record and stay in the conversation Flawed Intelligence captures every word and turns it into structured notes, action items, and follow-ups, not a transcript you'll never open. The actual work done for you. Capture more. Miss nothing. Find Flawed Note Pro at Flawed.ai. I think we want to really get to 2026 and 2028 and talk about what you were alluding to, which is the polarization and how these parties have changed. the republicans used to be you know this country club group uh elites rich people business owners now they're the populist party then the other side which used to be the working man and the working women's party they've become this liberal weird socialist party and that seems to be playing they're both what's going on with the vibes i guess between these two parties and how do you look at them because it does feel like inside of each of those parties you have two sub parties So you really have like some sort of four by four matrix or two by two matrix with four different groups. How is that going to play out in 2026, which still feels like the anti-Trump vote? Like, hey, I'm not happy about Trump. But 2028, there's Trump's not going to run a third time in all likelihood. So let's take those two buckets as well as the vibes and these parties fracturing a bit. Yeah, I think Democrats really have three factions as I've described them. one is the left the avatars might be Zoran might be AOC might be Bernie Sanders all of whom by the way are quite effective politicians in their own way Zoran understood how to like be a Knicks cheerleader for example that speech was like almost perfect whoever wrote it for him is a Knicks fan but look I'll be honest I didn't vote for him But I think find anyone who's trying to bridge gaps and expand a tent, even if it's from a direction that I might not agree with, I find that somewhat appealing, I suppose. You know, AOC, you can take your leave. She has become a more effective tactical politician. You know, Bernie, what he's built with with being a freaking old guy from Vermont, the socialist mayor of Burlington, Vermont, coming within not a hair's breadth, but coming, you know, quite close and beating Clinton in 20 states in 2016 or whatever was quite impressive. But like that's one constituency. And historically, the left has not had a lot of big wins outside of the bluest states. On the other side, there are the abundance libs kind of named after Ezra Klein, right? They are more pro-free market. They sometimes deny that they're centrist. I think they're pretty centrist. They are the ones who are very concerned with California as a case study of poor governance. And whatever you think about parties at the national level, generally speaking, it's the purple states, sometimes the red states where things are more functional, where there's more housing, where when you get out of the airport to catch an Uber, there's not some convoluted system where you have to wait 20 minutes in line to go to some shuttle like an LAX or whatever else, right? Where there's population growth. I mean, you want to talk about like hard data. Population data in the U.S. and jobs data is pretty good, and those are states where people have moved to. And the abundance slips are critical of democratic governance and critical of culture war issues on policing and trans rights And you have what I call the resistance lib faction. They're the ones who say they're really fed up with the Democratic establishment, but are still often very partisan and often very like cheerleading for the blue team. They're the ones who thought that Joe Biden was railroaded out of the 2024 race, for example. They're really Gavin Newsom's constituency. see um why is gavin newsom going out of his way to support and endorse kind of the biden's when biden even among democrats is not all that popular anymore everyone else wants to move on well it's because it's a signal to like the resistance libs that like i have your back i'm a fighter the reason why we didn't win in 2024 is because the media was unfair to biden and or because kamala harris was a black woman so pick a white guy who will fight for you and tweet in all caps and you'll win. So it's kind of like ride or die. We're going to just, our team, our team, our team's going to win. It doesn't matter. We never apologize. Kind of the Trump playbook. Never apologize. Go on the attack. Seems to be what Gavin's doing, right? Absolutely. And he had some proof of concept. I mean, the redistricting thing was a genuinely smart tactical move. Democrats are going to wind up losing seats, but like without California, they probably lose even more. And so he did skate where the puck was going there instead of the party's usual risk solution that I've critiqued before. But at the same time, the triangulating spirit of, like, let's pick Kamala Harris because she's the least unacceptable candidate, or Hillary, or John Kerry, if you want to go back to 2004, the establishment doesn't seem to have an understanding of the fact that almost every election now, Obama in 2012, was, I guess, the exception. Almost every election now is a change election. We might ping pong back and forth for many cycles. I think Democrats are slight favorites to win in 2028. It wouldn shock me if AOC or Newsom or Shapiro or Ossoff or whomever wins If they underdogs again in 2032 Look what happening in the UK where I mean it kind of become like a running joke but we going to be through like what like six prime ministers in nine years or something And they're probably the US's like closest comp. It's not a good time to be a defender of the status quo. And I do think candidates like Kamala Harris, who was unable to distance herself, kind of literally unable or unwilling to distance herself from Biden, or Newsom, who's kind of like defending that legacy in the same way. Like to me, that seems like a failed strategy. But like in a lot of these World Cup games, sometimes, you know, sometimes you win on penalties. You know, I don't think that any of the GOP nominees look to be particularly strong. Donald Trump and our approval ratings now is down to 38%. People are upset about Iran. They're upset about gas prices. They're upset about just fatigue of having, you know, a singular center star of politics over the past. You know, Trump kind of is like it's fatiguing a little bit. And so, like, it's an uphill battle for the GOP. Democrats might do their best to give Republicans a fighting chance despite that. So just to extrapolate from that, like the point about needing change, driving change on the progressive side, we are seeing socialists getting elected as mayor, socialists starting to rise at the state level. And many of these candidates that you've mentioned are self-declared socialists at the national level. We may potentially have a democratic socialist as president, 2028, based on what you're saying. Is that ultimately where this goes, where the populist movements drive the left further left? And everyone in that party now seems to be jumping on this bandwagon, proclaiming socialist principles as the only way to solve inequity and unfairness in this country. And, you know, kind of jumping on what we were from empirical kind of history shown doesn't work as a governing system, as a economic system. but suddenly everyone's kind of been swept away by it and seems to think it's it's the the only way forward does that kind of the the output of the conditions that you're describing that the left the democrats basically become a socialist party and they embrace socialism fully and full-throated i think there are huge generational divides where you know so i grew up i'm 48 um so i still remember the kind of not last questions but like i still remember the cold war I still remember the Berlin Wall falling. So for me, the connotations of socialism are close, adjacent to communism, are a long history of failure of economic development in countries that adopted that system. I think people who are a little bit older don't realize that the socialism brand is much more popular among younger Democrats. But by the same token, America is still a supremely capitalist country, you know, if not for and again, in my book, I have lots of critiques of the tech sector. We still are attracting the best and brightest young talent from all around the world. You know, I personally think the A.I. capital boom, whatever becomes of it, is responsible for keeping our economy, at least the stock market, in relatively good shape. and you know also things like where have democrats lost support well actually the biggest differences are concentrated among hispanic and to some extent asian american voters you know who do you think are the most likely people to own small businesses in the u.s it's a cliche but 100 true that like the recent immigrant groups are very entrepreneurial it's one thing that i believe makes the united states great and one thing that makes me very pro-immigration um but you have seen shifts in those groups and the most entrepreneurial groups away from Democrats. Yeah, because, I mean, they all escape socialist countries and socialist backgrounds and the economic mobility that's afforded by free markets and capitalism and the degree of true liberalism we provide in this country is what's given folks opportunities that don't exist elsewhere. But the second and third generation of the American middle class are probably, you know, more likely, as you point out, to kind of be convinced of the benefits of socialism. This isn't your wheelhouse, Nate, but if you were hired to give a playbook to either party for 2028, what would be in that playbook? What would you tell them is the right platform for this moment in time, a post-Trump era, and with socialism, wealth disparity, health care, there's a group of issues here that keep coming up, the support of Israel, foreign wars. What's the perfect platform for either party, an independent or left-leaning or right-leaning? What are going to be on the top of Americans' minds if you can look that far out? Yeah, look, I, by most definitions, am an elite, as are you guys. You can afford tickets to game three of the first NBA finals game in New York in whatever, 25 years, and you're probably an elite. And most elites like me say they're, you know, socially liberal, economically moderate. I use the term liberal, meaning the way liberals use in Europe, meaning some role for the state, but pro market in general. And that's probably my view. I'm not sure that view is actually an electoral winner as much. right um the most neglected voters in the u.s who are culturally a little bit more conservative but like economically more progressive potentially but not quite in the same way that you get from like a an aoc they support small business they are wary of conglomerations of power maybe i'm putting that with with too generous a brush but like i do think that like when you have the worst world's first trillionaire when people have a lot of anxiety maybe the anxiety is not the right shape of anxiety but understandable anxiety about ai when you have ai leaders saying things like it's going to displace all these white collar jobs i look i think a electorally i'm not saying morally or righteously whatever else right i think combining a little bit of the right kind of anti-oligarch rhetoric with moderation on some of the issues on the woke stuff. I get that term already feels like it's becoming outdated. But still supporting small business, especially for men. Young men still want to feel as though they control their own destiny. A lot of them feel like they don't do that anymore. But I don't think they necessarily want all that much hand-holding. But no, it's a difficult thing to triangulate. And the U.S. is not alone in having a lot of resistance and dissatisfaction with the status quo. So, you know, I mean, again, this is part of why, and I'm sure about 2% of your audience will be sympathetic to this, why I have, like, been more defending of Zoran Mamdani living in New York is because, like, he's at least getting the ins and outs. We'll see what happens in after four years of, like, New York being like a basically functional city, right? We have really nice new airports. It's not Zoran's doing. That's a hell of a lot of money spent. But like our crime is like relatively low compared to to California. I used to live right near Penn Station, Madison Square Garden. Not the nicest neighborhood, not the nicest block. But like I never walked around feeling unsafe there when I visit SF. Then you have to be more careful. Right. And so I think like combining functional performance in government with whatever message you want is part of it. I think maybe even like having like a little bit more like optimism, too. I'm kind of always a fan of like zigging where other people zag. Obama presented a more optimistic take about like kind of like the American spirit. Right. You know, look, I see all the enthusiasm around the World Cup and the Knicks. I don't want to sound like cliched, but, you know, tonight after we tape, this is taping on a Monday night, New York time. Right. I can like wander around the streets of New York and there'll be some like Norwegian bar that has Norway game on. And like that does make America great. And like rediscovering those values. I don't know. I mean, maybe somebody like, you know, I think maybe the most electable Democrat might be somebody like a John Ossoff, who is who is younger, who is pretty progressive. You look at his voting record, but like but isn't like a brawler in quite the same way that that Newsom is trying to be. I mean, the generational part is a lot of this. You know, I think it's insane that we had a candidate who was trying to be president until he was 86 and the alternative is someone who's trying to be president until he's 82. I don't you don't see very many Warren Buffett fight. If Warren Buffett ran for president, maybe I'd vote for him. Right. But like you don't see very many leaders in other parts of the world. You don't see very many CEOs or leaders. Otherwise, you know, I very much value the contribution of my older friends. Right. But like to run the biggest country in the world as an 82 year old, to me, seems kind of insane. And so there's some basic level of competence that Mondami showing in New York. He's positive. He's fixing potholes. He's making it, you know, a celebration of whatever the sports teams are. He's fixing garbage like there are some basic things that New York is very much appreciating quality of life. And that's not something you expect from a Democrat or a socialist. and those kind of like blocking and tackling in the high level of engagement which Trump you mentioned kind of burns people out with that high level of engagement seems like Mondavi comes just under that he's a little more positive he doesn't use like the toxicity that much but he's engaging right and that seems to be working in New York and with the voter base no he's pretty popular here so far and again New York is a New York is a capitalist city, I think. I think it's different than somewhere like California. It's not kind of as West Coast freshwater progressive. New York is a pragmatic place that people from all around the world migrate to. It's a place where there's a lot of wealth all around you. It's also a place that despite seeming like a chaotic shit show at times, I mean, look, it's easy to be optimistic about New York in mid-June when we have the most beautiful weather of the year and everyone's coming to visit and everything else. But New York is a success story in a way that I think California has become less of one, maybe. Sorry, let me just ask you a question on this capitalism. Have you seen data that underscores this main line that everyone's talking about, that the youth are kind of disillusioned by capitalism and don't believe in capitalism? I mean, to see this happen in a city like New York, to your point, a city that is a bastion of capitalism and progress and opportunity for people, for people to put in place a candidate as mayor that denounces the capitalism as a system and talks about collectivism just seems to indicate that maybe there's a real movement with the youth. I mean, one of the statistics I always quote to people is I think 45 million people graduated college in the last decade in the United States that have all of them or a large percentage of them, I should say, have a pretty significant debt burden that they feel is going to be very hard to get out of. And I would argue that that's a function of the federal student loan program and its underwriting processes. And it really condemns people to a life that is going to be very hard to grow your way out of. But what does the data tell you about capitalism and what that says about the next cycle here? Yeah, where the cut point is, is probably around age 40, I'd say, obviously, it kind of ages by a year every year. And like, you know, we saw I saw before the New York mayoral race last year, people who were able to make incredibly accurate, almost block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood projections based on where Zoran would be good versus Cuomo, just based on knowing the city and where younger people, younger, more progressive people live, I would say. You know, I think part of it might have to do with economic anxiety for sure. I think it's also your experience like growing up and exactly when you kind of came of Right. Again, I grew up in like, I guess the first election I was old enough to vote in was Clinton in 96. This is like the triumph of the West and capitalism. You had a very robust economy in the 1990s. You had a lot of growth. And by the time you get to your, you know, when the Great Recession hit, you know, I already had by a year. Right. I already had a job. I had a foothold. I think that people kind of like born, if you were in college when September 11th happened, like that might be kind of the cut point, roughly speaking. It doesn't cut quite cleanly from Gen X through millennials. It goes a few years into the millennials. But like sometimes I kind of joke, it seems to me like people like in their 40s through early 50s are like the only like sane people in the U.S., right? that kind of like second half of of gen x in particular although we've never had a gen x president kamal harris would have been a boomer too technically speaking um but they're the people who are like okay we grew up and we worked hard and we still felt like more or less the american system worked for us i think people wrongly or rightly that are half a generation younger don't have that experience also we should talk about like as much as i think that in certain ways the media is an overrated storyline how people consume their news um you know you look now at what's happening at cbs and paramount or cnn or whatever else right we had an era where you had very centralized news delivery systems under tv and radio i know i sound like i'm dating myself the internet's been around for for a long time but when you have three or four major networks that have a huge amount of editorial control over the message. And my, you sort of the New York times, right. You know, when I first got there, you would still have like the page one meeting every day where it's like, we are the people, the editors of the New York times, like deciding like what is news and what's not. And now it's become very decentralized. Obviously social media plays a role in that too. I think the evidence is pretty decent at like phones and social media affect youth satisfaction a lot. You know, you also have a culture, I think, among liberals where it's like no longer a stoic culture. It's a culture where maybe you might express your grievance. Ironically, maybe AI will change this a little bit. There's some initial evidence that like the models actually gravitate toward consensus views, expert opinion sometimes a jaded or hallucinated version of what the consensus really is but you know Claude or ChatGPT is probably less polarizing than Blue Sky or Twitter Let talk about social media for a second It used to be a paradigm of you follow people you build your filter, you have your list, you spend a lot of time curating that. And then TikTok comes out with their For You page, FYP. YouTube goes full algorithm, and now X has gone basically full algorithm. You can follow whoever you like, but your follower count is not your viewer count and engagement count. And obviously, after Elon took over Twitter, Libs, a lot of celebrities decided to leave. Business people stayed. Lots of anonymous accounts. It's the free speech platform of all free speech platforms. It's chaotic. But what impact, just in that very tiny nuance of followers to algorithm, has changed and impacted politics? Because it feels like the filter bubble is becoming incredibly pronounced. You give two or three things alike, and now that's the rest of your entire day. Yeah, look, for me, I don't think a person should have a correlated stance on taxes and abortion and Gaza and the free market and whatever else. um the partisanship is a very powerful force to squish this very complicated array of political issues we have in the united states on into into just one dimension blue versus red or left versus right and social media twitter in particular i think is a very effective mechanism for that and i get i get totally yelled at for um any bit of heterodoxy like in particular like saying biden is obviously too old democrats you're gonna you're gonna lose unless you replace him like that even though it's a sense that like literally 80 percent of voters agreed with will make you like seem like a heretic on twitter i've been critical by the way of of parts of what elon has done although some of the things predate him like the algorithmic feed um wasn't purely invented by email on it was improved or perfected or worsened depending on your point of view by the current regime you know i do think it's a problem that like like if i choose to follow an account you jason of the new york times or whatever else or nick's account i want to see their tweets without having to give the algorithm an additional signal like that part bothers me i don't like the depreciation twitter debates that's incredibly frustrating like you literally have to favorite or like things in order to keep them in your feed and i told the twitter team you should have a little button on the follow show me every post from this person like if i want to get my ski mountains reports or i want my nicks fan tv i want every single post and there's no way to do that except like every post and then your feed just goes off the rails yeah i mean it's very i look i actually think the for you algorithm is pretty decent for what it is you have to train it like you know for a while i got a bunch of like fight videos because they're compelling you see like a fight of teenagers and like oh i'm i spent eight minutes seconds watching this or whatever else it's terrible if you click don't show me this anymore it is pretty responsive and it's pretty good like the algorithm knows right now i just want to read tweets about the world cup and is yana's getting traded right and maybe a little bit about the new york and california elections um but i wish there were like you know i i don't like any algorithm that like presumes it's like smarter than the user and if i if i log in or if i subscribe to somebody and i want to see their tweets and i haven't muted them then show me their tweets you can mix in things that you think i'll like breaking the algorithmic or the time the chronological feed is also annoying to me right like i want um if i'm watching the world cup and there's a tweet about a match from six hours ago someone's like oh my god amazing right i'm like what just happened and like it's not surfacing things in quite the right order um look i think a lot of companies kind of make the mistake of uh twitter was i'm not sure if twitter was ever going to be like a hugely profitable company it was a very unique resource for following the news if like i am and like you guys are at least you jason are like total news addict like it was a very unique platform and i wish that functionality had been preserved again to be fair um this started before elon although it has been continued since let's wrap on 2028 and in particular gavin newsom oh no predictions for the midterms predictions for the midterm so light prediction for the house and senate predictions what does the data tell us right now so we'll have a model out within a few weeks been a little bit delayed by the world cup and they were distributing stuff prediction markets say democrats are around i think 80 or 85 percent to take the house and 40 or 45 percent to take the senate those both seem pretty reasonable to me i think if anything it's a little bit low on the house um i think it might be more like 85 or 90 my models surprise me sometimes but like look we've been through a lot of elections that are inherently hard to forecast. The House is the one where everything kind of points in the same direction. Democrats are facing a very unpopular president, an economy that voters have a lot of anxiety about, Trump, no new Middle Eastern wars. On top of that, the very, very long history of the president's party drawing a backlash and performing poorly at the midterms, the more recent history of incumbent backlash in the U.S. and all around the world, the good results Democrats in New Jersey and Virginia last year and special elections. Look, the redistricting thing helps the GOP a little bit in the end, but you're fighting against a lot of gravity. Whereas the Senate is more of a numbers game. Even in a pretty blue environment, Democrats have to win some seats in red states. It seems to me that taking a big risk in Maine, which is a state that by all rights, They ought to win in a D plus eight year and a D plus 10 state. But Graham Plattner is only two points ahead of Susan Collins. I think I take that polling at face value. I think he is. I take him at 50 50. But like that's a unnecessary risk potentially. But look, the GOP will be able to in these red states, a candidate like Tallarico, who is also probably in roughly a toss up race. And Paxton is a far less than ideal Republican nominee. Like partisanship is still a powerful force. People are saying, why are they kind of attacking Tallarico on, I think, things that are not above board, you know, critiquing your sexuality or whatever else. Well, it's because Texas is like a really red state. Like Trump's not popular, so you're like – you're kind of going for like the lowest common denominator. But in our system, that works a fair amount of the time. So it's just a polling and math and numbers game in the Senate. We're going to see more money spent than ever. whereas the house 435 seats i think the partisan gravity is more likely than not just too much for trump to overcome is there anything that trump can do or that could change in a macro out of our control perspective that could shift things more significantly for the house back to the republicans if he can get gas prices down it's such a visible indicator you drive by the chevron station whatever else right you you literally see it you know i think if you look at forecasts there is supposed to be some abatement, but very contention on how long the conflict war in Iran persists in this quagmire. You know, look, maybe if we maybe if we have a AGI, right, by by in October or something, who knows what happens then? But no, it's his unfavorable ratings are very entrenched and Democrats are very enthusiastic Despite their misgivings about their own party, and as much as I think they'll have in 2028 nominating a candidate, to vote for your generic Democrat against a generic Republican is a pretty easy ask for Democrats who feel like democracy on the line. And so I think that's fairly baked in. As someone who builds models, I don't bet on politics, I bet on sports. I'm always aware that, yeah, there's the 10% chance that the underdog you never see coming prevails. you know cape verde ties with spain or something but like that's pretty fundamentally driven whereas on the on the flip side needing to pick up four senate seats when you might blow the opportunity in maine it's a toss-up probably probably slight edge the gop with maybe gas prices and iran determining whether it's more truly 50 50 or maybe maybe 60 gop the chance of winning both Is that 80 times 40 type situation? Or is it different because of politics and the way the statistics work? Are they correlated? Yeah. Yeah. They're almost perfectly correlated. So if the odds of Democrats winning the Senate but not the House are like 1%, if you go to Kalshia or Polymarket, whatever else, they have to be like around 1%. So conditional Democrats winning the Senate, they'll almost certainly have won the House, will almost certainly have won governerships, which, by the way, these things are important. You know, I think people probably focus too much on the national picture and not enough on what happens at the state level where people actually have executive power and you're picking the candidates and the politicians for the next generation. State legislatures are important. If I were talking to all the listeners, right, I'd say look for like a city council candidate for whom your contribution might make a lot of difference. But like, you know, if Democrats win the Senate, that means it's a really blue year to overcome the fact that you're winning in places like Ohio, Iowa, Alaska. And if that happens, therefore, probably the rest of it, all the dominoes fall that way. All right. Gavin Newsom in 2028. He's an enigma of a politician, worst run state in the union as far as I'm concerned. But he's so polished and he speaks so well and people seem to like him with that great hair. What should we take from Gavin Newsom's, you know, continued ascension? Am I correct that he's still, you know, on the up? He's not. So we have an article up on Silver Bulletin, which we'll publish shortly after we finish this podcast. Newsom has fallen in Democratic primary polls from around 25 percent to 15 percent. He's fallen on polling market from like 33 percent to 22 percent or something. I think he was benefiting from some degree of name recognition, whereas now Democrats see a candidate like John Ossoff in Georgia, another good looking young guy, but like actually has a credential, which is we'll never have, of having won an election in a purple state and being a younger, fresher face. Like whatever you say about Graham Plattner and Janet Mills in Maine, I think Mills in the abstract might have been the safer choice. I think it's good that Democrats are showing a bias toward younger candidates, right? Like that's a lot of what happened with Zoran, too. You know, I wouldn't discount, by the way, someone like an AOC. I'm not sure if she'll run. Someone like Chuck Schumer might be very vulnerable in the 2028 primary. For example, she has a lot of time to wait. But like I could see like I again in New York, it's New York. So therefore, you can't extrapolate too much from New York. However, people saying we are sick and tired of the Democratic establishment. I'll take a more centrist version or more left wing version, but not the same. I think ultimately, Newsom has like a hard argument to make. He's arguing for continuity with Kamala Harris and Joe Biden. He's embracing Joe Biden when that strategy has failed electorally. I would argue in California governance wise as well. Well, to me, it's like a I think Newsom is actually in a pretty defensive position. And that's why you see him having Hunter Biden or something on his. Yeah. And AOC is now 36 years old. So she qualifies. You're saying it's not a zero chance that she could become the equivalent of Trump, the outsider, the burn it down, the sick and tired vote. She's my bet. She's my bet. Yeah. Yes, you're a bet. OK, what do you think? Let's talk about AOC. She got that possibility with her charisma. We've seen in states like Maine. We may see this in Michigan as well, where, yeah, I mean, look, for many years in the Republican primary, the notion was that the establishment always won out, that you'd have like the Rick Santorum or Sarah Palin's or Herman Cain's or whatever else is who would get 40 percent of the vote. But the same country club establishment types talked about the top of the show would prevail at the end of the day. and then it doesn't take that much of perpetually growing dissatisfaction or generational trouble. Young people in general don't understand why the f*** would I care about a party brand anyway. The Democratic Party brand is a lame brand, as certainly the GOP is. Interesting. So if you're an avatar for that brand, then I think the best candidates, even Obama in 2008, Obviously, not even Obama. Obama was a highly effective, one of the generationally charismatic candidates. But even he combined, on the one hand, positioning to the left of Clinton on issues like Iraq. On the other hand, he had a whole whatever. We have gay sisters in blue states and red states and we play Little League in the blue states and like that whole like post-partisan rhetoric. I think the most effective candidates can exactly what he is. He has made some efforts. I mean, he had Charlie Kirk on his podcast. I think it was last year, right? He has tried to moderate. I mean, he's against the billionaire tax. He's tried to moderate on some of the culture war issues, like nominated an institutional candidate from California. She didn't come that far from winning, but she lost all the swing states by two to five points. And I don't believe, at the end of the day, the Democrats would be persuaded that, like, oh, just because you're white and you have different anatomy, that fell from the one that every Democrat was terrified by in 2024. All right. An hour with our guy, Nate Silver. Let us know what you think in the comments. We will have you back on when we do our live election coverage, for sure, if you're available. And the audience always loves when you're on. He gets paid a lot on that night, J.L. I don't think he's coming on all of it. All right, whatever. He's a fan of the pod. He's a fan of all in. He's part of the family. Oh, come in the next day. Whatever. Whenever you're not securing the bag to secure more Knicks tickets for our repeat next year, everybody go right now. You can hear my voice, too. the silver bulletin, pop out a Hyundai and subscribe. You're going to love it. $95, Jason. That's right. I rounded up to a Hyundai. Listen, I know that you've probably done the metrics. $94.97 is the right number. $5 for the guy at the door. $5 for the guy at the door. Whatever. I'm a little bit off the top. It's all good. And, yeah, everybody go to Polymarket. Place some bets. Our favorite partner, Nate's favorite partner. And, yeah, we'll see you all next time on the All In Interview Show. Thanks, Nate. Great job, Nate. You rocked it. Thank you so much, guys. Awesome.