Nate Silver Predicts: Democrats Take the House, Newsom Is Fading, President AOC?!

Partisanship is the gravity that dictates every election in the U.S., right? 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 say that we could probably predict right now, with 97% confidence, who they'll vote for in 2028. And it's not because of rigging; it's because polarization and partisanship are very powerful forces that we can't seem to escape from.

We are delighted today to have the one, the only Nate Silver on the program. Gambler, statistician, podcaster, Substacker. How are you doing, brother? Nice to see you with your Knicks hat on.

I'm good. I think I have one more week to wear the Knicks hat. It's a little bulky and not super podcast-video-friendly, but 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 the New York City takeover of Wells Fargo Arena, or whatever the hell it's called now, Infinity or something.

Yeah.

I went to the Trump game, which was not the right game to go to, but I wanted to be there. I wanted to cover it for my readers. I felt like it was a moment where New York might triumph out of the shitshow that it was to get into the arena. It was a little—

Did you show up 2 hours early to get in? 3 hours?

I am not a particularly prompt person. No, I wasn't going to miss it, so I got there at 6:00 or 6:05 for an 8:30 game. You were supposed to get in on 6th Avenue and 33rd, and I was on 6th and 30th or 29th. It wasn't the worst or least efficient process I've ever seen. New York has a way of getting things done, and you just kind of follow people.

Yeah.

Once you get in, it was literally TSA security. They literally look at your wallet by hand, and they take your lighters, pens, 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 questionable officiating decisions in the second half.

Yeah. Did you bet any of the games? 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. The ticket was not cheap. It would not cover Jason's tickets, but I was able to cover my 200-level Bulls seat with the profits from those non-homer bets.

I thought the Knicks were legitimately overlooked in the East. When you see a team that wins like that game against Atlanta, where we were up literally 77 to 22—

Yeah, I was like—

As someone who studies this stuff and builds models, to see that kind of statistical significance for that level of dominance over four rounds of the playoffs, that's real. That's not noise.

Do you bet prediction markets, or how do you bet?

If you are perceived as a sharp bettor, you've been limited by DraftKings and MGM. A lot of the traditional retail sportsbooks limit you. The prediction markets do not. I consult for Polymarket, I should say.

If you're a sharp bettor, I have other issues with the prediction markets, believe me, but it becomes easier to concentrate your activity on the prediction markets. You have very smart people, and you have hedge funds that are probably making bets in these markets more and more. I don't want to go through the rigmarole of, “Can I even get my money down?” So I will admit I've gravitated toward those.

When you look at this team, what do you attribute it to? Obviously, during the season it was up and down. With 15 games left in the season, people were saying, “Hey, we've got to trade for Giannis. We've got to get KAT out of here.” But in January and February, we had this incredible run where we used KAT as the point center. Then we backed off of it, and I was on Knicks Fan TV talking with the real deep folks. There was speculation that they had figured it out, and they were saying, “Let's hold this play.” Mike Brown said, “Let's hold KAT at the point until the playoffs, because we know it works so well.”

What makes this team so special? Is it the wings? Is it just Brunson's grit? Is it the 3-point shooting across the team, selflessness, ball movement? There are so many things people talk about with this team.

I think it's Mike Brown and KAT. I'm not saying they're 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, I love Jalen Brunson—he might be my favorite player—but he's not a terrific 1-on-1 defender. He gets a few steals, but he's undersized. The low center of gravity somehow doesn't work on defense as well.

Every other defender on the Knicks, including Towns—which is a dissenting point of view—is at least average, if not better. 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 the Charlotte Hornets in the regular season is probably a smart move.

Yeah, this is why Thibs had to go when you look back on it. Thibs had ground these guys into submission for 3 seasons, and it was like we were down 1, 2, or 3 starters for every round of the previous playoffs.

Yeah, I remember going to Game 7 of the semifinals against Indiana in 2024. You could see OG was hobbling around out there. Josh Hart valiantly played, and you're like, “These guys are an infirmary ward.”

Mhm.

Especially because you're relying on smart, high-effort defense, they became a much better defensive team in the second half.

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—when they had lost 7 of 9 games and there was all the talk about KAT being traded. I just wanted to go and check out the vibe. I actually bet on the Knicks to win by 15 points or more because I thought this was either going to be the beginning of the end for this regime, or it was going to be a turnaround game against a team that was trying to lose—a crosstown rival that was trying to lose, frankly.

The fans were pretty tolerant of KAT. They wound up winning by 60 points or something totally absurd, and held the Nets to one of the lowest scores in the modern NBA era. From there, they won the NBA Cup, by the way.

But in the second half, they had something like the 5th-best defense in the NBA. They had the best defense in the NBA in the playoffs—not sustainable, but that was real. And then KAT presenting—

Yeah. He's a really good player.

I think he's one of the 15 best players in the league. Those 2 things combined—a little bit unusual for a veteran team, granted—created spontaneous improvement on both sides of the ball.

The coaching system let the team improve on defense, and KAT had a revelation. I love Jalen Brunson, but the offense can be a little bit predictable, maybe in clutch possessions.

Yeah, right.

It's amazing that Jalen Brunson shot 53% between 16 and 22 feet, which is kind of insane given that you know it's coming. It's like Mariano Rivera's cut fastball: You know it's coming.

But to have more optionality and variety in the offense, and to have more ball movement, allows those spontaneous things to happen. Coupled with the fact that the Knicks have the most playoff games of any team in the past 4 years—more than Boston, more than OKC, and a lot more than San Antonio—there is empirical evidence that playoff experience does matter.

This comes up in poker, too. If you're 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 you're operating on a different operating system.

To have had experience in a lot of high-stakes games, not all of which were wins, really does help.

Those 2 comebacks from the Pacers games, and from the Boston games where we just broke their backs last year, made it obvious to anybody that when we're down 10 or 15 points, that's not a lead against the Knicks. The Knicks are going to come back. We're just that good.

It's fantastic now that the entire league has to plan how to beat the Knicks. We spent the last 5 or 6 years asking, “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 have so much to talk about, and obviously you specialize in elections. We have the midterms coming up. We're going to talk about 2028, the post-Trump world, and all of that.

But we just concluded an election, and 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, or just mail-in ballots?

Yeah, that was just the LA election, Jason, just to be clear.

Yeah, just the LA election, but go ahead and build on it. The question that I wanted to talk to you about, Nate, is this: 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 Nithya 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 be voting in person, by mail early, and by mail late. I just wanted to get your read on that.

I'd say there's no evidence of fraud; that's the short-summary version. The mistake that can be made is to assume that each ballot comes in independently, when there are systematic differences between groups and when they tend to cast their ballots.

Democrats have long been encouraged to vote by mail. Actually, it used to be more of a Republican thing, but under Trump, who discouraged mail voting in 2016 and 2020 and, to some extent, 2024, that shifted.

Look, I think California's system is completely unacceptable. I've done some consulting work on the Indian election, where you literally have polling stations in the Himalayas. They stagger their elections, but once Election Day happens, they count the vote within 24 hours. I think it's ridiculous, and a sign of a failed state, that California takes longer than that.

But if you have one party that systematically tends to vote later, Democrats in both the LA race and the governor's race also had more of a choice to make. For a while, it looked like Eric Swalwell was going to win, then Katie Porter, and then Becerra finally emerged.

Look, my dad is from LA. I spent a lot of time in California, and I'm all on board with the criticisms of how the state is being governed, at least in parts of the state. I was in San Diego for New Year's. It's a beautiful time of year to be in San Diego, and you can literally run on the sand and the beach. Everyone's kind of hot, and you have good fish tacos and everything else.

That made me understand the California of my youth, or my dad's youth, and understand the appeal of the state. I also understand why LA and San Francisco, I think LA in particular, 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 redistricting referendum—I guess it was in 2025—how you can debate whether it's a good idea or not, but that tracked very strongly with the Democratic margin in presidential years, even though for many years Democrats have been the party against gerrymandering.

It's a capital-D Democratic state. It's not an idiosyncratic blue state like Maine or something. To expect even a very talented Republican like Spencer Pratt to win the mayorship is a lot. Even in New York, we have a bit more heterodoxy. Historically, we've had a socialist mayor, and we've had Michael Bloomberg and Rudy 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 vote by mail and that they show up late. But when you look at the overwhelming vote for Nithya Raman over Karen Bass that happened late in the counting cycle versus early in the counting cycle, and the statistical shift that occurred, and you look at the difference between in-person and mail-in voting being so statistically different, I get your point that Republicans are more likely to vote in person. Maybe you can make that leap there.

But the difference in the counting that happened over time—the ratio just seems so different between Raman and Bass. 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 vote was concentrated for Nithya 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—

And were those cast by the individuals who were supposed to cast them? This is one of the theories: that there are ballots getting filled out en masse in these ballot-harvesting efforts, where people walk around and say, “Hey, fill out this ballot for this person, and here's a free lunch.” I don't know what's going on, but there are all these videos. I don't know if they're true or not.

I think there is propaganda around this. I also think that mail-in voting provides some verification challenges in different ways. I don't inherently see anything wrong with a system where you go to a physical place to vote and sign your voter log, whether you show ID or not. If you have a disability, you're really in bad straits, or you're traveling in Albania or something, then you can—

That makes sense. But I want to ask you the empirical question: What is the difference in states, districts, or cities that don't have voter ID and those that do? Politically, does that basically create a huge overweighting for Democrats? Can you help us understand the politics behind this from an empirical perspective, without putting on a spin hat or anything?

The theory used to be that Democrats benefited from higher turnout by any means at all. That was an era when Democrats tended to dominate among non-college-educated voters, while Republicans were the country-club, Kiwanis Club people who showed up on the first day of voting.

That has shifted. Where Democrats have really, really overperformed is in special elections and midterms, as opposed to high-turnout races, like when Trump's been on the ballot. I think voter ID would be pretty reasonable. I'm not against voter ID. If you show your ID even in your mid-40s to get into a bar, you can probably show it to vote.

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 handled differently, with younger people who might be more progressive tending to vote later or by mail.

Again, it's not like this happened in Alabama or something. The prior probability of Pratt advancing would probably be pretty low, and I wish that people were less partisan. I've been critical in the newsletter, so we're bullish about Grant Platner, for example, because I think he's somebody who has not proven to be a reliable figure, so to speak. I was critical of Joe Biden, and I'm not even registered as a Democrat, by the way, despite what people assume.

If you're going to have 5 different ways to vote—and I say this as someone with experience actually trying to build election-night models and being on national television on election nights—these blue shifts or red shifts are somewhat predictable and are going to be a notable consequence of having different mechanisms to vote, where you have different queues 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 from the one that arrives through the main gates on 7th Avenue or whatever. I think the system should be simplified.

By the way, the same goes for things like ranked-choice voting, which I, again, as an election wonk, support because it gives voters more choice. Maine or New York City shouldn't need an extra 2 weeks to count ranked-choice voting. I could Claude Code a ranked-choice voting algorithm that would resolve itself in 7 minutes, even with 100 million votes in Maine, or half a million or whatever it was in the primary.

Yeah. So 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. She was paying people $3 or giving them cigarettes to register them. You have these marginal, fraudulent-looking behaviors.

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 and investigating it, and it's de minimis. It's a couple thousand cases they can find.

Even if you extrapolated that by 10 or 20 times—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 the most local, smallest election, where there are tens of thousands of votes or thousands of votes. Is that the issue that we're seeing here: this collection of appearances of impropriety?

Yes.

Look, the American election system is very decentralized, which, as an old-school liberal in some ways who is against centralized power, I think is quite brilliant in some respects. But, yeah, at scale, there certainly are cases of fraud. When Al Franken won—what was it, 2006, right?—it came down to a recount of 200 votes. We’re never going to know that with any degree of certainty. There is a margin of error.

But in practice—and we know this, too, when you do have recounts; you’ve studied this a lot—you have a 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 in the ward of their ballot, I understand why that bothers people. I think California has been complacent about this. I think perception does matter, and I think there can be a 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, having studied elections all around the world, it’s very unusual. Most countries would count much, much faster than the US. It’s really because we have an Electoral College system—it’s decentralized—but in most elections in France or the UK, where they keep having elections or whatever 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 beacon 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, 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 an irreversible model for the Democratic 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 US, right? Don’t worry, I will get criticized if we say, “Oh, whatever, Gavin Newsom or AOC is a 55% favorite,” and they lose. But in 43 of the 50 states, we can probably predict right now with 97% confidence who to vote for in 2028. And it’s not because of rigging; it’s because polarization and partisanship are very powerful forces that we can’t seem to escape from.

Again, I would love to see a little bit of this in New England, actually, right? You see a Charlie Baker or is it Phil Scott in Vermont, right? You see a little bit of cross-partisanship in New England. You see even in the South, like Beshear 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. California has always been the laboratory of weird and eccentric political ideas, but it’s become a machine state.

Maybe because it’s so large that voters can’t touch the candidates up close and don’t have a lot of directly relatable experience. Maybe California’s just too large in general, but I am very concerned about polarization and partisanship. I think it leads to lower-quality governance. I think it’s exacerbated by gerrymandering, this gerrymandering race to the bottom.

Democrats have paid the price where 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? They’re 1 out of the last 4. I consider Biden to have lost in 2024, but before that, Harris lost instead.

The one election they 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 don’t know. You can talk about Operation Warp Speed. I understand why voters were very unhappy with the 2020 version of Trump and the greatest economic disruption since the 1930s, so they kind of won the gimme.

They hadn’t won the close elections recently except for Obama, who conspicuously at least kind of made rhetoric about trying to bridge a divide between the parties. Obama still has—I looked at this today—a 57% approval rating post facto with independents. Biden is at 20%. And look, I think a lot of Democrats and Republicans certainly were hoping, 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 a Democrat, you win the numbers game.

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 a country-club group of rich people and business owners. Now they’re the populist party. Then the other side, which used to be the working man’s and working woman’s party, has become this liberal, weird socialist party, and that seems to be playing.

They’re both populist.

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 each of those parties you have 2 subparties. So you really have some sort of 4-by-4 matrix here, or 2-by-2 matrix with 4 different groups. How is that going to play out in 2026, which still feels like the anti-Trump vote—“Hey, I’m not happy about Trump”—but 2028? Trump’s not going to run a third time, in all likelihood. So let’s take those 2 buckets as well as the vibes and these parties fracturing a bit.

Yeah, I think Democrats really have 3 factions, as I’ve described them. One is the left. The avatars might be Zohran Mamdani, might be AOC, might be Bernie Sanders. All of whom, by the way, are quite effective politicians in their own way. I mean, Zohran Mamdani understood how to be a Knicks cheerleader, for example.

Yeah. [Laughter]

That speech was 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 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. AOC, you can take or leave. She has become a more effective tactical politician.

Bernie, what he’s built—being a freaking old guy from Vermont, the socialist mayor of Burlington, Vermont, coming quite close and beating Clinton in 20 states in 2016 or whatever—was quite impressive. But that’s 1 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 in LAX or whatever else, right? Where there’s population growth.

I mean, you want to talk about hard data, population data in the US and jobs data is pretty good. And those are states where people have moved to. The abundance libs are critical of Democratic governance and critical of culture-war issues on policing and trans rights, and they 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 much 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. Why is Gavin Newsom going out of his way to support and endorse the Bidens when Biden, even among Democrats, is not all that popular anymore? Everyone else wants to move on. It’s because of the signal to the resistance libs that, “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: Our team’s going to win. It doesn’t matter. We never apologize. It’s 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 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 aversion that I've critiqued before.

But at the same time, the triangulating spirit of, “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 understand that almost every election now, Obama in 2012 was, I guess, the exception, 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't shock me if AOC, Newsom, Shapiro, Ossoff, or whomever wins, and they're underdogs again in 2032. Look what's happening in the UK, where it's kind of become a running joke, but we're going to be through, what, like 6 prime ministers in 9 years or something? They're probably the US's closest comparison. 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 or unwilling to distance herself—kind of literally unable or unwilling to distance herself—from Biden, or Newsom, who's defending that legacy in the same way, to me that seems like a failed strategy. But, like in a lot of these World Cup games, sometimes you win on penalties.

I don't think that any of the GOP nominees look to be particularly strong. Donald Trump's approval rating is now down to 38%. People are upset about Iran, they're upset about gas prices, they're upset about the fatigue of having a singular center of gravity in politics over the past—Trump is kind of fatiguing people a little bit. And so 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, the point about needing change and driving change on the progressive side: We are seeing socialists getting elected as mayors, 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 in 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? They're kind of jumping on what empirical history has shown doesn't work as a governing system or an economic system, but suddenly everyone's been swept away by it and seems to think it's the only way forward. Does that kind of become the output of the conditions that you're describing—that the left, the Democrats, basically become a socialist party and embrace socialism fully and full-throated?

I think there are huge generational divides. I grew up—I'm 48—so I still remember the Cold War. I still remember the Berlin Wall falling, right? For me, the connotations of socialism are that it's close-adjacent to communism and has 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. By the same token, America is still a supremely capitalist country. In my book, I have lots of critiques of the tech sector, but we're still attracting the best and brightest young talent from all around the world.

I personally think the AI capital boom, whatever becomes of it, is responsible for keeping our economy—at least the stock market—in relatively good shape. And also, where have Democrats lost support? The biggest differences are concentrated among Hispanic and, to some extent, Asian American voters.

Who do you think are the most likely people to own small businesses in the US? It's a cliché, but 100% true, that 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. But you have seen shifts in those groups—the most entrepreneurial groups—away from Democrats.

Yeah, because they all escaped socialist countries and socialist backgrounds, and the economic mobility afforded by free markets and capitalism, along with 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 generations of the American middle class are probably, as you point out, more likely to 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? With socialism, wealth disparity, health care, the support of Israel, and foreign wars, there's a group of issues here that keep coming up.

What's the perfect platform for either party, an independent, or a left-leaning or right-leaning candidate? What are going to be at the top of Americans' minds if you can look that far out?

Yeah, look, by most definitions, I am an elite, as are you guys. If you can afford tickets to Game 3 of the first NBA Finals in New York in, whatever, 25 years, you're probably an elite.

Most elites like me say they're socially liberal and economically moderate. I know I use the term liberal in the way liberals use it 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.

The most neglected voters in the US are people who are culturally a little bit more conservative but potentially economically more progressive, though not quite in the same way that you get from AOC. They support small business. They are wary of conglomerations of power. Maybe I'm painting that with too generous a brush, but I do think that when you have the world's first trillionaire, when people have a lot of anxiety—maybe the anxiety is not the right shape of anxiety, but it's understandable anxiety—about AI, and when you have AI leaders saying things like, “It's going to displace all these white-collar jobs,”

Look, electorally—I'm not saying morally or righteously or whatever else—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. No, it's a difficult thing to triangulate, and the US is not alone in having a lot of resistance and dissatisfaction with the status quo.

This is part of why—and I'm sure about 2% of your audience will be sympathetic to this—I've been more defensive of Zephyr Teachout. Living in New York, he's at least getting the ins and outs. We'll see what happens after 4 years of New York being basically a functional city, right?

We have really nice new airports. It's not so much that what he's doing is cool or that he's spending a hell of a lot of money, but our crime is relatively low compared to California. I used to live right near Penn Station and Madison Square Garden—not the nicest neighborhood, not the nicest block—but I never walked around feeling unsafe there. When I visit San Francisco, you have to be more careful, right?

And so I think combining functional performance in government with whatever message you want is part of it. I think maybe even having a little bit more optimism, too. I'm always a fan of zigging where other people zag. Obama presented a more optimistic take about the American spirit, right?

I see all the enthusiasm around the World Cup and the Knicks. I don't want to sound clichéd, but tonight after we tape—which is on a Monday night, New York time—I can wander around the streets of New York and there'll be some Norwegian bar that has the Norway game on. That does make America great, and rediscovering those values—I don't know.

Maybe somebody like—I think perhaps the most electable Democrat might be somebody like Jon Ossoff, who is younger and pretty progressive if you look at his voting record, but isn't a brawler in quite the same way that Newsom is trying to be. The generational part is a lot of this.

I think it's insane that we had a candidate who was trying to be president until he was 86, and the alternative is somebody who was trying to be president until he was 82. You don't see very many Warren Buffetts, I find. If Warren Buffett ran for president, maybe I'd vote for him, right? But you don't see very many leaders of that age around the world. You don't see very many CEOs or leaders otherwise.

I very much value the contribution of my older friends, right? But 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 Mamdani is showing in New York. He's positive. He's fixing potholes. He's making it a celebration of whatever the sports teams are. He's fixing garbage. There are some basic things that New York is very much appreciating in quality of life.

And that's not something you expect from a Democrat or a socialist. Those kinds of blocking and tackling, and the high level of engagement—which Trump, you mentioned, kind of burns people out with—seem like Mamdani comes just under that. He's a little more positive. He doesn't use 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 capitalist city, I think. I think it's different from somewhere like California. It's not as West Coast 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 show at times—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 about this capitalism. Have you seen data that underscores this main line that everyone's talking about, that young people 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, progress, and opportunity—for people to put in place a candidate as mayor who denounces capitalism as a system and talks about collectivism just seems to indicate that maybe there's a real movement with the youth.

One of the statistics I always quote to people is that I think 45 million people graduated from college in the last decade in the United States, and 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 condemned 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 does that say about the next cycle here?

Yeah, the cut point is probably around age 40, I'd say. Obviously, it kind of ages by a year every year. 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 Mamdani would be strong versus Cuomo, just based on knowing the city and where younger, more progressive people live, I would say.

I think part of it might have to do with economic anxiety, for sure. I think it's also your experience growing up and exactly when you came of age, right? Again, I grew up in—I guess the first election I was old enough to vote in was Clinton in 1996.

[clears throat]

This is the triumph of the West and capitalism. You had a very robust economy in the 1990s. You had a lot of growth. By the time the Great Recession hit, I already had a job, right? I already had a foothold. I think the people kind of born—if you were in college when September 11 happened, that might be the cut point, roughly speaking. It doesn't cut quite cleanly from Gen X through millennials. It goes a few years into the millennials.

Sometimes I kind of joke: It seems to me like people in their 40s through early 50s are the only sane people in the U.S., right? That kind of second half of Gen X in particular, although we've never had a Gen X president. Kamala Harris would have been a boomer, too, technically speaking. 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, who are half a generation younger don't have that experience.

We should also talk about how people consume their news. As much as I think the media is, in certain ways, an overrated storyline, you look now at what's happening at CBS and Paramount, or CNN, or whatever else. 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 a long time, but when you have 3 or 4 major networks that have a huge amount of editorial control over the message—and I used to work at The New York Times, right? When I first got there, you would still have the page-one meeting every day where it's like, “We are the people—the editors at The New York Times—deciding 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 that phones and social media affect youth satisfaction a lot. You also have a culture, I think, among liberals where it's 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 the models actually gravitate toward consensus views and expert opinion, sometimes a jaded or hallucinated version of what the consensus really is. But Claude or ChatGPT is probably less polarizing than Bluesky or Twitter.

Let's talk about social media for a second. It used to be a paradigm where you followed people, built your filter, had your list, and spent a lot of time curating that. And then TikTok comes out with its 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 and a lot of celebrities decided to leave. Business people stayed, along with 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. I mean, you give 2 or 3 things a like, 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. Partisanship is a very powerful force to squish this sort of complicated array of political issues we have in the United States into just 1 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 totally yelled at for any bit of heterodoxy, in particular saying, “Biden is obviously too old. Democrats, you're going to lose unless you replace him.” Even though it's a stance that literally 80% of voters agree with, that will make you seem like a heretic on Twitter.

I've been critical, by the way, of parts of what Elon has done. Although some of the things predate him, like the algorithmic feed wasn't purely invented by Elon. It was improved or perfected or worsened, depending on your point of view, by the current regime. I do think it's a problem that if I choose to follow an account—say, The New York Times or whatever else, or a Knicks account—I want to see their tweets without having to give the algorithm additional signal. That part bothers me.

I don't like the depreciation of Twitter debates. It's 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.” If I want to get my ski mountain reports or my KnicksFanTV, 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.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I mean, it's very—look, I actually think the For You algorithm is pretty decent for what it is. You have to train it. For a while I got a bunch of fight videos because they're compelling. You see a fight of teenagers and think, “Oh, I spent 8 seconds watching this,” or whatever else, right? If you click “Don't show me this anymore,” it is pretty responsive and pretty good. The algorithm knows that right now I just want retweets about the World Cup and whether Giannis is getting traded, and maybe a little bit about the New York and California elections.

But I wish there were—I don't like any algorithm that presumes it's smarter than the user. If I log in or 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 feed from the chronological feed is also annoying to me, right? I want, if I'm watching the World Cup and there's a tweet about a match from 6 hours ago, someone's like, “Oh my God, amazing,” right? I'm like, “What just happened?” It's not surfacing things in quite the right order.

Look, I'm not sure Twitter was ever going to be a hugely profitable company. It was a very unique resource for following the news if, like me—and like you guys, or at least you, Jason—you were a total news addict. It was a very unique platform, and I wish that functionality had been preserved. Again, to be fair, this started before Elon Musk, although it has continued since then.

Let's wrap on 2028, and in particular Gavin Newsom. Oh no, that's for the midterms. Predictions for the midterms. Lightning round: prediction for the midterms. House and Senate predictions. What does the data tell us right now?

We'll have a model out within a few weeks. It's been a little delayed by the World Cup; we were just writing stuff. Prediction markets say Democrats are around 80% or 85% to take the House and 40% or 45% to take the Senate. Those both seem pretty reasonable to me. If anything, I think it's a little bit low on the House; I think it might be more like 85% or 90%.

My model surprises me sometimes, but look, we've been through a lot of elections that are inherently hard to forecast. The House is the one where everything points in the same direction. Democrats are facing a very unpopular president and an economy that voters have a lot of anxiety about. Trump: no new Middle Eastern wars. On top of that, there's the very long history of the president's party drawing a backlash and performing poorly at the midterms, and the more recent history of incumbent backlash in the U.S. and all around the world.

The good results for Democrats in New Jersey and Virginia last year and in special elections—you know, 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+8 year, in a D+10 state—Democrat Plaitner is only 2 points ahead of Susan Collins. I take that polling at face value. I have him at 50/50, but that's an unnecessary risk, potentially.

The GOP will be vulnerable in these red states. A candidate like James Talarico is also probably in roughly a toss-up race, and Ken Paxton is a far less than ideal Republican nominee. Partisanship is still a powerful force. People are saying, "Why are they kind of attacking Talarico on things that are not above board—critiquing her sexuality or whatever else?" Well, because Texas is a really red state, and Trump's not popular, so you're kind of going for the lowest common denominator. But in our system, that works a fair amount of the time.

It's just a polling, math, and numbers game in the Senate. We're going to see more money spent than ever. Whereas in the House, with 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 or whatever else, right? You literally see it. I think if you look at forecasts, there's supposed to be some abatement, but it's very contingent on how long the conflict with Iran persists and whether it becomes a quagmire. Maybe if we have AGI by October or something, who knows what happens then?

No, his unfavorable ratings are very entrenched, and Democrats are very enthusiastic despite their misgivings about their own party. As much difficulty as I think they'll have in 2028 nominating a candidate, voting for your generic Democrat against a generic Republican is a pretty easy ask for Democrats who feel like democracy is 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. But I'm always aware that, yeah, there's the 10% chance that the underdog you never see coming prevails—Cape Verde ties with Spain or something—but that's pretty fundamentally driven. On the flip side, needing to pick up 4 Senate seats when you might blow the opportunity in Maine, it's a toss-up. Probably a slight edge to the GOP, with maybe gas prices and Iran determining whether it's more truly 50/50 or maybe 60% for the GOP.

The chance of winning both—is that an 80% times 40% type situation, or is it different because of politics and the way the statistics work?

They're highly correlated.

Yeah.

They're almost perfectly correlated. So, if the odds of Democrats winning the Senate but not the House are 1%, then if you go to Calshi or Polymarket or whatever else, it has to be around 1%. Conditional on Democrats winning the Senate, they'll almost certainly have won the House, so they'll almost certainly have won governorships.

By the way, these things are important. 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 policies for the next generation. State legislatures are important.

If I were talking to all of the listeners, I'd say, look for a city council candidate for whom your contribution might make a lot of difference. But no, 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, and Alaska, if that happens, therefore probably all the rest of 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 continued ascension? Am I correct that he's still on the up?

He's not. We have an article up on Silver Bulletin, which we'll publish shortly after we finish this podcast. Newsom has fallen in Democratic polls from around 25% to 15%. He's fallen in prediction markets from around 33% to 22% or something. I think he was benefiting from some degree of name recognition.

Whereas now Democrats see a candidate like Jon Ossoff in Georgia: another good-looking young guy who actually has a credential Newsom will never have—he's won an election in a purple state—and is a younger, fresher face, like what you say about Grant Plantner and Janet Mills in Maine. I think Mills might be the safer choice.

I think it's good that Democrats are showing a bias toward younger candidates. That's a lot of what happened with Zohran Mamdani, too. I wouldn't discount, by the way, someone like 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 I could see it.

Again, in New York, it's New York, so therefore you can't extrapolate too much from New York. However, people are 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 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 terms of governance in California as well. It seems to me that Newsom is actually in a pretty defensive position. That's why you see him having Hunter Biden or something on his podcast.

Yeah, 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 "I'm sick and tired" vote?

She's my bet.

Yes, she's your bet. Okay, what do you think, Nate? Let's talk about AOC. She has that possibility with her charisma?

We've seen in states like Maine, and we may see this in Michigan as well, where, for many years in the Republican primary, the notion was that the establishment always won out. You'd have the Rick Santorums or Sarah Palins or Herman Cains or whatever else, who would get 40% of the vote, but the same country-club establishment types talked about at the top of the show would prevail at the end of the day.

And then it doesn't take that much—perpetually growing dissatisfaction or generational turmoil. Young people in general don't understand why they would care about a party brand anyway. The Democratic Party brand is a lame brand, as certainly is the GOP. If you're an avatar for that brand, then—

Even Obama in 2008 was a highly effective, generationally charismatic candidate, but he combined, on the one hand, positioning to the left of Clinton on issues like Iraq, and 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." That whole post-partisan rhetoric.

I think the most effective candidates can do exactly what he did. 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. He's against the billionaire tax. He's tried to moderate on some of the culture-war issues, like he nominated an institutional candidate from California.

She didn't come that far from winning, but she lost all the swing states by 2 to 5 points. I don't believe, at the end of the day, Democrats would be persuaded that just because you're white and you have different anatomy, that would be the one thing every Democrat was terrified of in 2024.