Honestly, I've felt that the "River" and "Village" metaphor is getting strained lately, especially in that NYT article. Is it supposed to be analyzing inherent features in existing groups in society? Or describing patterns of behavior that some groups tend to take? Is it really useful to say "the Village" is acting like "the River" or in a "Riverian" way? I would think the point would be clearer if it was "many establishment groups act in a risk averse way, and it's interesting that the Democratic party is making risky but sound decisions lately."
The way Silver writes, "Village vs River" is a glorified Virgin vs Chad meme where the people he likes are all smart quants and the people he doesn't like are losers.
Your opinion is not supported by any evidence I can see. In Nate's new book, there is plenty of criticism for the river, plenty of praise for the village, and vice versa. There is balanced analysis of both, and taken as a whole the river/village framework has far more depth than any meme.
I assume The Webcomics Review is referring to the NYT article specifically, and I can't help but agree with them on that front. I'm sure there's much more nuance in the book but when he tries to sell the River/Village dichotomy as a marketing hook it just comes across as petty and self-regarding.
Yes, it's not clear how it adds any insight to the political discussion as he applies it. If anything it seems to undermine the idea that these are different tribes at all.
Ahh, maybe that's it. I haven't read the NYT article, and it seems a fair number of people in these comments haven't read the book. The different context is likely the source of the different reactions.
I said this already above but the NYT article read like they told him he could plug his book in their paper if he dressed it up as an 2024 election analysis article. I figure the book itself is way more insightful.
I think it’s fairly clear that the River and the village are two particular communities of elites, according to nate, and not a broader categorization of most people or personalities. Most people are in neither. It’s more of a major divergence within the world of the rich and powerful. And his thesis would be that risk explains a lot of the split. I’m only 100 pages in so we’ll see. Ultimately I think the point is less to explain for the sake of political science and more to help people who are River-adjacent not get left behind.
It felt a little bit in that article like he was reaching to make the metaphor fit. Almost like NYT told him they’d let him plug his book in their paper if he dressed it up as an 2024 election analysis article.
I think you are missing the point. Nate has found behavioral patterns and tied them to outcomes in a significant way, and then found examples to make those concepts more easily understood. I have issues with some of his examples but his concepts are compelling. On the other hand, your conjecture feels more improvised than considered.
the Democrat view of what American "rights'" and "freedoms" are is NOT risk averse. It is completely at odds with formative American views and is authoritarian and dictatorial and is the most dangerous collection of garbage nonsense ideas to "buy votes" ever suggested by a national Party. In NO WAY is it risk averse except in dodging as much as possible anyone in the voting public actually understanding fully the ramifications of their new agenda
well he is selling a book right now. Also being able to use one word instead of "many establishment groups" helps if you're going to talk about them a lot.
I felt like the NYT article today would have been better without the River and Village framing, which didn't map cleanly on. Also, I assume Nate probably didn't write the headline.
It kind of had the opposite effect on me, though. My biggest fears with a book like this are a) pushing the framing too aggressively where it doesn't belong, b) using the terms "River" and "Village" so often that I throw the book out the window. This article seems to show both tendencies.
I notice that when you give examples of concrete Village risk aversion, you tend to use both COVID policy and free speech, which are two nice examples and very different from one another.
But I think the best class of examples---which I haven't really heard you discuss much if at all---is that many people in the contemporary Village have a political ideology that largely revolves around risk-reduction, even if it goes unstated. Universal health care, environmental protection, workplace safety standards, consumer protections, nutrition standards, etc.
A lot of these are good policies! But the underlying theme of the center-left, and I think what distinguishes them politically from both neoliberals and conservatives in many cases is this risk-mitigation focus of their public policy.
Great comment about the safetyist political ideology. I have not heard Nate say it that well, but it's true: Democrats routinely pay more for safety, and in some cases appear to massively overpay. Blue state housing regulations are another example.
yeah but the best examples of risk reduction policies, and the ones that take up a gigantic part of our national wealth, are defense spending, police spending, and jailing criminals. Not exactly democrat driven ideas.
When you start thinking about policy preferences in terms of riskiness, you also have to consider the difference between being willing to take risks on your own behalf, and being willing to take risks on behalf of others.
(On the subject of environmental protection, I feel like our current civilizational approach to climate change looks an awful lot like punting off a big stack when we've got a _very_ long tournament ahead of us).
I don't think it's so much that he's on a tilt as much as it is that he's always like this. I think the Trump we saw at the debate against Biden was influenced by a whirlwind of a month where his legal troubles seemed to continuously mount up further and further, putting him in a position where he couldn't afford to not listen to certain people giving him advice. As a result we saw a Trump that restrained himself on the debate stage, let his opponent collapse, and then proceeded to spend the next 2 weeks on vacation as his lead grew into the RNC.
However, in those 2 weeks, he was handed a slew of legal victories and a shockingly lucky assassination attempt survival, which may have made him feel invincible (both figuratively and literally?) and that he could pick a yes-man attack dog like Vance at the behest of his idiot sons over the advisings of well...actual campaign advisors. The result is the fallout we've seen since then.
And yet, he's still just a polling error away from the white house yet again.
River types aren't better at risk management, they just take bigger risks and the people who are better (or luckier!) rise to the elite ranks, leaning to a selection bias that they all succeed. But the River mindset also leads to a lot of big risks that go bust, like NFTs, the Metaverse, AI Wearables, Bed Bath and Beyond investors who STILL think their shares will take off even though the company hasn't existed in a year, and picking JD Vance as VP because you assume you have it in the bag.
What's changed with the Village is that Democrats now see the "conventional wisdom" itself as being the unreasonable risky play, and are leaning into an excite-the-base strategy in a way that they haven't in a long time. Picking Walz over Shapiro is a big example of that. Shapiro wasn't seen as the safe reasonable maximize-EVs choice, but as a pick that could potentially shatter their current unity.
A bit of further nuance here: the level of risk-affinity that's optimal in say, investment world is high enough that it's pathological in most other contexts. If you're a venture capitalist or a hedge fund trader, you're generally taking a very large number of bets, you have access to enough capital to absorb significant losses, and you're typically one of many investment staffers within your firm whose bets are probably correlated but not too correlated, so you should be very aggressive. But it's not coincidental that people who work in this world are also unusually likely to have serious gambling problems off the clock. (I work in the sector, know what it's like from personal experience, and have a risk affinity that's pretty high for a normal person but probably below average for the industry.)
I think there's good arguments for both walz or shapiro being the "risky" choice.
Shapiro pushes all the chips in on winning PA, but by picking another elite coastal lawyer, is not making any hedge towards the rest of the "blue wall", where walz' midwestern charm lets you play the field, and that doesnt even include the risk of breaking the base by reigniting tensions over gaza policy, and muslim voters possibly staying home via a sense of nihilism that neither candidate cares. Shapiro is a bet that if you can win PA, you can deliver enough other swing states to win on your own.
Walz brings an alternate viewpoint of the race. you leave PA in play in favor of more energy among a wider set of swing states. and on the policy front, you do risk alienating swing voters with a gift to the left. this brings it's own bet that I think assumes character is a bigger question for voters. that voters dont care for the personalities of the R ticket and will vote on gut feeling alone.
Personally I think Walz was the smarter pick. The thinking of Nate and others that "she has to win PA" i think oversells PA's power here, and undersells the need to win other states. that said Walz' rural charm is maybe overstated, his reelection was much closer and relied on urban areas in the twin cities to win. But I also think this cuts both ways, as shapiro was only just elected, so i'm not sure hes actually that popular and his approval is a honeymoon effect. (sarah palin had a similar effect in 2008, but after the national platform she was probably not going to be reelected)
Shapiro is the safe bet under the old logic of how to win, which is part of why Nate was stanning him. Democrats have decided the old logic was going to lead to certain demise and are picking the safe option according to the new logic, which seems to be working out so far.
I dislike your “kicking President Biden to the curb” phrasing and framing. While I (like everyone) agree that that event was critical to the turnaround, I don’t think it’s fair to imply that Biden wasn’t involved and lacked agency in the decision. He could have easily made it much harder or even neigh-impossible. Even the campaign’s insistence that he was staying in until the last minute probably just reflects that—until the decision was final—they *had* to say that. You can’t say “President Biden is considering withdrawing his candidacy” and then announce that after reflection he’s staying in the race and expect the campaign to survive.
There's a good Politico article that interviews a close aide to Biden. What could be said was said in it, and it definitely showed Biden as being pushed out, and as being pretty hurt by the push and has some resentment. Obviously, he can be both right to feel resentful and it being right for him to hand it over to Harris. He definitely has agency, but he was put into a position that only gave him one reasonable option.
Biden made the decision but it was crystal clear it was NOT his heart’s desire & involved a very large concerted effort to convince him that was the only way forward.
Well, yeah. But he was amenable to reason and decided in the best interest of Party and Country. That’s to be honoured and respected, if only because of the contrast with his opponent.
It is mutually exclusive. If he got kicked to the curb he made no decision at all. Being kicked is something that happens to you, not something you decided.
This is like saying “The dems were on tilt when they replaced Biden with Kamala”
Trump’s messaging and strategy for the last few months was aimed towards Biden as an opponent. Even after Biden dropped out, his campaign and advisors still stuck with this strategy, and it didn’t work.
He’s now adopting a new strategy aimed towards Harris. Also, he needs to focus on bringing out his base which is white voters instead of pandering and trying to switch the minds of normally democrat voters, which include blacks and hispanics.
That is a bit of a non sequitur. Also, please provide some context. Movement toward Trump since Harris replaced Biden would be relevant, but movement since 2020 would be a useless perspective here.
My perspective is that it's demographic change so the candidates of the moment are irrelevant. Trump wasn't running in 2022 and yet the share of minority votes that the Republicans pulled in continued to climb. And even in 2020 why should Hispanic voters turn out for the guy who was accused of calling illegal immigrants rapists and murderers?
Michael Lind is one of many who has pointed out that blue collar voters have been migrating to the GOP for decades and that, in recent years, that process is increasingly color blind. That probably has a lot to do with why Hispanics, with a higher percentage of blue collar workers, have shown an especially pronounced tilt towards Trump. And with black voters the switch is overwhelmingly being driven by younger generations.
What you are referring to seems mostly outside of the purview of Nate's Substack and entirely outside of the purview of this post. If there was movement towards Trump since Biden was replaced, that would certainly be relevant here given that the candidate has changed from a white man to a Black [and Indian] woman.
Since the issue is electoral politics a demographic shift among minorities is completely within the bounds of discussion here.
In addition Harris was the VP. She was on the ticket prior to Biden withdrawing. If simple racial tribalism is so potent what accounts for the well documented erosion of minority voters blocs in te Democratic Party? Is it really plausible to argue that black voters, for example, would be willing to vote for Harris as the Presidential candidate but not if she was second banana? Given Biden's age isn't a scenario where Harris takes office due to Biden's death or other health issues completely plausible?
And finally didn't Ruy Texeira just write something about how Harris' minority base still shows significant erosion compared to Obama's?
The efforts of his two new handlers to soften his image, which probably caused the transparent attempt to disallow any Project 2025 influence, have enraged some influential “influencers”. https://wapo.st/3WVuWUq
Right but Lewandowski is absolutely a "let Trump be Trump" race-baiter style pick - and there's the rally in Michigan in that Klan town today. I don't know if he's actually going to pivot away
Trump will be Trump. He showed that very publicly when he drifted quickly away from the acceptance speech prepared for him to read at the convention and segued right into a long long series of his usual series of rants. So many that some of the audience went to sleep.
There’s a very strong cancel culture that exists within the Republican Party in recent years, where anyone who is seen as going against the party gets canceled from the party. It’s the product of several interacting levels - primary voters will vote against anyone seen as insufficiently loyal to the party (and in most districts, the primary is the more relevant election); elected officials thus feel pressured to state extreme agreement with anyone who is currently supported by the primary electorate and extreme opposition to anyone who isn’t; elected officials talking this way then shapes public perceptions by primary voters in a reinforcing way. Occasionally someone has criticized some development in the party, and they have been summarily pushed out, whether it’s the Bush speechwriters, or the members of the Cheney family, or the last few moderates in swing congressional seats who voted for impeachment. While the democrats have had some minor attempts at cancellation with public figures who express sentiments that are seen as insufficiently supportive of minority groups, they haven’t pushed elected officials out of the party the way Republicans have, and particularly not for criticizing members of the party.
He's extremely popular within the Republican Party (just as he's extremely unpopular outside of it), and Republican primary voters have pretty poor recent track records of valuing electability over... being very popular within the Party, I guess? So here we are, and there they are, stuck with a suboptimal candidate.
He won in 2016 and basically battled to a drag in 2020. He was nominated partly because of a perception--a completely legitimate one in my book--that he could win.
JD vance pick was before Biden dropped out. Kind of the opposite of being on tilt, he was pretty much overconfident he was going to win and decided to pick his VP based on that.
Nate’s op-Ed in the NYT explicitly describes Trump’s choices as being on tilt, specifically “winner’s tilt,” “when a player becomes overconfident after going on a hot streak.”
Polling is obviously going to be front and central over the next 11 weeks. Going forward can you go a bit deeper into some of the variables in this unique election season? For example:
1) There's a tremendous support for Harris at rallies and on-line events (i.e. White Guys for Harris), as well as lots of people offering to volunteer. How much of this is not reflected in the polls, and how many of these people will actually vote?
2) Trump has performed about 2% better than his polling levels. Is that "Closet Trump Supporter" level still the same in 2024? In what states might this have significant impact?
3) Do the abortion referendums on various state ballots this year suggest increased voter turnout and, if so, how does that vote break between Harris and Trump, and are polls reflecting that?
4) Whatever other variables out there that you think polls may be missing, overlooking, or not emphasizing.
You've consistently provided stellar analysis of the polls, and these could be things that are already on your radar. Mentioning them because they happen to be things I'd like to see more coverage on.
I'm a curious new subscriber that is seeking a better understanding of the polling that is taking place for this election.
Reading some of the comments posted today, I know that I'm significantly out of my depth. It's like walking into a Dungeons & Dragons convention and trying to understand everything in five minutes. Prior to today the "River" was the name of a radio station in Boston, the "Village" referred to Hillary's book, and "tilt" was something that happened on pinball machines.
But I've been aware of (and a fan of) Nate from his early 538 days. He is undoubtedly a uniquely intelligent person, but his columns are always written at a very approachable common man level. He could dazzle us with all sorts of technical terms that some of his followers would get a thrill out of (such as all of the insider jokes and Easter Eggs on Futurama), but he relays information in a way that even dummies like me can appreciate.
I'm sure Nate has many things bouncing around in his head right now, and I was just throwing out some areas he might consider covering during his regular reporting.
I've been reading this blog for months, and I don't know the answers to the latter questions either. But to the first question, I believe the polls should reflect the tremendous enthusiasm.
"until early November once the election is resolved" a bit off topic for this SubStack, but I'm not confident the election will be resolved in November.
The election will be resolved in November. Trump may refuse to face reality, as he always does when reality doesn't give him what he wants, but that's not the same thing. He'll probably never concede the election; I don't think he ever conceded the 2020 election aside from moving out of the White House.
Yes, but if you have local officials refusing to certify/submit results or otherwise introducing shenanigans at the edge, it could take quite a bit to get results in.
The larger the margin of Democratic victories in November, the less legitimacy the "stop-the-steal" movement will have. Don't think for a moment that Dementia Donnie won't be having very loud conniption fits, but after 60+ unsuccessful court cases in 2020, perhaps the judicial system won't be as accommodating to his paranoid claims. And after 1000+ January 6th Insurrection participants have been arrested, perhaps Trump won't find many foot soldiers willing to sacrifice themselves for the cause of an old man in cognitive decline.
THE VILLAGE IS DROWNING. When you use organizations as a metaphor for the 'River' and the 'Village,' the members of those groups are as different from other members of their group as they are from members of the opposing group. The book is effective when you define a behavior and point out individuals who epitomize that behavior. However, when you extend it to organizations, you are left with mixed metaphors.
Love substack but all of the prices are too high. Hopefully as it grows everyone can bring them down. I don't think it's unreasonable to think I should be able to subscribe to my top 10 fav sunstacks for $5 each, $50. $20 is more than most pay for the NYT.
I respect that this is a business and Nate needs to make money, and I think it's reasonable to charge more for monthly subscriptions during election season. But continuing to charge people $20/month after the election, just because they don't realize that they (quite counterintuitively) need to click a button twice to go back to the $10/month price, is kind of not cool. I know this is Substack's default behavior, but IIUC their support team can fix it manually, and I think it would be good of Nate to ask them to do that.
My best guess is that the Substack software doesn't provide any way to do what you want, and that he's suggesting the easiest way to get the desired result.
I checked. The software indeed doesn't provide a way to do it automatically, but you can contact support after lowering your prices and they'll fix it for you.
Since the June debate I've been following the political scene obsessively, subscribing to a bunch of things beyond the mainstream publications I already took (your newsletter and your new book are part of that ever-expanding list), and I have to say that the theory of Donald Trump being on tilt is one of the most useful heurestics I have run across to parse his behavior. I just finished working up a piece on why half the country votes for him (working theory: they'rre not all fascists or crazy, though a lot of them are), so today's piece was timely for me.
I like the River and Village framework for talking about the sociocultural engines of contemporary society, but like others here it seems like the small word count of a Times Op-Ed doesn't give you space enough to make it really sticky there.
Thinking of how to work it out more thoroughly, I would concur that Trump is largely of the River--maybe generationally different from current Silicon Valley titans but with a lot of the same characteristics. (Generationally, he wasn't smart enough to be into math and computers in a time when they were mainly exotica for most of us.) But American politics itself, no matter where on the ideological spectrum, has almost always been a Village game. The only exception I can really think of is H. Ross Perot, who flashed across the screen like a fireball in 1992 before he disappeared.
There probably always has been a segment of the American populace looking for a candidate to shake up the Village game, and maybe it requires some dovetailing of popular mood and the emergence of specific figures--the 1990s had Gingrich as well as Perot, and maybe there's something to be said about the timing of that first Republican upheavel. Trump came along at a time when the old Republican Party seemed exhausted to a lot of folks, and he took a gambler's approach, basically bluffing his way to the convention in a crowded field, like he had a pair of deuces but no one else had more than a face card, and most folded before the flop.
And he never changed after that. He basically ran the same bluff against Clinton, probably not thinking he would win, but no one called him that summer, really--the mainstream press is part of the Village, as you note, and they didn't know how to see what he was doing--and he won the biggest pot anyone can ever win.
I think the Trump on tilt hypothesis has the most valence for me if I run it all the way back to November, 2016. That was the one big pot Trump one. And he never changed his strategy after that, despite continuing expectations--as recently as a month ago, post-assassination attempt--that he would. He has lost every hand since then, and my gut tells me he probably will lose this fall, despite the fact that even a modest change in strategy might let him squeak out victories in Georgia and Pennsylvania. (And he may still win anyway, who knows? But it is a long losing streak.)
So, yes, I agree, Trump is definitely on tilt right now. I'd just take it another step and posit that he's been that way ever since he won his first big pot. As to the River vs. Village trope, I would love to see an extended analysis of the ways in which Harris is being more River than Trump. She's definitely making some bets that seem risky to the Villagers at the Times and Post--playing the mem game, leaning into the authenticity of the Gen Z TikTok world, floating economic ideas that gesture beyond traditional Democratic centrism, and trying to signal that she'll be different about Israel--all of course while walking the tightrope of playing inside the Democratic Village lines.
Honestly, I've felt that the "River" and "Village" metaphor is getting strained lately, especially in that NYT article. Is it supposed to be analyzing inherent features in existing groups in society? Or describing patterns of behavior that some groups tend to take? Is it really useful to say "the Village" is acting like "the River" or in a "Riverian" way? I would think the point would be clearer if it was "many establishment groups act in a risk averse way, and it's interesting that the Democratic party is making risky but sound decisions lately."
The River/Village metaphor is very close to unintentional stereotyping, which is not a precision technique. It seems to be more a marketing tactic.
The way Silver writes, "Village vs River" is a glorified Virgin vs Chad meme where the people he likes are all smart quants and the people he doesn't like are losers.
Your opinion is not supported by any evidence I can see. In Nate's new book, there is plenty of criticism for the river, plenty of praise for the village, and vice versa. There is balanced analysis of both, and taken as a whole the river/village framework has far more depth than any meme.
I assume The Webcomics Review is referring to the NYT article specifically, and I can't help but agree with them on that front. I'm sure there's much more nuance in the book but when he tries to sell the River/Village dichotomy as a marketing hook it just comes across as petty and self-regarding.
Yes, it's not clear how it adds any insight to the political discussion as he applies it. If anything it seems to undermine the idea that these are different tribes at all.
Ahh, maybe that's it. I haven't read the NYT article, and it seems a fair number of people in these comments haven't read the book. The different context is likely the source of the different reactions.
I said this already above but the NYT article read like they told him he could plug his book in their paper if he dressed it up as an 2024 election analysis article. I figure the book itself is way more insightful.
I think it’s fairly clear that the River and the village are two particular communities of elites, according to nate, and not a broader categorization of most people or personalities. Most people are in neither. It’s more of a major divergence within the world of the rich and powerful. And his thesis would be that risk explains a lot of the split. I’m only 100 pages in so we’ll see. Ultimately I think the point is less to explain for the sake of political science and more to help people who are River-adjacent not get left behind.
Agreed. I enjoy the metaphor in the book, but there is too much nuance to employ it universally. It could get stretched too thin.
It also strikes me as a Very Online way of looking at the world.
Many people are finding it confusing.
It felt a little bit in that article like he was reaching to make the metaphor fit. Almost like NYT told him they’d let him plug his book in their paper if he dressed it up as an 2024 election analysis article.
I think you are missing the point. Nate has found behavioral patterns and tied them to outcomes in a significant way, and then found examples to make those concepts more easily understood. I have issues with some of his examples but his concepts are compelling. On the other hand, your conjecture feels more improvised than considered.
the Democrat view of what American "rights'" and "freedoms" are is NOT risk averse. It is completely at odds with formative American views and is authoritarian and dictatorial and is the most dangerous collection of garbage nonsense ideas to "buy votes" ever suggested by a national Party. In NO WAY is it risk averse except in dodging as much as possible anyone in the voting public actually understanding fully the ramifications of their new agenda
Suggested topic for you to bring up at you next counseling session; Psychological projection
It almost feels like you don't like us.
well he is selling a book right now. Also being able to use one word instead of "many establishment groups" helps if you're going to talk about them a lot.
I felt like the NYT article today would have been better without the River and Village framing, which didn't map cleanly on. Also, I assume Nate probably didn't write the headline.
The framing is there to promote the book.
Nate's gotta eat.
It kind of had the opposite effect on me, though. My biggest fears with a book like this are a) pushing the framing too aggressively where it doesn't belong, b) using the terms "River" and "Village" so often that I throw the book out the window. This article seems to show both tendencies.
It’s not widely understood terminology.
I notice that when you give examples of concrete Village risk aversion, you tend to use both COVID policy and free speech, which are two nice examples and very different from one another.
But I think the best class of examples---which I haven't really heard you discuss much if at all---is that many people in the contemporary Village have a political ideology that largely revolves around risk-reduction, even if it goes unstated. Universal health care, environmental protection, workplace safety standards, consumer protections, nutrition standards, etc.
A lot of these are good policies! But the underlying theme of the center-left, and I think what distinguishes them politically from both neoliberals and conservatives in many cases is this risk-mitigation focus of their public policy.
Great comment about the safetyist political ideology. I have not heard Nate say it that well, but it's true: Democrats routinely pay more for safety, and in some cases appear to massively overpay. Blue state housing regulations are another example.
yeah but the best examples of risk reduction policies, and the ones that take up a gigantic part of our national wealth, are defense spending, police spending, and jailing criminals. Not exactly democrat driven ideas.
When you start thinking about policy preferences in terms of riskiness, you also have to consider the difference between being willing to take risks on your own behalf, and being willing to take risks on behalf of others.
(On the subject of environmental protection, I feel like our current civilizational approach to climate change looks an awful lot like punting off a big stack when we've got a _very_ long tournament ahead of us).
I don't think it's so much that he's on a tilt as much as it is that he's always like this. I think the Trump we saw at the debate against Biden was influenced by a whirlwind of a month where his legal troubles seemed to continuously mount up further and further, putting him in a position where he couldn't afford to not listen to certain people giving him advice. As a result we saw a Trump that restrained himself on the debate stage, let his opponent collapse, and then proceeded to spend the next 2 weeks on vacation as his lead grew into the RNC.
However, in those 2 weeks, he was handed a slew of legal victories and a shockingly lucky assassination attempt survival, which may have made him feel invincible (both figuratively and literally?) and that he could pick a yes-man attack dog like Vance at the behest of his idiot sons over the advisings of well...actual campaign advisors. The result is the fallout we've seen since then.
And yet, he's still just a polling error away from the white house yet again.
River types aren't better at risk management, they just take bigger risks and the people who are better (or luckier!) rise to the elite ranks, leaning to a selection bias that they all succeed. But the River mindset also leads to a lot of big risks that go bust, like NFTs, the Metaverse, AI Wearables, Bed Bath and Beyond investors who STILL think their shares will take off even though the company hasn't existed in a year, and picking JD Vance as VP because you assume you have it in the bag.
What's changed with the Village is that Democrats now see the "conventional wisdom" itself as being the unreasonable risky play, and are leaning into an excite-the-base strategy in a way that they haven't in a long time. Picking Walz over Shapiro is a big example of that. Shapiro wasn't seen as the safe reasonable maximize-EVs choice, but as a pick that could potentially shatter their current unity.
A bit of further nuance here: the level of risk-affinity that's optimal in say, investment world is high enough that it's pathological in most other contexts. If you're a venture capitalist or a hedge fund trader, you're generally taking a very large number of bets, you have access to enough capital to absorb significant losses, and you're typically one of many investment staffers within your firm whose bets are probably correlated but not too correlated, so you should be very aggressive. But it's not coincidental that people who work in this world are also unusually likely to have serious gambling problems off the clock. (I work in the sector, know what it's like from personal experience, and have a risk affinity that's pretty high for a normal person but probably below average for the industry.)
I think there's good arguments for both walz or shapiro being the "risky" choice.
Shapiro pushes all the chips in on winning PA, but by picking another elite coastal lawyer, is not making any hedge towards the rest of the "blue wall", where walz' midwestern charm lets you play the field, and that doesnt even include the risk of breaking the base by reigniting tensions over gaza policy, and muslim voters possibly staying home via a sense of nihilism that neither candidate cares. Shapiro is a bet that if you can win PA, you can deliver enough other swing states to win on your own.
Walz brings an alternate viewpoint of the race. you leave PA in play in favor of more energy among a wider set of swing states. and on the policy front, you do risk alienating swing voters with a gift to the left. this brings it's own bet that I think assumes character is a bigger question for voters. that voters dont care for the personalities of the R ticket and will vote on gut feeling alone.
Personally I think Walz was the smarter pick. The thinking of Nate and others that "she has to win PA" i think oversells PA's power here, and undersells the need to win other states. that said Walz' rural charm is maybe overstated, his reelection was much closer and relied on urban areas in the twin cities to win. But I also think this cuts both ways, as shapiro was only just elected, so i'm not sure hes actually that popular and his approval is a honeymoon effect. (sarah palin had a similar effect in 2008, but after the national platform she was probably not going to be reelected)
Shapiro is the safe bet under the old logic of how to win, which is part of why Nate was stanning him. Democrats have decided the old logic was going to lead to certain demise and are picking the safe option according to the new logic, which seems to be working out so far.
I dislike your “kicking President Biden to the curb” phrasing and framing. While I (like everyone) agree that that event was critical to the turnaround, I don’t think it’s fair to imply that Biden wasn’t involved and lacked agency in the decision. He could have easily made it much harder or even neigh-impossible. Even the campaign’s insistence that he was staying in until the last minute probably just reflects that—until the decision was final—they *had* to say that. You can’t say “President Biden is considering withdrawing his candidacy” and then announce that after reflection he’s staying in the race and expect the campaign to survive.
Agreed, pointlessly rude. Nancy Pelosi said it much better back when President Biden was still making his decision.
There's a good Politico article that interviews a close aide to Biden. What could be said was said in it, and it definitely showed Biden as being pushed out, and as being pretty hurt by the push and has some resentment. Obviously, he can be both right to feel resentful and it being right for him to hand it over to Harris. He definitely has agency, but he was put into a position that only gave him one reasonable option.
Biden made the decision but it was crystal clear it was NOT his heart’s desire & involved a very large concerted effort to convince him that was the only way forward.
Well, yeah. But he was amenable to reason and decided in the best interest of Party and Country. That’s to be honoured and respected, if only because of the contrast with his opponent.
He got kicked to the curb, that’s not mutually exclusive with him making a good decision for the better of the country.
You sound like one of his aides in an interview last week shameless trying to spin.
That’s odd. I was trying to sound like someone who had an opinion and explained it carefully and clearly without the need for childish insults.
Try harder. 🤷♂️
Or fold on the loser hand 😜
It is mutually exclusive. If he got kicked to the curb he made no decision at all. Being kicked is something that happens to you, not something you decided.
Nope
Lol okay https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=kick%20to%20the%20curb
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/kick%20to%20the%20curb?utm_campaign=sd&utm_medium=serp&utm_source=jsonld
A term from the poker world which is actually a term from the pinball world.
And before that it was a term in Newtonian physics. :)
This is like saying “The dems were on tilt when they replaced Biden with Kamala”
Trump’s messaging and strategy for the last few months was aimed towards Biden as an opponent. Even after Biden dropped out, his campaign and advisors still stuck with this strategy, and it didn’t work.
He’s now adopting a new strategy aimed towards Harris. Also, he needs to focus on bringing out his base which is white voters instead of pandering and trying to switch the minds of normally democrat voters, which include blacks and hispanics.
"He’s now adopting a new strategy aimed towards Harris."
I have not seen any evidence of that. He was still rambling on about Hunter Biden in his speech in Pennsylvania yesterday.
Poll after poll has shown substantial movement in black and Hispanic voters towards Trump. It would be crazy not to try to attract them.
That is a bit of a non sequitur. Also, please provide some context. Movement toward Trump since Harris replaced Biden would be relevant, but movement since 2020 would be a useless perspective here.
My perspective is that it's demographic change so the candidates of the moment are irrelevant. Trump wasn't running in 2022 and yet the share of minority votes that the Republicans pulled in continued to climb. And even in 2020 why should Hispanic voters turn out for the guy who was accused of calling illegal immigrants rapists and murderers?
Michael Lind is one of many who has pointed out that blue collar voters have been migrating to the GOP for decades and that, in recent years, that process is increasingly color blind. That probably has a lot to do with why Hispanics, with a higher percentage of blue collar workers, have shown an especially pronounced tilt towards Trump. And with black voters the switch is overwhelmingly being driven by younger generations.
What you are referring to seems mostly outside of the purview of Nate's Substack and entirely outside of the purview of this post. If there was movement towards Trump since Biden was replaced, that would certainly be relevant here given that the candidate has changed from a white man to a Black [and Indian] woman.
Slaw is a fully dishonest hack. He’s trying to shoehorn in an argument that:
1) doesn’t fit the discussion conceptually
2) doesn’t fit the data (see cumulative trend of cross tabs post-Harris at top of ticket)
3) doesn’t make a lick of sense internally, Trump’s racism angled attacks on Harris is aimed at drawing what voters now????
You know, it's the sign of a coward when you're too afraid to reply directly to the person you disagree with.
Since the issue is electoral politics a demographic shift among minorities is completely within the bounds of discussion here.
In addition Harris was the VP. She was on the ticket prior to Biden withdrawing. If simple racial tribalism is so potent what accounts for the well documented erosion of minority voters blocs in te Democratic Party? Is it really plausible to argue that black voters, for example, would be willing to vote for Harris as the Presidential candidate but not if she was second banana? Given Biden's age isn't a scenario where Harris takes office due to Biden's death or other health issues completely plausible?
And finally didn't Ruy Texeira just write something about how Harris' minority base still shows significant erosion compared to Obama's?
🗑️
The efforts of his two new handlers to soften his image, which probably caused the transparent attempt to disallow any Project 2025 influence, have enraged some influential “influencers”. https://wapo.st/3WVuWUq
Right but Lewandowski is absolutely a "let Trump be Trump" race-baiter style pick - and there's the rally in Michigan in that Klan town today. I don't know if he's actually going to pivot away
Trump will be Trump. He showed that very publicly when he drifted quickly away from the acceptance speech prepared for him to read at the convention and segued right into a long long series of his usual series of rants. So many that some of the audience went to sleep.
He’s hopeless. I don’t understand how he got the nomination.
There’s a very strong cancel culture that exists within the Republican Party in recent years, where anyone who is seen as going against the party gets canceled from the party. It’s the product of several interacting levels - primary voters will vote against anyone seen as insufficiently loyal to the party (and in most districts, the primary is the more relevant election); elected officials thus feel pressured to state extreme agreement with anyone who is currently supported by the primary electorate and extreme opposition to anyone who isn’t; elected officials talking this way then shapes public perceptions by primary voters in a reinforcing way. Occasionally someone has criticized some development in the party, and they have been summarily pushed out, whether it’s the Bush speechwriters, or the members of the Cheney family, or the last few moderates in swing congressional seats who voted for impeachment. While the democrats have had some minor attempts at cancellation with public figures who express sentiments that are seen as insufficiently supportive of minority groups, they haven’t pushed elected officials out of the party the way Republicans have, and particularly not for criticizing members of the party.
He's extremely popular within the Republican Party (just as he's extremely unpopular outside of it), and Republican primary voters have pretty poor recent track records of valuing electability over... being very popular within the Party, I guess? So here we are, and there they are, stuck with a suboptimal candidate.
He won in 2016 and basically battled to a drag in 2020. He was nominated partly because of a perception--a completely legitimate one in my book--that he could win.
Losing the popular vote by 4.5 and the EC by 74 votes is a draw? By that reasoning, Gore won a landslide.
those people have a point and are right
Only if you want Trump to lose. Pure MAGA has a ceiling, and it's below 50%. The pros attempting to run his campaign understand that.
Messaging, yes. strategy maybe. Was JD Vance a choice on tilt even against Biden is the question.
JD vance pick was before Biden dropped out. Kind of the opposite of being on tilt, he was pretty much overconfident he was going to win and decided to pick his VP based on that.
Nate’s op-Ed in the NYT explicitly describes Trump’s choices as being on tilt, specifically “winner’s tilt,” “when a player becomes overconfident after going on a hot streak.”
Trump's winner's tilt has segued seamlessly into loser's tilt.
Overconfidence is still tilt.
Nate,
Polling is obviously going to be front and central over the next 11 weeks. Going forward can you go a bit deeper into some of the variables in this unique election season? For example:
1) There's a tremendous support for Harris at rallies and on-line events (i.e. White Guys for Harris), as well as lots of people offering to volunteer. How much of this is not reflected in the polls, and how many of these people will actually vote?
2) Trump has performed about 2% better than his polling levels. Is that "Closet Trump Supporter" level still the same in 2024? In what states might this have significant impact?
3) Do the abortion referendums on various state ballots this year suggest increased voter turnout and, if so, how does that vote break between Harris and Trump, and are polls reflecting that?
4) Whatever other variables out there that you think polls may be missing, overlooking, or not emphasizing.
You've consistently provided stellar analysis of the polls, and these could be things that are already on your radar. Mentioning them because they happen to be things I'd like to see more coverage on.
Thanks.
1. Why would you assume it is not reflected in the polls?
I'm a curious new subscriber that is seeking a better understanding of the polling that is taking place for this election.
Reading some of the comments posted today, I know that I'm significantly out of my depth. It's like walking into a Dungeons & Dragons convention and trying to understand everything in five minutes. Prior to today the "River" was the name of a radio station in Boston, the "Village" referred to Hillary's book, and "tilt" was something that happened on pinball machines.
But I've been aware of (and a fan of) Nate from his early 538 days. He is undoubtedly a uniquely intelligent person, but his columns are always written at a very approachable common man level. He could dazzle us with all sorts of technical terms that some of his followers would get a thrill out of (such as all of the insider jokes and Easter Eggs on Futurama), but he relays information in a way that even dummies like me can appreciate.
I'm sure Nate has many things bouncing around in his head right now, and I was just throwing out some areas he might consider covering during his regular reporting.
I've been reading this blog for months, and I don't know the answers to the latter questions either. But to the first question, I believe the polls should reflect the tremendous enthusiasm.
"until early November once the election is resolved" a bit off topic for this SubStack, but I'm not confident the election will be resolved in November.
The election will be resolved in November. Trump may refuse to face reality, as he always does when reality doesn't give him what he wants, but that's not the same thing. He'll probably never concede the election; I don't think he ever conceded the 2020 election aside from moving out of the White House.
Yes, but if you have local officials refusing to certify/submit results or otherwise introducing shenanigans at the edge, it could take quite a bit to get results in.
Sadly, I have to agree.
The larger the margin of Democratic victories in November, the less legitimacy the "stop-the-steal" movement will have. Don't think for a moment that Dementia Donnie won't be having very loud conniption fits, but after 60+ unsuccessful court cases in 2020, perhaps the judicial system won't be as accommodating to his paranoid claims. And after 1000+ January 6th Insurrection participants have been arrested, perhaps Trump won't find many foot soldiers willing to sacrifice themselves for the cause of an old man in cognitive decline.
For statistical purposes it will be. The model doesn't try to track non-voting methods of contesting the election.
THE VILLAGE IS DROWNING. When you use organizations as a metaphor for the 'River' and the 'Village,' the members of those groups are as different from other members of their group as they are from members of the opposing group. The book is effective when you define a behavior and point out individuals who epitomize that behavior. However, when you extend it to organizations, you are left with mixed metaphors.
Yeah, Nate really went on tilt today.
Thanks for the reply. Tell me more.
Love substack but all of the prices are too high. Hopefully as it grows everyone can bring them down. I don't think it's unreasonable to think I should be able to subscribe to my top 10 fav sunstacks for $5 each, $50. $20 is more than most pay for the NYT.
I didn’t look at the new price, but is this $20/month with no long term commitment?
As it is I’m paying a little under $8/month for a year. I assume this new payment is to extract value from election model?
I respect that this is a business and Nate needs to make money, and I think it's reasonable to charge more for monthly subscriptions during election season. But continuing to charge people $20/month after the election, just because they don't realize that they (quite counterintuitively) need to click a button twice to go back to the $10/month price, is kind of not cool. I know this is Substack's default behavior, but IIUC their support team can fix it manually, and I think it would be good of Nate to ask them to do that.
My best guess is that the Substack software doesn't provide any way to do what you want, and that he's suggesting the easiest way to get the desired result.
Just a guess, though.
I checked. The software indeed doesn't provide a way to do it automatically, but you can contact support after lowering your prices and they'll fix it for you.
Im hoping Powells in Portland, OR can book you! Seems like the right kind of bookstore you’d do!
Since the June debate I've been following the political scene obsessively, subscribing to a bunch of things beyond the mainstream publications I already took (your newsletter and your new book are part of that ever-expanding list), and I have to say that the theory of Donald Trump being on tilt is one of the most useful heurestics I have run across to parse his behavior. I just finished working up a piece on why half the country votes for him (working theory: they'rre not all fascists or crazy, though a lot of them are), so today's piece was timely for me.
I like the River and Village framework for talking about the sociocultural engines of contemporary society, but like others here it seems like the small word count of a Times Op-Ed doesn't give you space enough to make it really sticky there.
Thinking of how to work it out more thoroughly, I would concur that Trump is largely of the River--maybe generationally different from current Silicon Valley titans but with a lot of the same characteristics. (Generationally, he wasn't smart enough to be into math and computers in a time when they were mainly exotica for most of us.) But American politics itself, no matter where on the ideological spectrum, has almost always been a Village game. The only exception I can really think of is H. Ross Perot, who flashed across the screen like a fireball in 1992 before he disappeared.
There probably always has been a segment of the American populace looking for a candidate to shake up the Village game, and maybe it requires some dovetailing of popular mood and the emergence of specific figures--the 1990s had Gingrich as well as Perot, and maybe there's something to be said about the timing of that first Republican upheavel. Trump came along at a time when the old Republican Party seemed exhausted to a lot of folks, and he took a gambler's approach, basically bluffing his way to the convention in a crowded field, like he had a pair of deuces but no one else had more than a face card, and most folded before the flop.
And he never changed after that. He basically ran the same bluff against Clinton, probably not thinking he would win, but no one called him that summer, really--the mainstream press is part of the Village, as you note, and they didn't know how to see what he was doing--and he won the biggest pot anyone can ever win.
I think the Trump on tilt hypothesis has the most valence for me if I run it all the way back to November, 2016. That was the one big pot Trump one. And he never changed his strategy after that, despite continuing expectations--as recently as a month ago, post-assassination attempt--that he would. He has lost every hand since then, and my gut tells me he probably will lose this fall, despite the fact that even a modest change in strategy might let him squeak out victories in Georgia and Pennsylvania. (And he may still win anyway, who knows? But it is a long losing streak.)
So, yes, I agree, Trump is definitely on tilt right now. I'd just take it another step and posit that he's been that way ever since he won his first big pot. As to the River vs. Village trope, I would love to see an extended analysis of the ways in which Harris is being more River than Trump. She's definitely making some bets that seem risky to the Villagers at the Times and Post--playing the mem game, leaning into the authenticity of the Gen Z TikTok world, floating economic ideas that gesture beyond traditional Democratic centrism, and trying to signal that she'll be different about Israel--all of course while walking the tightrope of playing inside the Democratic Village lines.
I loved Nate’s piece today, on point.