🕒 The latest on Trump’s approval rating

Updated July 28, 2026

Donald Trump’s approval rating has improved somewhat over the last few weeks. It hit a second term low of -20.2 back in May. But today, Trump’s net approval rating is up to -17.4. Is he still less popular than he was at this point in his first term? Yes. But Trump is actually slightly more popular than Joe Biden was at the equivalent point (-19.2 net approval vs -17.4) in his term.

Over the past couple days, we’ve added a series of polls to the average — such as those from The Washington Post, Echelon Insights, and YouGov — that showed Trump’s net approval rating closer to -22. But before that, most recent polls had him in the -15 to -20 range, which is why he improved in our average. -EMD, 7/16/26

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.

Read more

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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.

Read more

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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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“Agency” is one of those terms — see also “priors,” etc. — that I associate with “Silicon Valley rationalist types” and more broadly with the community that I call the River in my book. It’s perhaps slightly more intimidating than it needs to be. But it also captures something that there isn’t exactly any good synonym for. Here’s how I define “agency” in On the Edge1:

Agency [is] … being empowered to make robust, well-informed decisions, knowing which factors are inside one’s control. [...] The term refers not merely to having options but good options where the costs and benefits are transparent, don’t require overcoming an undue amount of friction, and don’t risk entrapping you in an addictive spiral.

Cate Hall, the author of the excellent Substack Useful Fictions, has what is undoubtedly a better definition:

Agency [is] … the entirely learnable capacity to both see and act on all of the degrees of freedom that life really offers.

I met Cate while playing a low-stakes tournament during the 2021 World Series of Poker, and it turns out we have a lot in common. Like me, Hall quit a corporate-track job to play poker — indeed, with far more success than I had, at one point becoming the #1 ranked female player in the world. She’s since had a number of other adventures, including being the CEO of the Astera Institute and a co-founder of Alvea, as well as being the author of an outstanding new book, You Can Just Do Things: How High-Agency People Get What They Want Out of Life, which I spoke with her about on Thursday.

Both the poker life and the writer’s life offer a tremendous amount of ostensible freedom. You don’t have a boss, and you don’t necessarily have a lot of structure unless you impose it on yourself.2 There very much are consequences to a lack of productive effort — in some ways, in fact, they’re more direct consequences than when you’re working for a corporate paycheck3. But you mostly bear those consequences yourself. These are careers for highly agentic, self-motivated people, in other words.

I introduced “agency” in On the Edge in the context of an extended discussion about the proliferation of gambling. As a liberal with libertarian tendencies, you might say I have a prior against imposing limits on people’s choices. For instance, although I think ubiquitous sports betting is probably net-harmful for society, that doesn’t mean I think it should be banned. (Slot machines? That’s another question.) At the same time, I don’t think it’s as simple as saying “nobody has to gamble unless they want to, so all you’re doing is giving people more options.” Both brick-and-mortar and especially online casinos use all sorts of manipulative techniques to get you to gamble more, and it can require a lot of self-discipline to avoid these traps.

Social media algorithms, and algorithms in general, literally use some of the same techniques, establishing powerful defaults that can be hard to escape from. These are likely to become even more coercive in the age of AI, mining data on each user’s revealed preferences — essentially, pushing exactly the right buttons so they keep pushing buttons and increasing revenue and “time on site.” I think there’s far too much of a tendency in Silicon Valley to entrust decisions to AI — or to the billionaires who run the labs — on behalf of the rest of us.

What Hall’s definition captures that mine misses, however, is that agency is very much a learnable skill: few of us come out of the womb as fully realized, high-agency people. She has discovered this the hard way, including a multi-year drug addiction that she said “utterly wrecked [her] life.”

You Can Just Do Things is a brave book, both because of Hall’s honesty and because it breaks through certain taboos. Why do so many of us (raises hand) allow ourselves to become entrapped in dissatisfying professional relationships, for example? I’m not necessarily a believer in “radical transparency4,” but there are lots of times when more honest communication would allow us to get more of what we want out of life, while possibly making the other party better off as well, and we avoid it out of risk-aversion or fear of failure. This can also extend to friendships and even romantic relationships.

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows below.5

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Nate Silver: I’m here with Cate Hall, who I met playing poker a few years ago. I think Cate and I have a fair bit in common — we probably would have run into each other one way or another. Cate has a great new book out called You Can Just Do Things: How High-Agency People Get What They Want Out of Life, co-authored with Sasha Chapin.

Cate, I want to ask you how you came to write this book, but first I want to define the term “agency.” It’s a term I like. It’s a term people in the broader — I don’t know if I want to use the word “rationalist” — community use a lot. I know you define it in your newsletter, Useful Fictions, which is a great Substack, by the way. What does it mean, exactly?

Cate Hall: Good question. It’s kind of like a Rorschach test, because everybody has a slightly different definition. The one I use most often is the capacity to both see and act on degrees of freedom that other people overlook. So it’s a combination of observational capacity and then courage in acting on those degrees of freedom.

Nate: I like the courage part. This is a very courageous book. Would it be insulting to call it a self-help book?

Cate: No.

Nate: It’s kind of a self-help book for high-agency people, for a certain type of person who maybe has a lot of degrees of freedom in their life. I really liked it. But it’s a brave book, and a vulnerable one. How did you come to write it?

Cate: I’ve thought quite a bit, from a personal-journey perspective, about human agency over the last five years. Five and a half years ago I was really deep in drug addiction, and my life had totally fallen apart. I was broke. I felt like I was unemployable. Relationships had withered away. A lot of the content in the book, though it’s definitely not a book about addiction, comes from the experience of recovering and rebuilding my life. I put in a lot of cycles thinking about how to become a more effective person starting from a place of being really stuck.

The book actually came about as the result of the very first Substack article I ever posted, which I wrote at my husband Sasha Chapin’s suggestion. I dashed off an article about how to be more agentic, with a few tips, and the reaction was really strong. I got a ton of Substack followers. I had two book editors reach out and ask if I was interested in writing a book about it. And I was like, “Oh, okay. I guess this is a topic people really want to hear about. I guess I’ll write a book about it.” Working with Sasha on it was incredibly fun, and also incredibly necessary from the perspective of actually getting the book done.

Nate: I’ve never co-authored a book. Well, I guess I have in the old Baseball Prospectus days, for OG fans. My partner works on the Substack, and that creates interesting dynamics. One thing you talk about in the book that maybe I’m not the best practitioner of is hyper-honest communication. Does that go into the relationship, too?

Cate: Yeah, absolutely. Writing the book together was way more fun than I thought it was going to be. I kind of expected bad things to happen, because a lot of people report that when they try to do creative projects with their significant other. But I think we’re each well suited for very different parts of the writing and editing process, so it was actually pretty seamless, and we managed to not drive each other too insane along the way. We have a very honest relationship. We’re good at surfacing disagreements before they become lingering resentments.

Quitting law for poker

Nate: A book is a super high-agency thing to do. You start out literally with a blank page — or in your case, a blog post. The deadline is too far off. You talk in the book and in the newsletter about the importance of rapid feedback. In poker you get feedback after every hand. It’s very noisy, but you get it. With a book, you [didn’t] get that feedback until this week, when it’s in the hands of readers and reviewers.

I skipped over some of your biography […] you went to Yale Law School, right? And you were in Washington — am I making that up?

Cate: No, that’s right. I practiced in Washington for a while.

Nate: On a track to be one of these people who go [argue] before the Supreme Court one day. And then you quit to play poker — which has parallels. I quit my first job to play poker.

Cate: I was about 30 years old and a lawyer in D.C. at the time. I was in the process of discovering that I really didn’t want to be a lawyer around the same time that gambling became legal in the D.C. area. I picked up poker as a fun hobby, and then fell in love with it, and it slowly started eating more and more of my time. For some months before I officially told my law firm I was leaving, I was sneaking away to play poker a little too much. I remember my mother was very concerned that I had a gambling addiction, and I was like, “No, I’m just unhappy as a lawyer and I have a hobby that I like.”

But at some point it seemed like the law firm thing was going super well, in the sense that my career was advancing. I had a bit of a come-to-Jesus moment where I was like, “Oh, I need to get out of here, or I’m going to be stuck forever.” So I told my firm I was leaving shortly after bonuses were announced one year, which they always love. And everybody was like, “Okay, well, you’re obviously having a midlife crisis. Why don’t you take a year off and then come back?” I considered doing that, but I was completely in love with poker from the moment I started playing it, so I never seriously considered it.

Nate: And you had a lot of success. You were very high in the GPI — Global Poker Index — rankings at some point. I think you were the number one ranked female player in the world. Was poker one of those things that was as exciting as you expected it to be, or did it become a burden once it was your career?

Cate: I only played professionally for about three years, which is probably a good amount of time to play professionally without getting totally jaded. It definitely becomes less fun when you’re playing for a living than when you’re playing recreationally. Unless you’ve been a stockbroker, it’s hard to convey how demoralizing it is to show up at work and lose money day after day. You go on these streaks where it’s just brutal, especially if you’re a tournament poker player. And you start to feel like there’s no escape from the poker community, and the dynamics at the poker table.

Nate: I don’t think people realize, in the typical tournament, about 10 to 15 percent of players cash. If you’re good, you might cash more. But the real skill is being able to run very deep, and not just get these “min-cashes,” as we call them. There aren’t a ton of other fields where you fail 88 percent of the time. Even if you enter 200 tournaments a year and you’re a good player, you’re still going to have a losing year almost half the time.6 That’s just the math of the distribution, with the prize money concentrated at the top. What positive and negative habits does that lifestyle teach people?

Cate: It is such a head trip. Part of it is the fact that you can lose money a lot of the time. But there’s an additional psychological element, which is that if you play tournament poker — which is primarily what I did — something disappointing is always happening unless you win the tournament. You always have this very sad, numbing, terrible feeling at the end of the day or the tournament. I don’t feel like human psychology is well suited for that kind of environment. If you go super deep in a tournament and make back three or four times your buy-in, you’ve been sitting there playing for often multiple days, there’s a huge pile of money at the top, and you just feel like shit most of the time. You’re not thinking, “Oh, I made four times my money.”

I don’t know if there’s a useful thing to learn from that, besides maybe a bunch of different dissociation strategies. I do think there are habits of thinking you pick up in poker that are useful for other parts of life. I got a lot in terms of learning how to think probabilistically, to think in terms of expected value, learning how to be comfortable with failure, more experimentation and more doing stuff publicly. But I wouldn’t recommend adopting the psychological disposition of a poker player, because it tends to be sort of warped and mangled by the specificities of the profession.

Is addiction the opposite of agency?

Nate: There is a lot of compulsive behavior in the community — sometimes gambling, sometimes substance abuse, sometimes personality quirks. But the feeling of running deep in a tournament is really fun. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever experienced, and it makes up for all the constant pain and struggle a little bit. So how did you fall out of poker? Is this the point at which you developed addiction issues?

Cate: Yes. I had long been a psychonaut experimenter with drugs, and at some point I had this really intense spiritual experience — basically the first spiritual experience of my life — on drugs, and it became my complete obsession overnight. Replicating that, chasing that feeling. As obsessive as I had been about poker, I became about seeking that thing. At the time I stopped playing, I was still the top-ranked female poker player in the world, and I basically just left and almost never played again.

Nate: I think I played against you at the World Series in 2021 — it was you and me in some $250 H.O.R.S.E. tournament. Is it as simple as saying that addiction is the opposite of agency, or is it not quite that simple?

Cate: I think that’s a really interesting way to look at it, and I use that frame sometimes. If you think about agency as the capacity to unlock additional degrees of freedom, addiction is really the opposite of that. One of the things I talk about in a TED Talk I did is that when I would go out every morning to buy drugs and come home, I’d see people walking around doing totally normal things, and I felt incredible resentment toward those people because of the degrees of freedom they had — to just be out walking on the street, going to lunch with a friend. It was so far from what I felt I had the capacity to do at the time. Addiction does seem like stripping away everything else in service of mashing this one button over and over again, and that feels like the opposite of agency to me.

Nate: How did you get out of that spiral?

Cate: The real answer is that rehab was really important, and I was so resistant to rehab. For the first year and a half of my addiction, I wasn’t trying to recover. For the last two years of my addiction, I was trying to recover. I was doing all of the 12-step programs, and a bunch of stuff other than going to rehab, but I kept getting a month sober and then relapsing, and having a terrible relapse for months at a time. Having the really sustained timeout — the 60-day timeout from life that rehab required — was necessary for me to recover. Until that point, I had this idea that if I went to rehab, things would fall apart in some way that they hadn’t already, which is very classic addict thinking. But eventually I did it, and I really recommend it to anybody who’s having trouble recovering.

Nate: This is a kind of double-edged sword. People are very good, especially smart people, at rationalizing, and that can be rationalizing negative behavioral pathways.

Cate: Absolutely.

Does everyone actually want agency?

Nate: What if you’re just, quote-unquote, genetically super high agency? That’s one critique I’d have of the book: for a lot of people, it’s great to have every door be open. One of the important things you talk about is increasing your surface area for luck. It seems cheesy, but you go out and don’t just sit in your apartment, and you have conversations and meet people and explore the world. When I think about the friendships I’ve developed, a lot of them, it wasn’t like I planned, “I’m going to go make a new friend.” Usually it was like, I didn’t want to go to this stupid fucking event, and you go anyway, and you meet somebody. It’s more spontaneous than planned. But do all people want choice and agency?

Cate: I don’t know if everybody wants that. So the question is, to what extent do people differ in their capacity for this, maybe in addition to the desirability of it. Is that fair to say?

Nate: Yeah. I know people who are kind of paralyzed by choice, is the cliché. Same with the donkey who [is stuck between] two [pools] of water and they wind up staying in the middle. I think some people find the amount of choice kind of overwhelming, potentially.

Cate: I don’t know exactly what accounts for this, but experientially, the feeling of having more agency doesn’t feel like having an overwhelming amount of choice. You can think in terms of knowing what you want, and then knowing what to do about that, and I think about agency as more the latter than the first one.

There is an element of agency that’s about seeing choices you have that you might not otherwise recognize. But I think you can be really high agency in many senses and still not have a great idea of where to direct that agency, because actually knowing what you want in life is sort of a pre-agentic behavior. I know people who are really good at picking the actions that will get them the real-world result they want, but not at thinking about what they care about. I’m not actually sure that agency is super helpful when it comes to discriminating, at a basic level, between the different things you could choose to do with your life, or different options. So you may need an additional book for that.

Nate: It’s interesting in the debates about large language models. They have a more explicit utility function or loss function than people do. Sometimes when I wake up, Cate, I don’t know what the fuck to do. You wind up doing things that are firm and tangible. Having a Substack requires a lot of agency, or comfort with that. I can’t get fired, really, unless I’m more stupid than usual on Twitter. But you have a very direct linear relationship between the amount of work you do and the number of subscribers you get. In some ways, it’s a little bit crippling. Back when I worked for ABC News, I would take as long as possible at the World Series of Poker, because I had no incentive-based compensation, and I thought they were going to kill FiveThirtyEight, which they did. So I was like, “Fuck you.” Now it’s money out of my pocket every time I’m not writing a newsletter or doing something to promote the newsletter.

Cate: This is a very poker player way of thinking, too. One of the traps poker players fall into is that for every moment you’re spending on leisure activities, it’s really easy to figure out the exact hourly rate you’re sacrificing by not being at the table, and so people get into weird psychological loops about this.

Nate: When I was playing online poker — back then the games were really easy to beat, at least in my opinion — it was kind of like having an ATM. A high-variance ATM, where on average you withdraw $200 an hour. Sometimes, oops, you lost $10,000. Sometimes you gain $15,000.

This is one of the tensions you’re exploring in the book: how explicit [to be] or not to make [behavioral choices]. One thing people would be better off being explicit about is thinking about things that save you time or save you money. I remember I was traveling to Europe with my partner, and we had forgotten to bring the European plug adapters, and I said, I know it’s overpriced, but I’m going to buy chargers at the airport. I’m sure they’re marked up by 15 euros, but otherwise you have to find some little electronics store in the center of the city, and your credit card doesn’t work. But just taking the time to like give yourself the luxury of convenience. On the other hand, if you’re totally maximizing for everything, it feels like you wind up being quite miserable. And some things feel icky to be more explicit about.

You give a lot of concrete advice in the book about situations in the workplace, and to some extent situations involving friendships and relationships, where people are not very good at communicating things explicitly — especially men. I don’t think I’ve gotten in a real fight with a friend in a long time, but maybe I should. Maybe friendships drift apart, and maybe I should be getting into more arguments with my friends. What’s the barrier to communicating more explicitly and effectively? There are lots of examples in the book. I remember one about having a friend who always brings along a third friend, and you’re like, that’s a little bit weird. How do you broach those conversations?

Cate: This is one of the pieces of advice in the book that I’ve found most personally transformative: instead of having a feeling internally, just sharing it in a lot more circumstances. It feels extremely not allowed at first to just make a bunch of subterranean dynamics explicit, but once you start getting in the habit of it, it feels so liberating. Things I do at work all the time are just checking in with people: “I feel like you might be feeling a bit frustrated. I can imagine these reasons for it. Is that the case?” In other social circumstances, sometimes it’s, “I feel like maybe we have this awkward dynamic behind the scenes. Do you want to talk about that?”

It’s really interesting to think about why people never do this. The way I frame it in the book is “movie logic,” because in movies you see characters doing things where you’re just like, why don’t you just have a fucking conversation about what is happening here, instead of taking self-harming actions? And I wonder if it is a little bit downstream of movies, where in movies you need that for dramatic effect, but people download their ideas about the types of conversations that it’s okay to have from movies or entertainment. So I encourage people not to try to build dramatic tension in their own lives, but to just simplify things by making dynamics as explicit as possible.

Nate: I feel like there could be movies that end after 15 minutes. A couple rents an Airbnb and it looks like it’s haunted, and they’re just like, “I got a weird vibe about this place,” and they get a different Airbnb across town, and the movie ends.

Cate: One of the examples we use in the book is La La Land, where the whole blow-up of this great relationship could have been avoided if they’d just had one conversation where she said, “I want to see more of you,” and he said, “Great, I want to be on tour so that I can provide for us. How should we balance those competing considerations?” But then it’s not a very good movie, and it doesn’t win an Oscar.

Acting your way into right thinking

Nate: Is it fear of failure? That sounds very basic on the one hand, but one thing about being an entrepreneur, about being a poker player, about quitting your Supreme Court–track job to play poker, is that clearly you’re not afraid of failure, Cate. But how can other people learn that skill?

Cate: I used to absolutely suck at this. Part of the reason I became a lawyer without actually caring about being a lawyer was that it never required me to feel rejection or failure. It was super easy to be good at it. It was super easy to get into a good law school because of the type of brain that I have. And I more or less implicitly never wanted to be in a position of failure. I remember having this feeling up through my 20s that if I wasn’t literally the best at something, not only was it not worth doing, but life was measurably worse and maybe not worth living. I had a really extreme view of failure. For myself, addiction was pretty helpful for getting me over this, because I started failing a lot, and I sort of reset my expectations for what a successful life looks like.

There are some intellectual tricks in the book for thinking about failure. One that I’ve found persuasive is this concept that if you’re not putting yourself in a position to fail, you’re necessarily capping your total returns in life, because you’re not doing the things that are lower probability but higher consequence. But I think this is one of many areas where you have two ways of looking at an issue. One is, I will be able to think my way into acting better — I’m going to have the right set of thoughts about failure, and then failure won’t hurt anymore. The other is acting your way into right thinking, and a lot of the book is about acting your way into right thinking. It’s going to be unpleasant, but it’s a lot less unpleasant than you think, and the more you do it, the less unpleasant it feels. I’ve gone from a person who actually kind of wanted to die when I failed at things to just, “That’s fine, next thing,” over the course of my life. And it feels pretty learnable.

Nate: One thing you learn from poker — actually, one of the worst habits I probably have as a poker player — is that I will take actions that remove decisions later on. So classically, you might go all in, because then the hand’s over. When, in principle, if you’re a skilled poker player, you should want decisions that complicate things, where you have sub-decisions further down the line, where you have more options and more opportunity to press your skill. But people don’t seem to like that.

On your blog, you define agency as the entirely learnable capacity to see and act on degrees of freedom. But the learnable part — people might not realize that. People think, “Oh, I’m introverted,” or “I have impostor syndrome.” How do you persuade someone that they can get better at this stuff?

Cate: Hopefully part of the answer is the book. Identity is one of the things that keeps us kind of stuck in life. Having an identity is useful for a lot of things that you might want to do. But people also develop limiting identities: “Well, I’m not a charismatic person,” or “I’m not a confident person, I’m an introvert.” And they start to think about those things as immutable characteristics, as opposed to things primarily composed of learnable sub-behaviors.

Charisma is an example that I use in the book. People think about themselves or other people as being naturally charismatic or not, and it is true that there is natural variation in terms of how charismatic you are by default. But a lot of the things that signal charisma, that get interpreted as charisma, are actually learnable sub-behaviors: the way that you interact with somebody physically, the types of things that you think to talk to them about […] I think agency is an example of this, where when you break it down into more learnable sub-behaviors and small mental shifts, it becomes quite transmissible.

I happened to osmose a number of agentic habits from my environment over the course of the last decade. I think there are other life circumstances — like the desperation caused by addiction — that sort of prompt you to see new degrees of freedom. But that’s kind of the reason that I wrote the book. So please read the book.

Spiky agency in the Bay Area

Nate: You live in Berkeley, or Oakland, something like that?

Cate: The Bay.

Nate: How do you think about the typical California AI-rationalist-adjacent person? Are they high agency? You go to something like the Manifest conference and people are certainly on their own wavelength — kind of eccentric, kind of [a] hippie vibe, and there’s a lot of talk about agency. Are these people agentic? Because there’s also a lot of groupthink.

Cate: I think that’s true in a lot of subcommunities, right? Are you familiar with David Chapman’s “geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths” idea, about the different stages of development of a subcommunity?

It’s basically that the people who start a new subcommunity are generally free thinkers. They have their own ideas that differ from those of society. But the longer that subcommunity persists, the more people who are doing following behavior and not thinking about things from first principles get into it. It’s just kind of part of the life cycle of any community: it starts with the people who are wild and less constrained by what has been done before, and then it moves in the direction of conformity.

On the whole, rationalists and EAs are very high agency. I have found the same thing to be true of them that is true of most people generally, which is that people tend to be selectively agentic. People can be super high agency in certain areas where their self-identity allows it. I was professionally agentic, and agentic in the sense of noticing problems in the world and wanting to do something about them, long before I became agentic in the sense of figuring out who I wanted to be in an interpersonal sense, and how I wanted to relate to my romantic partners and especially my husband. And that’s a very common profile in the Bay Area: super high agency in certain domains and then lower agency when it comes to addressing some of the things that feel more like identity. “I am an introvert.” “I am” — you know, whatever, you pick your adjectives. Spiky.

Nate: I met for dinner with a startup founder recently. Really, really young guy, very smart guy. I’m sure he’ll be very accomplished one day. And he’s like, “I realized that I’m really smart, but I was very socially awkward, and I realized that was my big barrier to success.” And for a nerdy startup founder who now has, I think, probably above-average social skills, it doesn’t seem fake or contrived in the way it can a little bit sometimes from Bay Area people.

But something you said earlier kind of resonated with me, which is not letting yourself get pinned down to any one identity. You have a wider range of different types of people you’re interacting with, you get better at code-switching, and you’re kind of hedging your bets a little bit more. Agency and optionality, having lots of good choices, are very closely related. That’s hard for people, though. You’re a CEO and a co-founder and a poker player and an attorney and an author and a Substacker. You saw colleagues who were going to have some house in Maryland or Virginia, and they win some award one day, and then they’re 65 and retiring and thinking, “Man, my life sucked.” Why do people feel the need to stay typecast, or why can’t they break out of it?

Cate: I think it is one of the key stages of personal development, and it is one that probably many or most people never get to. There’s another way of thinking about personal development that my husband is a super big fan of, which is [the] Kegan stages. A lot of self-help and coaching is aimed at one particular transition in the Kegan typology, which is going from stage three, where your sense of self and of what is good is environmentally determined, to one where you are sort of choosing that for yourself. And I think it’s a minority of adults that are able to attain that.

It is still a little bit of a mystery to me why it happens for some people and not others. Certainly, the more constraints you take into your life, in the sense of sets of expectations you have adopted, the harder it gets. The classic thing is that once you are married and have kids, it becomes a lot harder for people to consider changing their whole identity around. There are good reasons why they don’t want to do that, so I think that’s a constraint. If you can do it when you’re young, that’s helpful. But it’s strange and tragic to me that it does not happen for more people, and I really hope that part of what the book does is prompt a few more people to have that kind of self-discovery — that maybe the way that they have arranged their life already is not the way that they want to have it forever.

Nate: One other thing that you talked about that was a profound insight is that sometimes when you’re at the beginning of a new relationship — maybe more often a work relationship — people become afraid of confrontations that define the scope of the relationship. Whereas for me, if you’re unable to resolve a small conflict early on, inevitably you’re not going to be able to resolve the bigger conflict later, when there’s a lot more wear on the tires in two years, three years. So not being conflict-avoidant actually saves you trouble down the road.7

Cate: Massively. Yeah, I think that’s massively true, and I’ve certainly found it to be the case for me. I know that my default tendency is not to raise stuff as early as possible, and instead to allow resentment to accumulate over some period of time until it becomes a much bigger deal. And a lot of maturity for me has been learning to have slightly uncomfortable conversations at a much earlier point in time, so you don’t end up putting yourself and the other person in a much worse situation further down the line.

Nate: Do you find that a lot of people would also want this? With friendships, there’s this thing where you silently reciprocate. Let’s say both you and your friend [secretly don’t feel] like hanging out. Sometimes you’re like, we’d probably both be better off if we just spent the night in. Or the reverse: I’m really bored, we hung out last night, but I’d really like to catch up, so maybe we’ll go hang out again today. Why do people find it hard to communicate these things? Or do most people think you’re weird if you’re that explicit about things that maybe [most people wouldn’t] talk about directly?

Cate: Having written a book about agency and addressed some of the topics that I have, I feel like I should have a better theory of why the human default is the way that it is, and I don’t. I do know that when I am honest in situations like that, by and large the response that I get from people is relief at the honesty. And I know that there is some selection effect — I end up selecting for close relationships with people who want that and value that — so perhaps my vantage point is no longer representative, and actually most people will hate it if you’re honest with them. But I kind of would be surprised if that’s the case. I live in the Bay Area. I don’t know what normal people like.

Nate: Selection effects are very powerful. The choices you make create path dependencies, and those are very important, and I think people are sometimes reluctant to open other doors. But some constraints are helpful, right? Like, the first thing that I’m going to do every morning is go work out or go run, and if I don’t do that, then my whole day is ruined. It seems like sometimes people need these absolutes, where it’s [harder for them] to say, “Okay, eight out of 10 days I’ll run in the morning, but sometimes it’s not practical.” Sometimes the routines are helpful. Or do you see that as a substitute for more sophisticated forms of agency?

Cate: Yes, it is sometimes good to have standards and routines for yourself. Having forcing functions, where you constrain your freedom in limited and sort of pre-committed ways for the greater good of some goal that you care about, is in general really good. And the question is just about how you scope those commitments so that you are adhering to them and they’re having the desired effect. We use the metaphor of tying yourself to the mast in the book, which is very timely because The Odyssey came out this week. I think that is good for routines, and I think it can be good for relationships. My relationship with my husband is phenomenal, and probably also would not exist at all if we hadn’t gotten married pretty soon after we got together. The first year and a half of marriage that we had was pretty difficult, and without the forcing function of having already made a commitment to each other, that probably would have driven us apart.

AI and the disappearance of friction

Nate: Can we talk a little bit about agency and AI?

Cate: Yeah, totally.

Nate: In my book, I kind of hypothesize that AI might be helpful for hyper-agentic people, but deprive a large majority of the world’s population of agency. When you hear Sam or Dario or people like that talk, do you think they put enough value on people’s agency, or do you think that’s a blind spot, potentially?

Cate: I think it’s a really hard question. I agree with your overall take that AI will, on the scale of individual humans, be either quite bad or quite good for agency, and that won’t be uniform across humans generally. I have found that AI gives me the capacity to do a ton of things that I would not be able to do otherwise, and it has freed me up to experiment with a lot of things professionally that I otherwise would not have.

But if you take anything from the example of recommender algorithms, it should probably be that technologies that are designed to eliminate friction in service of giving you a particular experience can be really agency-destroying. And I am worried about moving into a way of relating to technology where we are shaving as much friction off of the human experience as possible, and what that will do to people’s sense of an internal locus of control, or actual ability to affect the world. I hope that it ends up being good for human agency, but I am skeptical, for I think the same reasons that you are.

Nate: Yeah, friction can be underrated. Despite recent events related to Taco Bell, I kind of actually like Taco Bell. If there were a Taco Bell in my apartment, like there is in some of the Taco Bell commercials, I’d probably gain 30 pounds overnight, just because having some barrier matters. You see this in a more serious way with gambling addiction and sports betting. The physical act of going to a place and standing in line at a sportsbook and placing a wager and getting maybe the slightly judgmental look from a ticket writer — there’s no hard barrier there, but in practice, that’s a lot harder than downloading an app and pressing a button. You’d say people just have more choices now, but it’s a little bit complicated with any type of addictive behavior.

Cate: I think the gambling analogy captures some aspect of it. With sports betting, it’s probably not the feeling of having earned the sports bet that makes the friction the good thing. But there is an aspect of that in a lot of aspects of life, where actually the feeling of overcoming barriers is where a ton of the value in the human experience lives. I think you will hear this all the time from people who have recovered from addiction, but you also hear it from other people. I’m deeply skeptical of the ability of humans to have really good, meaningful lives if you eliminate all opportunities to feel like you are overcoming some barrier in the world. And obviously that has limitations — I don’t think that all suffering is inherently good because you have an opportunity to recover from it — but having a perfectly smooth experience also does not seem to produce human flourishing.

Nate: That’s the problem with all these utopias, whether it’s a socialist utopia or a post-AGI singularity utopia. I want fucking conflict. I want to have to fight for things. I don’t want some Holodeck-type thing where I can have whatever I want. That seems like it would be almost depressing in a way. I think utopias profoundly misunderstand human nature.

Cate: It’s really hard to write utopias for that reason.

Nate: How do you feel about the notion of revealed preference, which is another slightly nerdy, rationalist-adjacent term? Let’s say I’m the kind of person who’s going to start working out. If you go weeks and weeks and weeks and you’re paying the gym membership and not working out, on some level, is that your revealed preference? How should we weigh the fact that what people think they should do, and what people say they’re going to do, and the way they actually behave are different?

Cate: I get a lot of shit from my husband for my views about revealed preference. I am not a fan of revealed preference as a concept, simply because I am intimately familiar with the ways that you can really, really want one thing and do something else instead. And chalking everything up to revealed preference obscures a lot of useful information about what is going on underneath the surface. There really is a difference between somebody who is trying to recover from addiction and is wanting that, and somebody who’s just excited to keep using. I do get pushback from my husband on this, and I think I’ve made more of a bugbear of this in the past than I am ready to stand by now.

My current way of thinking about things is that all of the difficulty goes away if you stop expecting yourself to be a single unitary entity that has one set of desires that is carried through you at every level. And instead, what we are is some sort of parliament of sub-personalities that have different holds on us at different times. It’s kind of like a negotiation between the desires of different parts of us, but not a unitary self.

Nate: Yeah, it can be kind of lazy in a way. A lot of people become aware of the concept of revealed preference, and [they might be like] yeah, my revealed preference is to stay out playing poker [all night] at the Bellagio the night before I play the Main Event. Just because you do that every year doesn’t mean it’s a good habit.

Cate: Yeah, and it doesn’t mean that you really want it in all of the relevant senses.

Nate: That’s what’s weird about it, too. Typically when I go to Vegas, I’ll usually have some night early on where I stay up too late playing cash games, and it kind of fucks up my schedule for a couple of days. And the funny thing is, I kind of know I’m going to do it. In poker, the game usually gets better later at night, so it’s harder to quit. If you’re down money you want to keep playing, and if you’re up money you’re having fun and don’t want to quit either. It’s sort of weird how, without commitment devices, people [track] into their future less rational self … maybe revealed preference is overrated.

Where should you start?

Nate: Cate, this is like an Oprah question, but if someone wants to become more agentic, what are two or three things they can start doing today?

Cate: My number one piece of advice is one that nobody ever wants to hear: I really recommend having an anonymous feedback box, where you tell everybody you know that you’re doing it, you put it on social media. I think that a lot of what keeps us stuck in life is failing to get accurate information about ourselves from the world, and having an anonymous feedback box has been totally transformative for me.

People don’t want to do it because they don’t want to hear mean things about themselves. But even for somebody who’s a little bit publicly visible and has people who don’t like them, the proportion of stuff that I get that is intentionally mean is very, very small. There is a lot of stuff that is like, “I don’t know if you realize that you do this, I don’t think you intend it, but —” useful pieces of feedback on my management style. And I feel like I’m in a much better place today than I would be without it. I recently updated my sense of personal style and developed a wardrobe because of a piece of anonymous feedback that I got a few months ago. So that’s my number one thing.

Nate: That sounds terrifying to me. Maybe it’s because I do get a lot of unrequested feedback.

Cate: People are so mean to you just to your face. How much worse could it be?

Nate: They’re not, really. I’ve only had maybe once in my life, a negative interaction in person. Most people are cowards … behind keyboards. One time at the 2016 Democratic convention, some Bernie guy got up in my face.

Can you tell who the person is who’s giving you anonymous feedback, or does that not really matter?

Cate: I try not to fixate on it, and people are generally pretty careful to frame things in ways where it’s hard to know.

Nate: As the world becomes more comfortable, does that make people less agentic?

Cate: As it becomes more comfortable?

Nate: Yeah, because you can kind of just go with the flow, and now things are better, usually. You have better medicine, you live longer, the food’s better. I don’t know if the housing stock is better. But you can kind of just be more of a bot and not think as much. If you look at the history, people were miserable for most of human existence. There’s this false nostalgia for, oh, I wish I lived in the time of Homer. People were pretty fucking miserable for the most part.8 So is it easy just to tune out and not be agentic?

Cate: I think this is kind of the concern with AI, which is that things just become really easy in ways that are not ultimately productive for self-development. I do think there’s a difference between being active and being agentic. The bull case for human agency in an era of advancing technology is basically that less of your time and attention is consumed getting your basic needs met. Basic can just be shelter and food, but it can also be whatever standard of living you want to have. Maybe that requires less and less effort from individual people. And what happens when you free up that time, what you do with it, is kind of up to you. You can think about it as an invitation to greater agency, because the default is just boredom and stasis, but it also creates an opportunity for action in a bunch of directions that you might not otherwise have.

Nate: I do think it’s worth stating that being healthy and able-bodied, not being actively discriminated against in whichever society that you’re part of — I’m not, like, super woke, but there is some element of privilege in having a lot of agency, right?

Cate: I think that’s true, and I’m hesitant to speak for other people. I do think one of the nice things about agency is that for most people, in most circumstances, there is an opportunity to develop more of it, and it can be useful no matter what your situation is. It’s kind of just a generally useful skill set. It doesn’t require you having a super-genius IQ or a lot of connections. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t things that can constrain it, there absolutely are, but I think there is more room for malleability in different sets of circumstances than people maybe naturally think there is.

Nate: Are there things that you think a woman reader might get out of the book, or a [male] reader, that the other gender wouldn’t? Because, to stereotype a little bit, agency feels very male-coded.

Cate: Yeah.

Nate: What would you say to women who are reading this book in particular?

Cate: So I thought about this, because the PR firm that I hired was really excited about pitching me for a bunch of women’s shows about how women can be more agentic. And I thought about, is there an actual angle here for women in particular? Is there a different message for them that I would want to give? And I think my answer is just, not really. I think it’s true that agency is more male-coded. It’s also more dark-triad-coded than baseline-human-coded. And the core desire that I have in writing the book is exposing these skills of agency to a greater range of people who can benefit from them. I don’t know if the average woman will take more than the average man from it as a result of that, but I think it’s a pretty thoroughly all-purpose book.

Nate: Is there anything else you want me to ask, or want to ask me, or any other plugs for the book? Which I really do recommend — I read it twice, in galleys and again yesterday prepping for this. It really is a book that isn’t easily pigeonholed.

Cate: The only other plug that I would give for it is that we tried to be absolutely ruthless when it came to prioritizing the reader’s time. We started with an 80,000-word manuscript. We worked it down to a 50,000-word manuscript. It’s something that can be read by most people in a long afternoon, and I’ve been getting reviews from people who read it in one sitting. So it is short. There are no wasted words. It’s written for a Substack audience in particular. I personally do not buy a lot of self-help books, for multiple reasons, including that they are time-wasters. But I would encourage you, even if you don’t think about yourself as a self-help person, to consider buying the book and giving it a shot.

Nate: This is to say, “self-help” isn’t a bad word. But this book, I think, will appeal to people who would never be caught dead buying a self-help book.

Cate: Personal development is what we call it.

Nate: There we go. That’s the euphemism. Thanks so much, Cate.

Now that the World Cup is over, we’re fully focused on getting the midterm forecast up and running as soon as possible. I’m going to be honest that between publishing a ton of stories over the past two months, highly competitive primaries, redistricting, and various other distractions, this has taken a little longer than we were hoping for. So we’re going to err on the side of publishing less for the next couple of weeks until the model is ready to go.

However, one benefit of working on the model is that there are usually some fun spin-offs from the various data that we collect for it. For instance, in calculating the state-by-state correlations used by the model, we rely on voter-level microdata from the Cooperative Election Study, a large-sample online survey conducted every year or two. We’ve aggregated responses to the CES in each year it was conducted during the “Trump Era” — from 2016 through last year — into a dataset of more than 400,000 voters.

That gives us high-fidelity data for capturing voting trends among smaller subgroups that usually get lost in the shuffle. Today I’m going to focus on one such group: voters with high educational attainment but low to middle incomes. Because income and education are positively correlated, there aren’t all that many of these voters. I’d argue, though, that they’re vital to understanding emerging trends within Democratic politics, and particularly the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

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The DSA occupies the high-education, lower-income corner of the electorate

As a result of contentious Democratic primaries in Michigan, Maine, and New York, I’ve been reading a lot of conversation about the role that class plays in voting patterns in the United States. In these primaries, candidates like Graham Platner and Abdul El-Sayed who are associated with democratic socialism often claim to have the mandate of the working class. But in practice, their strengths tend to be with college-educated voters. Even before his scandals, Platner wasn’t particularly doing better among voters without college degrees than previous (losing) Democratic nominees in Maine. El-Sayed has relatively weak support from Black voters in polls, meanwhile.

But does that make them hypocrites? For what it’s worth, they certainly both have interesting backstories. Platner didn’t graduate from college, but came from a fairly privileged background. I don’t think it would be unfair to classify him as “downwardly mobile.” El-Sayed is in some ways the polar opposite: a first-generation American who went to a good public school in suburban Detroit and is obviously a high-achieving person.

The larger point, though, is that I think we ought to be careful about conflating class with educational attainment. Apologies for the cliché, but class in America reflects a tapestry of race, educational attainment, and income/economic privilege — and even that doesn’t capture everything.

I’m reminded here of Peter Turchin’s elite overproduction hypothesis. It basically argues that America is producing “too many” college graduates relative to the number of high-prestige, well-paying jobs available to them. People who wind up in this situation often carry heavy student loan burdens or other sorts of debt. Even if their material situation is objectively “just fine,” it’s rarely great. They’re gloomy about their own financial prospects, and feel aggrieved about the state of the country. Their class status is ambiguous: privileged in some senses, but they’re part of the “have-nots” in other meaningful ways.

What would be ideal here, to get closer to the notion of class, is if we had data on voters’ family backgrounds. Did they grow up rich or poor? Were their parents white-collar or blue-collar? Did they go to a private high school? Unfortunately, you’ll rarely, if ever, see this sort of question in political surveys, even ones as comprehensive as the CES.

Still, we can get a fair amount of texture by running through various permutations of income, educational attainment and race, all of which are available in the CES. I’ll look at who these voters preferred1 in the 2016 through 2024 presidential elections.2 Putting race aside just for a second, I’ve classified voters into four groups based on educational attainment, cross-hatched with five groups based on their self-reported household incomes.3

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Based on this grid, what is the most Democratic voting group in America? It’s voters with postgraduate degrees but lower-to-middle household incomes of $30K to $60K per year.

This is very much also the sweet spot for the DSA. In the group’s most recent member survey in 2021, 80 percent of members aged 25 or older had bachelor’s degrees, but 45 percent had household incomes below $60,000 per year.

This is unusual, because education and income are usually substantially positively correlated. In the composite CES data, only 19 percent of Americans with bachelor’s degrees or higher had household incomes of $60K or below. The DSA rate is around twice that.4 These voters aren’t necessarily “blue collar” in the sense of working with their hands. But that doesn’t mean they’re privileged. Common occupations among DSA members include teachers, non-profit workers, social workers, and public sector employees.

By contrast, who are the most Republican voters in the country? It’s not necessarily voters with a lot of “economic anxiety”. Rather, it’s the precise opposite corner from the DSA: high-earners who didn’t attend college. About 60 percent of voters with a high school education or less, but whose households earned incomes of $60,000 or above, preferred Trump to the various Democratic presidential candidates. (You can probably think of various stereotypical professions here too: small business owners, independent contractors, real estate developers, used-car dealers, etc.)

Could this just be some weird composite artifact of race? In the DSA’s 2021 survey, 85 percent of members reported their race as white5, which certainly isn’t representative of the country or the Democratic Party overall. But in the broader CES data, we find that the patterns mostly hold once you disaggregate by race. Let’s speed-run through the various major groups. Here is the CES data on voting by income and educational attainment among white voters alone.

Among whites, there’s particularly strong stratification in political preferences by educational attainment, with incomes making less difference. Still, there is some very mild “U-shapedness” — i.e., both the poorest and the richest whites are more blue than middle-income ones. The most Democratic group among all white voters is the same one as in the aggregate data: voters with graduate degrees making between $30K and $60K per year.

Next, the same numbers among Black voters:

While it’s true that Black voters are not a monolith, their preferences are notably more uniform than for whites — and mostly very blue. But what’s the most Democratic Black voting group? You guessed it — Black voters with graduate degrees earning $30K to $60K per year. In fact, with 95 percent of voters who meet this description voting for Democrats, it’s probably the most D subgroup in the entire voter universe.

How about among Hispanics?

This chart hits a bit differently. Among Hispanic voters, voting is considerably less correlated with educational attainment than among whites. However, Hispanic voters earning higher incomes are considerably more Republican than lower-earning ones. Hispanic-Americans (and Asian-Americans) have high rates of small business formation. As I’ve argued in the past, Democrats may be doing a poor job of appealing to entrepreneurially-minded Americans — and DSA-type messages may be particularly unappealing to them.

Still, it’s basically the same pattern again. The top-right corner of Hispanic voters (high education, low-to-middle income) is blue. The bottom-left one (high income, less education) is much more purple.

High-education, lower-income voters are cultural libs, too

Another complication with candidates like Platner and El-Sayed is that much of their messaging isn’t focused on bread-and-butter economic issues. Instead, like other Democratic factions, democratic socialists can believe in the “omnicause”. Apart from Medicare for All, the signature issue of El-Sayed’s campaign is Gaza, with a huge amount of his campaign communications focused on the extensive spending by AIPAC and affiliated groups in support of his opponent, Haley Stevens. Meanwhile, in his message announcing he was formally withdrawing from the campaign, Platner signed off with a series of cultural signifiers — “F*ck ICE.6 Free Palestine. Up the Hearts” — the latter a reference to Portland, Maine’s professional soccer team.

That’s not to say the DSA wouldn’t be better off in the long run if it were more agnostic on cultural issues. Even Bernie Sanders once had relatively moderate stances on immigration and guns. Even Zohran Mamdani has backtracked from his more left-wing positions on issues like policing.

But politicians who truly have some long-term vision are rare. Most of them are trying to play the ball where it lies. The fairway consists of college-educated, mostly younger, mostly white progressives who are disillusioned by their economic opportunities and/or with the direction of the Democratic Party. We could get into the sociology behind this, but this is a group that typically uses “post-material” cultural issues as their rallying points.

In addition to asking voters about their presidential preference, the CES also asks voters to rate their ideology on a scale from 1 (“very liberal”) to 5 (“very conservative”). “Very liberal” wasn’t a very common response: only around 10 percent of the electorate. But which voters were most likely to check the “very liberal” box?

You’re probably getting the hang of this by now: it’s voters with graduate degrees making between $30K and $60K a year. Some 21 percent of those voters say they’re “very liberal”, about twice the population average.

As I discussed last week, voters who describe themselves as very or extremely liberal tend to place more emphasis on cultural issues — particularly gay rights, trans rights, the environment, race relations and Israel/Palestine — as compared to other voters. They’re only about average or even a little below-average in how much they prioritize things like health care and jobs, by contrast.

So what Platner and El-Sayed are doing might be smart politics, particularly in El-Sayed’s case given Michigan’s relatively high number of Arab-American voters.

Noah Smith recently argued that the “socialist left” and the “woke left” should be regarded as separate political movements. But I’m not so sure that’s true. This data helps to explain the relationship. Messages like “Fuck ICE” and “Free Palestine” are catnip for college-educated liberal Democrats of all kinds. Culturally left-wing but economically comfortable Democrats are probably more likely to join other Democratic factions like the #Resistance. Culturally left-wing but more “economically anxious” ones are potential targets for more anti-establishment factions like the DSA, by contrast.

DSA members aren’t necessarily struggling to pay the bills, nor are most of them traditionally “blue-collar”. But they’re likely to be genuinely upset about their station in life as well as how things are going with the country. Without wanting to psychoanalyze too much, it can be appealing to anxious-feeling voters of all political persuasions to feel as though they’re part of some greater, more altruistic struggle against corrupt elites or injustice. The DSA is betting they’ll stick around for the socialism — but the culture wars are often what get them in the door.

PELE, the new international soccer model that Silver Bulletin launched in conjunction with the 2026 World Cup, uses a mix of match results, player market values, and historical economic and geographic data to rate all 211 FIFA teams. PELE covers all competitive international soccer matches since 1872 and is updated after new matches are played.

PELE was quite accurate in the World Cup. The system’s top 2 teams in our ratings as of the start of the tournament (Spain and Argentina) met in the final, and our #3 and #4 teams (England and France) also finished with those exact rankings after being eliminated in the semifinals. It also identified some more surprising contenders like Norway.

We’ll continue to update PELE with other international match results and will consider other special extensions in the future, such as for the 2028 European Championship. We’re also evaluating whether to extend PELE to club soccer.

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.

The rest of this page contains:

• A comparison of PELE and FIFA rankings;

• Tilt ratings;

• Offense, defense and round-robin results;

• Future match projections;

• 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 and more skeptical of teams on a possibly unsustainable hot streak. Market value data can help teams with star talent like Norway in PELE. Here’s how PELE compares with the current FIFA rankings.

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.1 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 matchups2). 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. For games eligible for extra time, the projections reflect the results at the end of regulation play, consistent with how the odds are usually listed at betting sites.

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⚽ The latest World Cup predictions: Updated July 19, 2026

Spain wins its 2nd World Cup as Argentina is overwhelmed.

Thank you so much for following our World Cup coverage! We were very pleased with the reaction from subscribers — and honestly also with the results, as the top 4 teams in PELE at the start of the tournament (Spain, Argentina, England, France) also finished in that exact order in the official standings.

I don’t know if you’d call the final an anticlimax, but Spain was obviously the better side. Even if they benefited from a second yellow card that sent off Enzo Fernandez, putting them a man up, Argentina generated literally zero chances until very late into extra time. Spain is very, very good — already one of PELE’s top-rated teams of all time — relatively young, and will co-host the World Cup in 2030, with the chance to build a potential dynasty.

We’ll continue to update PELE with international match results and consider future expansions of PELE, including 2028 Euro and 2030 World Cup forecasts, as well as possibly extending the system to club football.

We’ve updated the team rankings and historical data sections with the result of the final, but left other sections unchanged from before Spain’s win. This is the last and final update to our World Cup page! For our methodology, see here.

See also: PELE International Football Rankings.

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Jump to a section

• Part I — Team ratings — PELE ratings, adjusted for the World Cup

• Part II — Knockout projections 🔒 — odds at each stage, likely opponents, the bracket

• Part III — Match projections 🔒 — win probabilities, scorelines, and the knockout score matrix

• Part IV — Track record & history 🔒 — historical performance, upsets, milestones

So, who’s gonna win the World Cup? 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.1 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.2

Second, we update each team’s rating based on the quality of their performance relative to PELE’s expectations for each match. And third, we adjust for home-field advantage on a match-by-match basis.3 The factor is customized for each team: as it happens, the U.S., Canada and especially Mexico4 have above-average home-field advantages.

Ratings and forecasts will be updated at the end of each match day5. 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. Knockout stage projections ⚽

Here is each team’s probability of winning the World Cup, and advancing to each stage of the knockout round, using an old-school, FiveThirtyEight heatmap format.

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We’re probably not the only ones feeling sad about the end of the World Cup. Through 102 matches, the quality has been elite, with stars from Messi to Mbappé to Haaland having turned in A+ performances even relative to unreasonable expectations. With certain notable exceptions — England after taking the lead against Argentina on Wednesday — the play has been creative, daring and offensive-minded, and the 2.91 goals per match scored so far in the tournament is the highest since 1970. The finale is at 3 p.m. on Sunday in New Jersey, when Spain and Argentina will play one another in the World Cup for the first time since 1978.

Argentina and Spain were our co-favorites at the start of the tournament — a slight deviation from the conventional wisdom, which had France and Spain as co-favorites instead and Argentina a tier behind. So we’ll admit to feeling pleased with how the results have gone from a PELE/predictions standpoint.

But there was nothing inevitable about this outcome. In the knockout round, Argentina’s game-clinching goals have come, respectively, in the 111th, 93rd, 112th and 92nd minutes. Argentina and Spain might even have met in the R32 and not in the final if one of them had finished second in their group while the other won theirs.

We can’t promise you a great final. Historical World Cup finals have included some duds, in fact — a fair number of choppy, defensive stalemates, as well as a handful of blowouts. What we can guarantee, however, is that whoever wins will be able to stake a claim for being among the greatest World Cup champions ever. A Spain win by any means other than on penalties would leave them with the highest PELE rating of any World Cup champion immediately after the World Cup. Argentina, meanwhile, would be the first repeat champion since Brazil in 1958 and 1962, a less competitive era when only three knockout wins were required instead of five to claim the championship.

Their stories are different, however. Argentina has been remarkably persistent. Their case is about the cumulative success of Messi in his late 30s, winning not only back-to-back World Cups but also the Copa America in between. The better comparison for Argentina might not be to the 1958/1962 back-to-back Brazilian champions, but rather the more veteran 1970 Brazil squad. Still, there are veterans — Pelé, who might have won the Golden Ball if the award had existed then, was 29 in 1970 — and then there’s Messi, who is 39. Apologies to our non-American audience, but the best comparison we can think of is to that other type of footballer: Tom Brady.

Spain, meanwhile, is a team on the rise. You could say they’re “peaking at the right moment”, but as one of the youngest teams in the tournament, and with the World Cup set to be co-hosted in Spain in 2030, they could be set up for a dynasty. If Spain wins1 on Sunday, it would set an all-time record with 38 consecutive international matches without a defeat.2

Spain crashed out after winning their first World Cup title in 2010 and their second straight European Championship in 2012. They were eliminated in the group stage of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, and the R16 in both 2018 and 2022, in both cases on penalties. Their combined record in those years: 3 wins, 3 losses and 5 draws3, more suitable for Los Estados Unidos than a team that had just broken through to become only the eighth nation to win the World Cup.

But Spain has been building momentum pretty much ever since, with a perfect record in World Cup qualifying, seven wins in seven matches at the 2024 European Championship, and a run to the 2025 UEFA Nations League final, which they lost only on penalties.

You can find our official prediction on the World Cup landing page — spoiler alert, it’s close. I hope you’ll pardon the cliché, but this really is about as close as you’ll get to the irresistible force against the immovable object. So let’s talk more about the matchup, and how we got here.

Argentina is still king of the hill

PELE, like other variations on Elo ratings, pretty much takes the view that the best team is the best team until proven otherwise. Which isn’t exactly a controversial premise, we realize. But Argentina, which had the 2nd-highest PELE rating entering the 2022 tournament in Qatar, finished with the #1 ranking after defeating France on penalties in the final.4 You’d assume they’d at least be considered one of the favorites unless there was an obvious decline in performance.

But even as perhaps one of the most popular teams in the world, Argentina wasn’t given particularly much credit by betting markets, starting the tournament with only about 10 percent odds5 of winning: about half the chance that PELE calculated for them.

There was basically nothing in Argentina’s record since winning in 2022 that warranted such a bearish view. Their record isn’t as pristine as Spain’s. But it’s very good: in 46 matches since Qatar, they have 39 wins, 4 losses and 3 draws.6 They won Copa America and lapped the field in South American qualifying, where clean sweeps are basically impossible because of the large number of qualifying matches (18), many of which are in challenging road environments like Brazil and Ecuador. Their worst result since the last World Cup was a 2-0 loss to Uruguay at home in qualifying, but that was almost three years ago.

Technically speaking, match results aren’t the only factor in PELE. There’s also a slow process of mean-reversion applied in between matches, based primarily on the Transfermarkt value of the players on the roster and secondarily on team age, region (South America = presumptively good), the size of the country’s economy and its soccer legacy. Argentina does just fine by those measures. While they don’t have the player depth of France or England or Spain, they did rank 7th in the world in aggregate market value heading into the tournament in the way that we calculate it7 (ironically, without giving much credit to Messi8). And Argentina is a big country in what has historically been the most overperforming football region in the world.

Our diagnosis after our extensive work on PELE, making lots of comparisons between team records and player valuations in forecasting future games, is basically that prediction markets place too much emphasis on raw talent and not enough on team results. It’s a bit counterintuitive because international football teams don’t play all that many meaningful matches. We expected to discover something like a 50/50 blend of team results and priors was optimal for predicting future performance, but the “right” ratio is more along the lines of 75/25, with the bulk of the weight going to match results and the priors having a more gentle, long-term effect.

This may be because the idea that a team is just the sum of its player components is dubious. World Cup teams don’t have the same opportunities to optimize their talent that club teams do. While France or England might be better than Spain or Argentina given a few dozen games to refine their tactics, they were outstrategized in the semifinals.

But haven’t Argentina’s results in this World Cup been a little bit sketchy, with Messi constantly pulling rabbits out of his hat?

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Last week, we got some big news about a certain Democratic Senate candidate. No, not that guy. I’m talking about State Senator Mallory McMorrow suspending her campaign in Michigan. McMorrow was a rising star in Democratic politics and was the clear favorite of bettors on Polymarket to win the Michigan primary through late April. To be fair, she did perform well in some early polls of the race. But McMorrow was running with Rep. Haley Stevens to her right and Abdul El-Sayed to her left. Eventually, she was squeezed out of her position in the middle.

Now we’re down to just two active Democratic candidates in Michigan, and unlike some other high-profile Senate primaries, it’s a real moderate vs. progressive contest. Stevens is backed by Chuck Schumer and AIPAC, and was recently endorsed by Gary Peters — the seat’s retiring occupant. Outside groups are also running ads implying an endorsement from former President Obama, but it’s actually a clip from 2018.

El-Sayed, on the other hand, has picked up endorsements from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders. He’s also highly critical of Israel.1 “For too long, our foreign policy has been handed to us by the likes of the state of Israel and AIPAC, who has made sure that Democrats and Republicans are doing their bidding,” he said in a debate with Stevens on July 7. For his part, El-Sayed has even criticized Obama’s tendency to compromise.

If this dynamic sounds familiar, that’s because we’ve seen it play out across the country in Democratic primaries this cycle. And so far it’s mostly gone the same way. Everywhere from New York City to Colorado to, yes, Maine, progressive outsiders have been trouncing safer establishment picks.2 Is it a Democratic Tea Party? I’ll leave that for another column. But all the signs of this pattern continuing in Michigan are there. McMorrow started tanking in the polls shortly after she criticized El-Sayed for campaigning with left-wing influencer Hasan Piker, whom she called “a provocateur, to put it lightly, who says things that are misogynistic and antisemitic, and said that the United States deserved 9/11.”

Even Stevens took steps to distance herself from Israel’s government in her latest debate with El-Sayed. After Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu criticized her on CNN, she said he has “not made us safer, has not brought us closer to peace. And he’s endangered Jews here in America and around the world.” But is that too little too late to stop populists from racking up another victory? And if El-Sayed does win the primary, could that sink Democrats’ chances of retaining the Michigan seat, and, by extension, of reclaiming the Senate?

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Are progressives cruising to another victory in Michigan?

The basic El-Sayed skeptic’s position is this: Michigan isn’t New York City. You still need to win the general, and El-Sayed’s progressive issue positions are too far left for a state Donald Trump has carried twice. Stevens has made that same case. Aside from run-of-the-mill progressive stances like Medicare for All, El-Sayed supported defunding the police back in 2020. He also voted “Uncommitted” during the 2024 presidential primary as a form of protest of the Biden-Harris campaign.3

One could also cite misgivings that voters might have about “outsider,” lefty candidates after the Graham Platner disaster, but the comparison isn’t fair to El-Sayed. His credentials are impressive, from being a Rhodes Scholar and a star student-athlete to the Health Director of Detroit. He’s also run for office before, having finished a (distant) second in the 2018 gubernatorial primary against Gretchen Whitmer. His biggest scandal is calling himself a physician while never having completed a residency or being licensed to practice medicine. He can be extremely combative, however, and confident to the point of overconfidence — perhaps fittingly, since he hosts his own podcast.

But despite what could easily be considered baggage in a purple state like Michigan, El-Sayed was the clear favorite to win the primary before McMorrow dropped out. Prediction markets saw him as the third-place candidate early in the race, but he’s been on an upward trend since April. Prior to McMorrow’s exit, Polymarket gave him an 85 percent chance to clinch the Democratic nomination.

This was a case where the polls and betting markets aligned. The three most recent Michigan Democratic primary polls in the New York Times database before McMorrow dropped out were El-Sayed +5, El-Sayed +19, and El-Sayed +7. In fact, the last poll prior to McMorrow’s exit where El-Sayed wasn’t leading came back in May. And polling averages of the race only showed El-Sayed’s lead increasing in June.

That’s not entirely surprising. The war in Gaza has become an important issue in Democratic primaries, and Michigan has the largest population of Arab Americans of any state in the U.S., per capita. That group swung away from Democrats in 2024, at least in part due to criticism of the Biden-Harris administration’s approach to Israel. In Dearborn, which has the largest Arab American population share in the country, Trump won 42 percent of the vote in 2024, compared to 37 percent for Harris, and 18 percent for Jill Stein. El-Sayed could bring some of these voters back into the Democratic fold.

But perhaps McMorrow’s departure has given moderates a second chance. What if 80 percent of McMorrow voters flocked to Stevens? The race would get competitive. In fact, that would be enough to put her ahead if you take an average of all pre-dropout polls. But that approach gives a lot of consideration to older polls, conducted before El-Sayed really took off. If you downweight older polls, El-Sayed improves to a 42-40 lead even with just 20 percent of the McMorrow vote.

But post-dropout polls are more promising for Stevens. The first, conducted by Tavern Research, found El-Sayed up by 3 points when all three candidates were included on the ballot, but Stevens ahead by 1 point in the two-candidate matchup.4 Nearly every former McMorrow supporter in that poll moved to Stevens. And this week, a Glengariff/Detroit News poll showed Stevens leading with 48 percent of the vote to El-Sayed’s 41 percent.5

The new polls seem to indicate that the race has tightened. Part of that could come down to Stevens drawing support from more former McMorrow supporters than early polls suggested. Or perhaps the Platner fiasco is boosting moderates’ morale just a bit. Those Obama ads might even matter; Stevens held a large lead among Black voters in the Glengariff poll.

The Peters endorsement, which came after the Glengariff poll, could help, too. Endorsements aren’t usually decisive, but receiving the nod from the two-term incumbent of the seat you’re trying to win is a real “get.”

However, a Data for Progress poll showed almost the complete inverse result: 54 percent for El-Sayed compared to 41 percent for Stevens. But that poll was commissioned by American Priorities, a pro-El-Sayed super PAC. In general elections, candidate-sponsored polls typically exaggerate their candidate’s standing by a margin of about 4 points. We don’t have a comprehensive database of internal polls in primary elections, so we can’t say what the average bias is there, but the Data for Progress poll is showing a divergence from public polls large enough that the firm is putting its credibility on the line.

Would El-Sayed make Michigan competitive in November?

Michigan is a must-win for Democrats if they want to retake the Senate. It’s also an open seat in a year where the national environment should be good for Democrats. True, Trump has won the state twice, but they were narrow victories. This isn’t a scenario where you want or need a high-variance candidate.

Instead, you’d want someone with minimal potential downside who can coast to an easy win on anti-Trump vibes and solid campaigning. Stevens would seem to fit that bill. She’s not an electoral superstar (her Split Ticket WAR scores range from R +0.9 to D +2.8), but she’s not an underperformer either. Being a generic normie Democrat might make things harder in a primary, but it’s a boon in a general where even a neutral performance would likely net you the win. Our forthcoming forecast would also give Stevens some extra credit for held elected office when El-Sayed hasn’t. That’s not to say El-Sayed can’t win, but he’s certainly the riskier choice.

However, Democratic primary voters aren’t just optimizing for electability. While 25 percent of likely Democratic voters in the latest Glengariff/Detroit News poll said the top quality they’re looking for in a nominee is someone who can win in November, 38 percent said it was the nominee being a fighter who would stand up to Trump. If you’re looking for an anti-establishment fighter, El-Sayed is the obvious choice. The bet is that perhaps El-Sayed’s more left-wing views cost him some support relative to Stevens, but his odds of winning are still solid in this Michigan environment, and if he does, Democrats will get a Senator who better aligns with the party’s changing priorities. El-Sayed would also be the only Arab American in the U.S. Senate.

But that’s all very vibes-forward. The data tells a somewhat different story. If you take a simple average of all Michigan general election polls conducted this year, there’s essentially no difference: Stevens’s average margin against presumptive Republican nominee Mike Rogers is D +0.7 compared to El-Sayed’s D +0.2. However, El-Sayed outperformed Stevens in three of the five most recent polls, and they performed equally well against Rogers in a fourth.

On the other hand, one could argue that there is a pollster quality issue here. Michigan pollsters have a mixed track record. The only pollsters in this group with an A/B rating or higher are TIPP Insights, Glengariff Group, and Emerson College. Polls from those firms show Stevens leading Rogers by an average of 2.8 points, but El-Sayed trailing him by 2.5 points.

So … not to rehash the Moderation Wars for the umpteenth time, but this one comes down to your priors. If you think more moderate candidates generally outperform left-wing candidates, you can cite evidence from the higher-quality polls demonstrating that Stevens is the safer choice. If you don’t, you can emphasize recency instead, since the latest polls generally show El-Sayed doing at least as well in November.

There’s also a chance that the electoral environment will be blue enough by November that it won’t matter. Michigan is a truly purple state: Trump carried it by about 1.4 points in 2024 while Biden won it by 2.8 points four years earlier. But as of this post, our generic congressional ballot average is sitting at D +6.1. If that’s what the national environment looks like in November, you’d also expect the Michigan environment to be around D +6.1 according to our state-level benchmarks.

So even if El-Sayed underperforms, he’d have to underperform in a big way to lose Michigan in this environment. That’s not impossible, but just 23 percent of races in the Split Ticket WAR database (which runs from 2014 through 2024) feature a candidate under- or overperforming by more than 6 points.6 And many of those races featured consistently strong incumbents — such as Susan Collins, Jon Tester, and Joe Manchin — or consistent underperformers like Ilhan Omar. An open-seat race doesn’t fit that bill, especially because large over- and underperformances are simply rarer than they used to be.

If El-Sayed wins the primary, the general election is likely to be seen as a referendum on the electoral viability of populist, left-wing, Israel-skeptical candidates. An El-Sayed win in November will be taken by many as a sign that the progressive populist wing of the party is fully in control. But if El-Sayed loses, that same movement will potentially take the blame for costing Democrats the Senate.

Here at Silver Bulletin, we’ve frequently critiqued President Trump, the Democratic “establishment”, “Resistance Libs”, the left, the “tech right,” and the Republican Party. What’s missing from that list? We’ve had less to say about the political tribe that I at least vaguely belong to myself: the center-left.

How does one define the center-left? Well, that isn’t entirely straightforward. As Matt Glassman writes, “moderation” is associated with a cluster of attributes, including but not limited to: centrism, pragmatism, independence, willingness to compromise, obsession with “electability”, comparative optimism about the status quo, liberalism, and a preference for more complex, technocratic approaches toward governance. These aren’t entirely synonymous with one another and some elements can be in tension.

But put a pin in that for now; we’ll come back to it later. Because there’s a more pressing question: is the center-left at risk of losing its influence — even dying out, becoming the Blockbuster Video of politics1? For a cautionary tale, you need to look no further than the center-right, which has been almost completely hollowed out, with most of the public intellectuals who once occupied that space either having become Resistance Libs or joining the Trump Train.

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The death of the center-right didn’t come all at once. In fact, Republicans reacted to the failures of George W. Bush by nominating John McCain in 2008, probably the closest thing to a truly independent-minded presidential nominee in the modern era.2 But having the misfortune of inheriting Bush’s mess amid the worst financial crisis in 75 years, McCain lost to Barack Obama by more than 7 points. Mitt Romney then fended off the Tea Party in 2012, but also lost to Obama.

The repeated failures undoubtedly contributed to Trump’s rise to power. Trump zagged toward the populist, anti-immigrant right when the RNC “autopsy” after 2012 had recommended zigging toward the center — although he also pledged to protect Social Security and other entitlement programs, avoiding some of the most unpopular parts of the Bush-Romney agenda.3 Trump openly criticized all three of Bush, Romney and, of course, McCain. (“He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.”)

The center-left could find itself in a similar predicament. According to statistical measures of their Senate voting records, Joe Biden wasn’t really a centrist in the same way that McCain was. (Biden has always been much more of a loyal partisan, for one thing.) But Biden did win the 2020 nomination, helped by a cluster of endorsements and perhaps a “flight to safety” among voters as COVID hit American shores. Biden’s nomination came against literally more than two dozen alternatives, many of whom mistakenly assumed that Bernie Sanders’s strong performance in 2016 against Hillary Clinton heralded the rise of the left wing.

But maybe those candidates were just premature, not wrong. Although Graham Platner’s implosion was a setback for the left, they’ve been flexing their muscles in races from New York City to Colorado. And according to Gallup polling, the share of voters who describe themselves as “moderate” has fallen from 43 percent in 1992 to 33 percent today. Within the Democratic Party, meanwhile, self-described liberals now outnumber moderates almost 2:1.

These trends come despite the fact that, in the same Gallup polling, far more voters describe themselves as “independent” than ever before, with both major parties being deeply unpopular.

This puts the center-left in an awkward predicament. Voters might want independence from the major parties. But they don’t necessarily want more moderation; in fact, they are more willing to experiment with more radical approaches. However, the parties themselves are as partisan as ever, and social media tends to reinforce those orthodoxies. (So does Substack: Silver Bulletin is the only newsletter in the U.S. politics Top 10 classified as non-partisan by independent researchers.) Excessive partisanship may drive away moderates — but if they exit the primary voter pool, that only makes the remaining voters in the Democratic primary electorate even more progressive and partisan. Outnumbered in the Democratic Party, but having little in common with the MAGA-fied version of the GOP, the center-left is at risk of becoming politically homeless.

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The center-left is losing the argument about why Democrats lost in 2024

What’s more, the center-left risks being associated with the failures of the Democratic Party establishment — when, from a center-left standpoint, the problem was really the opposite: that the establishment moved too far to the left. More specifically, that Biden, despite his moderate reputation, was far too deferential to the progressive staffer class and “the groups”, particularly on immigration and on stimulus spending. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris and the rest of the Democratic Party couldn’t escape the shadow of Peak Woke. Remember this?

“Hopium” and motivated reasoning about public opinion don’t help either, as Democrats and the cosmopolitan, coastal news media are prone to mistaking the views of their most vocal opinion leaders and the most enthusiastic primary voters for those of the rest of the electorate. In a series of New York Times polls of key Senate races earlier this month, one that projected Democrats to come up slightly short of the four seats they need to flip the Senate in November, 53 percent of voters said that the Democratic Party was too far to the left, as compared to just 8 percent who said they were too far to the right.4

But Democratic primary voters, like Republican ones, increasingly occupy a separate universe. The Yale Youth Poll recently asked voters to select the more important issue for their vote from a randomly selected pair of 30 issues. Among all voters5, Israel/Palestine only tied for 25th out of 30 issues, winning just 28 percent of head-to-head “matchups”.

But among self-described “extremely liberal” voters, Israel/Palestine won 45 percent of the time. Gay and trans rights also got huge boosts. These differences are likely to be even more profound among the most politically active voters, to the point where views toward Israel have increasingly been a litmus test in certain Democratic primaries.6

Even if the media is overstating the importance of flashpoints like Israel and trans rights, enthusiasm matters a lot, and the center-left’s pet issues — affordable housing, I guess? — don’t tend to appeal to people’s passions in quite the same way. Turnout is overrated in general elections, but very important in primaries. In the primary in New York’s 10th Congressional District, where Brad Lander ousted incumbent Dan Goldman in a race with a heavy emphasis on Israel, just under 84,000 people voted out of a population of 750,000. That’s reasonably high by New York standards, but still only 11 percent of the population.

5 ways to define the center-left

Maybe the center-left can attribute some of this to bad luck. Still, making excuses is never a winning strategy in politics. And part of the problem is that the center-left may face an identity crisis. There are several different frameworks that you might use to categorize it.

First, you can describe the American political landscape in terms of partisanship. This chart of the voting record of Diana DeGette — a mainline progressive Democrat who was recently defeated by a DSA-backed challenger in her Colorado primary — categorizes all members of Congress from liberal to conservative based on their roll-call votes. In this conception, there isn’t really a center-left or anything in the center at all. Instead, the center-left is absorbed within the Democratic Party mainstream.

Actually, I lied. You can find one truly centrist Democrat: Jared Golden of Maine’s 2nd Congressional District:

But guess what? Golden, who has massively overperformed partisan baselines in his district, announced his retirement in November when faced with a primary challenge from Matt Dunlap, the Maine state auditor who is significantly to his left.7 That the Democratic Party is moving to the left doesn’t mean that the overall electorate is. In fact, that’s what you’d expect if centrists exit the coalition and so the coalition shrinks.

If you survey voters rather than looking at voting records in Congress, there is more of a middle — people who are “cross-pressured” between different views. Swing voters aren’t a myth. But their numbers are in steady decline amid ever-increasing partisanship. There’s no particular reason for a voter’s views on say, abortion, Gaza and taxation to be correlated with one another, but in a system with two extremely entrenched parties, they increasingly are.

A third alternative is to view the center-left as one of three major factions within the broader Democratic Party coalition, as I did in my story on Heather Cox Richardson that distinguished three groups:

• The Left

• Resistance Libs

• Abundance Libs

In this conception, the Democratic establishment is largely associated with the Resistance Libs and not the more centrist-leaning, pro-growth Abundance Libs. Even as polls show the Resistance Libs becoming increasingly discontented with their party, they tend to be highly defensive of Harris and Biden and convinced that they didn’t beat Trump because Democrats don’t “fight” hard enough.

But this framing isn’t common in mainstream media coverage of the Democratic Party. Instead, most news outlets treat “liberal” and “left” as synonymous, and many Democrats dubiously characterize candidates like Harris and Gavin Newsom as “centrist”.

A fourth approach is to set the parties aside and look for underlying ideological clusters, as I tried to do in my 2023 story on liberalism. That post defined “liberal” in a more European sense in opposition to the progressive left — not the way the term is usually applied in the United States. In other countries, liberalism is defined by its advocacy for individual rights, the rule of law, and a market-based approach to economics. (Though many liberals prefer a mixed economy and varying degrees of redistribution later on.) In this conception, liberalism is a separate third thing and a distinct ideological tradition that doesn’t fit neatly into the left-right spectrum.

My 2023 post now reads as slightly dated. The term “Social Justice Leftism” was my clumsy euphemism for the woke left — which I argued had some decidedly illiberal characteristics such as only lukewarm support for free speech. Still, there are things I like about this ideological triangle. I like that it recognizes liberalism as a separate and, in fact, philosophically well-grounded view rather than an ad hoc set of compromises and edge cases.

The triangle also helps to explain why both the Democratic establishment and what remains of the non-Trump Republican establishment find themselves in awkward positions. The Democratic establishment is trying to straddle the left and liberal traditions, but is increasingly struggling to hold the coalition together. The center-right, as we’ve said, is in even worse shape.

Finally, you could conceive of the U.S. as a parliamentary system. In Europe and other Western democracies, you can basically identify five major ideological clusters:

• 🔴 Labor/Social Democrats

• 🔵 Conservative/Tory/Christian Democrats

• 🟡 Liberal/Center-Left

• 🟣 Populist/Right-Wing/Nationalist

• 🟢 Green/Socialist/Hard Left

Yes, in the European tradition, the party colors are typically reversed from the convention in the United States, with left-leaning parties being red and right-leaning parties blue. And you can debate the semantics of exactly how this would map onto the United States.8

The important thing is that in this conception, liberals have their own party, rather than being part of Labo(u)r. However, this comes at a cost: they usually aren’t all that many voters’ first choice, especially in countries with strong polarization. In the United Kingdom, for instance, the Liberal Democrats have about 11 percent of the seats in Parliament, and that’s actually a recent high-water mark that resulted in part from the profound unpopularity of Tories and Labour. The real energy these days is often more in the extremes, like Marine Le Pen’s National Rally or Britain’s Reform UK. The liberal parties, however, do tend to play nice with others and often play an important role in helping one of the major parties form a coalition government.

Questions for the center-left

However it’s defined, we’re overdue to ask some questions of the center-left. I have a lot of questions, in fact, because I’m not sure how well things are going. The headline teases it as 12 questions, but it’s actually 52 (!) questions organized into 12 clusters.

In an earlier draft of this article, I paused after each cluster to give my “answers.” But that feels too didactic. You’re welcome to infer my opinions from the way the questions are posed and from what I’ve written previously in the newsletter. (I’ve also included a few editorial comments in footnotes.) But the questions are not intended to be rhetorical: I think these are generally hard issues that the center-left perhaps does not reflect upon enough.9

The questions are roughly sorted by importance, with the first four clusters being the ones I consider to be more existential.

The “Core 4” questions

1. Should the center-left explicitly avow liberalism as opposed to centrism, moderation or compromise? Is it a separate third thing with distinctive characteristics, or a sort of a 70/30 blend of progressivism and conservatism? If the latter, how does the center-left address the critique that it doesn’t really stand for anything?10

2. What is the center-left’s relationship with the Democratic Party “establishment”? Is it part of the establishment — even synonymous with the establishment? Or does it want to keep the Democratic Party at arm’s length? If the center-left seeks to channel its power through the Democratic Party, what risks does that pose as the establishment becomes increasingly unpopular? Either way, how does the center-left convey to voters that it should not be held responsible for the failures of said establishment, particularly its recent choice of presidential candidates?

3. What is the center-left’s strategy for dealing with an increasingly angry electorate? How does the center-left win Democratic primaries when Democrats want candidates who “fight”? Would an “angry center” attract more converts in an era where controversy and grievance often motivate voters? Or should the center-left bet that appealing to people’s more rational, dispassionate sensibilities will come back into fashion?11 How much should it emphasize non-ideological attributes like civility12 and candidate integrity or character? If the center-left is generally more optimistic than other political factions, should it lean into this or de-emphasize this? How does the center-left persuade voters that America has made significant progress when this view is increasingly unpopular and Americans have become less patriotic?

4. What is the center-left’s view on how capitalism is going as we pass the quarter-pole of the 21st Century? How much does the center-left prioritize economic growth versus distributional issues? Does it think government spending should be smaller or larger as a share of GDP? Is an “abundance” agenda neo-liberalism in sheep’s clothing? (And if so, is that a bad thing?) What is the center-left’s approach toward the tech sector and particularly toward AI?

Other important tactical and strategic questions

5. How organized should the center-left be — in terms of raising money, endorsing candidates, and seeking to increase voter turnout for its preferred candidates? Put another way, how much does the center-left want to engage in the “dirty work” of politics? Should there be more or fewer formal structures such as PACs, think tanks and congressional caucuses? Would building such infrastructure necessarily require the center-left to be part of the institutional Democratic Party?

6. What is the center-left’s approach toward poll-driven selection of policies and candidates? Does it too often default toward making arguments on “electability” grounds when it really prefers a given policy on the merits?13 How should the center-left feel about left-wing (or even right-wing) positions that are comparatively popular, or center-left/liberal positions that are unpopular? Even if it’s true that more moderate candidates overperform, how does the center-left win the intraparty argument over electability when many influential Democrats are disinclined to believe this?

7. Should the center-left join the Resistance Libs in regarding Trump as a 5-alarm, existential threat to American liberal democracy — or as something that will pass? Should it advocate for “vote blue no matter who”, because of Trump, as part of some broader “pro-democracy” coalition?14 If the center-left is part of the coalition, is it holding up its side of the bargain when leftist Democrats win primaries?

8. Should the center-left regard the “DSA left” as a threat to liberal values? If it does view the DSA as illiberal, how does it persuade “normie Democrats” about this at a time when the left appears to have a lot of momentum and much of the party is risk-averse and trend-following? Alternatively, are there issues where the center-left can find common ground with the capital-L Left against the mainline Democratic establishment?15

9. What is the center-left’s attitude toward the center-right and other non-MAGA parts of the Republican Party? Would the center-left have more leverage if it more often aligned with or even voted for Republicans? Would it be better off if the center-right were rehabilitated, potentially enabling a broader center coalition? In the abstract, would the center-left be satisfied with a parliamentary-type system in which it’s almost never the largest party but often plays kingmaker?

10. What is the center-left’s strategy for avoiding both the perception and the reality of elitism, especially given that it tends to attract high-earning, successful people? How much should it care about diversity of various kinds? How does it avoid Davos-type groupthink? Does it think the “expert class” is performing well or poorly? Does it think there’s too much or too little democracy? Does it share a Progressive Era vision for technocratic paternalism, or does it tend to defer to popular sentiment and self-determination?16

11. Can the center-left credibly regard itself as more pragmatic and evidence-driven than other political factions? Are they the “reasonable voices in the room”, or is this too self-flattering? Aside from effective governance, how does it demonstrate this to voters in a politics dominated by motivated reasoning and “vibes”? Should the center-left be low-key — or explicitly17 —utilitarian?

12. How does the center-left navigate Israel/Gaza? Can it accommodate people with widely divergent views on Israel and carve out a middle ground at a time when an increasing number of highly politically active Democrats view Israel as a litmus test? How can it avoid the “smalltentism” that defines other Democratic factions, especially when the center-left’s numbers are not all that large?

I suppose I’m hoping to get a debate started about these questions. And yes, that potentially includes here in the comments section. But keep in mind that Silver Bulletin has an extremely politically heterodox readership as compared to most Substacks. So please be kind and give other subscribers the benefit of the doubt.

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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 iteration of the World Cup has lived up to the hype so far. Say what you want about the 48-team format — which is probably here to stay unless FIFA expands to 64 teams instead. But having an extra knockout round has only raised the suspense for the teams that have survived.

Part of what’s made this World Cup intriguing is that no team has looked utterly dominant thus far. After a pristine group stage, Argentina has looked very beatable in the first two KO rounds — Cape Verde and Egypt were heavy underdogs, but the former nearly stole the game, and the latter gave it away. Meanwhile, betting markets lost faith in Spain after their 0-0 draw in the opener against the same Cape Verde, and Lamine Yamal, recovering from injury, has had a notably quiet tournament.

How about France? They began the World Cup as our 3rd-most likely winner but are now our favorite — though only by a hair over Argentina and Spain. Betting markets see them as a clearer #1. That’s reasonable using market valuations, which puts them highest in the world by our method. They’re the most fun team to watch and the first one you’d pick in a video game.

But in our system, these market valuations serve more as indicators of upside potential or team trajectory than of the quality on the pitch today. France has had some speed bumps since being the runner-up in the 2022 World Cup, like a draw in qualifying against Iceland, a home loss to Italy in the European Nations League, and a friendly loss to Cote d’Ivoire just before the start of this tournament. So far in the World Cup, they’ve played every bit up to that potential, however. Even then, they needed a penalty to beat Paraguay, and will face another very defensive-minded team (though a far more talented one) in Morocco today.

Before we preview the four quarterfinals, here is one more way to look at the odds: literally how the pie (chart) of probabilities for the eight remaining matches is divided up. There’s far more data available on the World Cup landing page, which we’ll continue to update after each game.

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1. You can say something like “Graham Platner, who has credibly been accused of sexual assault, doesn’t have any right to dictate terms”. But he won the party nomination. It’s his choice whether to vacate that nomination. Under Maine law, the practical rule is: Platner must withdraw by July 13 for Democrats to make a normal replacement nomination. After that, a replaceable vacancy generally requires death or catastrophic incapacitating illness or injury.1 As we’ll get to, Platner doesn’t have as much leverage as he thinks he does, but he does have some.

2. One theory of the case I’ve heard on Twitter is that if Platner remains on the ballot, Democrats will be forced to rally behind him. But as cynical as I sometimes am about the Democratic Party, I tend to doubt it’s that simple. We haven’t seen any post-sexual-assault-allegation polling yet, but if Platner is behind Collins by 10 points or something, the correct “play” is to write the race off and focus your resources on Texas or Iowa or whatever, rather than further undermining the party brand by associating it with a candidate whom almost every Democrat has now denounced as being unfit for the ballot. And while a Senate seat is very important, it isn’t as existential as a presidential race.

3. The write-in deadline in Maine isn’t until Aug. 25. So what the state party could say is, “We’re going to choose a different nominee and will back them in an extremely well-organized write-in campaign even if Platner refuses to vacate the Democratic Party ballot line.” The state party has already taken a fairly aggressive posture toward Platner, but pre-committing to this write-in process would more tangibly reduce Platner’s leverage and is the right move from a game-theory standpoint. While a write-in campaign might seem like an uphill battle that requires extra effort from voters, it worked for Lisa Murkowski in Alaska in 2010, a state with some similarities to Maine.2

4. Wouldn’t that lead to an outcome like: Collins 47 percent, write-in Democrat 33 percent, Platner 20 percent, meaning that this would be tantamount to mutually assured destruction? No, because Maine uses ranked-choice voting. In principle, voters loyal to Platner could list him as their first choice and the write-in as their second choice ahead of Collins. In practice, there are some issues, though. In the Maine gubernatorial primary last month, which went to RCV, about 10 percent of the votes were essentially tossed out because voters did not rank enough candidates.3 Platner voters could also refuse to list the write-in Democrat on their ballot out of spite.

5. So really, whether he remains on the ballot or not, most of Platner’s leverage comes from his voters. There’s sure to be some voters who remain fiercely loyal to him; partisanship is a hell of a drug. You don’t want those voters to feel aggrieved, as though their guy was railroaded out, especially if Platner sends signals to that effect.

6. While many people are drawing comparisons to Democrats’ decision to force out Joe Biden in 2024, there are some important differences. Platner isn’t nearly as much of a loyal party soldier. But more importantly, Platner won a highly competitive primary, whereas Biden won an effectively uncontested one. True, Janet Mills eventually dropped out4, but she did so because she was way behind in the polls, out of resources, and going to lose. Beating a sitting governor is a lot harder than beating Marianne Williamson in a race where the Democratic Party put a heavy finger on the scale for Biden.5

7. The comments section might not like this take, but I think it’s not inherently unreasonable for the Maine Democratic Party to respect the results of that primary by choosing another nominee who, like Platner, is more in the populist/progressive tradition.

8. Not only is this more democratic, but it also prevents those voters from feeling aggrieved. And while I’m generally of the view that moderate candidates overperform left-wing or right-wing ones — Collins is a good example of this, in fact — Maine has been a bit unusual in being willing to tolerate a wide variety of ideological options, from progressive fighters like Platner (who was quite popular before the scandals and probably on track to win in November) to Collins to the Trumpist former governor Paul LePage.

9. The best way to give voters some say, though, would be to hold a straw poll or a series of state caucuses or conventions, as Maine Democrats are reportedly strongly considering. Sure, such a vote would probably be dominated by “party activist types”, with much lower turnout than a “real” primary, but you want to keep your most engaged voters happy6 — and it’s still better than some sort of committee.

Those nine points cover my basic theory of the case, but let me take an even deeper dive into the strategy and the long-term implications for paid subscribers.

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Graham Platner, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Maine, was accused today of sexual assault in a story reported by Politico.

The allegation has to be taken seriously: the accuser identified herself by name and, according to Politico, provided corroborating materials, including communications about the assault with her therapist and with a friend before Platner became a major political figure. The woman had previously referred more obliquely to “reckless” and “unsettling” behavior by Platner in a New York Times story published last month.

Having worked in major newsrooms before, including the New York Times and ABC News, I can tell you that these stories are heavily “lawyered.” A high-prestige news outlet is unlikely to publish such allegations unless it believes they are well-supported. And Platner is plausibly litigious. In June, Platner referred to a claim by a reporter on Fox News that he was a “pathological liar” as “false and defamatory” and brought up the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox, which was settled for almost $800 million after Fox personalities falsely implied that the 2020 election had been rigged.

Platner, nevertheless, has denied the allegations — “any accusation of nonconsensual behavior is categorically false,” he said in a video he posted today. But he also said he was taking time to “reflect on the best path forward” for his campaign and the best way to defeat Susan Collins. Much of the video was phrased in the past tense.

Traders at prediction markets think it is very likely that Platner will drop out. As of Monday evening, they give Platner just a 3 percent chance of being the next U.S. Senator from Maine. After Collins, at 37 percent, the next-most-likely election winner is Troy Jackson, at 34 percent. (Jackson, a progressive Democrat, came in third in Maine’s recent gubernatorial primary.) Under Maine law, Platner has until next Monday (July 13) at 5 p.m. to withdraw from the race. The Maine Democratic Party would then have two weeks (until July 27) to replace him with a new nominee.

Interestingly, Democrats’ chances of winning the Maine Senate race actually improved on the news because traders think another Democrat would have a better chance against Collins.

Indeed, in our previous newsletter about Platner, we noted that he had lost altitude in polls after a series of sexting allegations surfaced in late May. Ahead of Collins by an average of 6 points before those allegations, he’s led by just 1 point since then, in a state where polls have frequently underestimated Collins and other Republicans. There’s been no particular sign of a rebound; in fact, two of the three most recent polls showed Platner trailing Collins.

It’s not exactly rocket science to suggest that Platner would be an underdog if he remained in the race. The sexting allegations were much less severe, but damaged his margin against Collins by 5 points. And now he has no more lead to spare.

The left should want nothing to do with Platner

So what are the takeaways here? The left has been on a good run in Democratic primaries lately, having ousted two incumbents in New York and one in Colorado with current or former DSA candidates. I owe you a newsletter on that; it was actually set to publish tomorrow before this latest news in Maine.

But who are the three most successful left-wing politicians in America? I’d argue they are pretty clearly Bernie Sanders, Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

What do they have in common? They might have significant ideological baggage in a swing district. In a series of New York Times polls of key Senate races last week, 53 percent of voters said that the Democratic Party was too far to the left, as compared to just 8 percent who said it was too far to the right. Twitter and Bluesky aren’t real life. But that’s not really a problem in New York City or Vermont.

And what Bernie, Zohran and AOC conspicuously don’t have is a whole lot of personal baggage. Mamdani, in particular, cultivates a clean-cut image by constantly wearing a suit and cheering for the local sports teams.

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You can say there’s a double-standard for candidates on the left. In my view, their success in recent primaries is both fairly predictable and arguably something the Democratic establishment “deserves”. As early as April of last year, Galen Druke and I both wanted to take Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez #1 in our Democratic primary “draft”, meaning we thought she was more likely to be chosen than someone like Gavin Newsom.

But even if Democratic voters are shifting to the left, that only goes partway to explaining the success of the DSA challengers. Democrats want candidates who are “fighters”, whether that means fighting Trump, fighting billionaires, or whatever else.

There’s no reason, though, for that to be attached to a long series of personal scandals that have nothing to do with a candidate’s position on the political spectrum.

And to be fair, some prominent voices on the left conspicuously aren’t circling the wagons around Platner. Hasan Piker today called the allegations “reliable” and said it was “curtains” for Platner’s campaign. The Nation called for Platner to be replaced.

I’d note here the left, at least in this case, has been quicker to revise its views when faced with “candidate quality” problems than the Democratic establishment has sometimes been in the past — and quicker than Republicans have been, certainly.

Why I became a Platner skeptic

After many years of covering politics, I think voters tend to have some instincts for which candidates they feel are “authentic”. We’ve covered Platner a lot, and at first I took a position of detached irony toward him. He’s from Sullivan, Maine, the tiny town where I spent many summers at my grandma’s house. He’s certainly not lacking for a swaggering charm. And his polls against both Janet Mills and Collins held up fairly well when the story was “just” about his Nazi-themed tattoo and his Reddit posts.

Part of why I grew skeptical of Platner after the sexting allegations is that I thought it called his redemption arc — that his decision in 2007 to get the tattoo had been a silly drunken mistake, for example — into question. It’s highly implausible that Platner didn’t become aware of the symbolism of the tattoo at some point before having it removed last year, and there are numerous accounts that contradict his story.

Platner’s campaign also took a highly aggressive posture toward Genevieve McDonald, Platner’s former political director, who left his campaign in October. Given that the sexting allegations were far less serious than a sexual assault claim, it was reasonable to ask whether they reacted in this way because they knew there were more serious allegations that might come to light.

There are other critiques that one can make of Platner also. He grew up with a fair amount of privilege. He was recruited by consultants and activists who saw him in a video shot by a local ecological conservation organization.

Few of us are boy scouts. At some point, though, you pass a threshold where someone’s story doesn’t add up.

I could get cute here and cite something involving reading poker “tells”. Generally you’re not looking for any one sure-fire sign — someone rapidly blinking their eyes, for instance — so much as a cluster of behaviors that are collectively more powerful than any one indicator individually.

But although poker players have more experience in precisely quantifying this, it’s actually a very natural human instinct and one that probably becomes better with experience. You might excuse a “problematic” element in someone’s personality, or two. But most of you have probably also had a moment where you learned that you were wrong to give the benefit of the doubt to a friend or coworker. “Fool me twice, shame on me” has always been one of the wiser proverbs.

Plus, political parties have to think probabilistically, too. Maybe it’s all a series of extremely unfortunate misunderstandings and coincidences. Democrats aren’t in a court of law, however, where they have to prove allegations beyond a reasonable doubt.

Should he remain on the ballot, Platner will be a burden for Democrats’ ability to win a majority this November. Progressives will probably want Jackson to replace him, while the establishment might make one last pitch for Mills. But that’s what the argument should be about, not trying to rehabilitate his campaign once more.

I’m going to admit to feeling a swell of patriotic pride after the U.S. beat Bosnia-Herzegovina 2-0 on Wednesday.1 Maybe it was a protective reaction after the bullshit red card the referee gave Folarin Balogun. Or maybe it was the juxtaposition of everyone singing along to “Country Roads”2 in the middle of Silicon Valley, not necessarily considered the most patriotic place in America.3

So congratulations to the United States on its 250th birthday, which the country will celebrate tomorrow. It’s really quite an accomplishment if you’ve spent any time studying the rise and decline of empires. And I hope you’ll have a fun and restful July 4 weekend, readers. I very much don’t want to rain on the parade. I’m also relatively optimistic about the future of the country. I’m a big defender of the complicated national project we’ve undertaken over the past two-and-a-half centuries. I love the United States, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be here for the rest of my life.

However, an increasing number of Americans don’t agree with me, to a degree that I found frankly surprising. We assigned this story to Eli in our weekly planning meeting, and I expected the data to show that, while American patriotism had declined, it remained relatively high as compared to the rest of the world. Some informative content that was a little on the lighter side, if we’re being frank.

But that isn’t the case. Compared to most countries, we’re now a little below average in patriotism.

So I just wanted to let you know where we’re coming from. Our goal here at Silver Bulletin is to evaluate public opinion for what it is, not to reflect our personal views every time we analyze the polls. (And even if we don’t necessarily agree, we understand why an increasing number of Americans feel ambivalent about the United States.) I thought this was a better way to approach the occasion than a hot take from yours truly. –Nate Silver

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What the polls say about patriotism

By Eli McKown-Dawson

“It was a grand day for the Bicentennial parade in the nation’s capital today, and it was a grand parade celebrating the diversity that is America.” That’s how The New York Times described America’s bicentennial celebration in 1976. The parade drew 500,000 people and featured Johnny Cash as the Grand Marshal. Our 200th anniversary also included a Grand Parade of Sailing Ships in NYC and a tour of the country by Queen Elizabeth II. When Gallup asked Americans in June of that year how much we had “succeeded over these 200 years in achieving the ideals for which this country was founded,” 77 percent answered either a great deal or a fair amount.

The vibes aren’t anywhere near that good for our semiquincentennial. The Great American State Fair has had problems with power outages and crowd sizes — and the celebration in general has a decidedly partisan flavor. Many of this year’s events are being put on by Freedom 250, a Trump-backed public-private partnership.4 The president also promised to “make a really long speech” before the fireworks begin in DC.

Being mad about the Great American State Fair is something we’d be tempted to characterize as “very online” behavior. But increasing skepticism about the United States isn’t just an online sentiment. In 2004, Gallup found that 69 percent of U.S. adults were “extremely proud” to be an American. The fourth wave of the World Values Survey (WVS) also ended that year and showed that a similar 71 percent of Americans were “very proud” to be American. Fast forward to 2026, and just 33 percent of adults are extremely proud to be American, according to Gallup, while the latest WVS wave showed an only slightly higher 46 percent in 2022.

To be fair, as Natalie Jackson pointed out earlier this week, the Gallup write-up only focused on the “very” or “extremely” proud categories. Some 75 percent of U.S. adults are at least “moderately” proud to be American, according to its data, a figure in line with other polls from YouGov and Fox News. Anti-American sentiment isn’t likely to be a winning argument, even in Democratic primaries, let alone in general elections.

How American pride compares to the rest of the world

Still, there has been a real decline in patriotism that I don’t think we should discount. Historically, American pride was somewhat exceptional when compared to other countries, so much so that the American tourist who slaps an American flag on everything is a common trope. Have smaller countries — particularly those in Latin America, the Middle East, and parts of Asia — always topped the patriotism charts? Absolutely. In the latest WVS wave, 97 percent of Jordanians were “very proud” or “quite proud” of their nationality, while 92 percent of Venezuelans and Colombians felt the same.

But we used to hang with that crowd. In the first WVS wave, concluded in 1984, 95 percent of Americans were very or quite proud of their nationality. That figure was higher than the average share in Latin America (83 percent) and much higher than the European average of 77 percent. Throughout the late 20th century, the U.S. was a patriotic outlier compared to other large developed nations and our peers in Western Europe. Just 19 percent of Germans and 32 percent of French people were very proud of their nationality in the 1993 WVS wave, compared to 74 percent of Americans.

Fast forward to 2022, and “just” 78 percent of Americans were very proud or quite proud of their nationality; that’s a 17-point drop since the 1980s and lower than the 2022 European average of 81 percent. People in Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East are hovering closer to 90 percent pride, on average. While other regions’ national pride has held steady or increased, ours has fallen.5

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It isn’t just the smaller countries either, which arguably have more national cohesion. Let’s pare down the WVS dataset to countries that have populations of at least 100 million or that are OECD members. We’ll create a “pride-o-meter” score for each country from 0 to 100 based on the four categories of responses.

You have to scroll down to the third page to find the United States. We’re 34th out of 45 qualifying countries. Americans are now no more proud of their country than Brits.6

Yes, patriotism is becoming more partisan

That decline in pride has happened across the board, but it’s been most pronounced among Democrats, particularly since Trump entered the political scene. To level-set, majorities of Republicans (96 percent), independents (59 percent), and Democrats (58 percent) are still proud to be Americans, according to YouGov. But when it comes to more intensive national pride, Democrats are nowhere near where they used to be.

During George W. Bush’s second term, an average of 58 percent of Democrats were extremely proud to be American according to Gallup, as was an identical share of independents — though Republicans were higher. The rough parity between Democrats and independents lasted through Barack Obama’s second term, but the share of extremely proud Democrats fell to an average of 30 percent during Trump’s first term and was just 14 percent in the most recent Gallup poll.

Although Republicans are generally more patriotic, their opinions can shift based on who occupies 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue too. The share of Republicans extremely proud to be American fell from 79 percent on average during Bush’s second term to 60 percent during Biden’s term. What happened after Trump retook office? It jumped right back up to 74 percent.

But did Democrats’ numbers bounce back under President Biden after Trump’s first term? Nope. They held steady at 30 percent. Some of this is probably attributable to changing attitudes about the nation’s founding and subsequent history that accompanied the Black Lives Matter movement.

Still, Trump seems to be the bigger story here, and perhaps even caused a permanent shift in attitudes. Echelon Insights recently polled Americans about “conditional patriotism” and found that 49 percent of Democrats agreed with the statement “how patriotic I feel depends on who is in power and current government policies.” The figure for Republicans was 18 percent.

Perhaps it’s rational that our pride advantage over other nations has evaporated. We’re still the world’s largest economy, but we’re not as clearly dominant across the board as we were in the ‘80s and ‘90s. The growth in American life expectancy has stagnated. And the U.S. is no longer as democratic as it once was, according to various democracy indices, even if we’d debate the notion that the country has passed some tipping point.

Still, a shared belief in the American project once served as a hedge against the “alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge,” as Washington put it. These days, even the joint gold medals by the U.S. men’s and women’s hockey teams at the Milan Olympics devolved into some indecipherable partisan argument.

Maybe if we win the World Cup? It’s not likely, granted. But at this point, a return to America being a profoundly patriotic country is probably a long shot too.

Today’s newsletter is a guest post from Joel Wertheimer. Joel is a civil rights attorney in New York and has served as a policy consultant to political candidates. He worked for President Obama from 2015 to 2017 as Associate Staff Secretary. He irregularly writes about data, soccer and politics at wertwhile.substack.com.

For nearly four years, the internet has debated whether we’ve been mired in what Kyla Scanlon dubbed a “vibecession” — whether people feel worse about the economy than the underlying data suggests they “should” feel. People as esteemed as Nobel laureate Paul Krugman have frequently posted about the vibes mystery. Nate wrote a whole piece about the divergence in the New York Times two years ago.

But there’s one big problem with the discussion: most of the participants are relying on a broken survey, the University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment survey (“Index of Consumer Sentiment” or “ICS”), that is in dire need of being repaired. Failure to correct for these issues has led to plenty of pet theories — but they explain a trend that may not even exist.

On Friday, the survey reported a 49.5 reading for consumer sentiment, a number that, while slightly improved from last month, puts it below the depths of the Great Recession. But without properly correcting for the survey’s issues, the headlines are misleading. No, Americans are not as unhappy about the economy as they were during the Great Recession.

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What’s wrong with the University of Michigan survey

The University of Michigan ICS is the gold standard sentiment survey measuring consumer sentiment.1 The survey has historically shown a very strong correlation with “hard” economic data such as inflation and unemployment. But before more bad analysis gets done on the vibecession, people need to know they’re working with dubious data. As with election polls, the ICS has struggled amid a shift away from telephone polling. There are issues both with partisan nonresponse, with some political groups more likely to respond than others, and partisan expressive response, with survey-takers using questions about the economy to express political sentiment.

So the problems with the ICS are these:

1. The switch to online polling made responses more negative and,

2. There are too many Democrats in the sample.

Thus, ICS data since mid-2024 is not comparable to past periods. Here is the partisanship of the sample over time:

And Democrats right now say they hate the economy with Trump in charge.

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When adjusted for these issues, the ICS should be substantially higher than the Great Recession lows we have witnessed over the past year. Weighting the survey to Pew’s National Public Opinion Reference Survey — what Nate Cohn called “perhaps the most important poll you’ve never heard of” — would place the ICS at a level more like that in 2013, when the economy was growing after the Great Recession but unemployment remained stubbornly high and wages stubbornly low. This adjustment would bring the survey in line with other measures of consumer confidence, such as those from the Conference Board, Gallup, and YouGov.

The online version of the ICS finds more negative sentiment

Some background on the ICS: for most of its existence, the survey was conducted by phone and weighted to demographic variables: age, sex, race, education, income, and region. Beginning in April 2024, the University of Michigan began a phased transition from phone to web polling, becoming fully web-based by July 2024, as response rates to telephone polls plummeted. Michigan was meticulous about the switch and polled both by phone and online for a period to establish the validity of the online polling method, finding a .97 correlation between the phone and web series.

But as Ernie Tedeschi and Ryan Cummings have noted at Briefing Book, that came with a seemingly permanent level shift in the survey, of nearly nine points down. A high time-series correlation only means the phone and web series moved together; it does not rule out a persistent level shift, with web respondents consistently registering lower sentiment. If every group’s economic outlook declines roughly uniformly, the correlation will hide that.

After controlling for respondents’ demographic characteristics across the web and phone versions, Tedeschi and Cummings found that the mode effect was very strong. The correlation that the University of Michigan found is still there, but web survey takers persistently expressed much more negative views than those reached on the phone (a well-documented phenomenon in other surveys). They found a persistent downshift of almost nine points. My own similar analysis found a similar, although slightly smaller shift.

But there’s also another problem.

The ICS has too many Democrats

We all know that partisanship drives much of how people respond to polls about the state of the economy. And as partisanship has continued to increase over the past two decades, the effect on the survey has become more pronounced.

Under George W. Bush, partisanship led to a 15-point gap between Democrats and Republicans, controlling for demographics. By Obama’s second term, it was over 20 points. In Trump’s first term, it was 38 points, and that number was similar under Biden. But so far during Trump’s second term, the gap between partisans equates to nearly 53 points of consumer sentiment.

These partisan shifts might balance out — Democrats might be too bearish about the economy under Trump relative to the objective underlying facts, but Republicans would counteract that by being too optimistic. However, since Trump’s re-election and the mode switch, the Michigan survey has largely failed to capture Republicans’ views.

How come? The devil is somewhat in the details. The ICS uses a rotating panel design. Part of the sample is “fresh”, but a respondent can be reinterviewed up to three times.

But over the past two years, more Democrats have been recruited into the sample, and Republicans have fallen out. Moreover, Democrats who respond at the reinterview stage return at much higher rates than they did during the phone survey, whereas Republicans only return at slightly higher rates — in fact, the strongest Republican voters2 are following up with re-interviews less than they did during the phone era. Taken together, this has led to a huge partisan shift in the ICS sample.

Joanne Hsu, who runs the Michigan survey, tackled this question on May 22: “Are the relatively dour readings seen in recent months being disproportionately driven by Democrats?” she asked. “A closer inspection of data on multiple dimensions of the economy reveals a resounding no.” She defended that position by noting “Sentiment readings nationally […] continue to be fully aligned with the views of independents.” She produced this chart in support of her view:

But Hsu’s chart doesn’t tell the full story.

Just for a quick-and-dirty comparison, without applying any demographic controls, I took UM’s published data by party and compared it to the topline ICS. In my chart, the dashed green line represents a panel that’s evenly split between Democrats, Republicans, and independents — while the blue line shows a skewed sample of 50 percent Democrats, 25 percent Republicans and 25 percent independents.

As you can see, prior to the mode shift, the overall ICS figure (in black) matches the balanced, ⅓-⅓-⅓ panel extremely well. But since the mode shift — and the 2024 election — the survey tracks closely to the blue line, with a panel that has twice as many Democrats as Republicans.

It might be true that independents are relatively bearish on the economy. But that doesn’t explain away the partisan skew. Independents often express dissatisfaction with the political system and the direction of the country — that’s part of why they don’t affiliate with one of the major parties. Also, as Democrats have soured on their own party’s leadership, many Democratic-leaning voters now identify as independents but still usually vote blue. (Kamala Harris actually won independents in the national exit poll in 2024 despite losing the popular vote.)

What’s more, independents had a much more negative response to the mode switch than Democrats or Republicans:3

The Michigan survey tracks others — if you remove the mode and partisan biases

It’s understandable that surveys might want to adjust for party affiliation. Although what party a voter is registered with is verifiable data4, most polls instead ask respondents which party they prefer. This is a political attitude, and it can change over time.

Fortunately, we do have a very high-quality survey called the National Public Opinion Reference Survey that can address this issue. Published periodically by Pew, NPORS is an annual address-based survey, with paper, online and phone response options and financial incentives. It has a much higher response rate than most contemporary public-opinion surveys and is used to benchmark many other polls.

It is true that partisanship shifts over time, but the trend was towards more — not fewer — Republicans in 2024 and 2025:5

Pew also publishes the microdata (individual responses) from the survey. Using this data, I reweighted the ICS to reflect the actual partisanship of American adults, in addition to the mode adjustment described above. When both adjustments are made, ICS is still low historically — but not depths-of-the-Great-Recession low. Instead, it looks more like the numbers during Barack Obama’s first term, when he was re-elected with a weak but growing economy:

Notably, these numbers look a lot more like the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index:

For some further validation, I found Gallup and YouGov polls that ask respondents whether they are better off or worse off financially than they were a year ago, and compared them to an adjusted number6 from an identical ICS question.7 With these adjustments, the Michigan series moves pretty much exactly like the YouGov and Gallup numbers.

The conclusion is simple: the ICS cannot continue to ignore its sample’s skewed partisanship in the future. And people who write about consumer and voter sentiment shouldn’t ignore the problems either. President Trump is highly unpopular, and, in contrast to his first term, his economic numbers are worse than his overall ratings. But the Michigan survey exaggerates just how sour consumers are feeling about the economy – the vibecession is partly an artifact of bad data.

Hello from Kansas City, where last night I witnessed one of the strangest World Cup games ever. Algeria and Austria — who were both guaranteed to advance with a draw but would have dropped out of the knockout round with a loss — really went for it in the first three-quarters of the game, with the score tied 2-2 after the second-half hydration/advertising break. Algeria seemed content to see out the game from that point forward, passing the ball back and forth at midfield as the pro-Algeria crowd1 booed sarcastically but didn’t seem too upset, given that Algeria would not only move on but also play a relatively forgiving opponent, Switzerland, in the R32.

Then Algeria’s Riyad Mahrez scored in stoppage time in the 93rd minute! Actually, not a smart thing to do because, while they’d still advance, it meant they’d play Spain in the opening round instead. But Austria reciprocated with time running out. So they’ve made it too, completing the knockout stage bracket in a heartbreaking moment for Iran, the last team out. I guess that’s a “W” for incentives, though I’d have thought 0-0 was a more likely score than 3-3.2

Since the tournament resumes at 3 p.m. today — Canada plays South Africa, but in Los Angeles, not the Vancouver slot designated for the Group B winner — let me get you in and out of here fairly quickly. Our World Cup predictions page has been refreshed for the knockout round, removing group-stage content but adding a couple of new, more detailed tables for the elimination bracket. The main thrust of today’s newsletter is to articulate (and quantify) how some teams are in a much more favorable position in the bracket than others, but first, I want to take one last look back at the group stage.

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Africa — and France, USA and Mexico — had a very good group stage

Which teams gained or lost the most in the group stage as compared to PELE’s pre-tournament expectations? Here is a modified version of the rankings table that sits atop our forecast page, only I’ve added the confederations3 and sorted the table based on PELE points gained or lost from the three group-stage matches.

Sense a theme here? Five of the six biggest gainers are from Africa, led by underdogs Cape Verde. True, none of the African teams won their groups, and most face relatively difficult knockout-stage assignments, as we’ll get to. (Including Cape Verde, which plays Argentina in the R32.) And let’s not talk about Tunisia, who was so bad that they fired their coach midway through.

Still, this is nice to see for a continent that has some of the best footballing talent in the world but has notoriously underachieved at the World Cup. Morocco, in 2022, is the only African nation ever to reach the semis.

France, however, tied with Cape Verde with a +39 rating gain in the group stage. That’s impressive given that France was already highly rated by the model4 but reflects excellent work in the closest thing this tournament had to a Group of Death, also featuring Senegal and Norway.5

And it’s been a good tournament for the United States and Mexico — the model isn’t too punitive toward Team USA’s loss to Turkey given that we rotated out many of our best players. Canada ended with a -5 rating adjustment, meanwhile. I’d argue they were a little better than that, but now they’ve lost the benefit of playing their R32 match at home.

Which teams have the easiest knockout-round paths?

Canada can’t complain too much, though, because South Africa, even after a favorable adjustment for their group-stage performance, ranks 38th of the 48 entrants this year in PELE. There is, however, a different team that has by far the easiest knockout-round pathway — and since they were one of our pre-tournament favorites, that significantly affects the odds for the title.

Any guesses? First, let me show you the bracket.

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The phrase “it’s coming home” has, over the years, taken on a hint of irony for English football fans. After all, it’s been six decades since England last won a major international trophy — a drought that rivals just about any in sports.

But this year has been pretty good for ending trophy droughts: Arsenal won their first Premier League in twenty-two years — the first since their famous Invincibles season — and the Knicks snapped a 53-year wait, beating the Spurs for their first NBA title since 1973.

On the surface, the English national football team is a lot like the Knicks: both believe they’re the rightful “home” of their respective sports, both ran into juggernauts in the late 1990s and early aughts, both suffered through bad management in the early 2010s, and both still have some of the most passionate fans — maybe too passionate — in the world. By now the relationship between English fans and their team borders on tragic, each tournament following the same script: a wave of genuine belief, then the familiar blow — a penalty shootout or quarterfinal collapse.

Despite their trophy drought, England remains a hotbed for producing world-class players.1 After they laid waste to Luka Modric and Croatia in the second half of their opening game, it was easy to see the type of performances their squad is capable of. Still, while England certainly has the talent to succeed this year, far more goes into winning the World Cup than having the best players.

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Why did England’s Golden Generation fail?

A lack of talent has never been the real issue for England. In fact, too much of it may have been the root of their underachievement in the 2000s. During the 2000s, the English talent wave — nicknamed its country’s Golden Generation — was deep at every position.

They boasted two monstrous attackers in Michael Owen and Wayne Rooney. Owen won the Ballon d’or in 2001 at only 22 years old, while Rooney is recognized as one of England’s finest-ever talents, starring for Manchester United teams that dominated the Premier League. Their backline had no holes either: Rio Ferdinand is widely considered one of the best defenders of his generation, Ashley Cole and Gary Neville flanked the left and right back positions, respectively, and John Terry filled in the final spot. Their midfield was perhaps their deepest position: Joe Cole, Paul Scholes, Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard, and their captain, David Beckham, competed for scrace available spots in the center, often leaving an odd man out.

England’s Golden Generation was something of a cultural phenomenon at the height of tabloid culture, with the footballers’ relationships being some of the most discussed news stories in mid-2000s Britain, peaking around the 2006 World Cup in Germany. It wasn't without reason: the English squad boasted some of the most recognizable footballers on the planet, but their partners — or as British media coined them, “WAGs” — were famous in their own right. Household names like Victoria Beckham and Cheryl Cole made their partners into news fixtures as much as any goal or trophy did.

These relationships were engines of financial success. David Beckham was a wildly good footballer at the peak of his powers, yes, but the commercial value of his brand proved to be far more valuable to clubs looking to build viewership. At the time of the 2006 World Cup, Beckham was playing for Real Madrid as one of their Galacticos, but was already considering offers to play in the MLS as part of a plan to build the global fame of the league.

Despite the stardom, the Golden Generation didn’t produce a single trophy, never making it further than the quarterfinals in any of the major tournaments during the 2000s.

Of course, there are some boring reasons behind England’s underachievement in major tournaments. For one, there was quite a lot of bad luck involved. England had a longstanding “penalty curse.” Across a decade of major tournaments, they were repeatedly undone from the spot: Euro 96 against Germany, a 1998 World Cup last-16 tie against Argentina, Euro 2004 against Portugal, and the 2006 World Cup quarterfinal against Portugal again. England also faced major injuries during some of these tournaments: Michael Owen famously tore his ACL during the 2006 World Cup, and Wayne Rooney struggled with metatarsal injuries after breaking the bone in the lead-up to that same tournament.

Even then, not reaching even one semifinal for almost a full decade can’t be explained only by bad luck. England had its fair share of poor performances, highlighted by poor chemistry between their squad and rigid tactical formations that didn’t showcase their best players.

Manager Sven-Goran Eriksson employed a 4-4-2, which put Gerrard and Lampard — both gifted attacking midfielders — at odds with one another. The fundamental issue was that the 4-4-2 asks its two central midfielders to split duties, with one sitting back to provide defensive cover while the other roams forward to create. Gerrard and Lampard were both creators, by temperament and by the role they played at club level. When both pushed forward, as they tended to do, they vacated the space in front of the back four and left England exposed through the middle on transition. When one held back, England no longer retained the midfield advantage it had on paper.

England could have employed defensive midfielder Owen Hargreaves in a more prominent role, but he often didn’t get the call to start. English management had trouble leaving a world-class player like Lampard, Gerrard, or Scholes on the bench, and Hargreaves was often derided as England’s lesser midfielding talent. Hargreaves turned out to be one of the few bright spots in an otherwise underwhelming 2006 campaign, proving the media wrong, though it didn’t rescue England's tournament.

Some of England's misfortune, too, was simply a matter of being one superteam among many in a crowded era. In 2002, the Brazilians featured Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, and Rivaldo, and beat England in the quarterfinals before winning the tournament in dominant fashion. In 2006, the Italian side that won the tournament featured world-class players up and down the pitch, from Gianluigi Buffon in goal to Ballon d’Or winner Fabio Cannavaro in defense and Andrea Pirlo pulling the strings in midfield. England’s trouble against a strong Portuguese side in 2004 and 2006 shouldn’t be excused, but Portugal wasn’t exactly an underdog. After all, they started Luis Figo, Deco, and a young Cristiano Ronaldo in a devastating attacking trio that would have troubled any good team.

Even in their better moments, England never achieved a year-end #1 PELE ranking, and only ever peaked at year-end #4 during Beckham’s run as team captain. Moreover, the dominance of countries like Spain highlighted England’s tactical rigidity. During the 2008 Euros, Spain ran a more typical 4-4-2 formation, but by 2010, they had started to focus more on possession as the main lever of control, treating the ball itself as the most valuable thing on the pitch and building everything else around keeping it.

Under Luis Aragones and then Vicente del Bosque, Spain moved from a system of football nicknamed la furia — “Spanish fury,” an identity built on physicality and aggression — to one known as tiki-taka, a possession-obsessed style defined by short passing and constant movement. In the 2012 Euros final, for example, Spain lined up without a recognized striker at all, deploying the midfielder Cesc Fabregas as a false nine ahead of a side built around Xavi, Busquets, Xabi Alonso, Iniesta, and David Silva in a now-famous 4-6-0 formation. This stylistic evolution underpinned Spanish play during a period in which many other footballing powers struggled to get the most out of their talent.

Of course, you can't blame England for not pushing the boundaries of football any more than you can blame early 2000s NBA teams for not shooting enough threes. Innovation involves risk-taking, and the number of chances you have to win an international trophy with a Golden Generation of players is few and far between.

Can England bring it home this time?

The modern England side has at least somewhat internalized the lesson the Golden Generation never could. Under new manager Thomas Tuchel, who took charge at the start of 2025, the team has a clear division of labor in midfield, and a willingness to leave big names at home when they don't fit.

The 2026 iteration had some huge omissions — Phil Foden, Trent Alexander-Arnold, and Cole Palmer all missed out after mediocre club seasons —and some in the press have called it the most shocking English squad in almost thirty years.

These decisive moves have paid off for England thus far. Despite a draw against Ghana in their last match, they’ve enjoyed a stellar run of play going into this World Cup. They won all eight qualifiers without conceding a single goal, and outplayed familiar foe Croatia in their opening match.

Kane, unlike the Golden Generation players, is a bit underrated considering his consistency over the last decade or so. Most serious football analysts consider him the most complete striker in the world, even if fans don’t always give him his respect: he’s England’s all-time leading scorer and has maintained form in both the Premier League and the Bundesliga.

When Kane first burst onto the scene in Tottenham, he was considered more of a poacher — reliable, yes, but not a player that England could anchor a counterattack around. By 2021, Kane had started to use his attacking potential to draw defenders and create space for fellow Tottenham left-winger Son Heung-Min, which led to a devastating number of goal-combinations.

This expanded framework for the #9 role has become one of the most devastating aspects of Kane’s game. During his 2017-18 season with Tottenham, Kane operated as a penalty-box striker, but he’s gradually moved away from poaching to a deep-lying creator role, playing closer to the halfway line. Despite many predicting Kane would have a steep decline in older age, he’s effectively tripled his creative output, creating more for his teammates.

Kane isn’t necessarily unique in this transformation. Lionel Messi transformed from a right-winger to a deep-lying playmaker later in his career, going from a devastating one-on-one dribbler during his early years at Barcelona to a game built on vision and weight of pass. It’s the appropriate way to transition your game from being dependent on athletic tools to something more stable: intelligence and positioning.

The shift has steadied Kane as one of the world’s best players— there are arguments he is outright the best, though I won’t go too far — but England should be wary of an overreliance on him. So far, Tuchel has been keen to make use of Kane’s all-around offensive versatility, but their dependence on him could put them in tight spots as they go deeper into the knockout rounds.

He’s produced nearly a third of the team’s goals and xG across the last four tournaments, but when he struggles to break down the opposition’s backline, they can be left vulnerable to tight games that get decided by small margins. In England's match against Ghana, for example, Kane said he couldn't find much space because he was effectively man-marked by Thomas Partey, denying him the room to drop deep and arrive late in the box. England dominated possession (79 percent) and outshot Ghana 19-2, but were essentially neutralized because there wasn’t a second reliable attacker for Kane to create space for.

Nonetheless, Kane isn’t the only world-class talent on their roster. England’s most pivotal player might be Arsenal midfielder Declan Rice, widely regarded as one of the most complete players in football. Rice’s transformation from playing the destroyer role to becoming a more versatile box-to-box attacker catapulted Arsenal to the Premier League title and a Champions League final. The unlock came when Arsenal signed Spanish holding midfielder Martín Zubimendi in 2025. With Zubimendi anchoring the base of midfield in a double pivot, Arteta was free to push Rice into a more advanced role, releasing him from the pure shielding duties that had defined his West Ham years. Rice topped Arsenal’s rankings for both chances created and possession won, and even with 27 of his 63 key passes coming from set pieces, he still finished joint-second on the team for chances created in open play while remaining their primary ball-winner.

Tuchel has kept him in that role thus far, pushing him relatively far above the halfway line in England’s first two matches. If Rice’s presence can aid England’s attack and relieve some pressure off Kane and fellow midfielder Jude Bellingham, England looks to be extremely powerful in this tournament.

So will England bring it home this year? They have a good chance — our model gives them the fifth best odds in the field — but it might be worth tempering the optimism. For one, England will need to win today against Panama. They’ve already clinched a spot in the knockouts, but finishing second could mean playing either one of Portugal or Colombia in the round of 32. Both teams are good enough to send England home. There’s a world in which they could play a very tricky combination of opponents in sequence: Portugal, Spain, Belgium and France — and winning out would require both some luck and tactical brilliance. Conversely, a win today could put them on the other side of the bracket, where they would play DR Congo or Senegal in the first round. Senegal is the better team, but is probably England’s preferred matchup, given their defensive limitations thus far.

Either way, World Cup title or not, England’s tactical innovations are suggestive of a side that has gotten over its tendency to favor star players over the overall healthiness of their team. Much of winning a World Cup is luck, but after 60 years, a team built to give itself the best possible chance is about all you can ask for.

After years of build-up, the Giannis Antetokounmpo trade saga drew to a close Monday night, with the Bucks’ franchise legend heading to Miami. Per various reports, Milwaukee spent the afternoon weighing two offers: a Celtics package fronted by some variation of Jaylen Brown and draft capital, and the Heat bid that ultimately won out.

They ended up shipping Antetokounmpo and Bobby Portis for Tyler Herro, Kel’el Ware, Jaime Jaquez Jr., Kasparas Jakucionis, three first-round picks, a pick swap, and a second-rounder. Jon Horst and the rest of the front office chose flexibility over a win-now star, taking a stockpile of capital to build the next era of Bucks basketball around upcoming talent rather than an established veteran.

There are more than a few angles to discuss here. But the trade also feels like an anticlimax, as Giannis’s star has dimmed from consensus top-3 player to a guy who might need to be paired with another star or an outstanding core of complementary players to compete for a title.

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Milwaukee fumbled a golden opportunity

It’d be hard not to feel a little disappointed if you’re a Bucks fan. None of the players they received have real All-NBA upside, and the pick they acquired in this year’s draft landed outside the top ten, leaving them with one of the draft’s more polarizing players in Nate Ament. They did pick up Miami’s 2031 and 2033 first-rounders, which could become valuable assets down the line, especially with the league’s new lottery system.

Trading players when they can fetch the most value is optimal portfolio management — though “selling high” is difficult for any number of reasons. Still, the Bucks getting cold feet more than a few times over the last few years has cost them some potential assets. For what it’s worth, despite my own projection that Giannis would regress, he looked very good in the half-season that he played this year — but not quite good enough for his value as an asset to catch up to his age and injury concerns.

While not everyone inherently trusts the advanced stats, Giannis’ defensive EPM tracks with consensus opinion here. He won Defensive Player of the Year in 2020, also his best season according to EPM. But he hasn’t made an All-Defensive team since 2022. The pattern is typical of aging players, who sometimes hide the decline with less effort on the defensive end while maintaining the same “box score stats”. It’s not much of a decline on a per-minute basis, though, and any player with Giannis’s geometry is going to be severely disruptive at the rim. The question is availability.

Giannis is also on the last year of an expiring contract with a player option — he’ll almost certainly opt out and fetch more money — which gave him leverage on his trade destination. According to reports, he narrowed his own preferences down to Boston, Miami, and strangely, Minnesota (which wound up having other ideas up its sleeve.) None of those teams could put together the world-beating packages you would expect for a top five player in the league.

Still, the absence of asset-rich teams like the Spurs, Rockets and Thunder from the conversation should be noted. If the mock trades from a year ago were anything close to Giannis’ true value in the moment, the Bucks missed out on a chance to land a real cornerstone. Most of the Bucks’ conversations stayed behind closed doors, so the rumored packages deserve a healthy dose of scrutiny. Still, if there was a deal on the table headlined by a genuine young building block, like Stephon Castle, plus the usual draft capital, it would exceed what they ended up with this year.

Or there was another possibility: the Mavericks reportedly offered Luka Doncic for Giannis. Perhaps that rumor was a bit of ass-covering for Nico Harrison, whose process in trading Luka to the Lakers was secretive. But let’s say they made that trade. It’s possible Luka wouldn’t have wanted to stick in Milwaukee long-term. They’d still have held his Bird rights and been able to offer the most years and money of any team, so he’d likely have been in a sign-and-trade of some sort. Could they have fetched a better package for him than they just received from the Heat? Both Luka and Giannis have injury concerns and fit issues with teams not specifically designed around them, but Luka is four years younger, and is probably the better asset as of this moment both in theory and in practice.

By now some of our Wisconsin readers — there are 2,763 of you — are probably itching to change the subject. Forget about what the Bucks should have done. What happens now? Well, the trade package isn’t so bad. As I mentioned, the Heat attached their 2031 and 2033 first rounders, which are more valuable under the new lottery system (teams can no longer just win enough games to avoid conceding a good pick), and the young talent they received is enough to be tentatively excited about. They retain Ryan Rollins, who made a sneaky run at the Most Improved Player award last season, and Kel’el Ware is an intriguing player who was buried on the Heat’s bench for unclear reasons.

Granted, if you're a Bucks fan, supporting a team that's openly rebuilding without control of its own future first-round picks might feel a little strange. There are ways out of it, but they'll take a kind of patience you may not be used to. The last time the Bucks missed the playoffs for two seasons in a row was actually before Giannis got drafted. Barring any further moves, it’s likely that streak is broken this upcoming season.

Miami gets the better of Boston again — or did they?

After their many playoff battles, it was only fitting that Miami foiled Boston’s plans to retake control of the Eastern Conference. It’s hard to say, though, that either team is in a significantly better place after the trade had settled.

On the surface, Miami’s roster doesn’t suggest championship contention. The pairing of Bam and Giannis is fine, on both ends, but the rest of Miami’s roster has been stripped down to its bones. They can try to resign Norman Powell on a cheaper deal — it looks unlikely at the moment — and fill in the rest of their roster with minimum contracts, but does that team compete with the Knicks, Celtics, Pistons, or even the Pacers1 next season?

I’m inclined to say no, but that doesn’t mean that they overpaid. Some of my favorite pieces to write at Silver Bulletin are our semi-annual Future of the Franchise rankings, particularly because they help us frame transactions in terms of championship equity. Does Giannis give the Heat enough championship equity to justify mortgaging their future? It’s certainly possible. Something I’ve learned to not underrate is the value of short-term championship equity.

The Heat could lose in the playoffs next season, but all they really need is one or two strong runs over the next four years, barring major injuries to Giannis or Bam. And the league’s Collective Bargaining Agreement is on their side here: the hardest thing to acquire in today’s NBA is a cornerstone, not the role players around one. It’s more or less impossible to sign your way to a top-five player, while rotation pieces, by contrast, are a renewable resource — minimums, the mid-level, veterans chasing a ring all present affordable options.

The bull case for Miami doesn’t rest on this roster beating New York next May. It’s that they’ve already cleared the highest hurdle and the CBA makes everything downstream of that much cheaper to solve for a front office in a desirable market that tends to make strong moves on the margin.

Still, the clock is ticking. “Barring injuries” is not something to just gloss over — after all, it was baked into Giannis’ trade value. The trade reminds me a bit of the Kevin Garnett sweepstakes in 2007 — the Celtics traded a lot of their middling depth for the aging superstar and ended up winning a championship, with Garnett playing 71 games for the terrific 2008 team. By 2009, Garnett was already dealing with major knee injuries that would speed up his decline. If the “Big Three” hadn’t won a ring together, would the trade be considered as much of a win? Still, that’s somewhere in the vicinity of a favorable precedent for this deal.

Of course, Giannis has proven to be more durable in form than Garnett was at the same age, but he hasn’t finished a season truly healthy since 2022. This isn’t very surprising for a player over the age of thirty.

Heat fans might have to adjust their expectations. This team probably isn’t going to compete for the #1 seed even if they have decent health next season.

Still, it’s worth noting that the Heat often outplay the sum of their parts. With Erik Spoelstra on their bench, and a group of scrappy veterans, it’s not impossible they can make some noise next year, even if they don’t end up winning the championship. If you’re a Heat fan, that would obviously be a better outcome than the play-in disappointments of the last few years.

The Jaylen Brown sweepstakes begin?

Even if the Giannis trade makes the Heat competitive again, the rest of the league should be breathing a collective sigh of relief that the Celtics couldn't pull off their attempted heist of the Bucks. I know Jaylen Brown just made an All-NBA team, but swapping him and Giannis for only two additional picks would have been highway robbery.

Had the trade gone through, the Eastern Conference landscape would have shifted drastically in favor of the Celtics, especially given the depth they have to surround a star like Giannis. Luckily for the rest of the league, the Celtics are now in a somewhat weird spot — Brown can’t be happy that Boston so openly tried to offload him after a career year, and it looks like they’ll be taking calls for him.

I don’t love to speculate on future transactions, but I’d be surprised if he’s still on Boston’s roster to start next season. The market for Brown is sort of ambiguous at the moment, though. It seems like Milwaukee’s biggest concern in trading for him was a worry that he would demand a trade elsewhere, not that he wasn’t an appropriate talent return, so there may be interest around the league.

If Brown really does have a top fifteen trade value, like Bill Simmons ranked him back in February, then the offers should be steep. Depending on the front office making the trade, it seems plausible he could be valued at a very high price, even if most of the advanced metrics consider him as a solid starter at best. Brown had a career year, sure, but inflated per-game numbers without a matching jump in the advanced metrics is about as clean a sell-high window as you’ll find.

Why is Brown not liked by impact metrics? Well, he’s a fine scorer on high volume, but his passing doesn’t match his overall offensive load while he averages more turnovers than you would expect for someone of his archetype. Even with his scoring getting directionally better, there are clear ceilings on what he can do in a lead role. On defense, he has the reputation as a two-way player but has regressed into more of a one-way, efficient-but-not-super-efficient shot creator. Of course, trade value and impact metrics can differ. Shot creators are scarce in the NBA, especially after Brown demonstrated he could carry a high usage rate. Ultimately, I would expect Brown to be moved for at least a credible package of capital — at least two firsts and/or a younger player with upside — even if his impact estimate doesn’t justify it.

The Timberwolves just made the best move of the summer so far

The Giannis trade dominated the news cycle, but a few moves flew under the radar this week, most of all the Timberwolves’ offloading of Julius Randle. The trade was made to open up financial flexibility for an Ayo Dosunmu extension — a pretty large overpay in my opinion — but left room for further moves. It was rumored that the Timberwolves tried to trade for Derrick White, but were turned down shortly before the Giannis negotiations hit their peak.

As it turns out, those further moves came fast. With rumblings about Anthony Edwards’ reported unhappiness clearly weighing on the front office, Minnesota pulled the trigger on the real blockbuster: LaMelo Ball (plus Josh Green) for Naz Reid, a 2033 unprotected first, three first-round swaps, and a bundle of seconds. As a LaMelo Ball fan (although I can admit he has some flaws, both as a player and an off-court personality), I think this is an very solid gamble for the Wolves — and a case where it pays to be long volatility given the high bar established by the Spurs and Thunder in the West.

It’s a weird move for Charlotte. LaMelo is the engine of their offense, and the Hornets were one of the best teams in the league over the second half of the season, but perhaps they have doubts about his injury history or his place as a franchise cornerstone.

Still, the return isn’t amazing when compared to LaMelo’s overall impact2. It’s not certain that any of those swaps would convey — the Hornets are probably going to be worse than the Timberwolves for a while — and Naz Reid is a fine player, but nowhere close to LaMelo as a ceiling raiser. The bet is mostly that either LaMelo will be injured or Anthony Edwards demands a trade, which would let one of those swaps actually land in the lottery. I feel this isn’t a basketball bet so much as a bet against Minnesota’s stability, which could be plus-EV in terms of pure championship equity (assuming LaMelo can’t recreate his past season elsewhere) but additional years of struggle for a franchise that last made the playoffs a decade ago.

The rest of the league is still reacting to this past season’s playoffs, which appear to have created something of an arm’s-race as teams adjust to the talent level now required to compete for a championship.3 Most front offices haven’t fully tipped their hand yet, but the Giannis and LaMelo deals suggest that more dominoes will fall in the coming weeks, and that the order in both conferences could look fairly different by the time they do.

It’s been a terrific World Cup — but the tournament will only accelerate from here, with the highest-stakes matches yet to come. Teams will play their third and final group-stage matches in simultaneous pairs; the structure is intended to reduce the informational advantage from knowing exactly what you’re playing for.1 Then we’ll have the first-ever 32-team knockout bracket.

This is going to be an extremely meat-and-potatoes article. (Thanks to the thousands (!) of you who have subscribed for our World Cup coverage.) I’m simply going to go through each of the 12 groups and describe what each of the 48 teams has at stake in its final match. Only 7 teams have officially advanced to the knockout round — these are, in alphabetical order: Argentina, Colombia, France, Germany, Mexico, Norway and the United States, each with 6 points.2 Not all of these teams have clinched their groups, however. Another 11 teams are sitting on 4 points, with a win and a draw so far. They are extremely likely to advance, although in some cases, whether they finish 1st, 2nd, or 3rd in their group makes a big difference.

Only 5 teams have been formally eliminated: Haiti, Jordan, Panama, Tunisia and Turkey. Because 3 points will often be enough to advance, especially with a favorable goal differential (GD), and because a win is worth 3 points (and every team has one more game to play), it’s actually pretty hard to have been strictly eliminated at this point.3

This late-night newsletter is intended as a companion to our World Cup predictions page, and it might be helpful to open another browser window and go back and forth between them. For your convenience, though, here are our current projections for each team’s odds of finishing in each slot (1 through 4) in the group stage.

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