Pushkin. Welcome back to Risky Business, our show about making better decisions. I'm Maria Kanakova and.
I'm Nate Silver. Today we're going to be talking, as you might expect, more about the elections. There's been a lot of frankly dark and disturbing news. There's also been a lot of polling since the debate. We'll tell you more about what it says and where our forecast is.
We'll also talk about Calshi and prediction markets and betting on political outcomes in the United States. There's been some big news on that last week. And finally, we're going to take it to a more personal place and talk about the saga that I've been having with air conditioning in the midst of a New York City summer. Let's start off with the election models. Trump's assassination, the debates. All of this stuff has happened since we last spoke.
I mean, the debates happened the day before we last spoke, but none of that data had been incorporated into the models. There were no quality polls out. What has changed. Have we seen quality polls in the last week. Where do the data stand now? How have your election model predictions shifted.
Are you implying that data is plural.
Maria, data are plural name?
Oh my god, this is It's been a great run. Thank you for listening to risky business. But we have irreconcilable differences.
And Michelle is singular name.
God. Look, before the debate, Harris was ahead in national polls by about two percentage points, and now she appears to be ahead by roughly three percentage points. And there has been quite a bit of high quality data at the national level. Why is it number important? Well, the electoral college bias, according to our forecast, Silver Bolton forecast favors Trump by about two and a half points, so kind of the point spread, as if Harris wins the popular vote by two and a half points or more,
she's a favorite in electoral college. If she wins by less than two and a half points, she probably doesn't get over the finish line in states like Pennsylvania. So therefore this is a good development for her. There's other stuff too. The question is how sustainable is this if you get like a short term bounce, So maybe the news cycle already moves on to things like this other attempt on Trump's life or conspiracy theories about what Haitian
immigrants are doing. Then we'll see. But in contrast to this kind of labor day period where she was getting a lot of mediocre data, like from the New York Times, this is now back on track for basically a toss of election.
Well that's good news, I mean.
If you're if you're a Harris fan.
If as people know I am, it's good news for Harris. But where are we in terms of the poll cycle? Right? Do you expect that this is kind of that the highest quality polls have already come out, or do you expect that we're going to be updating this significantly in the coming week or two.
Now, what happens after a big event typically is the national polls go first. If you're going to conduct one pole and you do a national poll first, and we're kind of well, we're waiting over the next week or two to populate infill with with some of the higher quality state polling data. Look, earlier this month, Harris was getting some pretty mediocre numbers in state polls. You know
she got for example, Suffolk is a good pole. Souf University had her up three in Pennsylvania, but a lot more polls have had Pennsylvania, Michigan and whatnot basically a tie recently. So so we'll see, you know, if if those state polls also improved for her by a point or two, that we might be at a point where where you would say the race leans slightly toward her. If they don't emote, might go back to saying that
race leans slightly toward Trump. I know it's frustrating. I wish I could like have a crystal ball here and
predict what they would say. But that electoral college gap is like, I think it's counterintuitive for people if you're used to seeing headlines saying Harris ahead, Harris ahead, tye, Harris ahead, lots of reporting the national polls again, Biden won the popular vote by four and a half points in twenty twenty and just barely won the electoral college by by you know, a point or so in Wisconsin.
Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by two point one points in twenty sixteen and lost the electoral college plust all these mid Western states, for example, So you can't look at these national polls and feel too complacent if you're if you're a Democrat, and.
Are we still looking at Pennsylvania as kind of this this benchmark, because you have written about the Pennsylvania polls in the last few days, so I'm kind of curious to see where we stand there. You just briefly mentioned it, but I'd love to kind of go into a little bit more detail because you've also you've also had some of those paths to victory that might not seem intuitive, Like you had one post called Alaska Alasco lastar Alaska,
which I thought was quite funny. But can you elaborate a little bit and can we talk about kind of the first Pennsylvania and then what different paths to victory might look like if we don't, you know, if we stay within this margin and don't see Harris improving.
Yeah, so Pennsylvania is the most likely what we call tipping point state. The tipping point state. The short version is it's a state that gives you the two hundred and seventieth electoral vote. That's the state that's the number that guarantees you a victory in electoral college. A longer version, if you line up all the states from most blue to most red and add up the electoral votes, that's where you get over the finish line. But basically it's the decisive state about a third of the time in
our model, but it's not alone. In that department. There's about a thirty percent chance that Pennsylvania is a tipping point state, which means there's a seventy percent chance that it isn't Harris unlike Biden. I mean, Biden kind of had to win Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan very narrow path, whereas Harris has often begetting their numbers in Georgia. For example, North Carolina is a state that comes up quite a bit. Those states both have sixteen electoral votes, Pennsylvania has nineteen,
so you can't quite substitute one for the other. But there are combinations that work North Carolina plus Nevada, or North Carolina plus Arizona, Nevada Nevada, or if you want to get really creative, Nevada plus Arizona plus Alaska, where a poll came out this weekend showing Harris down by only four points.
When is the last time a Democrat has taken Alaska nineteen.
Sixty four, LBJ. I believe one Alaska people actually thought when Alaska and Hawaii enter the country the Union, that Alaska would be democratic and Hawaii would be Republican and the reverse has been true instead fascinating, but Alaska has a Democrat representative named Mary Peltola who is a lone US House or presentative for the state at the state legislature level. It's kind of by partisan. It's population is changing a lot about you know, four percent of the
population moves into Alaska every year. It's a transient workforce. I don't know if you're getting the expats from California and stuff like that. So Harris does have more paths, but there's not any one safe path. Let's also remember, by the way, I don't mean to scare our Democratic listeners. Let's also remember that in these Midwestern swing states Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, those are states where Poles have overrated Democrats in the
past couple of elections. So how safe should you feel if you're ahead by one point in Wisconsin when Biden was up by seven points in Wisconsin and only one by one point, for example, Maybe not that's safe.
Yeah, no, I think that's a very fair point. So it is though it is a movement from last week, but again there is still a long way to go. Now, what about the Trump assassination attempt. Are we seeing any effects from that? Will we see effects from that? Because obviously that happened over the weekend, and you know, we're recording this on Tuesday, September seventeenth, so it's not like polls come out, you know, every single day that incorporate
new events. But I'm curious whether there have been any shifts and whether you expect any shifts or not.
I don't know. I mean we should also so clearly, the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania was a very serious incident where Trump was injured and could have been killed if he didn't read at the right point in time, and another people person and was killed and other people were injured. And it's somewhat more common to see plots foiled. This guy got further than a lot of people. It was a guy at a golf course hiding in the bushes.
For some reason, he decided to wear a pink shirt, which is not known as a color that helps you camouflage.
Very well, yes, it's not traditional camouflage, that's true.
So you know, I don't know whether this gets kind of talked about or thought. It was an event that totally disrupts the news cycle in prediction markets we talked about in a moment, it did not particularly move the numbers for what it's worth. I mean, look, it just I don't know. I mean, this election's turned pretty dark, I think, needless to say, right. I mean, you know, there probably should be more investigation into the Secret Service and what they are or are not doing. I don't know,
that's not a bigger topic. For example, you have you know, Elon Musk making this awful joke about why hasn't anyone tried to assas the Democrats? That was low even for Elon, Even for Elon. I mean, you also have on the on this Haitian immigrant story. Some of this stuff is pretty outright racist, I think. And you also have like JD Events saying well, maybe it's not I'm paraphrasing slightly, maybe it's not strictly true, but at least it's a
way to get people talking about immigration more. I mean, you're, first of all, you're not supposed to say that part JD Events, right, You're you're saying the quiet part out loud, and I and it's just so bizarre and and weird. I don't know, Maria, there comes a time when and this is after a period when after she took over, after Biden was shoved out of the way. He didn't honorably step aside. He was shoved out of the way by Nancy Pelosi and people who are smart and want
to win the Democratic Party. You know, Harris ran this kind of sunnier, happier campaign and and I know sometimes after Labor Day things just turn dark.
Yeah, this has been a very dark election. I think that's a good way of putting it.
Yeah, look the way I liken this is a little bit too. H here's another analogy that'll probably piss half for audience off.
It's okay, It's okay, as long as we keep pissing off different halves than it all.
Even say, it's a little bit like climate change in the sense that any one severe weather event like a hurricane is hard to attribute to climate change. But when you have a climate when people are saying violent things, and I don't think the parties are equally responsible for this. I think Trump is much more likely to engage in violent rhetoric. But there's plenty of objectionable stuff on the
Democratic side too. You know, the risk of violence is higher and we've seen, you know, these two attempts on Trump's life. We saw, you know, Paul Pelosi, the speaker from Preacau's House's husband attacked. You had a shooting in a congressional baseball game back. I guess this was several years ago, twenty seven, but still kind of in this you know, modern era twenty sixteen onward. Then it's been
kind of a violent time in American political life. You saw a shooting of Republicans in a congressional baseball game a couple of years ago. You know, this is not good. Sorry, I guess I'm studying the obvious, right. And you have also January sixth, in the summer of twenty twenty, you have protests that are not always peaceful. Frankly somewhere often not. You know, look, I think in politics people feel like they have license to behave really badly. They feel self
righteous about it. I don't know, Maria, No.
It's not good. And I think that I think we're forgetting you know so much about why democracy works. You know, what makes democracy different from other forms of government, That we're supposed to have peaceful transitions of power, That peace is kind of supposed to be built into the system, you know, right now the United States, and some of it's in some of what's going on is more resembling, you know, countries that are dictatorships, that are that that
are not used to having peaceful transitions of power. And I think that that's highly problematic. And I hope that it's not a harbinger of things to come. I hope that we are we are looking at a blip in time that will that will disappear. But that's just hope, right that has no no basis in reality, And right now the reality is actually showing us that we're veering off into another direction. And you know, we need data and we need to see what happens, but right now it's it's not looking pretty.
Yeah, Like I think Democrats feel like, oh, if we just kind of defeat Donald Trump, we solve the problem, right, But you know, I'm not sure sure how how true that is exactly. Clearly a lot of these other Republican
candidates are trying to emulate Trump's image. It is interesting though that the GOP brand is not terribly popular, Like they're still losing a lot of these races for a Senate and the House will probably take over the Senate because you have these Democrats that are up in very red states that might tip the balance, but in his swing states are often down by by five or six points.
And I think somehow, like somehow, Trump sometimes gets a pass from voters, or maybe just Trump is kind of a guy who is he has a certain charisma that resonates with a certain type of voter. People think that he is on their side, whereas you kind of see like the more charisma less version with say jd Vance for example. So maybe it's right that if Democrats win this election two and Trump is then one for three. Although who knows, is there any reason why he wouldn't
run in twenty twenty eight. I don't inherently see why not. Right, age is the.
Only thing that I might that I might say in case there's, you know, any infirmity or anything that really prevents him from running, I think that that's the only thing that would really stop him.
I mean, he'd be the same age as Biden tried to run this year, although I guess it's a negative indicator.
Yeah, look at how well that turned out. Yeah, So just to kind of wrap this up, is there anything else that you think we should be looking at in the next week. Do you expect to see any changes in the coming week or do we just need to kind of wait and see what happens.
Yeah, I hate to I hate to sound like a broken record, but you know, are you seeing for Harris poll showing her up one or two points in Pennsylvania's constin Michigan? Failing that, you know North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Well, then you know Nevada. Now I'm saying it weird.
Nevadada, Novada, no matter, you got it?
Okay. It's one of those words where I feel like, you know, like if you know someone named Megan, but then it's Megan, and then then you swear because like, oh it's not the way I think it is. Then you get screwed up between Megan and Megan. I just
think people should consolidate these names, right, We should? You know how like in France you're only allowed certain surnames or Germany or something, right, Yep, we should stipulate Sarah with an H and Sarah with an A. You just got to get together and pick one.
I could. I could see how that's going to play out. Nate, if that's part of your political platform. I'm going to tell you right now, you're gonna lose parents. Parents on both sides of the of the party spectrum are going to fight you to the death on that. They want their creative spellings.
We're trying to like simplify these poor people's lives right there, spelled half the time.
I completely agree with you, but I do not have children, and I think that a lot of people would disagree with us and would say that they need the freedom to spell the name however they want to spell it. And I think at some point that goes just a little bit too far. I'm all for simplification. Sarah's and Sarah's of the world unite. After this break, let's talk about Calshi and some prediction markets. Last week there was some major news in the prediction market space. So Nate,
you know, we give this disclaimer all the time. You're an advisor for Polymarket. We're not talking about polymarket right now. Polymarket is not legal in the United States. There is a prediction market that is legal in the United States called cal she and last week it won its federal lawsuit against the Commodity Futures Training Commission in order to be able to offer contracts on which party will control
the each House of Congress after the election. And this was a huge, huge deal, right because betting on elections has not been legal in the United States. It's been this huge lightning rod, this huge argument against prediction markets in general, and the fact that cal She won this
lawsuit was just absolutely huge news. So right after it won, it actually offered these contracts, people started betting on them, and then a few hours later they had to free them because the CFTC said, hold on, you know, freeze, we want to contest this. We don't think this should be legal, and right now we're kind of in this holding pattern. No one knows what's going to happen to the people who already placed their bets last week during the few hours that vetting was open, and we don't
know what's going to happen. They were supposed to potentially resolve this yesterday Monday. As of today, Tuesday, September seventeenth, they still have not resolved this. So the US Court of the Appeals and the DC Circuit is waiting. We're waiting to hear how they rule on this, and that's going to do a lot to determine the future of
political betting in the United States. Let's talk about this because you know, this is something that cal she has been fighting for for over four years, and not just Calshie obviously other future markets, but Cals. She's been doing it from within the United States, bringing it through the court systems, and it's a big, big deal.
Yeah. Whereas probably market has an agreement with the CFDC not to allowed trading in the US like I, as I need to say, whenever this type of subject comes up, I have a conflict of interest here. I am invi are to a competing prediction market called poly market. You know, the reason on aviasure to them is partly because they they compensate me, but also because I believe in prediction
markets as a product. But look, the basic argument for prediction markets is that, you know, market risk inherently has to price in political risk anyway, that if you're thinking about how different classes of equities will move, or interest rates or you know, or foreign markets, you know, US policy toward China or whatnot, people already are factoring in who's gonna win the election, how political events might unfold, including like foreign elections for example, so why not allow
people to bet on this directly instead of kind of filtered through other types of more imprecise commodities. You know. The CFTC says they're worried about market manipulation, and they can cite, for example, people playing placing fake poles out there. We've seen this sometimes actually, where you'll see people make
up credible rumors of a poll. Whether they do that just to fuck with people or because it's a way to manipulate markets, I'm not so sure, you know, But the question is why use this in a different category than say betting on sports, where you have seen efforts to throw matches in manipulation, or trading equities and things like that, you know. I mean, if you have like a Donald Trump stock, you have things that are kind of proxies for election anyway. I mean Bitcoin often moves
upward and downward. That's seen as Trump is seen as bullish for bitcoin. So if you have Trump having a bad debate like you had last week, for example, bitcoin goes down. So I don't know, I think it's I think the CFTC has always been very if you read the book my book, they're very villagy, right, They seem to think that like trading or gambling is is bad and and evil and will taint the political system when it's like, I don't know, you know, Alex, uh excuse me.
You know, I always like the phrase that a bet is a tax on bullshit. You know, It's not uncommon for me to like be in an argument with somebody on Twitter and to say, Okay, you actually believe what you're saying, let's bet on it. Let's bet surreal money.
Has anyone, by the way, ever taken you about it? Because I've seen you offer it to so many people, and I've never seen someone say yes.
They're always they're always cowards, right, They're always cowards. They're always cowards because they don't actually mean what they say most of the time. Right, they're talking a big game and they don't actually mean what they say. And and I don't know, maybe it's a weird thing to want to like bet on all this stuff, but like, but yeah, yeah, by the way, we walk into Alan Lickman today. That feels like too much of a detour.
We can, we can, but but first, uh, but first let's uh, let's let's stay on Calshi for a little bit and betting on elections. So you said a few things, and there there's one thing that you know that I completely agree with, which is that, you know, to really test someone's opinion, bet on it. Right. We did not invent this. I think I've cited Immanuel Khnt on this
podcast before. You know. He was one of the original proponents that if you say something's going to happen, if you have a certainty in it, how much money are you willing to bet on it? Right? What will you
place on it? And he did see this as a tax on bullshit and on false certainty, on unfalse confidence, and he thought that this would really be a very strong corrective towards people just prosaltizing and giving unfounded opinions and trying to you know, stand on a soapbox without actual knowledge or backing that you really needed to put your money where your mouth is. And so in that sense,
you know, betting on politics great, right. It helps calibrate outcomes, It helps kind of figure out where things are standing, because people really have skin in the game as opposed to just kind of standing on their soapbox, which when it comes to politics, everyone has a soap books and everyone wants to scream loudly. But let's look at the
other side of it. So you said something which was, you know, if we're betting on sports where people there has been manipulation, people have tried to throw games, why aren't we allowed to bet on politics? I would say, I think this is a huge problem in sports betting
as well. We've talked about this, and if you think it's a huge problem in sports and that people are throwing games and that it actually is kind of adding some of this uncertainty to certain outcomes where you can't really tell, you know, did this person actually you know fumble,
did they throw the game on purpose? Kind of there's it introduces a lot of shades of great in the moment that you can bet on some of these outcomes, including just these crazy prop bets, right, not just the outcome of the game, but there are these just insane prop bets that have a lot of money riding on them during the game. But think about like at the end of the day, like it's it's a sports game. I know there are listeners of the show who are huge sports fans, but like it's not going to change
the fate of the world. We're talking about politics, those things become amplified because we're now playing in a different ballgame. Let's mix metaphors here and bring sports to politics. It's a different game that we're playing with much higher stakes, where any potential impropriety, manipulation, things that could actually throw elections one way or another, one outcome one way or another, they become much much bigger deals. Right, we actually have
to pay attention to that. Now, I'm not What I'm not saying is this is the case and we can't allow betting on elections. What I'm saying is we need to talk about this, We need to consider it. We need to try to figure out, you know, what are the pros, what are the cons, what's the risk of this? And given that, what kinds of tools also do we want to offer? Because prediction markets don't just offer, you know,
a straight out bet on the outcome of the election. Right, there are contracts, there are derivatives markets, There are all sorts of secondary things where you get to bet on also some things. And so even if we you know, once you and I talk about it, even if we agree that okay, some sorts of betting is okay, that doesn't necessarily mean that all sorts of betting is okay, and we can then go back to sports and say, Okay,
these these things are not necessarily okay either. I'm talking a lot in generalities right now, just because I want to kind of lay out some of the points that I think we should discuss.
Look, I think, you know, in some sorts, I think it kind of almost cuts the other way that, like there is economic value created. You know, you have more market efficiency and less deadweight loss when you're allowed to create on these things that move markets anyway instead of having to go through proxies. And that's a very University of Chicago economist hat thing to argue, Whereas I'm not sure there's any value per se created by sports betting.
For some people, it's fun, for some people it's addictive. It's a tough game to win, to be sure. So I don't know, I mean, And there's also this argument that if things are more regulated, then it's easier to catch like market manipulation for better or worse draft kings, and FanDuel can say, yeah, we he it was unusual betting patterns. NBA, you should go investigate this, NFL should go investigate this. If it's regulated versus occurring in like
offshore crypto markets and so forth. But anyway, I'm biased here. I'm clearly biased. I like better, I like trading right, and I cansult for one of these companies, So I'm totally totally biased. But I've always thought the CFTC was kind of nitty.
Yeah, I mean, I can see that, but I can also see the argument for if you are able to manipulate markets for even for a short period of time. And by the way, last week there was an attempt to do this on poly market during the debates, right, there was an attempt to improve Kamala Harris's odds over a short period of time. One person bet over two point five million to move the markets. It didn't end up working, so the market ended up correcting. So this
is an argument in favor of self correcting markets. But if you think about like a billionaire, right, who is willing to put in more money and willing to kind of do this in a more egregious way, even if it does end up correcting eventually. We know that especially in close selections, even rumors, even kind of things that say, you know, these days you can actually open most not most but a lot of news stories will actually say the polymarket odds right, We'll say like Donald Trump is
at X, Kamala Harris's at why. So those things can be self fulfilling prophecies. They can actually influence people's perceptions of how something is going influence their behavior. There are these cycles where like, just psychologically speaking, I think it's something to think about.
Yeah, there are a couple of concerns here. What is that Sometimes polymarket and other prediction markets, we'll have these complicated derivative contracts, like you can predict will Harris be ahead on poly market at X and Y time on zmy day, and then it may be worth it to try to move the markets that you win. The deritive contract like stuff like that should probably get cleaned up.
And yeah, I mean, and there can be this kind of circular literalism almost where where you know, people assume the prediction markets are wise and then so actually one example, you remember this, a couple of weeks ago, they were rumors that there would be a special guest at the Credit Convention.
People thought Beyonce was potentially gonna say that. That's thought That's where it ended up going.
People thought Taylor Swift. People thought Beyonce right, and then Beyonce was up to like ninety seven percent on polymarket, and then TMZ releases a story where her spokesperson said, no, she's not even in the it's not even in Chicago right now, right, it's not happening. And that was a case where people look at the prediction markets and said, boy, they must know something. They must know something because they have gotten other stuff right. They were smart about the
packed of the debates. They were smart about Harris. You know, the day that Tim Walls was named Jos Shapiro. I think they were. I know people were like scouting out the Tim Walls residents or something. So they are. They are remarkably right a lot of the time. And then but sometimes you have this overconfident phenomenon where where people think they're infallible and then and then there's a big And this is true for other types of markets too, right.
I am not a complete believer in efficient market hypothesis.
Yeah. So, so if you think about, once again, the repercussions when it's something that's more significant, right, like the elections, like politics, I think that there is room obviously for these type of markets to exist, and obviously there's an argument that they exist already, right, So as you said, regulate like allow them and and be strict about it.
But when you're talking about things like these derivatives, contracts, all these secondary things, like, I think that we need to have some rules in place, right, Like there's not having allowing markets for political betting does not mean allowing all markets on everything with every single type of financial instrument, right,
that one does not follow from the other. We can have very specific rules even with crypto, right, like the you've had we've talked about ethan bitcoin and you know the very narrow like the path that they had to go through, right to allow one very specific type of financial instrument in order to be able to trade in proxy. Yeah.
Yeah, And this is true in sports betting markets too, which is that there's so much pressure to offer so many different derivatives of markets for every possible type of event and things like that, and the more robust business model is to kind of keep it simple, right, You commit on you know, the money line and the point spread and the total. If there's a player injury situation, then they'll take it off the board instead of being subject to inside information. They're not gonna let you bet
on things. This is again like the more robust, more robust betting platforms like Circa, for example, which is known for actually taking action from sharp winning players and properly doing handicapping or bookmaking I should say, not handicapping. But there's this pressure to like offer you eat, to bet on everything and have this gicanic menu. It's often a false front, right if you try to bet some of the weird stuff on DraftKings or FanDuel, then you'll get
limited right away if you're any good. So keeping things simple I think is a lesson here for everybody.
Yeah, keeping things simple and also potentially potentially limiting in the moment things right, Like one of the one of the issues with last week's attempt to manipulate the markets was it was during the debate, right, they were trying to keep those markets open during a very specific window.
It's like when you're allowed to play sports bets on certain outcomes in the middle of a game, and they're even you know, in some countries, like the sports bets will actually pop up on your screen as you're watching a game, and you can, you know, you can place bets and you know, we know that if this appeals to your djen Hart on some level. But I think that especially when it comes to politics, limiting things like that and trying to figure out, okay, what what is necessary?
What is least likely to be manipulated? How do we place limits on manipulation? Right? Could it be that, like you actually are not allowed to bet ten million dollars? Can we Is that? Is that a thing? Or or is that like not a thing?
Right?
Should we allow bets of any size on anything? You know? How do we how do we play safely? Well?
The thing is, there's so much money in elections that I mean, and there have, by the way, been so in two thousand and eight. There are reports of people trying to buy John McCain's stock, or buying John mccainstock on prediction market platforms back then because it was a relatively cheap way to move the media narrative. Right, you spend a few thousand bucks and someone writes a story about I'll look the smart traders know that McCain is
searching now on whatever it was back then. You know, now that the volumes are more liquid, it's harder to do that. You can't really like spend a thousand bucks and have any lasting effect.
But yeah, but you can spend millions and have an effect. Right, we did see that they did. Like I said, and I just keep going to last week because it just happened last week. Right, this is just something that's easily accessible to my mind. The two and a half million and those few beds did move the markets, right, they did, correct, But now, like let's assume it was on something that
was more more important. I do think that we just need to figure out, you know, how do we take this into account, How are we aware of this, How do we make sure that, you know, we can have markets that actually reflect real sentiment opinion, so they do clear, you know, so that they are put your own money where your mouth as types of things, as opposed to how do I make more money by trying to kind of manipulate this for a short period of time, or how do I get my preferred candidate to win by
you know, putting one hundred million in the prediction markets on my candidate, moving the narrative, getting those stories and actually in a very very tight election where we're talking about you know, one point lead here, one point lead there, where something like that might actually, as we know, as we know with Pokernate, you know, every every little piece of a percentage matters when you're talking about it.
So very it's also very directionally unclear though, why you even care that much about the narrative. It's it's not clear that it you know, whether it makes people complacent or makes people turn out or whatever else, it's not entirely clear. That's funny thing true. You've had this funny thing where, you know, when Harris, now she's been moving back up in the forecast, but a period of a week or two ago, when she was moving down in the Silver bulletin forecast, you had both Trump and Harris
citing the forecast. Trump said that Nate still Ryer's a pretty smart guy, which is not what he said about him four years ago. Meanwhile, the Harris campaign is blasting out the forecast and saying, look, we're the underdogs in this race, trying to manage expectations. That speaks to the
different personality types between Democrats and Republicans. But people, you know, I think there are a lot of can I use this term, a lot of losers out there who are mistaken winning the news cycle or yunking on somebody for winning the election, and they often have nothing to do with one another. You know, the more you can chill out and be looking toward the long term what's your long term strategy for November, and the better off you are than trying to like win the day quote unquote.
Do we know whether voter turnout is affected by your perception of how close the election is versus how well your candidate is doing? Because you know, if you think back to Hillary Clinton versus Trump, because she was such a favorite, even though we know that in your model, Trump had a twenty eight twenty eight percent yes correct chance of winning that you know that you're less likely to vote because you'll say, oh, you know, it doesn't
really matter that much. Like do we have do we have good data on how that works?
There's data that turnout is higher the closer the polls are. Whether that's because of the polls or not is hard to know. So yeah, in swing states they tend to have holding other factors equal higher turnout. I mean, you know, again we don't know how exogenous or indogenous this is. Yea, the campaigns spend more in those states and knock on more doors, and there's more advertising and the candid's visit
and all those things. Right, there's more infrastructure. So so the causality is hard to know, but there is that pattern for sure.
So in that sense, that's where the narratives end up mattering a little bit, right, where if we can depending on how we can frame the cycle, frame how close the election is, who's ahead, who's behind. Potentially, right, it might affect a thousand voters, two thousand voters, but sometimes that's all you need. I know that in the midterm election in Nevada, during which I voted not a not a not a secret voted for the Democrats, the Democrats ended up carrying some of those seats by a few
thousand votes. I think it was like two thousand something, right, It was like tiny and and that's when you realize, oh wow, like it actually does matter exactly how many people went out to the polls. Once again, I as you know, I am all for prediction markets, I'm for betting on outcomes. I just think that, you know, these are all really important questions and we should be looking
at just like you look at Alaska, Alaska, Alaska. We should consider edge cases, We should consider these spots where it might affect a tiny fraction of people, but that tiny fraction is enough in swing states. You know, these are these are things that we should talk about still, even if it's not very likely. So let's say a break and then onto lighter things like air conditioning.
Some Maria, I've been traveling. I was in London a week and a half ago. I was in Wyoming for last week's episode. Now I'm in San Francisco. The result, I'm like jet lagged in both directions, and it's just completely random. When I get hungry. Sometimes I'm like starving at like five in the morning, and then not all hungry during regular people hours anyway. So I have not been in on the gospel your air conditioning situations. I just want you to take it away. What is going on with your ac Nate.
You've been to my house in New York, and you know that we used to not have air conditioning. We you know, it's an old round stone. We had window units and that is how we air conditioned our apartment. And you know, New York summers have been getting quite hot and quite sticky, and this was just getting more and more unbearable. I thought, I was doing something really good and finally upgrading our you know, old apartment that had window units, two split AC units that get installed
in the wall. Much more efficient, much nicer. Fast forward to today. We weren't there when these units got installed. Two of them were great. There are three rooms in my apartment. The one in the bedroom not so great. There is a pump that will not shut.
The suck up.
This is the loudest water pump you have ever heard.
It's just you imitate it. Can you imitate it?
Glug glug?
Okay, okay, all right, yeah.
Very good and very loud. And it does it all the time, so not just when there's water in it. The reason it's so loud is that it does it when there's no water at it either. So anyway, completely faulty needs to be replaced. Has not been patched up because we complained immediately when when.
We saw this.
So our bedroom is just one big gaping hole, holes in the wall, holes in the ceiling, you know, exposed insulation, and this fucking pump which makes it impossible to sleep. And so basically there's no ACA in the bedroom. You cannot run that thing because it is so damn loud.
And I honestly, like, I do not know what to do because when I told them multiple times that this needs to happen, the latest is that it will not happen until mid October, by which point I will be long gone in Las Vegas, which is.
My I got right. I got news for Maria, got news for you. It gets a little cold, and I don't know what boys I'm doing here. It gets cold by October. Who cares about our conditioning?
No one cares about a sea by October. But we do care about the fact that our walls and ceilings are wide open and the insulation and it is completely exposed. And we live in on the top floor of a tiny walk up, so this actually does matter because the insulation in this building ain't the best. So Nate, like, I honestly do not know, Like, what is my plus EV move? What am I supposed to do to try to get this AC installed as quickly as possible and just get this work done.
Yeah, there's some case where they kind of have you by the tail. I was gonna say, of the balls, but I don't want to genderize it.
They they can have you buy the balls. I'm cool with it.
Uh Yeah, it was in a TSA situation. So the TSA doesn't always like it when you bring your podcasts equipment through the planet. They don't like your mics or whatever, right, and so there was just like long line. There was some guy who decided to bring a knife, like a dual sided knife in his carry on luggage, which you know, some German fellow. That seems like a pretty bad idea
at a major commercial airport. Has caused a big delay, And I'm like, I could complain about this, but that's just gonna make it worse, right, there's no saying nothing is the only plus EV play in that situation. I think if they have you by the balls, then you got to you gotta.
Yeah, I think they kind of have us by the balls, and there's there's really nothing that I can do and it but it's awful. I feel like I should be able to do something like maybe get someone else to finish it, but then that someone else is going to charge you know, another another arm and a lug to
do the replacement work and fix this. And I just it's very rare for me to be in a situation where just it seems like there's no plus EV outcome right, Like I just I wanted to do something good for the apartment, to make it more livable, and at the end of the day, it's a million times worse than the situation we had before, and and my decision making mind wants there to be a decision calculus that says, uh huh, this is the correct branch of the decision tree.
But it seems like the correct branch, as you say, is just saying nothing and hoping for the best and trying to be nice, which is what I've done. But being nice has gotten me absolutely nowhere so far.
Sometimes, Maria, there are only negative V moves and you have to pick the least negative EV move.
That's not what I want to do to say.
Risky Business is hosted by me Nate Silver and.
Me Maria Kanakova.
This episode was produced by Isabel Carter. Our associate producer is Gabriel Hunter Chang. Our engineer is Sarah Bruger. Our executive producer is Jacob Goldstein.
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