So, who’s gonna win the World Cup?

Well, that’s a question we’re prepared to answer in great detail. This page contains our forecast for every game and every stage of the tournament. We’ll update it regularly with every match result, every tiebreaker scenario, and even every injury.

What's the catch? This being Silver Bulletin, our answers are, of course, probabilistic, based on 100,000 simulations of the tournament. That’s especially necessary here because historically, the World Cup hasn’t been particularly kind to favorites. Last month, we launched PELE, our international soccer rating model, which combines some of the best features of our1 previous soccer model, SPI, with data on player market values, incredibly detailed calculations of home-field advantage, and some new innovations like a Tilt rating for each team that measures their tendency toward attacking or defensive play.

We’ve also run PELE back to the first World Cup in Uruguay in 1930. Based on our retrospectively calculated, pre-tournament PELE ratings, favorites (often boosted by home-field or at least home-region advantage2) went 8-3 in the first 11 World Cup tournaments, culminating in Argentina’s 3-1 win in extra time against the Netherlands at the 1978 final in Buenos Aires. Since then, however, favorites are 3-8, with the last pre-tournament #1 to win being Spain in 2010.

This year’s tournament would seem to feature an especially large amount of parity. In prediction markets, France and Spain began the tournament as essentially co-favorites at around 16 percent, leaving plenty of win probability to divide among defending champion Argentina, England, Brazil, Portugal and others. It’s the sort of tournament where home-field advantage might break the tie. But the three co-hosts, Mexico, Canada and the United States, are a tier or two below elite status according to nearly everyone’s estimation.

So who does PELE like? While our model doesn’t deviate too much from the conventional wisdom, we don’t have teams in quite the same order. Each time we run the model, we play out 100,000 simulated World Cups, accounting for the difficulty of each team’s draw, meticulously calculating tiebreakers, and even the possibility of a dark-horse contender getting hot and unexpectedly being in top form.3 Let’s look at the PELE ratings and some specific adjustments that we’ve made to them for the World Cup.

Part I. Team and group ratings ⚽

Our baseline PELE ratings are adjusted in several ways for the tournament. First, we account for differences between PELE’s algorithmically calculated rosters and the actual, announced World Cup rosters. Thus, we correct for the impact of injuries or otherwise unexpected player absences.4

Second, we update each team’s rating based on the quality of their performance relative to PELE’s expectations for each match. For instance, while Mexico beat South Africa 2-0 in the opening game, this result was pretty much what PELE expected so it doesn’t produce much of a revision to the overall ratings. And third, we adjust for home-field advantage on a match-by-match basis.5 The factor is customized for each team: as it happens, the U.S., Canada and especially Mexico6 have above-average home-field advantages.

Spain is our top-rated team in PELE. England and France, meanwhile, are essentially tied for the #3 position.

But you can see the impact of some of PELE’s advanced features. Norway, for instance, receives a boost from Erling Haaland because PELE accounts for player market values.

You might have noticed that our table introduced some mascots: a fox7 (🦊) for Group F, for instance. (By the way, that’s a hedgehog 🦔, not a porcupine, for Group H.) We figured that might be helpful because with 12 groups this year, the group stage could be roughly as confusing as the Tokyo Subway Map. Here are all the groups, with their mascots, along with the pre-tournament composite ratings8 for each one.

Some groups are tougher than others, particularly France’s Group I (🦎), which also features Norway and Senegal. Under the old format, this would be a proverbial Group of Death, but now all three teams have a chance to get through. The United States’ Group D (🐬) is also a little tougher than reputed, with no elite teams but also no easy outs. Canada and Mexico have among the easier draws in the tournament, however.

But let’s be honest: 32 teams out of 48 advancing makes for a forgiving format. (The eight highest-ranked of the 12 3rd-place finishers will go to the knockout stage along with the winner and runner-up from each group.) Yes, we put a lot of work into precisely incorporating FIFA’s complicated tiebreaker rules into our simulations. (Head-to-head results now take precedence over goal differential.) But no country that has any pretension of being a soccer superpower has a good excuse not to advance. The expansion from 32 to 48 teams also lowers the floor significantly, with teams like Uzbekistan, Cape Verde and Curacao potentially providing for easy group-stage fodder and possibly yielding a higher-scoring tournament.9

Let’s take the rest of this in phases. We’ve accounted for pretty much every detail that we can think of, from how teams’ odds of advancing will change based on the results of each group stage game to the biggest upsets in World Cup history:

• Part II: Group stage projections

• Part III: Knockout stage projections

• Part IV: Road to the knockout stage

• Part V: Match projections

• Part VI: Team track records and historical data

Ratings and forecasts will be updated at the end of each match day10. As a heads-up, we’ll show all of you some data from the first four groups as a preview, but most of this incredibly detailed analysis is reserved for paying subscribers. (Paid subscribers will also get access to our full suite of PELE ratings and our forthcoming midterm election forecasts.)

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Part II. Group stage projections ⚽

As we’ve said, 12 groups are a lot, especially with as much detail as we’re going to show you. So let’s pair our mascots off into squads of four, starting with Groups A through D, which include the three co-hosts. Here are the latest results of our 100K simulations. Once the tournament gets underway, we’ll hardcode any actual results and simulate the rest of the World Cup from there.

We’ve opted to show you a lot of detail here because of FIFA’s complicated tiebreakers. Here’s what determines group stage placement, in precise FIFA order:

• Points: 3 for a win and 1 for a draw

• Head-to-head results between tied teams

• Goal differential

• Goals scored

• Fair play points (FPP), or basically yellow cards and red cards: the fewer, the better for advancement (appropriately, this is the yellow column in the chart)

• Finally, the FIFA rankings

Mexico (with its huge home-field advantage) and Brazil are clear favorites in Groups A and C, respectively. In fact, Mexico is now almost certain to advance after their 2-0 win against South Africa in the opener. But the positions behind them may be a scramble with the tiebreakers mattering. The U.S. and Canada began as more like co-favorites in their groups along with Turkey and Switzerland — Canada’s Group B is rather weak — although the U.S.’s superior performance in their opener have put “us” in a good position. So what exactly are their odds of advancing? That’s in our next table:

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The 2026 World Cup will begin on June 11, creating the biggest spectacle in the history of the sport: 48 teams, 104 matches, $11,000 tickets, and three hosts: Mexico, Canada and the United States. It will also be a referendum on the state of the U.S. soccer program: one that, based on our recent results, we might not be prepared to pass in a blaze of red, white and blue glory.

But World Cup time also means “model time” to me. I first designed a soccer rating system, Soccer Power Index, for ESPN in advance of the 2010 World Cup; we later extended it into SPI 2.0 at FiveThirtyEight. While SPI was a good system, I’ve spent a lot more time developing sports models since then.

PELE, our new international soccer model, combines the best features of SPI with some tricks we’ve learned from our newer models. It uses a mix of match results, player market values, and historical economic and geographic data, and is obsessively customized to the peculiar contours of the global sport.

We’ll use PELE, Predictive Elo with Lineup Equilibria, to power our official Silver Bulletin World Cup projections once rosters are finalized in a few weeks. But rather than being a placeholder for SPI, we think PELE has a lot of value on its own — in fact, it might be my favorite model we’ve worked on. Starting today, we’ll publish our PELE ratings for all 211 FIFA teams, covering all years since 1872, and update them whenever new matches are played.

You can get a more formal introduction to PELE on the methodology page. But the best way to demonstrate the breadth of the system is by example. So let’s start with our overall PELE ratings. One tip: we’d encourage you to view PELE on the web rather than in email or the app.

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PELE ratings

Each team gets a continuously updated pair of ratings: PELE and Tilt. PELE is the headline number that predicts overall team quality. It’s basically a fancy variation of an Elo rating system, though it’s affected by changes in player market values and player ages as well as match results. Argentina and Spain are essentially tied for the top slot as we head into the 2026 World Cup. But you’ll have to scroll down a few pages to find the United States.

The rest of this page contains:

• A comparison of PELE and FIFA rankings;

• Tilt ratings;

• Offense, defense and round-robin results;

• Future match projections, including for the 2026 World Cup group stage;

• The Atlas of PELE, our 12 footballing regions and home-field advantage;

• Market values and projected team trajectories;

• And, detailed historical PELE data since 1872, including the best teams of all-time.

The last few “advanced” sections are a bonus for paying subscribers. We greatly appreciate your support and we’ll consider extending PELE to club soccer depending on the amount of interest in the model.

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Ready for some ranking controversies? You can already get a few hints for how PELE differs from other systems. Because PELE is designed to be predictive, it can be more sympathetic to recent underperformers like Germany (#7 in PELE, #10 in FIFA) and more skeptical of teams on a possibly unsustainable hot streak (FIFA has Morocco #8; we have them #22). It also tends to like South American teams (CONMEBOL1) better than FIFA. And market value data can help teams with star talent like Norway in PELE.

Tilt ratings

Offense and defense are more fluid in soccer than in sports like American football, but there are some predictable patterns. Tilt ratings indicate a team’s tendency toward attacking or defensive play. They are based on both long-term tactical preferences and the personnel on the field — the presence of Erling Haaland makes Norway more attack-minded than they otherwise would be. Tilt measures the impact on the total number of goals scored combined between both teams.2 For instance, if Germany’s Tilt rating is +.6 (“very attacking”) that means games involving Germany will tend to feature 3+ goals rather than the ~2.5 that is more common in modern international matches.

Offense, defense and round-robin results

Now that we have both PELE and Tilt ratings, we can do some neat things. Most importantly, we can forecast matches! Our round-robin results project every pairwise combination of match results between the 211 current FIFA members (weighted slightly toward more challenging matchups3). Also, this process allows us to derive offensive and defensive ratings for each team, as measured by the projected number of goals scored and allowed against the same competition. Teams with negative Tilt ratings like Colombia and Senegal will produce lower-scoring matches with more draws.

Future match projections

But better yet, let’s forecast some actual games. We’ve uploaded the schedule for all future international matches that we’re aware of. This includes group-stage matches for the 2026 World Cup, though our ratings for World Cup games will be slightly tweaked later once rosters are finalized.4

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🕒 The latest on Trump’s approval rating

Updated June 13, 2026

Donald Trump’s net approval rating hit a second term low of -21.2 in late May. Since then, it has rebounded slightly to -18.7. For comparison, Trump’s net approval rating was just -11.2 at this point in his first term, while Joe Biden’s was -13.5.

Trump is also underwater on the four major issues we track. His net approval rating on immigration has held steady around -10 since March. But in late May, his net approval on the economy dropped below -30 for the first time in his second term. Things are even more dire for Trump when it comes to inflation. Recent polls show that just 20 to 30 percent of Americans approve of how he’s handled that issue. -EMD, 6/8/26

See also: Generic congressional ballot dashboard and Iran War support dashboard.

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This is the landing page for Silver Bulletin presidential approval ratings. We’ll regularly update the charts below as new polls about Donald Trump’s approval rating come in.1 This page is designed to be viewed on the web rather than in our email client or in the Substack app.

Click here for more information on how the average works. The Silver Bulletin average weights more reliable polls heavily — you can find our latest pollster ratings here.

The topline: So, just how popular is Trump?

Our default average reflects a combination of all polls, whether conducted among adults, registered voters or likely voters. If a pollster releases multiple versions of the same survey, we use the all-adult version of the poll before the registered voter version.2 This is because all Americans have a say in how popular the president is — whether or not they vote.

The polls: What do the surveys say?

Each poll gets an “influence” score based on its pollster rating, its sample size, its recency, and how often a pollster is publishing numbers.3 Sometimes, surveys with mediocre pollster ratings have more weight in the model just because they were conducted very recently or polled more people.

Inevitably, there’s a lot of disagreement from survey to survey, not just because of statistical variation but because pollsters have long had trouble pegging down Trump’s popularity. By clicking on the “adjusted results” tab, you can see how the “house effects” adjustment that corrects for these predictable differences works in our model. You can also click here to download every Trump approval poll in our database — including some additional details not shown in the chart below.

The issues: What do Americans think of Trump’s policies?

Pollsters don’t just ask about Trump’s overall job approval, they also ask about how well he’s dealing with different issues. We’re tracking how the public feels about Trump’s handling of four topics: the economy, immigration, trade and tariffs, and the cost of living.

The deep dive

We also have a few features we’re reserving for paying subscribers:

• How do Trump’s approval ratings compare to every past president since Truman?

• How many voters strongly approve or disapprove of Trump?

• What are Trump’s numbers in only polls of adults or only polls of likely and registered voters?

You can find all of that, plus downloadable data on every president’s approval rating every day since 1945, down below.

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This is our landing page for polls about the Iran War1, tracking support for U.S. military action in Iran since March 1, the day after the war began.2 We’ll regularly update this average as new polls come in.3 This page is designed to be viewed on the web rather than in our email client or the Substack app.

Click here for more information on how the average works. The Silver Bulletin average weights more reliable polls more heavily — you can find our latest pollster ratings here. Our process for calculating support for the Iran War is similar to that for calculating President Trump’s approval ratings.4

The topline: So, just how popular is the Iran War?

This average includes polls that ask about support for the Iran War, strikes in Iran, or U.S. military involvement in Iran. Compared with tracking approval ratings, questions about war can be less straightforward. Our goal is to limit the analysis to polls that ask neutral questions rather than introduce assumptions about how the war is going or its objectives. (See below for more details on how we make this assessment.) Our default version of the ratings reflects a combination of all polls, whether conducted among adults, registered voters, or likely voters.5

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The polls: What do the surveys say?

You can see all the numbers for each poll that feeds into our average below. You can also click here to download all the Iran War numbers.

We exclude questions that:

1. Make presumptions about the reasons for or against the war and/or offer an assessment about whether these objectives have been met (even if respondents are offered arguments on both sides);

2. Ask how the war is going relative to the respondent’s expectations (i.e., “Is the war going too far”?);

3. Ask about President Trump’s approval on Iran, as opposed to support for the overall war operation6, or;

4. Ask about some particular aspect of the war (e.g. targeting nuclear facilities) rather than the overall situation.

Also, in line with longstanding Silver Bulletin policy, surveys that fail to provide the specific question wording or other key details about the poll (dates, sample frame, sample size) can’t be included.

Polls are adjusted for house effects (i.e. persistent differences between a pollster’s findings on the war and the consensus) and are weighted based on each firm’s pollster rating and the poll’s sample size and recency. The “influence” score in the table below shows the relative importance of a poll in our current average given these considerations.7 In practice, recency is often more important than the other factors in our weights.

As a reminder, we update this database about once per day. If a poll seems to be missing, we may not have added it yet, we may be awaiting more information from the pollster, or it may contain question wording that doesn’t meet our standards for this project.

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This is the landing page for Silver Bulletin’s 2026 generic congressional ballot polling average. We’ll regularly update the charts below as new generic ballot polls come in, and eventually, this average will feed into our 2026 midterm forecast model.1 This page is designed to be viewed on the web rather than in our email client or in the Substack app.

Click here for more information on how the average works. The Silver Bulletin average weights more reliable polls more heavily — you can find our latest pollster ratings here.

Who is favored to win the House in 2026?

Our default average reflects a combination of all polls, whether conducted among adults, registered voters or likely voters. If a pollster releases multiple versions of the same survey, we use the likely voter version before the registered voter version.2 That’s because for this average, we’re interested in people who plan on voting in 2026.

Every generic ballot poll in our database

Each poll gets an “influence” score based on its pollster rating, its sample size, its recency, and how often a pollster is publishing numbers. You can find that in the table below. Sometimes, surveys with mediocre pollster ratings have more weight in the model just because they were conducted very recently or polled more people.3

Inevitably, there’s a lot of disagreement from survey to survey, not just because of statistical variation, but because some polling firms consistently lean toward Democrats or Republicans. By clicking on the “adjusted results” tab, you can see how the “house effects” adjustment that corrects for these predictable differences works in our model. You can also click here to download every generic ballot poll in our database — including some additional details not shown in the chart below.

State benchmarks and every generic ballot poll since 1994

We also have two cool features we’re reserving for paying subscribers:

• Benchmarks in each state. Which party would we expect to be ahead in, say, Georgia or Michigan or Ohio, given the current generic ballot?

• And generic ballot averages going back to 1994.

You can find all of that, plus downloadable generic ballot data for the past 30 years, below.

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We had this conversation yesterday afternoon before the results were known1, but Graham Platner is now the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate. With 90 percent of the vote counted, he has 72 percent compared to 19 percent for former Governor Janet Mills — who suspended her campaign in April but made some half-hearted efforts recently to remind voters that she was still on the ballot — and 9 percent for other candidates. That Platner share has been falling slightly as more Election Day votes are counted — early voting began before Platner’s latest series of scandals — but I’d expect it winds up north of 70 percent. Turnout was decent: we just passed 200,000 votes counted, exceeding the 163,000 ballots cast in the Democratic Senate primary in 2020.

I’m not quite sure how to evaluate that performance relative to “expectations”, and I’ve never loved playing the expectations game. For what it’s worth this result was quite close to what prediction markets were expecting at the start of the day. “Platner won by 50 points on high turnout!” is one way to frame it; “30 percent of Democrats protested Platner despite his essentially running uncontested” is another.2

Meanwhile, prediction markets have Democrats’ chances of winning the general election in Maine rebounding after a sharp drop following Platner’s sexting scandal.

This isn’t a particularly easy race to forecast. Maine is an unusual state that often isn’t correlated well with national trends. Indeed, it has become somewhat bluer recently, defying the pattern of rural white voters becoming redder. But it has a recent history of lowballing Republicans in polling — and particularly Susan Collins, Platner’s opponent.

Platner is an unusual candidate; it goes without saying, between the lack of elected experience and the scandals — but it’s also easy to see why he strikes some voters as genuinely charismatic and a break from the norm. You could argue that Collins is unusual too, just by virtue of being basically the only surviving blue-state Republican Senator in the Trump Era.

Polls suggest that the sexting scandal has made a dent in Platner’s numbers, however. In three polls since the latest scandal, he leads by an average of 2 points, versus 7 points beforehand. That includes a Platner internal poll — campaign internals typically exaggerate their candidate’s standing by about 4 points of vote margin — although, for that matter, it also includes a Collins internal.3

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This the landing page for the Silver Bulletin average of Elon Musk’s favorability polls, tracking him back to the start of 2024.1 We’ll regularly update this average as new polls come in.2 This page is designed to be viewed on the web rather than in our email client or in the Substack app.

Click here for more information on how the average works. The Silver Bulletin average weights more reliable polls more heavily — you can find our latest pollster ratings here. Our process for calculating Musk’s favorability ratings is similar to that for calculating President Trump’s approval ratings, although we use slightly more conservative settings as Musk is polled less often than Trump.3

The topline: So, just how popular is Elon Musk?

Our default version of the ratings reflects a combination of all polls, whether conducted among adults, registered voters or likely voters. If a pollster releases multiple versions of the same survey, we use the all-adult version of the poll before the registered voter version.4

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The polls: What do the surveys say?

You can see all the numbers for each poll that feeds into our average below. You can also click here to download all the Musk favorability numbers — and some additional details not shown in the chart below — for every Musk favorability poll in our database.

This is a free feature, but it requires work to update and maintain. We very much appreciate your support via paid or free subscriptions.

This newsletter aims to cover a lot of bases. We’re aware there’s a lot of political news and sports news. We’re working overtime to cover these beats; I’m not sure we’ve ever published so much in such a compressed time period before.

And life can be wonderful in early June, especially if you live in a temperate city like New York. So we’re also aware that even the substantial number of sports fans on the Silver Bulletin mailing list are not necessarily grappling with the fact that the World Cup will begin on Thursday. The opening games are in Mexico; the United States’s first match is set for Friday night in Los Angeles. (See here for a more detailed outlook on the U.S.’s prospects.)

However, I did want to give you one more pitch for our World Cup predictions. We’ll update these projections every day throughout the tournament. But today’s newsletter provides some bonus World Cup content inspired by reader suggestions. I’ll take advantage of our model to answer two common questions:

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1. What is each country’s most likely path to the World Cup title?

2. And if you’re thinking of watching or even attending a match, which group-stage games will have the greatest impact on the eventual outcome of the tournament? And might be most worth buying tickets for?

Paths to the World Cup title

With a 32-team knockout-stage bracket in place for the first time ever, there’s basically no avoiding that your favorite soccer team will eventually have to defeat some tough opponents. To be honest, the group stage is rather forgiving, with two-thirds of teams set to advance into the “playoffs”. However, our simulations suggest that group-stage slots are far from equal. There actually is an advantage in most cases to winning your group. And although the top 8 of 12 third-place finishers will also advance — this World Cup format is practically giving out participation trophies — these paths are generally pernicious, yielding tougher R32 and R16 opponents.

So here’s one fun way to look at the group stage. Conditional upon finishing first or second in the group, or qualifying from the 3rd-place slot1, what are your team’s most likely opponents in every subsequent round? And what are its odds of taking home the FIFA World Cup Trophy?

This is one of those times when I’m going to show you the data first and explain it later. As a warning in case you’re a fan of Uzbekistan or something, I’ve restricted the outlook to the top 30 among the 48 teams. This basically covers everyone, including co-hosts Mexico, Canada and the United States. But the bottom 18 teams are so unlikely to win that the simulation results are mostly statistical noise, even though we ran 200K simulations today instead of our usual 100K.

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It’s been a satisfying few months as a sports fan. “My” Knicks have their best chance at a championship since 1973. And Jack Hughes’s overtime winner over Canada in the Gold Medal Match in Milan represented a triumph for the men’s hockey team.

So is it too much to ask that this is also the year when the U.S. men’s soccer team breaks through, with the World Cup set to kick off this week on North American soil?1

The 23 previous hosts2 have a pretty good track record, with 6 outright wins (though none since France in 1998). Another 7 hosts made at least the semifinals. So an optimistic spin on this data might suggest that the U.S. has a 50/50 chance of making the final four, something we haven’t done since the inaugural World Cup in 1930.

But that’s not what the smart money thinks. Prediction markets give the U.S. only a 10 percent chance of reaching the semifinal. No spoilers, but our forecast is in the same broad range.

Most host nations, of course, have better soccer legacies than the United States. (Or at least, better legacies in men’s soccer; our women’s team has won 4 of the 9 Women’s World Cups.) The two tune-up matches the U.S. played in advance of the tournament are typical of our not-quite-arrival on the scene. We beat Senegal 2-1 last week but then lost by the same scoreline to Germany in Chicago yesterday, conceding a goal in the second minute. These aren’t bad results: Germany is our 6th-ranked team in PELE and Senegal is 16th. But it’s more of the win-some, lose-some outcomes that have long characterized American soccer.

A future that has never arrived

Soccer has long been considered the “sport of the future” in the United States, but that’s sort of a running joke: the future has never really arrived. Soccer exploded as a youth participation sport in the 1970s and 1980s, and by 1978, the New York Cosmos were drawing almost 48,000 fans per game at Giants Stadium. But by 1985, the North American Soccer League was defunct.

Perhaps there was a little spark of something there, because American soccer had truly been through its Dark Ages. The U.S. failed to qualify for a single World Cup between Brazil 1950 — when we miraculously beat England 1-0 but lost our other two games — and Italia 1990, when our return to the global stage was marked by a 5-1 loss to Czechoslovakia.

What might be less well known is that American soccer looked more promising in the early years of the sport.

Silver Bulletin’s PELE ratings are calculated back to the first international match in 1872. And as you can see above, they began with a relatively optimistic prior about the United States, with an initial PELE rating of 1904. That would rank us about 15th in the world today, in the same general vicinity as Turkey, Uruguay, Belgium and Italy.

That initial rating is based on three factors: the size of our economy (always enormous), the year that we first joined FIFA (1914, nine years before Brazil did) and a regional coefficient. The regional coefficient does a lot of work, and there’s room to debate whether it’s too high or too low. But the USMNT lived up to the model’s expectations in the early years. Our first two World Cup matches in 1930 were 3-0 wins, producing an all-time high rating of 1958 on July 17, 1930, before we got crushed 6-1 by Argentina in the semifinal.

However, the U.S. didn’t play any international matches between 1937 and 1947. Early attempts at domestic leagues never really cohered. And with a World War going on, we had more important things to do. But when our team returned after the war, it was in much worse shape. We lost our first six matches after WWII by a combined scoreline of 36-2, including indignities such as a 11-0 loss to Norway. Our 1-0 victory over England in 1950 is one of the World Cup’s greatest all-time upsets. But it was an upset precisely because we weren’t very good. Indeed, that’s the only World Cup match we won between 1930 and 1994.

Football and an isolationist streak slowed soccer progress

So what went wrong? You could chalk it up to soccer being viewed as a “foreign sport” after World War II, but the game was invented by England, our ally, not the Axis powers.

Two other factors probably played a larger role. One of them is football — or excuse me, American football. The gridiron codes developed in the late 19th century at places like Harvard and Yale steered our version of the sport in a different, more rugby-like direction. While the optimal body types for American football and soccer aren’t really the same3, football has long been the focal point for amateur athletics.

And the NFL developed into a huge commercial enterprise in the 1950s and 1960s during the Dark Ages for American soccer. Not to mention other homegrown sports like baseball and basketball. The United States is not exactly lacking in athletic prowess, as our women’s team and our success in other sports show.

But it’s fair to say that soccer has long had a reputation in the U.S. as an “immigrant game”, with our strengths in regional and ethnic pockets of the population. In theory, that might nevertheless play to our strengths. Even amid a recent period of immigration backlash, the U.S. has more than 50 million foreign-born residents, triple that of any other country. It’s hard not to notice, though, that our soccer success has tended to rise and fall with our immigration levels, the Dark Ages coinciding with a more isolationist streak before and after World War II.

The U.S. finally qualified for the World Cup again in 1990, though we lost all three group stage matches. In 1994, we got an automatic berth as hosts and turned in a more promising performance, beating Colombia in the group stage, albeit on an infamous and tragic own goal, before bowing out respectably 1-0 to eventual champion Brazil in the Round of 16.

The next decade or so represented steady upward progress. Yes, the 1998 team was overmatched in France. But in 2002, we won our first and heretofore only World Cup knockout stage game in Jeonju, Korea, defeating rivals Mexico dos a cero. Meanwhile, MLS was established in 1996 and was proving more stable than past leagues like the NASL.

Since then, however, we’ve been treading water, with highlights like Landon Donovan’s dramatic late goal against Algeria to advance us to the knockout stage in 2010 and lowlights like failing to qualify for the 2018 World Cup at all after washing out against Trinidad.

This year’s team isn’t on a particularly promising trajectory. We hosted Copa America in 2024, which had typically been held in South America, but failed to advance out of a relatively weak group featuring Bolivia, Panama and Uruguay.

Meanwhile, we haven’t beaten any team in the current PELE top 10 since a 4-3 win over the Netherlands in 2015. So we can beat the Senegals and Algerias of the world, but not the Germanys or Brazils — although we do seem to have a knack for drawing England.

Is MLS part of the problem?

If you’d asked me in 2002, I’d have expected MLS to become a much bigger deal by 2026. And the league is successful in some ways. MLS now has 30 teams, and it’s a solid draw, attracting more than 20,000 spectators per game.

However, the league lacks traction as a national focal point that aspiring athletes dream of playing in. Google searches for MLS-related terms are only one-fifth as high as the NHL — and less than 1/30th the volume for the NFL.

MLS has an unusual, centrally-owned structure, with the 30 franchises being more like true franchises in the McDonald’s sense, with strict spending limits and a risk-averse approach. Exceptions famously can and have been made for aging stars like Messi and David Beckham. Overall, though, the combined player market values for MLS is “just” €1.4 billion, according to Transfermarkt. For comparison, PSG (€1.37b), Man City (€1.32b) and Arsenal (€1.25b) each have nearly as much player value on their rosters by themselves.

It’s surprising, given the extremely lucrative market for sports franchises among multi-billionaires, that in a famously capitalistic economy, the United States doesn’t have a few teams that are attempting to compete with the world’s best. LAFC and Inter Miami have franchise valuations of $1.2 billion — that’s the estimated market price for franchise resale, not the Transfermarkt player valuations described above — but that’s lower than even the NHL’s Winnipeg Jets. A rival to MLS called USL Premier, which would feature full relegation and promotion, has been proposed, but is in the very early stages.

But aren’t our players increasingly successful in Europe? Although Christian Pulisic has had an arguably underachieving career, the answer is basically yes. In addition to factors like region and GDP, PELE uses Transfermarkt valuations for a country’s top 23 players to help set its priors. Even after adjusting for persistent inflation in player values, the value of the U.S. roster has roughly tripled since 2005. It’s also become more skewed toward attacking players, in contrast to our history of being stronger at defense and goalkeeping.

However, the twin development pipelines of MLS and Europe don’t necessarily lead to a highly coherent approach to international matches. Our 2026 World Cup squad is split between 8 MLS players, one in Liga MX, and 17 on various European teams. No two members of the 26-man roster play on the same club team.

How much this matters is hard to know. In our research for PELE, we found that rosters heavy with players from domestic club leagues slightly overperform, but the effect is minor. The bearish case for this model is Africa, which has lots of soccer talent, but almost all of which plays in Europe. The only African country ever to reach a World Cup semifinal was Morocco in 2022. However, Brazil and Argentina export most of their best talent to Europe and have been perfectly fine, obviously.

Why FIFA overrates Team USA

These mixed signals make the United States one of the harder teams to rate. The World Football Elo Ratings have the U.S. 38th. PELE has them 29th. But the FIFA rankings, which are also based on an Elo-type system, have them 17th.

What accounts for the difference? The comparatively more optimistic rating for the U.S. in PELE than in the World Football Elo Ratings reflects the effect of the priors that I described. Basically, PELE thinks the U.S. should be better than we’ve seen from match results alone. This prior has some predictive power, especially given that high-stakes international matches are relatively infrequent.

The aggregate Transfermarkt value of our optimal 23-man roster ranks 17th in the world; that’s the main benchmark PELE is using. We also calculate a “GDP prior” based on GDP, region and soccer legacy (as measured by the first year in FIFA4), and which plays a secondary role in the system.5 There we rank even higher: 9th. Granted this is tricky, because the regional variable carries a lot of the load, and there aren’t a lot of good comparison points for the United States. 6

So basically, PELE endorses the notion that the USMNT “should” be better at soccer than it is. Probably not a top-flight team: the soccer hegemony of Latin America and Europe has been quite persistent over time. But PELE is always trying to nudge the U.S. a little upward, and we are often failing to live up to those expectations.

What about our #17 ranking in FIFA? Well, it’s wrong. That’s not to say we aren’t capable of playing that well, and 17 versus 29 isn’t that big a gap. But FIFA overrates the quality of our resume from match results alone.

It’s wrong for a simple reason: FIFA doesn’t account for home-field advantage. Since 2015, the U.S. national team has played 134 of its 179 matches on home turf. That’s 75 percent, roughly double the average of 37 percent for other participants in the 2026 World Cup.

We host a lot of friendlies and regional competitions like Copa America. These matches are often well-attended and popular. But home-field advantage makes the going a lot easier in soccer. In the World Football Elo Ratings, a home match is worth 100 Elo points. Ignoring draws, that increases the win probability between two evenly-matched teams to 64 percent for the home team. PELE uses a considerably more complicated system for home field, incorporating travel distance, altitude, and long-term performance for home teams both collectively and individually, so each team gets a customized factor. But the United States’ home rating (+83) is fairly high.

Home-field is our biggest asset until proven otherwise

However, we’ll get to take advantage of home-field advantage in the 2026 World Cup. All of our group-stage matches will be played at home, and the knockout-stage draw has also been set up in a favorable way for us. Should we make the Round of 32, it’s guaranteed to be a home match; and then the U.S. hosts everything from the quarterfinals onward.

Put another way, that #17 FIFA rating inflates our stature because it’s largely based on home matches. But since essentially all of our 2026 World Cup matches will also be played at home, it’s a pretty decent approximation for how tough of an out we’ll be in this tournament. Indeed, we’re the 16th most likely team to win the World Cup according to PELE. Although those chances are only around 1 percent, they’re considerably higher than they’d be in a tournament played in Qatar or Russia or Spain.

That leaves us in a position more like that of the 1980 Olympic hockey team — not this year’s Hughes-brothers-led edition.7 Winning our group will be the first step, since that would set us up to play a 3rd-place team in the Round of 32. Our most likely R32 opponents are Bosnia, Egypt and — this one would be interesting — Iran. Those are winnable matches. Beyond that, we’d probably need a Miracle on Grass. But stranger things have happened in soccer.

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One mode we sometimes use at Silver Bulletin is “Nate’s bad tweets, explained.” (Here’s an example.) But when I expressed my frustration with California’s incredibly slow vote-counting process earlier this week, I was surprised at how little dissent there was from Democrats, Republicans, or pretty much anyone.

Of course, we might want to analyze the implications of California’s elections on Tuesday under the state’s top-two primary system. But we can’t do that because we’re on the third day since the election and the finish line is not in sight yet for several key races.

Rather than editorialize too much further, though, we assigned Eli to pull some data. Indeed, California is even more of a negative outlier than I’d realized. –Nate Silver

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California has few (good) excuses for its slow vote counting

by Eli McKown-Dawson

It’s been three days since the polls closed in California’s primary elections, and we still don’t have race calls for governor, Los Angeles mayor, and for multiple salient US House contests. Did all of those races come down to a few hundred votes and get bogged down in recounts and litigation? Nope. Was there an earthquake or Succession-esque ballot fire that threw vote counting into chaos? Also no.

In fact, this outcome was entirely expected. And that’s the whole problem.

Before Election Day, many newsrooms put out similar articles explaining that tight races “could take days or even weeks” to call. That’s because California is notoriously slow at counting its ballots. In 2024, it took California until November 8 (three days after Election Day) to get just 70 percent of its ballots counted. Across all 50 states, the average share of the vote counted by that date was more than 95 percent, putting California squarely in last place. Rest assured, The Golden State did eventually hit that 95 percent mark… a full 10 days later.

Of course, statewide general elections — like those for president, governor, and US Senator — are called quickly in California, even though the vote count is slow, because the state isn’t particularly competitive. But close races are another story. In 2024, races for California’s 22nd and 27th districts took a week to call1 — and the 13th District took about a month! The country has frequently had to wait on California to see which party won control of the House.

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That would seem to indicate there are major issues with California’s election administration, or at least some minor issues that need improvement, right? Not according to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber.2 “I know the value of being fast for some folks,” she told CalMatters. “For me, accuracy is far more important.” She’s not alone. There’s an attitude in some (mainly Californian and mainly Democratic) circles that California’s slow vote counting is indicative of a state that takes its time to carefully count every vote and ensure maximum accessibility. Here’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer on election night: “It might take some time to figure out where this is going. We’re going to wait until every ballot is counted. We’re going to give democracy time to work.”

To be fair, there are real reasons why you’d expect California’s count to take longer than other states. One explanation you’ll hear often is that the state is massive. With nearly 40 million residents, California would rank as the 4th largest economy in the world if it were treated as a country. Los Angeles County alone has a larger population than 40 states. California also sends a mail ballot to every registered voter and most voters — about 80 percent in 2024 — do choose to vote by mail. Those ballots take more time to tabulate, in part because election workers need to verify that the signature on each mail ballot matches the signature on file for that voter.

And California is quite permissive about when those mail ballots need to arrive. As long as the ballot is postmarked by Election Day, it can arrive up to one week later and still be counted. That means election offices will be getting new primary ballots to count through next Tuesday. Those late ballots don’t just slow down the count; they can also produce strange-looking results with blue or red skews. In this primary, Democrats on average returned their ballots later than Republicans, so the first-counted results from Election Day and early mail ballots were significantly redder than the eventual final result will be.

But none of these factors have anything to do with the accuracy Weber cares about. Vote tabulation is highly accurate across all 50 states, even those that manage to count everything on election night. And none of them are particularly good enough excuses to explain the extent of California’s slowness.

I went to college in another large state: Florida. When you talk to election officials in The Sunshine State, the 2000 election always looms large. Aside from butterfly ballots and recounts, the big story is how Florida’s election administration improved after that trainwreck. Fast forward 25 years, and Florida now manages to count 99 percent of its ballots within a few hours of polls closing, in part because election officials can process ballots before the polls close. And they are able to accomplish this feat of incredible speed with a sizable proportion of mail votes — about 27 percent in 2024.3

California is a massive outlier relative to other states and other countries

California likes to tout that it’s larger than many countries, but most developed countries are able to wrap up nationwide elections more quickly than California can tabulate its votes. Colombia held a presidential election on Sunday, and 99.98 percent of the result was in on Monday morning. Japan also counts most of its votes overnight.4 And in the UK (not exactly a poster child for state capacity), you can generally expect to have calls for all 650 parliamentary seats the morning after the election.

How about India? It’s one of the few places that can claim to have even more complexities than California. In fact, elections there are conducted in multiple stages. But it did manage to count 640 million votes in a day in 2024 once the final phase was over.

Indeed, the more you scrutinize this, the fewer excuses California has. It is not the state with the most mail voting, nor is it the state with the latest mail ballot return deadline. Mail-voting states such as Oregon, Washington, and Colorado count slowly relative to the US average, but they’re all faster than California.

As The New York Times Editorial Board pointed out earlier this year, Colorado is able to mail ballots to all registered voters while maintaining speedy counting in part because it limits late ballots to exceptional circumstances (such as military troops outside the state). That might sound “uninclusive,” but the share of California ballots rejected for lateness moved from just 0.5 percent in 2012 (before the one-week grace period was implemented) to … the exact same 0.5 percent in 2022. You can make voting accessible without bending over backward to accommodate the tiny share of people affected by extending the mail ballot receipt deadline.

What about accuracy and overall quality of election administration? California comes up short there too. There’s no evidence that voter fraud or other election administration issues are any less prevalent in California than in faster counting states. Based on the Elections Performance Index — a project that compares election administration quality across states — California ranked 41st in 2024.5 So the state isn’t slower and better: it’s slower and (often) worse.

Slow counting fuels conspiracy theories

The fallback argument is that speed just doesn’t matter, and the only people who care about California’s weeks of counting are election junkies (guilty as charged) and conspiracy theorists worried about voter fraud. Of course, that’s true to some extent. Many Californians are fine with their timely presidential and statewide decisions, and don’t care that the insurance commissioner primary still hasn’t been called. But these delays do contribute to voter fraud conspiracy theories. Don’t believe me? Here’s the President of the United States early yesterday morning:

In a rare moment of bipartisanship, Gov. Gavin Newsom agreed, writing in a letter to election officials that “We must acknowledge that the longer the voting count takes, the more mis- and disinformation spreads.” Intuitively, that makes sense, especially when there’s a partisan dimension to when voters return their ballots. It’s unlikely that Democrats will get locked out of California’s 6th district, but right now, the Democratic candidate is in third place because only 53 percent of the vote is in. That’s confusing if you aren’t glued to election Twitter. There’s also evidence that longer-than-expected vote-counting times can reduce trust in elections.

It doesn’t have to be this way. And the solution is not to stick your head in the sand and say that anyone who complains about California’s sluggishness is fueling conspiracy theories. The state has taken some baby steps — counties now have to finish counting most ballots in 13 days instead of 306 — but it’s not nearly enough. Even putting aside inclusivity concerns, California simply counts the ballots it has too slowly, and its elections offices are underfunded. If you want people to be confident in your electoral system, a good first step is to build one that works properly instead of adding yet another example to the “California is a failed state” pile.

It’s a busy week here; thanks as always for reading Silver Bulletin! While we’re not neglecting politics, we’re very excited about this year’s matchup in the NBA Finals, which start tomorrow. I made my glass-half-full case for the Knicks on Sunday; today, it’s Joseph’s turn to make the argument for the Spurs.

Joseph and I also chatted with Nate Duncan of the Dunc’d On podcast yesterday — one of our absolute favorite shows — about the Finals and other pressing NBA storylines. So you’ll see the video first (I believe this is Joseph’s video debut at Silver Bulletin!) and then his Spurs story.

One other heads-up: with rosters being finalized today, our World Cup forecast will launch imminently, we believe tomorrow, but don’t kill us if it slips to Thursday. When we have a short-term feature of this nature, we increase pricing for newly initiated monthly subscriptions. This does not affect annual pricing or people who are already subscribed. We just wanted to disclose that ahead of time; the pricing won’t change until the World Cup forecast is published tomorrow or Thursday. —Nate Silver

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Our NBA chat with Nate Duncan

The case for the Spurs

by Joseph George

If there was any doubt, Saturday night’s Game 7 made it obvious that this year’s Western Conference Finals was one of those series — the stakes were extraordinarily high, a number of the league’s main characters left their marks, and no team ever felt like it established true control.

The Spurs and Thunder had been on a crash course for a long time. Oklahoma City has occupied the role of “best positioned team in the NBA” since 2022 at least, but the Spurs’ lottery luck vaulted them into the same tier of short-term and long-term contention. Both teams sit in roughly the same age window, ranked #1 and #2 in record and simple rating system, and have consistently held the top two spots in our Future of the Franchise rankings. As of a few months ago, there honestly wasn’t much deliberation at the top end of FotF; the Spurs were clearly #2 ahead of the rest of the league, but the Thunder were clearly #1. This series obviously calls that into question.

There’s not a lot of love lost between the two franchises either. The matchup doesn’t carry the pedigree of a Lakers-Celtics, but both teams have loyal, dedicated hometown fanbases and a real claim to being the model for a modern basketball franchise. Those past matchups were notable for the depth of talent they featured and the narratives around those teams. The Thunder were young, loud, and stupidly athletic; the Spurs were the dynasty in its long, graceful decline, buying time with system and pedigree.

The newest iteration of the Thunder-Spurs rivalry has only had the first of what should be many future playoff series, so while we don’t know exactly how this story will go, the historical parallels are easy to see. The emergence of young players during the series, like Dylan Harper and Jared McCain, forced both teams to make heavy adjustments. The Thunder aren’t much older, but they played the part of the battle-tested veterans. The Spurs, whose three best players in this series were in their third, second, and first seasons, didn’t blink, answering every punch with a swift counter.

How did we get here?

That lack of experience was certainly one of the bigger storylines during this series, and it’s even more dramatic than I had previously assumed. The Spurs aren’t just young and inexperienced for a Finals team: by most measures, they’re one of the most inexperienced teams to ever make the playoffs. For reference, the closest historical analog is the 2012-13 Warriors, who fell in the second round to the Tim Duncan-led Spurs.

There is the question of how they’re overcoming this disadvantage. Empirically, playoff experience does matter, but perhaps its effects can be more dramatic for certain types of teams. The Spurs have been particularly resistant to some of the typical issues that beset younger teams in the playoffs, like suffering from long scoring droughts or struggling to make consistent rotations. Instead, their overall play has actually improved — over a sample of 18 games in the playoffs, they’ve maintained a net rating of +11.0, a decent improvement over their +8.4 mark in the regular season.

Now, I do recognize that I’m several paragraphs into an article about the Spurs and I haven’t mentioned Victor Wembanyama. Part of that is the point — this run has been a team achievement in a way that's easy to miss when one of the players is Wemby. But it's hard to overstate just how unprecedented he is, both in his on-court playstyle and his accolades at such a young age. Wemby is, to put it plainly, complete madness to watch. It’s not just the step-through dunks from inside the free-throw line, or the pull-up threes over other seven-footers. It’s the poise he shows in anchoring team defense, and the growth he’s shown in setting up a very organized offense this season — both genuinely rare for someone at his developmental stage.

When I wrote my debut byline about Wembanyama back in October, I postured about whether he could make the MVP leap, which felt like a longshot in the moment. While he didn’t take home the award this year, he has certainly placed himself in the “best player in the world” argument, if not already grabbed the title outright. Wemby belongs to a rare class of rim protectors and can outright take over the offensive end at times.

Somehow, Wemby’s defense has gone up a notch in the playoffs — he has the best rim deterrence on/off of any player ever with at least 500 minutes in the playoffs — and the Thunder had to resort to some interesting strategies to keep him away from their drivers.

Wemby hasn't had to carry it alone, though. The other Spurs went 12-6 in games without him this year and have also stepped up big time. I was worried Stephon Castle’s looseness with the ball might be too much to overcome after Game 2, but he didn’t let it hamper his aggression, which proved to be the correct gamble as the series played out. It will probably be a bigger deal in future seasons, but there’s something to be said about how he was able to find other ways to impact the game as the series carried along.

The Spurs’ X Factor is likely their youngest player, Dylan Harper, who looks like he’ll be one of the best guards in the league very soon. He’s already creating at historic levels near the rim. Some of the greatest point guards of all-time have had similar (indeed, often slightly worse) profiles to Harper at the same age, and most of them never had his high defensive floor. Harper was already one of the highest volume self-creators at the rim this regular season, with the only hole being his inability to draw fouls consistently. In the playoffs, his free throw attempts per 100 possessions nearly doubled, which is incredibly rare for a rookie guard. (They don’t typically get a generous whistle.) If this continues to progress, he could return All-NBA level value while still on his rookie deal.

Harper’s ability to push in transition and in the half-court gives San Antonio an additional release valve, and it showed against Oklahoma City — in multiple games this series, the Spurs went to Harper as a creator at the end of the shot clock. At the end of Game 7, Harper launched an absolute bomb over SGA, which quieted the Thunder crowd.

It reminded me a little of a young James Harden in 2012, before most had pegged him as a guy who would command the attention of an entire defense. I don’t think Harper is there just yet, but I keep coming back to the fact that the Spurs are getting this from a rookie who isn’t even their best young player. If there’s a team that could show a lack of experience doesn’t mean a lack of poise, it’s this one.

Do the Spurs have an answer for point-KAT?

Plenty of people seem to think the Western Conference Finals already settled who’s winning the title. I don’t exactly buy it, and underrating the Knicks feels backwards. We almost never see playoff runs this dominant. New York chopped up a decently tough schedule, and it’s a signature of that dominance that their opponents look like roadkill in the rearview mirror.

As Nate wrote on Sunday, the Knicks have KAT-ified their offense since their early struggles against Atlanta. I’ve actually long wondered whether KAT’s ideal role is exactly this — less a usage-sink secondary scorer, more an oversized creator running the offense through his passing, like an oversized attacking midfielder in soccer, a Ruud Gullit of sorts.1

Towns is driving the ball at similar rates to the regular season, but it’s clear that he’s found a better cadence and angles in the playoffs: his finishing percentage on drives and his passing percentage have gone up 6 percent. This isn’t the first time wingifying a big man has had good results — in 2023-24, Joel Embiid transitioned more from baseline post-ups to face-up elbow actions, which made him one of the best passing bigs in the NBA almost immediately. It’s possible that KAT’s involvement in the offense unlocks a dimension for the Knicks that the Spurs aren’t entirely prepared for.

As a result of KAT’s self-creation jump (and his floor spacing), Wemby will likely be assigned to Josh Hart to avoid pulling him out of the paint too often, which puts pressure on the Spurs’ forward depth. Wemby’s rim presence helps, but Carter Bryant, Devin Vassell, and even Castle will have to spend sizable stretches on Towns, and avoiding foul trouble becomes a very tangible goal if they want to keep KAT from leaving a mark on this series.

Still, this isn’t a complete positive for the Knicks. KAT has often struggled with body control, and the threat of Wemby roaming will make it hard for him to find the same angles to the basket he’s enjoyed over the last two series. It’s possible the series swings the Spurs’ way as a result of Towns getting into his own foul trouble. We can sort of reliably expect KAT will have at least one of those games — he was the worst big man in the NBA this year when it came to offensive fouls, and a matchup that forces him to put the ball on the deck against smaller players is exactly where he gets into trouble, picking up cheap charges and player-control fouls that send him to the bench. If the Knicks can’t play Towns as much in the second or third quarter, the Spurs will try to bury them in defensive stops.

The variability of these matchups makes it hard to know what version of the Knicks the Spurs will have to face. During the regular season, the Knicks had a tendency to break down offensively at times, usually as a result of poor communication or bad process. The playoffs have featured less of that, but they also involved back-to-back rounds of pretty weak guard defenders (Donovan Mitchell, Tyrese Maxey, James Harden). Brunson may have a harder time trying to create against the Spurs guards and wings, as they contain a bit more length.

On the offensive end, the Spurs will have to do with less Wemby self-creation away from the basket. If I’m correct, the Knicks will have OG Anunoby on Wemby, in hopes that OG’s relatively low center of gravity will make it hard for him to create much on post-ups away from the basket. Luckily for the Spurs’ guards, there are real weak spots for them to attack in the Knicks’ rotation. If they can force Brunson on Harper or Castle, they’ll be in cruise control. Of course, the Knicks’ wing stoppers will make it hard to get that match up very consistently, but on the margins this feels like an area to exploit.

I’d expect that the Spurs will try to take advantage of lobs for Wemby, and their transition offense will be in full effect against Brunson and Towns, but I’m still not totally convinced that this is a great series for either team. The Spurs seem like a tougher matchup for New York than Oklahoma City (with their injuries) would have been, but there are real levers that New York can pull to stretch San Antonio thin.

If I had to estimate, this series goes six or seven, and I’d lean San Antonio. Obviously, a lot will be made of the Spurs’ inexperience if they lose, but I’d push back on that framing in advance. The Knicks don’t need San Antonio to play down to its age to win this series; these are two genuinely good teams, and in their current form New York might simply be the better one. For the Spurs, the youth that looked like a liability back in May has been the whole story of this run, and I don’t see the Garden being the thing that finally cracks them. Still, the mechanisms are there for New York to turn this into a war of attrition, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they walk away with the trophy.

This is going to be a sports-heavy week at Silver Bulletin. No apologies for that, with both the NBA Finals and the World Cup set to start soon. You can find the first part of our NBA Finals preview here on the Knicks. And I think we’re within 48 hours of being ready to publish our World Cup forecasts. (In the meantime, you can find our underlying PELE ratings here.) I’m not much of a hard-sell guy, but we do hope that Silver Bulletin will provide a lot of value over the rest of the year between the sports models and, of course, the midterms.

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Let’s see if we can get away with a quickish politics post, though. Like Matt Yglesias, I have some thoughts on recent developments in the Maine U.S. Senate race, and I figure they belong here rather than on X.

The state of play in Maine

When we last checked in on the Maine race, Graham Platner, the populist oysterman who probably needs no further introduction at this point, had seemingly vanquished Governor Janet Mills in the Democratic Senate primary, with Mills suspending her campaign. The primary is set for next Tuesday, June 9. Over the weekend, however, the Wall Street Journal reported that Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, had flagged sexually explicit texts sent by Platner to a number of women on the messaging platform Kik as being a potential concern for the campaign.

The story is very messy. Platner hasn’t denied the existence of the sexts, but a senior Platner strategist, Morris Katz, reportedly threatened Genevieve McDonald, Platner’s former political director who quit the campaign in October, for speaking with the press. Rather than retracting her claims as Katz demanded, McDonald instead went on the record with them. Katz responded by making an apparent reference to McDonald as an “incompetent, opportunistic” operative who valued “vengeance over decency.”

I’ll be diplomatic and say Katz doesn’t sound like a very nice guy. While I personally don’t care much about a candidate’s personal conduct, so long as it doesn’t impact his performance in office, it’s up to the voters of Maine to decide what exactly is their “fucking business” and what isn’t.

In Maine, the line between the personal and the political can be blurry

No Maine voter, from Kennebunkport to Presque Isle, presumably cares very much about whether Morris Katz is a jerk. But they might have concerns about Platner. So far, Platner has shown an arguably Trump-like resilience to a series of scandals, including a tattoo of the Totenkopf, a Nazi symbol, which Platner got while serving in the Marines in 2007 and had covered up last year.

If voters don’t care about a Nazi tattoo, why would they care about some sexts? Every couple, certainly, has their own boundaries for what is and isn’t acceptable in a relationship and even whether fidelity is expected at all. Gertner, for what it’s worth, has been supportive of her husband. (She has also been paid almost $30,000 by Platner’s campaign.)

However, Platner has spun his story as a redemption arc: that the tattoo and a series of inflammatory Reddit posts were youthful, sometimes drunken, indiscretions. That the sexts were relatively recent calls that narrative into question.

And look, all of us have probably had friends who engaged in infidelity or other indiscretions. Just speaking for myself, I’m a fairly tolerant person — human beings are human beings — but these can yield some tough judgment calls. Maybe you see someone as an occasional “drinking buddy” you don’t want to get too close to; I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with that. But if there’s a cluster of bad behavior and no trajectory toward improvement, you may conclude that someone is too toxic or narcissistic to be worth your goodwill. You might also feel betrayed if you thought someone had earned your trust and they turn out to be chronically manipulative.

It’s hard to know how all of this translates when you’re evaluating a candidate for office rather than one to get some beers with. And I know I’m psychoanalyzing. Maine, however (where I’ve spent quite a lot of time) is a state where personal relationships matter and the boundary between the personal and the political isn’t always so clear. The fact that Platner is “relatable” undoubtedly accounted for some of his appeal.

Yglesias pointed out other flaws with Platner, such as his tendency to burn bridges with the Democratic establishment, a risky strategy in a state where he might need every vote. I’m less sure about that, actually. Part of Platner’s appeal, I think, is that he doesn’t come across as a partisan in a state that’s famously nonpartisan, having elected plenty of Democrats, Republicans and independents to office.

You can’t necessarily trust the polling in Maine

Still, Platner has had something of a halo around him because his polling has held up well. He had large leads over Mills before she suspended her campaign and typically led by mid-to-high single digits in matchups against Susan Collins.

These polling leads have scrambled some of the usual intra-Democratic arguments around Platner. Despite being on the left, he’s very unpopular on Bluesky, for instance, while he’s been supported by more “electability” focused types who usually prefer more moderate candidates.

But here’s the thing. It’s a little early to crown Platner with Trump-like Teflon abilities. Platner hasn’t been elected to anything yet, and Maine’s not a state where you should make too many assumptions based on the polls.

In 2020, the last time she was on the ballot, Collins trailed former State Rep. Sara Gideon in almost every poll, but wound up beating Gideon by 8.6 points, making for one of the largest polling errors in our extensive polling database. One could argue that 2020 was an unusual circumstance. Perhaps because of COVID-related behaviors, polls badly overestimated Democrats that year, with Joe Biden just barely holding on to win the key Electoral College states. There was also an important late-breaking development in the race: Collins voted against Amy Coney Barrett, perhaps earning back some moderate cred, and most of the polling predated this.

Maine has also gotten meaningfully bluer as recent transplants to the state have been overwhelmingly from Democratic-leaning voting groups. It voted for Hillary Clinton by just 3 points in 2016, but Kamala Harris by 7 points last year. One other difference: in 2020, ticket-splitting voters in Maine might have assumed that Collins could serve as a check on a newly elected Democratic president in Biden. This time, they know they’re getting two more years of Trump.

However, the tendency for polls to overrate Democrats in Maine has been fairly persistent. Since 2014, in Maine races with two or more polls in the final three weeks, Republicans have beaten their polls by about 4 points on average.

There wasn’t much consistent bias prior to 2014, though Collins substantially outperformed her polls in 2008, even as Barack Obama won the state overwhelmingly. She underperformed her polls in 2002 but still booked a 17-point win.

Maybe none of this matters. Based on Democrats’ substantial lead on the generic ballot plus Maine’s increasingly blue lean, our current benchmark for the state is D +14.6. In other words, you’d expect a “generic” Democrat in the state to beat a “generic” Republican by double digits.

Is Platner such a bad candidate — or is Collins such a good one — that she can overcome that?

Well, there’s precedent. Interestingly enough, in 2020, our model actually pegged Maine as a toss-up rather than buying into Gideon’s polling lead. There are several reasons for that, but the basic story is that the model defaulted more toward “fundamentals” because polling in the state was sparse. And so Collins’s history of winning by landslide margins, and to a lesser extent her bipartisan voting record in Congress (candidates who more often defy their party in Congress tend to overperform electorally) caused it to hedge substantially.

We’ve since tweaked our model to be less sensitive to “candidate quality” factors of any kind and more keyed to raw partisanship, such as expressed by that D +14.6 statewide benchmark. Still, the fundamentals matter some, and they’ll work against Platner in the model. The model will regard Platner’s lack of electoral experience as a problem, and we’ve found that prominent scandals can subtract several points from a candidate’s vote share even in an era when ticket-splitting has become less common.

Furthermore, Maine tends to march to its own drummer. Demographically and politically, Maine is among the biggest outliers and the least correlated with other states, which in the model’s logic tends to make outcomes there highly uncertain. You can’t infer as much from the national picture there as you would in a state like Pennsylvania.

While I suppose I’d still bet on Platner, I’m very curious what the model will say. And I’d note that we absolutely can’t be certain that there aren’t further skeletons in Platner’s closet. Some of the women who received the sexual texts might speak out. (Most users of Kik are much younger than Platner.)

There’s no particular reason for Collins to have leaned into her opposition research file while the Democratic primary is technically still unresolved. And Katz’s defensiveness and the departures of McDonald and other staffers aren’t a great sign either.

So it would take a somewhat unlikely parlay — but, yes, it’s at least plausible that Democrats will have a strong night in November but will blow the race in Maine.

Mills would at least be a lower-variance bet, and that’s probably what you want in a blue state in a blue year. She reminded voters today that she’s still on the ballot. It’s probably too late, with early voting already having been in place for several weeks, though Platner would have until mid-July to withdraw and be replaced by a candidate of the state Democratic Party’s choosing.

With San Antonio finishing off Oklahoma City, the Spurs and New York Knicks are set to face one another in a rematch of the 1999 NBA Finals that could be the most fun matchup in years. This is the first of our two-part NBA Finals preview; I’m making the case for the Knicks, while Joseph George took on the Spurs in Part II. We also did an NBA Finals Substack Live with special guest and friend of the newsletter, Nate Duncan; you can find that in Joseph’s story.

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I can’t claim to be a long-suffering Knicks fan, but I’m not exactly a bandwagon-jumper, either. I moved to what is technically northeast Chelsea in 20131, but which is really more of a no-man’s land between Midtown and various places south2, a micro-non-neighborhood defined by its abundance of parking garages, “Irish” sports bars, illegal weed stores, and most of all, its proximity to Penn Station and Madison Square Garden. When a team’s stadium is almost literally across the block — for a time, my apartment was constantly bathed in red light from an extremely vibrant Rao’s Pasta Sauce ad on the MSG outdoor billboard — and that team is notoriously, chronically underachieving, you are provided with the option to adopt it in midlife, as clearly articulated in §14.2.7 of the 1955 Sports Fandom Accords.

Linsanity also helped whet my appetite. Those days in February 2012 were proof of concept for how the city would go absolutely crazy for the Knicks. They also felt like something out of the movie Awakenings: glorious, but glorious precisely because they were obviously too good to be sustainable. Indeed, Lin played just one season with a team, with the Knicks declining to match an offseason offer sheet from Houston. Fans might have been ready to get over it following a fluky 54-28 record in Anthony’s third season with the team in 2012-13. But after a second-round exit at the hands of the Pacers, the Knicks never again made the playoffs for the rest of Carmelo’s tenure in New York.

The Jalen Brunson Era has obviously been a revelation as compared to the false dawns that preceded it. (I haven’t even mentioned Kristaps Porzingis.) But my take on the current iteration of the Knicks has long been that they were a canonical, high-floor, limited-ceiling team: a good watch but bound in by middling defense and roster inflexibility after a series of all-in moves. I supported the replacement of Tom Thibodeau with Mike Brown largely on the grounds that the Knicks didn’t have many other options to improve.

I actually did bet on the Knicks to win the Eastern Conference before the playoffs began and doubled down while they were in the midst of their 140-89 shellacking of the Atlanta Hawks in Game 6 of the opening round. (The odds were good, though my proceeds are quickly being squandered on World Series of Poker buy-ins). But I assumed that would be as far as it went before a 4-1 shellacking against the Thunder or Spurs.

I’ve changed my view. I think the Knicks could actually win the NBA title — and win it fair and square. Not just because of incredibly hot shooting — though that would help — or a Spurs injury, in other words. I wouldn’t bet on them at even money, especially with Game 7 scheduled for San Antonio’s Frost Bank Center, not MSG. But I think this might be a great team, not merely a very good one.

What to make of a truly insane playoff run

You’ve probably seen stats like this: the 2025-26 New York Knicks currently have the best playoff scoring margin in NBA history at +19.4 (!!!!!!!) points per game. It’s been such a dominant stretch that all three of the Knicks’ vanquished Eastern Conference opponents have to deeply reconsider their futures — the 76ers fired Daryl Morey, indeed.3 Of course, the playoffs aren’t over yet, and I wouldn’t count on the Knicks beating the Spurs by 19 points in the Finals. They’re in truly elite company, though: Jordan’s Bulls, Kareem’s Bucks, the Shaq-Kobe Lakers, and Steph’s Warriors are the others in this stratosphere. Wemby’s Spurs have also outscored their opponents by double digits so far in the playoffs, though, I’d note.

But a hot streak in basketball isn’t merely a curiosity; it can also be predictive. Here’s some additional context that I’m pretty qualified to provide, having spent thousands of hours developing sports rating systems like RAPTOR, COOPER and PELE. Recent performance should be weighted fairly heavily, especially in the NBA, which is perhaps the most deterministic sport since each team gets around 100 possessions per game. In the NBA, 14 games is not a small sample and especially not in the playoffs. If you’re calibrating your expectations for the Knicks based on their 53-win regular season, you’re doing it wrong.

What’s unusual, though, is that the Knicks aren’t in either category of teams that usually make this sort of leap. Middle-aged in basketball terms, the Knicks are not a young team that is suddenly coming into its own. But they’re also not a team that has so proven its bona fides that they can lollygag their way through the regular season in the style of the 2000-01 Lakers. In fact, that’s sort of the antithesis of Brunson’s approach, or Thibodeau’s or Brown’s.

The Knicks do have a lot of playoff experience, however, something we’ve found in the past is also predictive. In Brunson’s four years with the team, they’ve played 56 playoff games; only the Celtics have played more during this period, and the Knicks will surpass them when they take the court for Game 2. They have a 35-21 record despite catching what you could argue to be various bad breaks. They did also win the NBA Cup this season, defeating (drumroll) the Spurs.

The Knicks’ defense suddenly got way better

The Knicks’ 53-29 regular-season record was similar to last year’s 51-31 and 50-32 from two seasons ago. But that, plus a midseason slump when they went 2-9 over 11 games in January, tends to obscure some real improvement. The difference came on defense: the Knicks’ regular-season defensive rating jumped from 14th in the league last year to 7th this year. Moreover, the defense got better as the year went on and Brown had more time to shape the approach.4 The Knicks allowed 114.9 points per game in games through Jan. 19, the last day of that slump. But after limiting the Brooklyn Nets to just 66 points on Jan. 21, they only allowed 104.9 PPG for the rest of the regular season — and it’s been 100.6 so far in the playoffs, with the Knicks having the best defensive rating in the league in the postseason.

“Very good offense, average defense” is a plausible formula to win the Eastern Conference. “Great offense, good defense” is what they’ll probably need to beat San Antonio.

The fiercer defense also makes the Knicks feel much more Knicks-y. The Knicks have always risen and fallen with their defense; the Patrick Ewing teams actually had a below-average offense even in the years they reached the Finals, but a defense that would beat you into submission in a manner that perhaps only the Bad Boy Pistons ever matched. (The average scoreline of the 1999 NBA Finals, also against San Antonio, was Spurs 85-Knicks 80.) The strengths of the 1970s championship teams were also concentrated on the defensive end.

But is the newfound elite defensive performance sustainable? Listen to enough NBA podcasts, and you’ll frequently hear the take that the Knicks have two massive defensive holes to patch: Brunson at the point and Karl-Anthony Towns in the frontcourt. So even with a trio of very good “wing-stopper” defenders in OG Anunoby, Mikal Bridges and Josh Hart, they’re sort of treading water.

The critique of Brunson is fair. He’s not a black hole like Trae Young out there, and he gets his share of steals, but his low center of gravity does not really translate on defense according to either the eye test or the advanced stats. However, I’d argue that the Knicks have one big defensive liability, not two. According to EPM, Towns had the best defensive season of his career and was a slight defensive positive overall.

Some of that is because KAT is a terrific rebounder, averaging 13.8 rebounds per 36 minutes this year, a career best. Rebounding has become underrated among analytical types: it doesn’t count as a defensive stop until you grab the board.

Admittedly, KAT is perhaps the weirdest player in the NBA, spectacularly talented without being particularly athletic or confidence-inspiring. He is almost never described as a “unicorn,” despite probably being the best-shooting 7-footer in NBA history. Towns had a reputation coming out of college for being a “very good shot blocker”, but after a rookie season in which he averaged 1.7 blocks per game, that’s never been how he makes stops, relying more on his size than the threat of a swatted shot.

Furthermore, Jordan Clarkson and Tyler Kolek aside, the Knicks’ defense often improves with their bench units, which isn’t common in the league. With Miles McBride and/or Mitchell Robinson out there, the Knicks do more than just hold the opposition to a draw. In the regular season, the Knicks outscored their opponents by 10.6 points per 100 possessions with McBride in the lineup, and by 8.7 points per 100 with Robinson playing.

There’s no doubt that the Knicks have also benefited from some shooting luck in the playoffs. So far, their opponents have hit just 30.5 percent of their shots from three and 73.1 percent of their free throws. Both of those quantities are extremely mean-reverting (defense doesn’t affect an opponent’s three-point success much, or its free-throw percentage hardly at all5). So OK fine, apply the league-wide playoff averages of 34.7 and 76.9 percent shooting instead. That would yield an extra 78 points for the Knicks’ opponents over 14 playoff games, which is meaningful. Even with those revisions, though, the Knicks would still be outscoring their opponent by +13.8 PPG so far in the postseason.

Basically, the math adds up: one big minus (Brunson), one neutral (KAT), and otherwise a bunch of positives sums up to a pretty good defense — if not a little better than that.

It can be a little unorthodox and require high possession-by-possession effort from the wings, however. High floors don’t necessarily imply low ceilings. The Knicks tend to get away with medium effort on both sides of the ball better than most teams, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a higher gear. It’s easier to find it more often when you don’t run your players ragged with such a heavy minutes load as Thibs did. Hart, Bridges and Anunoby all ranked in the top 5 in minutes per game in 2024-25. That’s a lot to ask of anyone, let alone two-way players who you’re also hoping will be active in transition.

KAT has reshaped the offense

There’s probably been some luck on offense too — the Knicks are shooting an even 40 percent from three in the playoffs, up from 37.3 percent in the regular season. Still, offense and defense aren’t as separable in basketball as is commonly assumed. The Knicks are scoring a spectacular 1.32 points per possession in transition in the playoffs; they actually aren’t getting that many steals, but the ones they do get, largely from their wing defenders, have often been pick-sixes at midcourt that set up automatic points on the other end.

Is anything else different on offense? Well, it’s really just one thing, but it’s major:

They’ve let the KAT out of the bag. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.) Towns’s assist rate has roughly doubled from the regular season, to the point where he’s a full-on point forward, assisting on shots at nearly the same rate as Brunson. There is a trade-off here: KAT’s usage rate (the percentage of possessions he ends via shots, free throws or turnovers) has fallen, something I wouldn’t necessarily have recommended because he’s a very efficient scorer.

But the critique of the Knicks’ offense one could have raised before is that it was sometimes plodding and predictable under Brunson, even if he’s one of the most effective players in the league late in the shot clock. The Knicks just have a lot more optionality with Brunson and KAT as twin fulcrums in the halfcourt, making better practical use of their spacing. It’s the sort of tweak that elevates the offense from good to great.6

Health matters also, and the Knicks are more or less fully intact. (Though now Robinson has mysteriously injured his pinky finger.) They bulldozed through the Sixers to the point where you almost didn’t notice Anunoby’s absence to close out the series. While the Knicks didn’t have any catastrophic regular-season injuries, Hart missed 16 regular-season games (and played another 13 from the bench), Miles McBride missed half the regular-season schedule, and even Brunson missed 8. While I’m not in love with the deeper part of the Knicks’ bench, it hasn’t been needed as much — many of the minutes have been in garbage time in the various blowouts — and Brown’s “bench mob” mentality gets players who know they’re only going to get a 6-minute stint to go full balls-to-the-wall in those minutes.

The Knicks are more than the sum of their parts

If the Knicks do win their first title since 1973, you might see some recalibration in the conventional wisdom on the much-debated question of “how good must a team’s best player be to win a title?” In April, The Ringer ranked Brunson as the 12th best player in the league. I say that’s too low — I’d take him above Jaylen Brown, for sure, and probably ahead of Donovan Mitchell. But he’s basically a one-way player, and that caps his capacity to compete for, say, the top five. EPM, meanwhile, actually thinks KAT is the Knicks’ best player (!) with Brunson and Anunoby (!!) tied for #2. I’m not sure I totally believe that, either.

On the other hand, I’ve always thought the notion that you must have a top-5 player to win the title is more of a correlation than a causal mechanism. We have a Silver Bulletin tradition of writing about the new NBA champion, and the recurring theme is that the archetypes people have in their heads are too rigid. The Steph Warriors were too young and too small until they weren’t; Nikola Jokic’s defense was supposed to be too much of a liability; the Raptors’ one-year rental of Kawhi Leonard was the sort of thing that had never worked in the past.

Basketball is a team sport, and this is the best team that New York has seen since the 1970s. The front office overpaid for Bridges on the theory that being more than the sum of one’s parts could outweigh mismatched high-end talent of the sort that Cleveland and Philly fans just saw fail. Although the Thibs Knicks were considered overachieving, it’s Brown who has seen the vision through. I’m not gonna lie: Knicks fans are probably going to remember this season fondly even if we’re on the wrong end of a 4-0 sweep. But with a defense that has gone from average to good and an offense that might be legitimately great, the Knicks just might have it in them to find four more wins.

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From a certain vantage point, you can argue that May has been an “incredible few weeks for Trump’s political operation,” as the journalist Rachel Bade recently did. Bade cited redistricting wins for Republicans in Virginia and at the Supreme Court, and the ousting of a series of Trump-skeptical Republican incumbents — like Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Thomas Massie of Kentucky — in Republican primaries this month.

Trump may add another notch to his belt on Tuesday in Texas, when Republicans will go to the polls in the runoff of the U.S. Senate primary between incumbent John Cornyn and state attorney general Ken Paxton, whom Trump just endorsed.

But rest assured, readers: this is not our perspective here at Silver Bulletin. Here’s a good rule of thumb to understand why: if Nancy Pelosi somehow did a Freaky Friday-style body swap with Trump, would she have handled this Texas endorsement any differently?

Last time we wrote about the Republican Senate race in Texas, Cornyn was trailing the scandal-plagued Paxton in primary polls. We said the one thing that would give Cornyn a shot at frontrunner status was an endorsement from Trump. Instead, in a move reminiscent of the New York Times’s co-endorsement of Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren in the 2020 Democratic primaries1, Trump endorsed all three Republican candidates. You could call that a nice gesture — and an understandable one because Trump featured prominently on all of their campaign websites. But it of course defeated the entire purpose of an endorsement as an informative signal.

Cornyn outperformed his polls even without Trump’s help and narrowly won a plurality of votes in the primary. But that wasn’t enough to avoid a runoff. So Republicans were staring down the barrel of nearly three more months of an already nasty race between Paxton and Cornyn before they could pivot to the general. To make matters worse, Jasmine Crockett — Republicans’ preferred candidate — lost the Democratic primary to James Talarico.

Let’s remind you of the stakes here. Democrats need to pick up four seats to flip the Senate in November. The comparatively easy pickups are in Maine, where the state’s increasingly blue lean might be enough to overcome both Susan Collins’s track record and Graham Platner’s controversial past, and in North Carolina, a purple-ish state which prediction markets say is more likely than not to turn blue thanks to a strong Democratic nominee in former governor Roy Cooper.

After that, things get harder. Democrats have fighting chances elsewhere, but are no better than a toss-up in any other contest. And one more pickup is not enough: they have to win at least two seats on top of Maine and North Carolina. Putting Texas in play would make for a lot more winning combinations.

So something had to be done, as Republicans were fully aware. Trump jumped into action with the promise of a quick endorsement of one of the two primary survivors and strong encouragement that the non-endorsee should drop out:

Although that Truth Social post played its cards close to the vest, reporting at the time indicated that Trump was leaning toward endorsing Cornyn. We don’t say this too often about Trump, but tactically, that seemed like a good call. Cornyn is probably the better general election candidate, and not just because he’s the incumbent.

So what happened? Whether out of frustration that his plan to back Cornyn leaked or because of his usual instincts to improvise, Trump’s speedy endorsement never materialized. The March 17 deadline for one of the two candidates to remove their name from the ballot came and went, and after maneuvering from both sides, it looked like Trump might not endorse anyone. “The impact of him staying out of the race, I think, has been unfortunate because now we’ve spent tens and tens of millions of dollars in a competitive US Senate seat in Texas that could’ve otherwise be used for competitive House seats … against Democrats in the fall,” Texas Republican House member Nathaniel Moran told CNN.

But on Tuesday, Trump finally did endorse Paxton, whom he called a “true MAGA Warrior.” Paxton had already been a slight favorite in prediction markets, but his chances shot up from 60 percent to 95 percent following the news.

Anyone surprised by the flip-flop between Cornyn and Paxton either hasn’t been paying attention to Trump’s previous endorsements or is too plugged in to Beltway inside baseball. The most basic take here is that Trump seems to have questionable taste in candidates. Just like with Herschel Walker in 2022, he chose the loyal but scandal-plagued over the safe “establishment” option.

Is Texas truly a toss-up?

In previous cycles, these Trump-backed candidates have seriously underperformed. And Trump’s endorsement of Paxton comes at a time when Trump’s political standing is probably at its all-time low: he’s at a net -19.3 in our approval rating tracker, the worst rating for any president at this point in a nonconsecutive term.2

To level-set here: the Texas general election contest is the proverbial case of a rock meeting a hard place. It’s a very red state, having repeatedly defied Democrats’ wishes to “Turn Texas Blue”. It’s the kind of place that has survived blue waves, like in 2018, when Ted Cruz was just far enough ashore to beat Beto O’Rourke by 2.7 points.

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Joseph’s story today is intended as a companion to our PRISM NBA prospect ratings, and PRISM has also been updated with additional data and player commentary since its initial release. Go check out PRISM! -NS

It's easy to forget, given the incredible games we've been gifted this postseason and the carnage that Knicks have caused to the rest of the Eastern Conference, that the most pivotal moment of the NBA season takes place on a random afternoon in May — when deputy commissioner Mark Tatum strides onto a stage with a stack of envelopes, ready to smile while some fanbases realize a year of struggle was for nothing and others celebrate a potential future of perennial contention. Seated in the audience are the draft prospects, the coveted prizes that the front office executives, also in attendance, throw away entire seasons for.

Despite its funkiness, the lottery is perhaps my favorite event of the year. Even beyond my interest in prospect evaluation, it’s one of the few times the NBA honestly focuses on team-building, acknowledging both the decision-making and, yes, the luck required to take a team from sitting in that audience to hosting a playoff game in May. This year’s lottery felt more special to me than any other — I spent an inordinate amount of time on the draft given my work on PRISM, and I felt like I had a vested interest in the order despite my favorite team, the Spurs, not being in the bottom fourteen for the first time since 2019.

The actual TV presentation of the lottery reveal is pretty unnerving. I’m surprised there hasn’t been a Key and Peele sketch on the prospects’ awkwardness as they realize they may have to spend the next five years in Memphis or Utah instead of Miami or Los Angeles. Last year’s lottery reveal had Cooper Flagg making the biggest “this-had-to-be-rigged” face as the Mavericks won the rights to select him #1.

No prospect should feel certain of their destination this year, even if there’s a loose ordering as of right now. My work on PRISM only confirmed this: Cameron Boozer, the projected #3 pick, is ahead in my model by a lot but is unlikely to be selected with the first pick. That makes the 2026 draft unusual — it has so much more top-end talent than a typical class that the team holding the first pick could capitalize and grab additional assets in a trade-down. The lottery results only increased the probability of that happening. The Washington Wizards, who won the lottery, have reportedly been exploring trade options given their comfort level with any of three or four prospects: presumably AJ Dybantsa, Boozer, Darryn Peterson, and Caleb Wilson.

This uncertainty creates diverging scenarios. Depending on your flavor of scouting — I tend to focus more on production, for example — the draft could play out very differently from how I’d run it if I were picking everyone myself.

But that’s what today’s story is intended to highlight. It’s not a “mock draft” or a projection of who teams will pick. It’s who I think they should pick, considering PRISM ratings and team needs.1 Because I’m essentially making myself the GM of all 30 teams, I’ve resisted the temptation to make trades. In real life, I’d trade down if I were the Wizards because I value Boozer more highly than the consensus, but I’m imagining that most of the other 29 Joseph-run teams would also have Boozer #1 on their boards, making deals much harder to find.

The “who they’ll probably take” picks below are based on the consensus mock draft.2 An asterisk by the player’s name indicates the team can’t take their mock-drafted player because they’re already off the board in my draft.

1. 🧙 Washington Wizards

Who they’ll probably take: AJ Dybantsa

Who they should take: Cameron Boozer

The Wizards landed the first overall pick in a somewhat anticlimactic NBA draft lottery, their first win since they nabbed John Wall in 2010. Fun fact: it’s actually Anthony Davis’ THIRD draft lottery win; he was on the Pelicans’ roster in 2019 when they won the Zion Williamson sweepstakes and the Mavericks last season when they picked up Cooper Flagg.

This year’s draft doesn’t have a consensus best prospect the way those ones did, but in the analytics camp, one prospect seems to reign supreme over the others. While there are legitimate gripes with Boozer — he doesn’t project as a rim protector and he gets away with a bunch of travels on his post-ups — it’s hard to ignore this level of dominance from a freshman. He essentially plays as a wingified version of Nikola Jokic, and I expect that to continue as he develops. Yes, I’m aware that’s a lofty comparison, and I’m not saying I expect Boozer to be as good as Joker, but the typecasting of Boozer as a Kevin Love or Al Horford-plus player probably understates his ceiling even if those are reasonable comps.

Boozer will never truly be a poor defender because his strength can help on lighter players trying to drive past him, and because he’ll enter the NBA as the best rebounding wing in the sport. Even if Boozer’s scoring never becomes the main draw of his game, his ancillary skills should be more than enough to make him the best value proposition in the draft. PRISM, I’d note, also focuses on a player’s production over his first seven seasons, when he’s most likely to be on a discounted or otherwise reasonable contract. Sometimes that tilts it a bit toward older players — but Boozer won’t turn 19 until a month after the draft.

The Wizards shouldn’t really be drafting for fit in the first place, but they especially shouldn’t be scared off just because their two best players (Sarr and Davis) are occupying both spots of a double big lineup. Boozer isn’t supposed to be in those spots, projecting more a as an oversized ‘3’, and the Wizards might actually make a playoff push next season if they found a way to incorporate Boozer as a small forward.

Perhaps understanding their optionality, the Wizards have been somewhat secretive thus far on what they plan to do with the pick. They have a budding analytics department and I wouldn’t be surprised if Boozer is on the top of their board and they’re looking for options to trade down, especially since AJ Dybantsa (currently mocked at #1) is coveted by more than a few teams in the lottery this year.

2. 🎷 Utah Jazz

Who they’ll probably take: Darryn Peterson

Who they should take: AJ Dybantsa

It’d be reasonable to assume that the Jazz really want AJ Dybantsa — their owner, Ryan Smith, is a BYU alum, and it’s not everyday that a top draft prospect prefers to live in Utah. In the world where I’m the GM of every team, this works out cleanly — I think Dybantsa is either the second or third best prospect in the class, and the Jazz would look very tantalizing with Dybantsa, Lauri, JJJ, and Walker Kessler in a humongous lineup.

Dybantsa’s combine measurements were super appealing — he measured in at just around 6’9 barefoot, making him a legitimate ‘big wing’, but the concerns about his defense remain. Here’s a disconcerting fact: Reed Sheppard had twice as many blocks as AJ Dybantsa did during their freshman seasons. It’s hard to ignore something like that, even if Dybantsa’s scoring profile is one of the most robust in recent memory. As Jeremias Engelmann wrote, he has some of the signatures of a high-volume, medium-efficiency, middling-defense player who can turn into a quagmire on a bloated contract later. With that said, there are few true can’t-miss prospects on the Flagg tier and PRISM does grade Dybantsa as a “superstar”, a rating that might make him #1 in a weaker draft.

3. 🐻 Memphis Grizzlies

Who they’ll probably take: Cameron Boozer*

Who they should take: Caleb Wilson

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The NBA draft is the league’s most consequential event. We touched on this in our Future of the Franchise rankings, but most teams are in their respective positions because of their decisions in June. This has held true since the NBA’s inception — contrary to popular belief, only a handful of champions were built primarily through free agency or trades. Most title teams, like last year’s Oklahoma City Thunder, are born of smart drafting, supplemented by shrewd moves on the trade market rather than the other way around.

Teams are aware of this, and, of course, are willing to throw away entire seasons because of it. (With the league’s proposed anti-tanking solutions leaving something to be desired, we’re still working on our own NBA draft reform plan. Look for that soon.) In the years since Sam Hinkie’s “process”, tanking and its more polite cousins like “strategic rebuilding” have become a fixture of the league’s competitive landscape. Front offices will openly gut rosters, bench healthy veterans, and punt on entire seasons, all for the chance to move up a few slots.

You would think, then, that NBA teams would be remarkably good at making draft picks. If the draft is important enough to sacrifice entire seasons for, surely the evaluation process behind it must be at least very good? But every year, we see the same pattern of misses. There are a few reasons for this.

Yes, scouting is inherently noisy. Even with a sound approach, you’re trying to project outcomes years into the future from a small sample of games among a set of 18-year-old outliers. This isn’t to excuse bad process — there’s definitely plenty of that across the NBA. But even analytically sound prospects fail to translate for reasons that are hard to foresee.

NBA teams undervalue production and overvalue “potential”

Cognitive biases also distort where players end up getting drafted. Consensus evaluation tends to prize linear ordering — ranking players from “#1 option” down to “role player” — even when that hierarchy doesn’t map onto how basketball value actually works for most teams. The result is that, relative to more “reliable” players, teams systematically overweight creator archetypes and the sorts of players who can turn into what our friend Jeremias Engelmann calls “quagmires”. At each slot, teams should be selecting for the highest expected value, not just the highest ceiling. Team-specific needs complicate things further, but figuring out how to define expected value is most of the problem.

Current production is also chronically underrated. Simply put, the strongest predictor of future NBA success is current success. This shouldn’t surprise anyone, and yet every draft cycle, evaluators find new ways to talk themselves out of good players. Paolo Banchero was drafted ahead of Chet Holmgren in 2022 largely on this basis despite far less efficient college stats, but Holmgren has almost certainly been the better pro from an impact standpoint. So our new model, PRISM1, focuses on identifying good, impactful players for their age without glaring holes in their statistical profiles.

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Admittedly, athletic characteristics like vertical leap, agility, speed, and strength are hard to measure outside of combine testing, which only becomes available in late May. And to be fair, our PRISM projections still incorporate consensus scouting rankings — though we’ll show you our “pure stats/computer” version just for fun later on.

But do combine measurements tell us which of those traits are functional — that is, do they actually correlate with positive NBA outcomes? The best studies we’ve seen say not really. If you want an athletic guard because athletic guards get to the rim, a guard who already gets to the rim is a good bet, regardless of what he tests at the combine or what the aesthetics look like.

When we remember the great teams in NBA history, it’d be hard to not rank the Golden State Warriors dynasty from 2015 through 2022 near the top. Most narratives assume they caught lightning in a bottle, drafting Stephen Curry in 2009 and Draymond Green in 2012. But what if I told you those picks were layups? That the Warriors did something as simple as ignoring aesthetic biases — Steph was considered too frail to translate and Draymond didn’t fit a specific archetype — and simply selected the most productive players at their positions. Curry and Dray were two of the best college players two years before they were drafted. There are actually plausible arguments that both should have been drafted top five in 2007 and 2010, respectively. The cornerstones of a dynasty were not that difficult to identify years before anyone considered them future Hall of Famers.

“Analytical” scouting, which isn’t restricted to models, certainly has its place in NBA front offices today, but it’s not nearly as widespread as most fans would think. There seems to be this assumption that front offices are making decisions with extreme efficiency and little bias, but many teams still default to silhouette scouting — evaluating players based on physical traits and aesthetics rather than production, and projecting outcomes based on who a player looks like rather than what they’ve done. This might explain why Kon Knueppel got Joe Harris comparisons last season.

When a player consistently drives winning outcomes against high-level competition, the burden of proof reverses. The question shouldn’t be whether their game “looks” translatable, but whether there’s any structural reason it wouldn’t be. “Structural” might be doing a lot of work in that sentence, but we mean this should be grounded in real, current gaps in production — not just perceived translatability concerns. Luka Doncic shredded the EuroLeague before entering the NBA, winning its MVP in 2017–18, but fell to third behind Deandre Ayton (!!!) and Marvin Bagley III (?!?!?) because evaluators worried his lack of athleticism would neutralize his otherwise extraordinary skill set. It didn’t. Luka never became a great athlete; the traits that made him dominant in Europe simply remained dominant in the NBA. On the other hand, Jahlil Okafor was genuinely productive in 2014–15, but fell out of the league because of his low passing and defensive indicators — real holes in his profile, not just aesthetic concerns.

PRISM is built to operationalize these principles. It anchors on production — what players have actually done against real competition — and layers in the contextual factors that shape projection: shot creation volume and efficiency, defensive and offensive roles, positional size, age-adjusted performance curves, and more. So let’s take a look at our top 5 for this year’s class. Note that PRISM currently only rates players who have spent at least some time with a Division I NCAA program2, but virtually all of the top prospects fall into that category this year.

Intrigued? You can find a more complete methodological description of PRISM here. Spoiler alert: Kansas’s Darryn Peterson, still considered the potential #1 overall pick, is a few ranks outside of our top five. His ranking consistently fell over the course of the college season as we refined PRISM, and the Jayhawks’ washout from the NCAA tournament dropped him further. Some of that reflects the depth of the class: he’d be as high as #2 on PRISM’s board in other recent drafts. But the possibility that he could wind up as a “tweener” or even one of Engelmann’s “quagmires” has been increasing as his production hasn’t quite matched his scouting reports.

In typical Silver Bulletin fashion, we’ve got a lot of detail for you in the rest of this newsletter:

• Prospect profiles for Cameron Boozer, AJ Dybantsa, Peterson, and most of the other top ~20 players in the upcoming 2026 class

• Full PRISM rankings for the 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026 classes

• A comparison of PRISM rankings versus consensus rankings

• Projected offensive and defensive roles

• Draft strength scores: Is the 2026 draft as good as reputed?

• Raw PRISM ratings based purely on stats, with no prior based on scouting rankings

• Projected player development trajectories and volatility ratings

• And a draft simulation factoring in young core, fit, NBA lifecycle, and more.

Here are PRISM’s full rankings. (Note that you’ll want to scroll through the pages to see beyond the top 15.)

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The 2026 World Series of Poker begins this Tuesday (May 26). I’ll be out there, of course, and hope to see some Silver Bulletin readers at the tables. But my schedule will be a little unusual. I’ll literally be playing from the first day of the WSOP for a 7-10 day trip, then back home for a month to hopefully launch our World Cup and midterms models, and then probably back at the end for the Main Event.

The distractions are unwelcome from a poker standpoint. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my better years at the WSOP have tended to be in odd-numbered (i.e., non-election) years. That includes last year, when I had an excellent series, cashing 7 events, including my second deep Main Event run in three years. (I made it to Day 6 in 2023 and Day 5 last year.)

Some of that was variance/luck. But I do think I have a certain knack for playing the WSOP. The format tends to help people like me who have experience playing against fish, tough lineups, and everything in between, because you’re going to encounter all of that at the World Series.

So this guide contains some of my best tips for the WSOP. It was originally published in 2024, but I’ve decided to make it a little tradition to add one new tip every year to match the calendar (so we’re now up to 26 tips for 2026):

• The main addition this year is a long tip (#11) about what to do when you do encounter tougher opponents — contrary to what your instincts might tell you, it’s not necessarily a time to back down.

• There’s also a much expanded section (#18) on scouting your opponents, something which is even more essential now since the WSOP+ app reveals the names of your opponents from the first hand.

Most of the other tips should hold up well, but I’ve given them a light edit to match recent changes in the structure of the WSOP. And if you need advice on where to stay, see also: Nate’s Incomplete Guide to Vegas.

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Almost every poker player loves the World Series. It’s sort of our version of summer camp. Except, it’s a summer camp that also features the softest poker tournaments in the world.

This is a guide to the tournament written for a relatively specific audience: a competent-to-proficient poker player who is now looking to take the WSOP more seriously. In other words, this guide is written for … myself from a few years ago. After having treated the WSOP as kind of an afterthought for most of my poker-playing career, I’ve made multi-week trips every year since 2021, and those long days in the Paris, Horseshoe and Rio ballrooms have given me some insight into how the WSOP just isn’t like any other tournament series. In 2023 felt like I really got the hang of the WSOP, cashing seven events and making deep runs in the Millionaire Maker and the Main Event. Last year was another strong series, as I wrote above. But I barely even remember anything that happened at the 2024 World Series, except for incredibly dramatic political news constantly interrupting my poker schedule. So it goes sometimes when trying to balance the World Series with other priorities, but this guide is explicitly written for people in similar circumstances.

I’ll break these tips down into three categories — logistics, mindset and strategy. The first section is free, and — since this is Actionable Gambling Advice — the rest is for paying subscribers.

Logistics

1. Don’t just play World Series events.

It feels weird to begin a guide to the WSOP by telling you not to play the World Series. But in addition to the WSOP, at least seven other venues across Las Vegas will be holding poker tournament series; you can find a complete list of these using Kenny Hallaert’s awesome spreadsheet (updated for 2026). It’s true that the WSOP events come with more notoriety and media coverage — and probably have the softest fields relative to the buy-in levels. But they can also be a shitshow; the Wynn in particular is luxurious by comparison. So I recommend mixing and matching. Sometimes, one of these other venues will be the best use of your poker time. It will still feel great when you make a deep run.

2. Have a plan A, B and C for each day. If you want to make time for non-poker things, be explicit about it.

The sheer abundance of poker all around town at the WSOP — not just tournaments but also cash games — is a luxury, especially if your home base is somewhere like New York where the nearest legal cardroom is more than an hour away. So what happens in my experience is that all non-poker activity tends to fall by the wayside. Once you’re on site, it’s just too tempting to register for another tournament even if you’ve busted out of something. Vague plans to get dinner with your long-lost friend at some point during the WSOP? Probably won’t happen unless you make an explicit effort to follow through. Exercise and non-poker work? Budget time in the morning or build some off-days into your schedule or it won’t get done.

For planning the poker part of your trip, I recommend going through Hallaert’s schedule and marking it up with 1 to 4 stars — one meaning events that are just barely worth playing for you, and four meaning “destination” events that are among the main reasons for your trip. (Say, the Main Event.) Start with your 3- and 4-star events and build your schedule backward from there. The summer schedule can be a jigsaw puzzle — for instance, you'll need to ensure that potential Day 2s or 3s don’t conflict with other events you’re committed to playing. Poker players love being able to set their own schedules, but this is the one time you’ll really benefit from advanced planning.

3. Never play an event you can't finish.

In 2023, there was a guy who flew to his buddy’s wedding in the middle of the Main Event. And I knew another guy who was planning to skip any Main Event days on Saturday because he observes the Sabbath. Listen, those might be honorable practices. But it’s very, very –EV to play an event that you can’t see to completion; most of the prize pool goes to people who are lucky enough to make a deep run.

As a corollary, avoid playing events that will cause a significant amount of stress or hardship if you run deep, like having to cancel an important business meeting. This is a particular issue with the Main Event, since it takes nearly two weeks from start to finish. Now, granted, you can play the percentages — only about 1 percent of the field makes it to Day 6 of the Main, and that qualifies as enough of a once-in-a-lifetime experience that you won’t feel guilty for changing plans. Still, as the pressure builds later in a tournament, the last thing you want is to have any subconscious excuse to punt off your chips. 

4. If you make it to Day 3, aggressively cancel other commitments.

The counterpart to this is that if you do make a deep run, you’ll want to devote 100 percent of your energy to the following: playing poker, studying poker, sleep, eating adequately and maybe working out. Since WSOP events typically have players on the clock for 12 hours a day, these categories alone make for a full schedule.

Because, as Maria and I talked about on Risky Business, focus is a scarce resource when you’re playing poker day after day. By Day 3 of an $1,000 tournament, you may suddenly be playing a de facto $25,000 tournament. That means that getting an extra hour of sleep, or not playing hangry, or not having to write a bunch of work emails in between hands, can be extremely valuable. Deep runs do not happen all that often and you want to make the most of them.

5. Stay within walking distance.

Some people really like renting a house with their buddies for the WSOP and I can see the appeal — I’ve never done that for the World Series, but I had a cute little Airbnb apartment at EPT Paris in 2024 and it was kind of great. But along the theme of minimizing unnecessary distractions, one thing I don’t want to have to worry about is catching an Uber or fighting through traffic in the morning. And Las Vegas hotels in general offer good value for the money relative to what the same categories would cost in other cities. (Do sign up for the various casino rewards programs; even bottom-tier status can get you meaningful discounts on room rates.)

You can find my Vegas hotel guide here for reviews of basically all the mid-tier-and-above Strip resorts. But you might adjust it based on walking distance: your default should probably be to stay somewhere nearish to Paris/Horseshoe. I’d consider anything from roughly MGM Grand on the south side of the Strip to the Venetian on the north side to qualify.

6. Don’t come in cold.

Because the WSOP is such a hive of activity, it can take some time to get your bearings. Like most casinos, Paris/Horseshoe is a sprawling, mildly confusing venue. It helps to literally and figuratively know where the bathrooms are and other logistics of the property. If you’re in town for, say, the Main Event, I’d recommend playing at least one other event or some cash games first.

And if you can’t, at least get to the venue early to do some walking around.

Let me be a bit more explicit about this. If you haven’t touched physical playing cards in 3+ months, it's probably worthwhile to get a cash-game poker session in before your big event. But absolutely should not be a priority over sleep, etc.

I will say, though, that the new WSOP+ App introduced in 2025 has made tournament registration and other things less stressful. I’d call it a genuinely well-run tournament at this point, which I wouldn’t have said a few years ago.

7. Watch for dealer errors.

A couple of times a summer, I’ll deal a backyard game for friends — and man, it’s really given me a new appreciation for what dealers have to put up with. Dealing a poker game is highly skilled labor.

Unfortunately, Caesars faces a problem: there’s far more demand for poker dealers at the WSOP than at any other time of year. So they inevitably wind up hiring some people who don’t have much experience. By the end of the tournament, the worst dealers have gotten some reps in and/or been weeded out. But for the first two or three weeks, you’ll see dealers make a lot of mistakes. Protect yourself: don’t muck your cards until the pot has been awarded to you, use proper change if at all possible, and double-check the dealer’s calculations in large all-in pots. And if you see something — like the dealer not reading the board correctly in a split-pot game — be a good poker citizen and say something.

The WSOP has controversially introduced a dealer rating system this year, and I’m actually a fan of this. Yes, some players are probably going to mark down dealers if they take a bad beat. But usually, there’s a ~5 percent left tail of dealers who just aren’t fit for duty. The rating system could make the weed-out process smoother if WSOP staff can detect reliable signals from this.

8. Consider the small mixed-games events.

In 2021, I cashed the $10K HORSE event and finished 2nd in the $10K Limit Hold’em and got a reputation as a “mixed games guy” that I don’t really deserve. Other than limit hold’em — which I used to play professionally — no limit is by far my best game. 

With that said, I still like the mixed games experience — events like the $1,500 Single Draw, $1,500 Bagudi or $1,500 Eight-Game Mix are typically a lot of fun. Many of your opponents won’t be playing at an expert level either and the level of camaraderie is higher than at other points of the schedule. (Mixed games players are some real characters.) And these events are a comparatively cheap introduction to the mixed games, which are often played only as part of high-stakes cash games. Plus they feature smaller fields, which makes final tables more likely. So consider them a long-term investment in your WSOP bracelet equity.

Mindset

9. Recognize that most WSOP opponents are far from GTO optimal.

This is a dangerous tip, but an important one. In general, I think you’ll do better in poker — and other walks of life — by not underestimating your opponents. Nowadays, even amateur players have access to GTO solvers, coaching sites, and all sorts of other poker tools. Some geezer you assume is terrible at poker might actually be running PioSOLVER sims.

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Last Thursday night, I was working late, trying to put some of the finishing touches on our forthcoming World Cup model — and actually looking up an article I’d written for FiveThirtyEight in 2014 about my previous soccer model, SPI. Although the quality of the archive has gradually deteriorated since Disney shut down the site in 2025 (I left two years earlier in 2023), at least our text-based articles were mostly still there, or so I thought. Instead, I was auto-redirected to ABC News’s home page, which looked something like this:

Sometimes weird things happen on the internet late at night, so I resisted the temptation to tweet something about it. But one of my former colleagues noticed the same thing on Friday. ABC News hasn’t made any public comment that I’m aware of — they declined to make a statement to the New York Times, which wrote about FiveThirtyEight’s disappearance. It’s possible that they have something up their sleeve, I suppose. But presumably, this was either intentional or willfully neglectful. All of the former FiveThirtyEight site from my nearly decade-long tenure at ESPN/Disney/ABC is gone.1

It’s common to read things like: “what happens on the Internet stays on the Internet”, the notion being that you can never escape your digital past. But this isn’t really true. A Pew study of a random sample of Internet links conducted in October 2023 found significant “link rot”: almost 40 percent of links that had been active 10 years earlier were broken. And that’s probably an underestimate: the study was based on the Common Crawl web archive (the same one that AI labs use to train their models), which is quite comprehensive but probably contains some bias toward more prominent sites. Another study by ahrefs found a two-thirds attrition rate for web links after 11 years.

Yes, you can still access (for now) Disney-era FiveThirtyEight content via the invaluable Internet Archive, and pre-Disney-era content from The New York Times (which I partnered with from 2010 through 2013). And obviously, we’re trying to recreate some of the most popular parts of FiveThirtyEight at Silver Bulletin. The election models and polling averages are here, and new-and-improved versions of the sports models (PELE, ELWAY, COOPER) are gradually returning too.2 Galen Druke, Clare Malone and I have even been getting the old podcast crew back together for live shows.

To be clear, we’re not trying to create a full-fledged version of FiveThirtyEight. Having a smaller team gives me more time for creative work, such as writing and building models. In fact, post-Disney life is better along pretty much every quantifiable and intangible dimension.

Still, these abstractions about “link rot” don’t quite capture the feeling of seeing so much hard work erased.

200,000 hours of work erased

Here are some numbers roughly in the right ballpark: during the Disney era, which lasted about 10 years, FiveThirtyEight published about 20 stories a week. Let’s say that each story took about 20 hours to produce between research, writing, graphics and editing.3 Do the math, and that works out to about 200,000 person-hours of work that ABC News just deleted.

What’s probably harder to see from the outside is that none of this was ever smooth sailing: that content was produced through a lot of blood, sweat, and tears (sometimes literally on certain election nights).

Maybe the deletion of the site has me feeling wistful, but I thought I’d write about the various phases of FiveThirtyEight, including some inside-baseball stuff that I’ve never really talked about publicly.

I’m just going to speak from my vantage point, not on behalf of the several dozen people who worked on the site in its various iterations. I’m not going to talk about competing editorial visions or personality clashes or any of that, though we had our fair share of newsroom drama. Instead, this is intended as more of a business school case study: a study of a large corporation, The Walt Disney Company, behaving in an incredibly neglectful way toward a smaller brand it acquired, with dozens of employees who worked exceptionally hard despite constant existential uncertainty.

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I want to state one thing up front: I think FiveThirtyEight could have been a highly valuable business if it had been managed more carefully. I know the New York Times considered FiveThirtyEight a valuable part of its subscription offering. I know some of the sharper minds behind subscription-based businesses tried to acquire FiveThirtyEight at various times. And I know the economics of Silver Bulletin, and they’re good. There are challenges: our traffic is highly cyclical, increasing severalfold around major elections and sporting events. Still, my guess is that FiveThirtyEight could have had north of 100,000 paying subscribers by this point: in the same general ballpark as The Free Press, which recently sold for $150 million.

The thinking at Disney is presumably that they invested a lot of money in FiveThirtyEight and were left with nothing to show for it. But to my mind, however much they spent on FiveThirtyEight, they never invested a dollar in it. There was never really any effort, or even any pretense of trying, to make it a profitable unit of the company. At one point, other senior staffers and I basically begged Disney to turn on a paywall, figuring this could provide some security, and were told, essentially, that it just wasn’t worth Disney’s bandwidth to figure out the mechanics of one. We were treated like an unused gym membership: you don’t want to cancel because you think you ought to be hitting the gym, but every month a charge hits your credit card statement and you aren’t getting any fitter.

The origins of FiveThirtyEight.com

I founded FiveThirtyEight.com under the pseudonym “poblano” in March 2008 as a spin-off from a popular series of posts at the progressive blog Daily Kos. For the previous several years, after quitting my corporate consulting job in 2004, I’d had two main sources of income. One of them was building statistical models like PECOTA for Baseball Prospectus, an early adopter of a subscription-based business model that still exists today and has graduated dozens of staffers into Major League front offices. BP had good timing going for it — this was the dawn of the Moneyball era in sports. But the subscription-based offerings were relatively rare at the time. BP churned out enough revenue to support a middle-class income for around a dozen co-owners/stat nerds/writers but not much more than that.

However, I didn’t really care because my real source of income was playing online poker. Yes, there really was a time when you could click buttons for a living and make a pretty good income by working the late shift against what I imagined to be drunk Scandinavians. It seemed too good to be true, and ultimately it was. The passage of the UIGEA in late 2006 essentially cut off new money flowing into the game, the remaining players were getting sharper, and the format I specialized in at the time (limit hold ‘em) was gradually losing ground to no-limit hold ‘em, which I wouldn’t become proficient at until years later.

The UIGEA, passed on the last day before Congress adjourned for the 2006 midterm elections, did pique my interest in American politics, however. I wanted the bastards who had deprived me of a living to be voted out of office, and they largely were, including the chief sponsor of the bill, the 15-term Iowa Congressman Jim Leach.

“Moneyball, but for elections” was a logical enough pitch, but I didn’t anticipate the degree to which FiveThirtyEight.com would become a viral hit in 2008. It helped that the election featured a number of compelling personalities, including a guy whose name I’d vaguely remembered from my time at the University of Chicago: Barack Obama. I ran ads on FiveThirtyEight, and the money wasn’t fantastic by any means, but digital advertising rates were comparatively healthier back then, so it was enough to pay the rent.

FiveThirtyEight, de-anonymized midway through the 2008 cycle, drew a lot of media attention, particularly after the model’s highly confident “call” that Obama would defeat John McCain proved correct. On a train platform on my way back from the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference conference in 2009, I encountered a senior editor at the New York Times who had been in attendance. I’ve long been an admirer of the NYT — my parents in East Lansing, Michigan even had a ritual of walking to the bookstore every day to buy the print edition. Long story short, the NYT made a good-enough offer. The finances weren’t fantastic, but it was an extremely clean deal: I was a contractor, not an employee, so I was free to pursue other sources of income, and I regained full ownership of the models and the other IP after I left the Times.

Honestly, I expected to renew with the Times. At the risk of being immodest, the 2012 election forecast had been a smashing success, with the FiveThirtyEight model famously “calling” all 50 states correctly that year in a stroke of luck that later felt like a bit of a curse. (There was only about a 3 percent chance this would happen, according to the model’s internal logic.) The Times had launched a digital paywall midway through my time there, and its subscription revenues had grown significantly in the 4Q of 2012, coinciding with the Obama-Romney election. How much FiveThirtyEight was responsible for this was hard to say — the Times has had a lot of success without us, obviously — but I had a lot of leverage.

“We” (my attorney and I) basically decided to give the Times an exclusive negotiating window before exploring the market. My keen sense at the time was that the NYT would not be the highest bidder, but I really did like working there, and they deployed me creatively on everything from the Magazine to the book review. The Times was a deeply factional place in those days, though, and the FiveThirtyEight product had both internal champions and internal critics.4 The Times was also in the midst of a leadership transition, and new management tends to want to move on from the old regime’s pet projects, even if they were successful. Although I’d moved to an apartment within walking distance of the NYT office in anticipation of a new deal, the Times dragged its feet to the point where we eventually felt like we had no choice but to test the market.

We wound up signing up with ESPN. It doesn’t seem like the most obvious fit now, but this came during an era when ESPN basically thought of itself as the best business in the world, guaranteed an annuity based on cable rights fees. Its then-president, John Skipper, had highbrow ambitions for premium products, notably Grantland. Grantland, built around another spiky founder, was quite explicitly a precedent for FiveThirtyEight @ Disney. I don’t catch up much with Bill Simmons these days, but he was a helpful consigliere during the negotiations, offering reliable advice on navigating any and all things Disney-related.

For the record, other offers we seriously considered came from NBC News, Bloomberg and the Times. The latter two would probably have been better fits, because they’re basically in the same business as Silver Bulletin/FiveThirtyEight: selling premium subscription products.5 ESPN and NBC are primarily television networks, by contrast. I’ve never really liked going on TV, and it’s probably my worst medium despite some genuinely good-faith efforts by ABC News to make it work.

The early Disney years: mistakes were made (mostly by me)

In hindsight, I chose poorly. Skipper had been fairly explicit that he didn’t really care whether FiveThirtyEight made money: like Grantland, we were essentially a hood ornament on ESPN’s oversized SUV and a “rounding error” relative to Disney’s gigantic P&L.

That might seem like a fantastic situation — Disney’s pitch was basically “we’ll cut you a nice check to be maximally creative” — and I consider myself privileged to have been given the opportunity. But there were several problems with the arrangement.

The b-school way to put this is that there was never brand or incentive alignment — with Disney being very “macro” (it takes huge swings: theme parks, Marvel movies, NFL rights deals) and FiveThirtyEight being very “niche”. Furthermore, the Disney attitude basically seemed to be that “creatives” were sensitive artist types who didn’t care about money so long as they made enough of it, but I’ve always had a fairly entrepreneurial spirit.

But most of all, this sort of arrangement makes you extremely dependent on your bosses’ goodwill, and Skipper abruptly left ESPN one morning in 2017 because of an extortion scandal.

FiveThirtyEight relaunched @ Disney/ESPN in March 2014 to “mixed” reviews. And by “mixed” reviews, I mean mostly bad ones. The launch was kind of a disaster, really. I’ve written before about some of the Mistakes That Were Made, most of which were predictable mistakes that I made. Among other problems, I did too much bragging in the media and didn’t anticipate the extent to which public opinion toward FiveThirtyEight would shift once we became a corporate-backed incumbent rather than an eccentric upstart. We added too many staffers too quickly, perhaps anticipating that we’d never have more leverage to add “headcount” than when we were a new, shiny object for Disney. Relatedly, we put too much emphasis on quantity and not enough on core products.

The core mistake, though, was that almost nobody was thinking about how to make FiveThirtyEight a viable business. We had essentially no dedicated business people or “product” people or anyone else whose job description depended on the site being economically viable. We never developed the muscle memory or the infrastructure to be a commercial product.

Despite all of this, FiveThirtyEight eventually rounded into a very good and popular website, or so I’d like to think. Our 2016 election forecast was literally the most “engaging” feature on the internet, according to Chartbeat, and our podcast received hundreds of thousands of downloads per episode.

But it never quite felt that way. Whenever we felt like we finally had some open runway, we’d encounter an unwelcome hurdle.

In 2015, I was taken aside while walking with my boss one warm spring afternoon and told that Bill Simmons would be dismissed from Grantland. Grantland had a brief and tumultuous post-Bill period but was shuttered completely by late 2015. This was a very ominous precedent: Grantland had literally been in the same sub-unit of ESPN as FiveThirtyEight, with much of the same senior management.

Then in 2016, there was the whole … Trump thing. Being dismissive of Trump’s chances early on in the Republican primary was the biggest analytical mistake of my career, and I think I deserved a lot of blame for that.6 I will insist that our general election forecast did an excellent job that year, though. Our model famously/infamously gave Trump about a 30 percent chance of winning, much higher than prediction markets, other models or the conventional wisdom at the time. That’s not how the rest of the internet saw it, however. It was a difficult election night and a difficult aftermath period. Everyone had their own way of coping; I remember playing an inordinate amount of the EA Sports NHL game and trying to take the Rangers to the Stanley Cup.

We wanted to leave Disney sooner, and we probably should have

Honestly, ESPN took the Trump stuff relatively well. FiveThirtyEight had produced a truly extraordinary amount of traffic in 2016, at least — even if none of it was being monetized. But at some point in early/mid 2017, with my initial contract with ESPN set to expire in early 2018, Skipper called me up to his office one morning and told me basically that FiveThirtyEight could no longer be a thing at ESPN, but he’d work his connections to find a good landing place for it. I don’t know what the impetus was for this — although it came amidst the whole “stick to sports” period at ESPN, and FiveThirtyEight obviously mostly wasn’t sports. For what it’s worth, though, I thought Skipper was relatively sincere, and we did take a lot of meetings.

But the resulting negotiations were fraught. There were plenty of “suitors” interested in a pared-down version of FiveThirtyEight, which would trim staff by perhaps half to two-thirds. For better or worse, I’d chosen to place a big emphasis on staff retention, even though the market consensus was probably right that the business model would be better with a leaner staff. The two main external suitors were The Athletic (later sold to the New York Times) and, confusingly, The Atlantic. I think highly of the leadership at both organizations, and they had the right idea: FiveThirtyEight could be a compelling subscription product even if it wasn’t viable based on web advertising alone.

We came quite close to securing a deal with The Athletic, close enough that the founders came to New York for an entire week of meetings to sort through every detail. I’d expected things to culminate with a handshake agreement and a celebratory lunch before they headed back to California. If you know anything about my organizational skills, they aren’t great, but I thought we (me and the other senior staff) did a reasonably good job of softening the ground for a potential transition to The Athletic and a subscription-based business model. This wasn’t a hard sell because most of the staff would be offered jobs at the new organization.

Long story short: the potential deal with The Athletic hit a last-minute snafu, which there might have been time to work around if there hadn’t been a hard deadline imposed by Disney, but Disney needed a decision from us. The sale process was complex: Disney owned some of the key IP (the trade name and site archive), while I owned some of it (the models). Moreover, Disney was both running the sales process and represented one of the bidders (ABC News). Somewhat bizarrely, ABC, a Disney related party, had entered the bidding at some point midway through the process; apparently, there had been some signals crossed about this in Burbank, and ESPN hadn’t realized that ABC had been interested.

So we put our tail between our legs and signed up for another tenure at Disney, doing our best to make it seem as though this had been the plan all along when it obviously wasn’t. Although ABC News was nominally a better fit than ESPN — they did put me and other staffers on TV more often — I was quite certain at the time that this was going to be our last hurrah at Disney. It became apparent, even before there was any ink on the deal, that while ABC News was happy enough to spend money on FiveThirtyEight with major elections forthcoming, there was the same issue as with ESPN: they weren’t really looking to invest in the property in a way that might make it profitable and sustainable. And even more so than ESPN, ABC News was a dinosaur of a business that attracted mostly older customers and managerial talent.

Nevertheless, the period from roughly 2018 to 2019 was probably the high point of FiveThirtyEight at Disney. It helped that our 2018 midterms forecast basically totally nailed the outcome, offsetting at least some of the stink from 2016. Still, the existential uncertainty about Disney’s loyalty to the site persisted.

This was when we pitched the paywall idea to upper management. Disney batted it around and ultimately turned us down. We never quite got a coherent rationale for why: something something about Disney being busy with its Hulu acquisition and not wanting to launch multiple subscription-based businesses at the same time.

It didn’t make much sense. My content had been paywalled at the New York Times and at Baseball Prospectus before that. Long before Substack came along, it was the business model that works for differentiated, high-quality content. (For “niche sites”, if you will, although elections and sports are large niches.) I don’t know what the paywall would have made, but after a year or two to get settled, it would probably have been comfortably in the seven figures annually: let’s call it $5 million. The cost might be annoying some customers who were used to free content, but we were hardly running any ads on the site anyway.7

What sort of business basically turns down a “free” $5 million? Well, apparently, a company like Disney, a company that made $69 billion in revenues in 2019. If you’re a rounding error when you’re losing a couple of million bucks a year, you’re a rounding error if you’re making a few million also.

The most generous interpretation is that Disney only understands things that operate at very large scales to truly mass-market audiences. ESPN.com had once been the exception to this, full of quirky offerings like Page 2 and Grantland. But it has largely been lobotomized, too, with talents like Pablo Torre and Zach Lowe having been let go.

The long, weird, bitter end

Then came the COVID pandemic in 2020. We thought we were smart by telling staff to start working from home a day or two before official Disney guidance, not realizing that the newsroom would never really be the same again.

Honestly, I think people forget how difficult this whole period was. I consider myself lucky never to have gotten seriously sick or to have lost any close friends to COVID. But there were challenges if you were working in the media at the time: the adjustment to “going remote” and the political “reckoning” that basically any non-explicitly-conservative-coded media business experienced, and all of this coming on top of an election year.

Even as the world awkwardly and unsteadily got “back to normal,” FiveThirtyEight never really did. Key staffers like Clare Malone were let go without any real plan to replace them. Slowly, the oxygen tubes were being removed.

There was also the matter of my contract. The new deal I’d signed with ABC News in 2018 was nominally 5 years long but included a mutual opt-out after 3.5 years, originally timed to December 2021. Either I or ABC had the right to pull the plug, but if neither of us did, the deal would extend through the 2022 midterms by default.

The signals I was getting from ABC News were quite bearish, but they also weren’t quite ready to make a decision. What I wanted, frankly, was to pare down my responsibilities to Disney — and take an appropriate pay cut — in exchange for non-exclusivity. I’d license the models to them for 2022, produce some designated number of columns and TV appearances. But I wanted to be officially free of managerial responsibilities, serving as more of a mentor/founder, and also free to start a Substack and begin building an audience for it.

ABC’s response to this was basically radio silence. There was never any sort of counteroffer or serious conversation about it. Surely, then, they’d exercise their opt-out right, and we’d each go our separate ways in December?

Well, no. Disney repeatedly asked to push back the deadline for making a go/no-go decision, and my agents and I agreed to several extensions until we got tired of the delays.

The eventual, thrice-delayed deadline came on an exceptionally cold Saturday in February.8 I had a late dinner reservation with my sister and some friends, and we went back to her apartment afterward. I checked my inbox in between sips of wine, half expecting to get an email from ABC at 11:59 p.m., but nothing came. I don’t know if they literally forgot about it, but that’s how it felt.

To be fair, I could have opted out also, and if I’d known at the time how much better life after Disney would be, I would have. But I was pretty explicitly in a lame-duck period from that point onward. I’d totally busted my ass for the first seven or eight years of my 10-year tenure with Disney, but in this late phase, I was mostly focused on my book, which I explicitly had the right to work on per my contract.

I received an urgent text message from my boss one morning in April 2023. There had been rumors of job cuts at ABC News, and it could only mean one thing. What was surprising, though, was that while the cuts were both deep and haphazard — while you might have been able to take a go at 2024 with a skeleton crew, you probably wouldn’t have wanted to cut all the managers and editors, as ABC did — they weren’t quite ready to shut down the site entirely. I was not, technically speaking, a part of this layoff, but with only two months to go on my contract, it was safe to assume that they weren’t going to offer me a new deal and I wouldn’t have taken one anyway with the staff gutted and the remaining staffers left in an incredibly challenging place.

To be honest, I’m not sure that ABC News realized that they had no more rights to the models: the license term on the election models expired with my contract.9 But they did eventually hire another “model guy”, G. Elliott Morris, to replace me. I am absolutely not looking to extend a beef with Morris, who, like me, seems much happier with his post-Disney life on Substack. But it’s important context to state that this isn’t the person I’d have hired; we’d had a long-running feud, in fact.

I chatted with my ex-boss at about this point in time and asked if they’d consider discontinuing use of the FiveThirtyEight trade name. Even leaving the Morris hire aside, there were a number of other things I did not like, such as beginning to stylize “FiveThirtyEight” as “538” and replacing our carefully refined site design with an ugly ABC News template. (Even though FiveThirtyEight routinely drove more web traffic than the entirety of ABCNews.com.) There was no more sports section, either. The brand was very much being depreciated, and I didn’t want people to associate this stage of the site with its glory days.

What happened in 2024 isn’t something I’d have scripted, though. Basically, their new election model was literally broken, continuing to show Joe Biden virtually tied with Trump even after his disastrous debate. (Evidently because Morris’s design for it had been overcomplicated. These models are hard to design, by the way.) The model was taken offline for more than a month after Biden dropped out, missing basically the entirety of the Kamala Harris “Brat Summer” period. My understanding is that the new, debugged version had been ready earlier, but ABC News PR was exceptionally sensitive about public perceptions around the model, speaking about it only cryptically in contrast to the transparency the site had been known for.

Meanwhile, I had a good year. Silver Bulletin received more support than I ever expected, and I was all over the media during my book tour. I’m not going to lie: after 10 years feeling jerked around by Disney, the whole sequence was pretty satisfying. But it also proved the point about a subscription-based model being the right call.

ABC finally fully shut down FiveThirtyEight in March 2025, 11 years after its debut at Disney. Eleven years is a long time in the media business, and the site covered one of the most tumultuous periods in American political history with its unique blend of analytics, brutal honesty and irreverence.

Disney refuses to negotiate with me

It would be nice if that work could be preserved for the public record. I don’t know what plans Disney has for FiveThirtyEight, if any. But I did approach Disney a year or two ago, through my agent, about acquiring the remaining IP. I’m probably the logical high bidder, though the value is rapidly depreciating as what’s left of the site falls into disrepair. At a minimum, we’d restore the archive, with prominent links to Silver Bulletin.

We were told to basically get lost: ABC was annoyed with my critical public comments about their management of FiveThirtyEight. It apparently wasn’t a long conversation, so I don’t have a lot more color to report than that.

Hanlon’s Razor states: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. But honestly, I don’t know which explanation is better suited to ABC. During the second half of my tenure with Disney, it felt like they were putting almost literally zero effort into any decisions involving FiveThirtyEight (other than my being featured prominently in their election night coverage10).

The one good thing about the bitter ending is that it prevents the temptation to feel overly awash in nostalgia. Because FiveThirtyEight was always produced with a lot of care, including attention to copy editing and graphics, it tended to impress people as a more smoothly running operation than it actually was. Internally, there was always a lot of conflict: between bright but opinionated staffers, all of whom had slightly different ideas about what “data journalism” was, between staffers and their opinionated boss/founder, between the news cycle and our deadlines, and between pretty much everyone and Disney. The relationship with Disney wasn’t particularly heated, so there weren’t a lot of stories that would make for good movie scenes. But mostly we just felt neglected.

Disney HR did send me a literal Mickey Mouse plaque after I left, celebrating my 10 years as a “castmember”. There was one small problem, though: they misspelled my first name as “Nataniel”.

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This has been one of those weeks when the hard-working Silver Bulletin staff has devoted most of its hours to some longer-term features — most importantly, the midterm and World Cup models1 — and several of the articles we have planned are in a state of half-finishedness. When this sort of thing happens, it can be easy to feel a sense of substackschuld — the German word for the guilt felt for not having published a newsletter for several days (OK, I made that up).

Giving in to substackschuld sometimes just perpetuates the problem by pushing back everything else on your to-do list. So this was supposed to be a short newsletter that just posted the video of the show Galen, Clare, and I did at Comedy Cellar on Wednesday night (you can find that at the very end). But I talked myself into a full article after reading this excellent post by friend-of-the-newsletter Matt Glassman on “constitutional hardball”.

What is constitutional hardball?

Glassman defines “constitutional hardball” as “using political tactics and strategies that are thoroughly legal under the constitution but flout the basic assumptions about the rules that we all agree upon”: in other words, things that are technically legal, but which violate democratic norms. An example might be Virginia Democrats changing the retirement age for the state supreme court, enabling them to appoint an entirely new court and presumably to overturn the court’s decision to block the state’s redistricting referendum.

Virginia Democrats have abandoned that effort, to which I say, good: I argued at the live show that I really disliked the plan. It felt like a violation of norms: too much of an escalation, the sort of thing that Democrats would blast as exceptionally undemocratic if Republicans did it, for frankly too little gain (just a couple of seats in the House for two years).

And norms matter. Often, they do most of the work. This is not a perfect heuristic, but in any sort of long-term relationship, it’s usually a bad sign when you have to “look at the contract” instead of counting on both sides to just behave “reasonably”.

But what constitutes “hardball” and what’s going “too far” isn’t so straightforward. As you may have noticed, democratic norms have been severely weakened in the United States, and President Trump has not exactly shown much respect for the Constitution.

Were Republicans playing hardball when they threatened to breach the debt ceiling to extract concessions out of Barack Obama? When they refused to hold a confirmation vote on Merrick Garland? When Texas Republicans kicked off a mid-decade redistricting war last summer? I’ve chosen these three examples because the first two preceded Trump, and the last one sort of does: Texas Republicans did basically the same thing under George W. Bush in 2003. This isn’t entirely a new problem or a Trump problem.

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The golden rule of constitutional hardball

And what about some of the ideas Kamala Harris floated this week in what she called a “no-bad-idea brainstorm”? Such as adding Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. as states, or expanding/packing the Supreme Court?

For his part, Glassman — who lives in Virginia and voted against the state’s redistricting amendment out of a sense of principle — is on board with gerrymandering reform and with new states2, but not with court packing. For the most part, I share his intuitions.

But “intuitions” is exactly what they are. Other than finding some way to end the insanity of the current gerrymandering/redistricting prisoner’s dilemma, I don’t think any of these are easy calls, exactly. Puerto Rico and D.C. statehood seem fine/good to me, but I don’t feel that way about the occasional proposals to divide California (or on the GOP side, Texas) into several states. Then again, state boundaries are hardly sacred: there really don’t need to be two Dakotas, and creating them was an explicitly partisan move.

Meanwhile, you can argue that expanding the court would be a tit-for-tat maneuver for the Garland thing — though a more precise and reciprocal retaliation would be Democrats refusing to confirm a Republican president’s nominee should they control the Senate during a GOP presidency. A situation that has roughly a 50/50 chance of coming into play after the midterms, by the way.

Even as someone who thinks of himself as a principled guy, I don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with inductive moral reasoning, meaning that you look at the edge-cases (“this feels right, but I don’t think this is OK”) and “work backward” to impute some general principles from them. The better approach, though, usually involves some synthesis of inductive and deductive reasoning: you look at the edge cases to help define the rules, but then consider how the rules would define the other edge cases, and so on until you converge on a point of some coherence. (This all feels weirdly intuitive to me because it’s very similar to the process of creating a statistical model. You neither want to overfit a model —doing too much “gerrymandering”, if you will, around the edge cases — or to underfit one by failing to capture key features of the system.3)

But probably I’m abstracting this too much. Glassman proposes this test of when something constitutes undesirable constitutional hardball:

This can get quite messy, but here’s a rough shorthand test: do you favor instituting your reform when the other side is in power or will otherwise benefit, or only when you are/will? If it’s the latter, that’s a good sign that it’s not a neutral reform, and not likely to be productive in a non-partisan, democracy affirming and republic-strengthening sense.

I like Glassman’s test, but I’d extrapolate a half-step beyond. We might ask: what is the equilibrium that emerges if both sides reciprocate, which they almost inevitably will? Is it a stable equilibrium or one that would potentially oscillate out of control? Or in a more formal philosophical sense, what is the categorical imperative?

If Democrats were to add two new Supreme Court justices, Republicans would probably do the same the next time they held a trifecta. The equilibrium would be that: 1) whenever a party won a trifecta, they’d also gain control of SCOTUS and 2) a Supreme Court with dozens (eventually hundreds, thousands, etc.) of justices. I’m not sure how stable that is, and that certainly doesn’t feel right if you believe in any sense of checks and balances.

Or, what is the equilibrium that emerges from totally unconstrained mid-decade redistricting? It’s basically that the U.S. House becomes a sort of version of the Electoral College. Whenever a party wins a state trifecta, they rejigger congressional boundaries until they control all or nearly all of the districts in a state.

That bothers me slightly less. The lack of representativeness in the House and the lack of competitive districts are major negatives, but I can imagine this norm changing without really threatening the integrity of the Constitutional system. It at least still has an electoral mechanism, in that you have to win state-level elections to enact your maximalist plan.4 And for better or worse, it’s the equilibrium we’re headed toward anyway until and unless either Congress takes action on gerrymandering or SCOTUS does (and the current SCOTUS isn’t going to). Incidentally, such an equilibrium would not necessarily be bad for Democrats, provided they’re just as aggressive about redistricting as Republicans are, including in their own majority-minority districts.

A “democracy agenda” should be popular

Still, whenever I see a partisan Democrat proposing to fight back by any means necessary — including by doing things like kicking Virginia’s current supreme court out of office — I’m reminded that the parties aren’t in perfectly symmetrical positions.

For one thing, Republicans get to play as the home team because of the current composition of the court. For another, Democrats, especially in their past three presidential campaigns, really emphasized the point that they were the party that stood for norms, institutions and democracy in general. One tactical advantage that Trump has is that he’s so flagrantly hypocritical that nobody expects him to be anything other than self-dealing. Democrats are threading more of a needle.

Do Democrats at least get any political mileage out of their messaging around democracy? Maybe. In 2024, Kamala Harris beat Trump 80-18 among the roughly one-third of the electorate who cited “democracy” as their most important issue. Then again, voters sometimes reason backward on this sort of poll question5 — and Harris lost. Then again, it’s hardly surprising that Trump won given record-setting levels of both immigration and inflation, the whole Biden fiasco, and the generally unpopular position of incumbents around the world — and Trump is now super unpopular.

So here’s a proposed tiebreaker for the edge cases: is your proposed reform popular? Would voters like it?

I’ve written before about some of the undemocratic tendencies of Democrats who wear the “democracy” label on their sleeve. They don’t tend to trust voters much, and they’re more technocrats than populists. By contrast, not only do I think it’s more democratic to actually consider public opinion above and beyond just elections, but I also think that voters will come to better judgments than elites much of the time. I often find myself in a weird part of the Venn diagram as someone who has many technocratic characteristics but is fairly skeptical of central planning and expert judgment.

If you’re going by the polls:

• Any sort of gerrymandering reform would potentially be quite popular;

• Americans favor Puerto Rico but not D.C. statehood;

• And voters are strongly opposed to court packing, but support term limits and/or a mandatory retirement age for Supreme Court justices.

Some of this isn’t going to happen (changes to the tenures of existing justices, unlike court expansion, would require a constitutional amendment). Still, I’d happily take that deal. And it represents a solid foundation for any sort of “democracy agenda” that Democrats might seek to propose in the future — better than presuming the possibility of some sort of total partisan victory in an era of short-lived majorities.

Finally, as promised, here’s the video of my event with Clare and Galen, which was a really fun show. Due to the idiosyncrasies of the Substack publishing system, it’s behind a paywall6, but you can find a free preview of the first 20 minutes over at Galen’s newsletter.

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