I am not totally bought in to the Village/River narrative, but more because it doesn't really cover the spectrum of political operators - perhaps it is not really meant to. Trump, for example, is clearly a long way from the River. He doesn't maximise EV in any real sense. I guess you could say he tries to maximise his own wealth and his own public profile, but not in a calculated way that you would expect of the River. Equally, I can't see him in the Village - given he is attacking all the institutions that you identify as forming it. However, if he is good at anything it is politics (and I guess he must be good at that if he has been elected twice) and not profit-making through truth-seeking, which might define the River. I guess he actually lies closer to the Village, but as a rival to the 'left' Village in the same way as the River features rival corporations. Perhaps there is a different group which is made for people like him, who are risk-seeking, but not for the calculated benefit the River participants seek. ChatGPT came up with the following possible names for the group...
Here are some name ideas that would fit in the “Village/River” metaphor style:
The Storm – unpredictable, turbulent, thrives on chaos.
The Arena – where politics is a blood sport and winning is all that matters.
The Volcano – volatile, explosive, reshapes the landscape when it erupts.
The Game – viewing politics as a contest to be won, not a system to uphold or a truth to find.
The Carnival – spectacle, drama, and chaos as the main currency.
The Wilds – unbounded, opportunistic, outside the managed flows of the River or the order of the Village.
The River/Village metaphor is not nearly as good as Nate thinks it is and this post feels a little forced in trying to explain current events. The Village conception relies too much on stereotypes and Nate over represents the prevalence and influence of River personalities because he spends so much time with them.
If the Village and the River occupy opposite quadrants of a plane defined on one axis by being "data-driven" vs "vibes-driven", and the other is something like "risk-seeking vs risk-averse"... or maybe it should be "pro-stability" vs "pro-breaking-things", or "cooperative" vs "competitive", or "community-minded" vs "individualist", then maybe we have something like:
| Cooperative | Competitive
---------|------------------|--------------------
Vibes | Village | Carnival
Data | Lab(?) | River
You (or ChatGPT) could probably come up with a better name than The Lab. That's definitely the quadrant I most identify with, and always feel left out of the River vs Village characterization, because I feel like I share the data-minded outlook of the prototypical River type (which is why I read Nate), but I'm not personally a fan of the high risk "move fast and break things" mentality of The River. I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Bayesian when it comes to epistemology, but I guess my utility function is more concave than most Riverians. In other words, when it comes time to optimize expected utility integrating over the joint belief and prediction distribution, the asymmetry I apply to seeking potential gains vs avoiding potential losses is greater, and so the expectation-maximizing action for me is more cautious, than what you'd typically associate with the River.
I like this. It opens up to more of what we see. Mamdani (I hope) is more in the lab and Trump is more in the carnival. It at least gets us closer to explaining something as opposed to a duopoly which leaves out the progressive gambler.
The Wilds – a third domain, outside both the Village and the River. Populated by risk-seeking political operators who thrive on volatility and spectacle rather than calculated, long-term gains. They are driven by power, status, and disruption more than truth-seeking or institutional preservation. The Wilds produce figures who can dominate the political arena without aligning with either the River’s rational profit-maximisation or the Village’s consensus-building.
I would encourage you to read the book because the nuance is discussed much more there than it has been. The Village vs River breakdown isn't one of political division, but of cohesion, enforcement, and philosophy. The Village is effectively self-policing and ousts anyone that doesn't meet their specific criteria, leaving pretty much every outsider as the "River" (of which there are various upstream, downstream variants discussed in the book). This is why you see such weird alliances like RFK Jr and Trump, or Elon Musk and Trump. While they disagree with each other on almost all points, the one thing they have in common is they have been ousted from the Village, and see the other person as someone they can use for their own purposes.
For those of us who use AI at work, I think we've started to realize how limited it is. I've been using it since February, was skeptical, went all in, then realized it was actually costing me more time than me just coding myself. I use it for situations where I have no idea what to do (decoding Spark's ridiculous error messages and fixing my config file), but my intern (not yet completed grad school) just finished a project faster without AI than with it. He's a good intern, but I don't think that's the level people are envisioning for AI.
I have recently been using GPT-5 instead of Claude 4 Sonnet and have detected fewer errors... But still enough that I spend more time doing code review than it would have taken to write it myself. I find myself wondering what's going to happen to all of these AI companies when the VC money runs dry.
I heard someone say that the only companies letting people go because of AI are companies trying to sell AI as a work reduction tool. Anybody who uses it knows that’s not the case.
Can you explain what distinction you're making here between a work reduction tool and.... what? Superintelligence? It seems to me virtually all of the use cases of AI so far are about letting people do some sort of automation of certain steps in a workflow. Is that not what you mean by work reduction tool?
I guess the other big set of use cases I can think of are drawing on LLMs' ability to map text or image data, both of which have deep and complex semantics that in many instances are difficult or impossible to define in a uniform structure that covers all the potential inputs you care about, to a mathematical representation (which is informed by huge training sets) that can be used in downstream processes. So there you're not exactly using it as a labor-saving device, you're using it as a way to draw on data sources you would have had a hard time making use of before. But those sorts of use cases are pretty technical and not likely to be the ones end users are engaging with very often?
I would like to see a bit more of a thorough discussion of the role of expertise in this discussion especially in light of the firing of the BLS commissioner... To me there were a fair number of centrists who thought experts in the medical establishment, public health, legal circles, academia etc. had gotten a bit over their skis with how liberal they were, and were losing credibility.
So while Trump wouldn't be an ideal president perhaps he was a necessary corrective against an overly politicized expert class. But with the firing of the BLS commissioner and replacement with an incompetent hack who has no knowledge of data collection, we see that even impeccable technical credentials, bipartisan support and a fastidious commitment to rigorous methods isn't worth anything if it puts you crosswise with Trump in even the most modest way.
So I don't know if there is any way for any experts to retain credibility anymore. And this is not the fault of the experts, it's the fact that some people are very interested in contesting things that were considered outside the realm of political contestation 20 years ago, like vaccines and unbiased statistics.
The follies of the River are well described in Adam Becker, More Everything Forever, and regularly by Paul Krugman, a card carrying Villager. The primary distinction is differing views of justice: the Village is Rawlsian, the River a crude combination of utilitarian and libertarian.
I think it is a mistake to associate someone's risk preference with virtue or vice.
1. If you want to make the case that society needs individuals who are risk loving, risk averse, and risk neutral, I agree. Yes! Diversity is good!!.
2. If you want to make the case that the establishment (or " the Village") fails to appreciate what risk-loving entrepreneurs (and other members of "the River") offer society, I am still very much with you. This follows directly from #1. We need people of all types. Given the risk-reward ratio, progress depends on some proportion of the risk lovers (perhaps more than we see in the current population).
3. If you want to argue that there are many risk lovers and risk haters who conflate probabilty and risk (i.e., too many risk haters overestimate the probability of doom and too many risk lovers overestimate the probability of boon), I am very much with you. I wish we humans were better at separating risk preference from risk assessment, but, alas, this seems like a rare ability. Nate seems to suggest that this ability is better represented in "the River," but I am not convinced.
4. I also buy into the notion (and I think might be Nate's most important insight) that we have professionally sorted by risk preference with fields like government* and higher education* dominated by people with a lower tolerance for risk and fields like finance and tech dominated by people with a higher tolerance for risk. This sorting is detrimental to everybody. The cautious bureaucrat and the reckless tech executive may be stereotypes - but they are not completely unfounded. Finance and tech could use some prudence. Government and higher ed can use some entrepreneurialism.
5. HOWEVER, I bristle at the suggestion that risk lovers are smarter, more virtuous, or more socially valuable than others. See #1! I think Nate is mostly arguing 1-4, but occasionally lapses into the more narrow-minded #5.
*To be transparent, I am proud to be a former local government public servant and current higher education administrator.
Read "The Empire of AI" by Karen Hao to learn everything about OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and other AI leaders that they're not telling you. Yes, AI is becoming enormously powerful. The costs in environmental destruction, human suffering, and colonial-style exploitation are staggering. Sam Altman may be talented, but he is one of the most manipulative dissemblers in Silicon Valley, and that's saying something. WARNING: You will not want to use AI after reading this book.
A general question and I think it will help highlight the problem with this duopoly: where does Mamdani (and Bernie and other populist socialists) fit? The river or the village? He’s definitely not the village, and I’d consider progressives as part of the River. They’re not risk averse, they just don’t line up with the capitalist/libertarian portion.
The fact is the river is a way to divide insider and outsider with risk tolerant, gambling types on what side and established institutions on the other. The general problem with the risk tolerant group being characterized as “libertarian” and more capitalistic (taking business risks or however you want to divide), excludes a huge chunk of risk tolerant folks who want progressive change. The progressive yimby’s, the abundance folks, the folks who want universal healthcare or at least a public option, the folks who want to increase taxes on the wealthy to redistribute and balance the classes in this country. These are big risks with big rewards. They include reducing car lanes and adding bicycling and trams/light rail, rezoning vast swaths of land, investing in nuclear energy and so on. The progressive of this mind dreams big, expects more and is highly skeptical of the establishment. We don’t even want to hurt businesses, we just want the government to take risks, act fast, fail fast and fix the failures fast. So we can all get better lives faster. And accelerate businesses that can help too where the government struggles. Do we all agree on everything over here as progressives? No, but there’s room for folks who want things to be better tomorrow, not 10 years out.
I haven’t read On the Edge so apologies if I’m misunderstanding, but my sense is that Trump has one foot in the river and one in the conservative version of the Village. At his best, he’s trying to bring Silicon Valley-esque business acumen to DC, which I think is much needed. I am a left-of-center liberal but surely we’re all aware of how bloated and outdated the federal government is. But, core MAGA voters, Trump’s OG ride-or-dies, are firmly entrenched in some very unpopular but long-established value systems, esp around social issues like gay marriage, abortion, THC, etc. That is Trump at his worst imho.
If a pro-business liberal was the candidate for the DNC (maybe like a Jared Polis? Idk), people like Elon would run to that side and Trump would be left with the weird racist uncles he started out with.
I'd love to listen to you and Matty Yglesias discuss how the Trump Administration is navigating AI policy and where that diverges from Riverian consensus.
Thanks Nate for your discussion. I am your subscriber but live far away from US, so don't understand US politics much. One question I would like to ask you if whether the "Riverian" persons still support Donald Trump, given the daily chaos on tariffs, his incompetent and hypocritical subordinates (at least in my opinion), destruction of scientific research, inconsistent and impulse policies, firing of BLS chief (the new guy is just horrible, even worse than the China statistics people) and his clear intention to destroy democracy as I (or we) understand?
I disagree with your analogy of MAGA is the river and Progressives are the village.
How aggressive MAGA/Progressives can be is a matter of vote counting, which is particularly clear in the Senate.
In 2021, Democrats needed all 51 votes and had arguably two "moderates" (Manchin and Sinema) and in 2025 the GOP have two "moderates" (Collins and Murkowski) in the Senate. But Democrats couldn't pass anything without both moderates going along, whereas the GOP can lose both moderates and still carry the day with a vote to spare (since the VP is a Republican). That means MAGA can pass more ideological pure (extreme) policies than the Progressives could. Go back five years and switch two red seats to blue and it would have been Progressives being bigger risk takers than the GOP.
There were a lot more moderates in both parties back then. Trump/Sanders in 2016 started movements in the two parties that tribalized them by the 2024 election.
What policies did Democrats seek when they had the trifecta that they didn't get, other than when the filibuster or Manchin or Sinema stopped them? Even former moderates, like Tester, Casey, and Brown went along with the progressives.... and is why they lost reelection.
Both parties have pretty much "purified" themselves of non-MAGA/non-progressives. If you disagree, who are your examples in congress (either chamber) other than Collins and Murkowski?
I think the demonym for the people of the river should probably be Riparian, or maybe Lotic, or Fluvian, if it be critical that being in the flow of the river as opposed to on its banks be emphasized. "Riverian" doesn't seem like good usage from where I'm sitting.
I think Steve High has some interesting points. For myself, I was looking more for the rest of the people, the farm hands and ranch hands and trades people, which is somewhat congruent with the folks who made Mr Trump President. What I read suggests that Black males and Hispanics gave President Trump his edge. People thought Candidate Trump was wasting time campaigning in NYC, with no Electoral College votes to be hand, but it paid off across the Fruited Plain.
I did expect a few paragraphs better relating "The River" to its [assumed] associated.
If it takes these many words to explain some words you have tried to coin, it just isn't happening.
I am not totally bought in to the Village/River narrative, but more because it doesn't really cover the spectrum of political operators - perhaps it is not really meant to. Trump, for example, is clearly a long way from the River. He doesn't maximise EV in any real sense. I guess you could say he tries to maximise his own wealth and his own public profile, but not in a calculated way that you would expect of the River. Equally, I can't see him in the Village - given he is attacking all the institutions that you identify as forming it. However, if he is good at anything it is politics (and I guess he must be good at that if he has been elected twice) and not profit-making through truth-seeking, which might define the River. I guess he actually lies closer to the Village, but as a rival to the 'left' Village in the same way as the River features rival corporations. Perhaps there is a different group which is made for people like him, who are risk-seeking, but not for the calculated benefit the River participants seek. ChatGPT came up with the following possible names for the group...
Here are some name ideas that would fit in the “Village/River” metaphor style:
The Storm – unpredictable, turbulent, thrives on chaos.
The Arena – where politics is a blood sport and winning is all that matters.
The Volcano – volatile, explosive, reshapes the landscape when it erupts.
The Game – viewing politics as a contest to be won, not a system to uphold or a truth to find.
The Carnival – spectacle, drama, and chaos as the main currency.
The Wilds – unbounded, opportunistic, outside the managed flows of the River or the order of the Village.
The River/Village metaphor is not nearly as good as Nate thinks it is and this post feels a little forced in trying to explain current events. The Village conception relies too much on stereotypes and Nate over represents the prevalence and influence of River personalities because he spends so much time with them.
If the Village and the River occupy opposite quadrants of a plane defined on one axis by being "data-driven" vs "vibes-driven", and the other is something like "risk-seeking vs risk-averse"... or maybe it should be "pro-stability" vs "pro-breaking-things", or "cooperative" vs "competitive", or "community-minded" vs "individualist", then maybe we have something like:
| Cooperative | Competitive
---------|------------------|--------------------
Vibes | Village | Carnival
Data | Lab(?) | River
You (or ChatGPT) could probably come up with a better name than The Lab. That's definitely the quadrant I most identify with, and always feel left out of the River vs Village characterization, because I feel like I share the data-minded outlook of the prototypical River type (which is why I read Nate), but I'm not personally a fan of the high risk "move fast and break things" mentality of The River. I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Bayesian when it comes to epistemology, but I guess my utility function is more concave than most Riverians. In other words, when it comes time to optimize expected utility integrating over the joint belief and prediction distribution, the asymmetry I apply to seeking potential gains vs avoiding potential losses is greater, and so the expectation-maximizing action for me is more cautious, than what you'd typically associate with the River.
Curse you Substack comments for not using the Markdown standard and mangling my table :-)
I like this. It opens up to more of what we see. Mamdani (I hope) is more in the lab and Trump is more in the carnival. It at least gets us closer to explaining something as opposed to a duopoly which leaves out the progressive gambler.
Further ChatGPT framing...
The Wilds – a third domain, outside both the Village and the River. Populated by risk-seeking political operators who thrive on volatility and spectacle rather than calculated, long-term gains. They are driven by power, status, and disruption more than truth-seeking or institutional preservation. The Wilds produce figures who can dominate the political arena without aligning with either the River’s rational profit-maximisation or the Village’s consensus-building.
I would encourage you to read the book because the nuance is discussed much more there than it has been. The Village vs River breakdown isn't one of political division, but of cohesion, enforcement, and philosophy. The Village is effectively self-policing and ousts anyone that doesn't meet their specific criteria, leaving pretty much every outsider as the "River" (of which there are various upstream, downstream variants discussed in the book). This is why you see such weird alliances like RFK Jr and Trump, or Elon Musk and Trump. While they disagree with each other on almost all points, the one thing they have in common is they have been ousted from the Village, and see the other person as someone they can use for their own purposes.
For those of us who use AI at work, I think we've started to realize how limited it is. I've been using it since February, was skeptical, went all in, then realized it was actually costing me more time than me just coding myself. I use it for situations where I have no idea what to do (decoding Spark's ridiculous error messages and fixing my config file), but my intern (not yet completed grad school) just finished a project faster without AI than with it. He's a good intern, but I don't think that's the level people are envisioning for AI.
I have recently been using GPT-5 instead of Claude 4 Sonnet and have detected fewer errors... But still enough that I spend more time doing code review than it would have taken to write it myself. I find myself wondering what's going to happen to all of these AI companies when the VC money runs dry.
I heard someone say that the only companies letting people go because of AI are companies trying to sell AI as a work reduction tool. Anybody who uses it knows that’s not the case.
Can you explain what distinction you're making here between a work reduction tool and.... what? Superintelligence? It seems to me virtually all of the use cases of AI so far are about letting people do some sort of automation of certain steps in a workflow. Is that not what you mean by work reduction tool?
I guess the other big set of use cases I can think of are drawing on LLMs' ability to map text or image data, both of which have deep and complex semantics that in many instances are difficult or impossible to define in a uniform structure that covers all the potential inputs you care about, to a mathematical representation (which is informed by huge training sets) that can be used in downstream processes. So there you're not exactly using it as a labor-saving device, you're using it as a way to draw on data sources you would have had a hard time making use of before. But those sorts of use cases are pretty technical and not likely to be the ones end users are engaging with very often?
I would like to see a bit more of a thorough discussion of the role of expertise in this discussion especially in light of the firing of the BLS commissioner... To me there were a fair number of centrists who thought experts in the medical establishment, public health, legal circles, academia etc. had gotten a bit over their skis with how liberal they were, and were losing credibility.
So while Trump wouldn't be an ideal president perhaps he was a necessary corrective against an overly politicized expert class. But with the firing of the BLS commissioner and replacement with an incompetent hack who has no knowledge of data collection, we see that even impeccable technical credentials, bipartisan support and a fastidious commitment to rigorous methods isn't worth anything if it puts you crosswise with Trump in even the most modest way.
So I don't know if there is any way for any experts to retain credibility anymore. And this is not the fault of the experts, it's the fact that some people are very interested in contesting things that were considered outside the realm of political contestation 20 years ago, like vaccines and unbiased statistics.
The follies of the River are well described in Adam Becker, More Everything Forever, and regularly by Paul Krugman, a card carrying Villager. The primary distinction is differing views of justice: the Village is Rawlsian, the River a crude combination of utilitarian and libertarian.
I think it is a mistake to associate someone's risk preference with virtue or vice.
1. If you want to make the case that society needs individuals who are risk loving, risk averse, and risk neutral, I agree. Yes! Diversity is good!!.
2. If you want to make the case that the establishment (or " the Village") fails to appreciate what risk-loving entrepreneurs (and other members of "the River") offer society, I am still very much with you. This follows directly from #1. We need people of all types. Given the risk-reward ratio, progress depends on some proportion of the risk lovers (perhaps more than we see in the current population).
3. If you want to argue that there are many risk lovers and risk haters who conflate probabilty and risk (i.e., too many risk haters overestimate the probability of doom and too many risk lovers overestimate the probability of boon), I am very much with you. I wish we humans were better at separating risk preference from risk assessment, but, alas, this seems like a rare ability. Nate seems to suggest that this ability is better represented in "the River," but I am not convinced.
4. I also buy into the notion (and I think might be Nate's most important insight) that we have professionally sorted by risk preference with fields like government* and higher education* dominated by people with a lower tolerance for risk and fields like finance and tech dominated by people with a higher tolerance for risk. This sorting is detrimental to everybody. The cautious bureaucrat and the reckless tech executive may be stereotypes - but they are not completely unfounded. Finance and tech could use some prudence. Government and higher ed can use some entrepreneurialism.
5. HOWEVER, I bristle at the suggestion that risk lovers are smarter, more virtuous, or more socially valuable than others. See #1! I think Nate is mostly arguing 1-4, but occasionally lapses into the more narrow-minded #5.
*To be transparent, I am proud to be a former local government public servant and current higher education administrator.
Read "The Empire of AI" by Karen Hao to learn everything about OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and other AI leaders that they're not telling you. Yes, AI is becoming enormously powerful. The costs in environmental destruction, human suffering, and colonial-style exploitation are staggering. Sam Altman may be talented, but he is one of the most manipulative dissemblers in Silicon Valley, and that's saying something. WARNING: You will not want to use AI after reading this book.
A general question and I think it will help highlight the problem with this duopoly: where does Mamdani (and Bernie and other populist socialists) fit? The river or the village? He’s definitely not the village, and I’d consider progressives as part of the River. They’re not risk averse, they just don’t line up with the capitalist/libertarian portion.
The fact is the river is a way to divide insider and outsider with risk tolerant, gambling types on what side and established institutions on the other. The general problem with the risk tolerant group being characterized as “libertarian” and more capitalistic (taking business risks or however you want to divide), excludes a huge chunk of risk tolerant folks who want progressive change. The progressive yimby’s, the abundance folks, the folks who want universal healthcare or at least a public option, the folks who want to increase taxes on the wealthy to redistribute and balance the classes in this country. These are big risks with big rewards. They include reducing car lanes and adding bicycling and trams/light rail, rezoning vast swaths of land, investing in nuclear energy and so on. The progressive of this mind dreams big, expects more and is highly skeptical of the establishment. We don’t even want to hurt businesses, we just want the government to take risks, act fast, fail fast and fix the failures fast. So we can all get better lives faster. And accelerate businesses that can help too where the government struggles. Do we all agree on everything over here as progressives? No, but there’s room for folks who want things to be better tomorrow, not 10 years out.
I haven’t read On the Edge so apologies if I’m misunderstanding, but my sense is that Trump has one foot in the river and one in the conservative version of the Village. At his best, he’s trying to bring Silicon Valley-esque business acumen to DC, which I think is much needed. I am a left-of-center liberal but surely we’re all aware of how bloated and outdated the federal government is. But, core MAGA voters, Trump’s OG ride-or-dies, are firmly entrenched in some very unpopular but long-established value systems, esp around social issues like gay marriage, abortion, THC, etc. That is Trump at his worst imho.
If a pro-business liberal was the candidate for the DNC (maybe like a Jared Polis? Idk), people like Elon would run to that side and Trump would be left with the weird racist uncles he started out with.
I'd love to listen to you and Matty Yglesias discuss how the Trump Administration is navigating AI policy and where that diverges from Riverian consensus.
When are you going to be at the union square B&N! Would love to have u sign my copy!
Thanks Nate for your discussion. I am your subscriber but live far away from US, so don't understand US politics much. One question I would like to ask you if whether the "Riverian" persons still support Donald Trump, given the daily chaos on tariffs, his incompetent and hypocritical subordinates (at least in my opinion), destruction of scientific research, inconsistent and impulse policies, firing of BLS chief (the new guy is just horrible, even worse than the China statistics people) and his clear intention to destroy democracy as I (or we) understand?
Hi Nate,
I disagree with your analogy of MAGA is the river and Progressives are the village.
How aggressive MAGA/Progressives can be is a matter of vote counting, which is particularly clear in the Senate.
In 2021, Democrats needed all 51 votes and had arguably two "moderates" (Manchin and Sinema) and in 2025 the GOP have two "moderates" (Collins and Murkowski) in the Senate. But Democrats couldn't pass anything without both moderates going along, whereas the GOP can lose both moderates and still carry the day with a vote to spare (since the VP is a Republican). That means MAGA can pass more ideological pure (extreme) policies than the Progressives could. Go back five years and switch two red seats to blue and it would have been Progressives being bigger risk takers than the GOP.
Perhaps, but it didn't happen when Obama had the votes.
The fact is that Progressives are not in control of the Democratic party except in Republican mythology.
There were a lot more moderates in both parties back then. Trump/Sanders in 2016 started movements in the two parties that tribalized them by the 2024 election.
What policies did Democrats seek when they had the trifecta that they didn't get, other than when the filibuster or Manchin or Sinema stopped them? Even former moderates, like Tester, Casey, and Brown went along with the progressives.... and is why they lost reelection.
Both parties have pretty much "purified" themselves of non-MAGA/non-progressives. If you disagree, who are your examples in congress (either chamber) other than Collins and Murkowski?
I think the demonym for the people of the river should probably be Riparian, or maybe Lotic, or Fluvian, if it be critical that being in the flow of the river as opposed to on its banks be emphasized. "Riverian" doesn't seem like good usage from where I'm sitting.
"My advice to you is to start drinking heavily" Sen. Blutarsky https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-EdiXP87uE
I think Steve High has some interesting points. For myself, I was looking more for the rest of the people, the farm hands and ranch hands and trades people, which is somewhat congruent with the folks who made Mr Trump President. What I read suggests that Black males and Hispanics gave President Trump his edge. People thought Candidate Trump was wasting time campaigning in NYC, with no Electoral College votes to be hand, but it paid off across the Fruited Plain.
I did expect a few paragraphs better relating "The River" to its [assumed] associated.
Cliff