SBSQ #19: What is Elon's endgame?
Plus, whether American elections are under threat. And, on a brighter note, an NCAA basketball mini “model talk.”
Yesterday, Democrats won a Wisconsin Supreme Court election by 10 points in a race Elon Musk heavily invested in to preserve a 4-3 liberal majority on the court. The outcome wasn’t exactly a surprise, except perhaps to Musk. Still, the performance was impressive given the extremely high turnout — almost 2.4 million voters, compared to 1.8 million in Wisconsin’s 2023 Supreme Court election1, which Democrats had won by a similar margin. So, while part of a longstanding pattern of Democratic overperformance in non-presidential elections, it was nevertheless a substantively important result in a key swing state. The 2023 election had ended years of self-perpetuating partisan gerrymandering in the Badger State.
Meanwhile, in Florida, Democrats lost special elections to the US Congress in the 1st and 6th districts by 15 and 14 points, respectively. But these were also good results for Dems relative to the partisan makeup of the districts, which respectively voted for Donald Trump by 37 and 30 points in the 2024 election. Combined between the three races, Dems outperformed the 2024 presidential result by an average of almost 17 points. Any “Blue Wave” that comes next year almost certainly won’t be that large. But they’re a reminder of political gravity — or less politely stated, the FAFO principle: fuck around and find out. Trump and Musk’s declining popularity isn’t just an abstraction or a polling artifact.
I swear I hadn’t planned it this way. But the results are also pertinent to two of the three questions in this newsletter — the Steve Yzerman (#19) edition of Silver Bulletin Subscriber Questions — one about the future of American elections and the other about Musk’s political strategy. March was a strong month for Silver Bulletin with a lot of new subscribers, so let me rearticulate the SBSQ rules here:
Once a month, typically around the turn of the calendar, we’ll run this reader mailbag.
You can leave questions for next month’s SBSQ (#20) in the comments below.
You’re also welcome to comment on this month’s responses, but please avoid turning this into a general-purpose discussion thread. Comments on Silver Bulletin posts are nearly always limited to paid subscribers — just trust me when I say it’s better this way.
In this edition of SBSQ:
So, uhhhh, just how worried should you be about the end of elections?
What is Elon’s endgame?
Is our NCAA tournament model biased toward underdogs?
So, uhhhh, just how worried should you be about the end of elections?
Aaron asks:
Question for the next SBSQ:
What are the odds that the US continues to have free and fair elections in the next two or four years? Given how much of your work is premised on that assumption I would bet that you have given it some thought. Even a small chance of America devolving into Russian-style sham elections could have implications for how you plan and think about this newsletter for the long term.
I’m going to mostly ignore the “meta” question here — no, it wouldn’t be great for the Silver Bulletin business model if American elections ended. But in that case, the business model would be among the least of my concerns.
I do want to articulate a general sense of … let’s call it mild alarm. I try to stick to an equivocal tone in this newsletter. That’s partly because that’s just how I roll, partly because I want to respect the diversity of political perspectives among the subscriber base, and partly because I think panic is almost never an emotionally or politically effective response.
But I’m worried about how it’s all going — if we’re being honest, more worried than I expected to be. However, I’m less worried about elections ending than other things.
After I published the 113 predictions for Trump’s second term column in January, there were two forecasts I regretted more or less immediately. One was the possibility that Trump would defy a Supreme Court order:
The White House refuses to comply with any Supreme Court order. This is at least a DEFCON 3 constitutional crisis and unlikely only because Trump has a relatively friendly court — but unfortunately, still “thinkable” given some of the rhetoric that Trump and his allies have used in the past. 10%
To be fair, I think the logic here makes some sense. It’s a conservative court, which is both likely to be friendly to Trump and — because the Court understands politics and behaves tactically — is likely to avoid direct confrontation with him, i.e., not wanting to pick fights it thinks it's going to lose. I almost included a separate prediction about the chance that Trump would defy a lower court order, which he’s arguably already done; I’d have put a higher probability (maybe above 50 percent) on that. There’s also some inherent ambiguity on this question: if Trump intends de facto to defy a Supreme Court order, the White House will probably at least make some pretense for why their actions are legal and justified. Nonetheless, 10 percent was considerably too low according to both the spirit and the letter of the question.
Conversely, I was worried that this prediction was too high:
The 2028 election is not regarded as “free or fair” (or similar terminology) by one or more major international organizations. I continue to see these as tail risks, though international organizations could be overzealous. 10%
There are various reasons I thought this. The US election system is highly decentralized and hard to override by executive fiat. Plus, even autocracies often have elections — although, as Aaron notes, they can be sham elections to varying degrees: see also the category of “electoral autocracies”.
Perhaps more important than any of this, as last night shows, Trump is unpopular and likely to become more unpopular. If he forced the issue, he might lose from the various sites of resistance in the system, including public opinion. It doesn’t help Trump that Americans are now quite worried about the economy, increasing the FAFO factor. In contrast to Trump 1.0, it’s harder to just go about your business and ignore politics when buying a new car is suddenly about to become more expensive, for example.
So, I still think a 10 percent chance is probably a reasonable forecast. But I also think it’s a high forecast, both in the sense that a 10 percent chance of free and fair elections ending is very much worth worrying about from an expected value standpoint — and because elections might be one of the last parts of the system to succumb even if other things are going really badly. (Elections are happening all the time, in fact — like last night.)
Still, I certainly don’t see anything in the first ~75 days of the Trump administration that would limit the downside case. And there have been a few worrying developments. The White House issued an executive order last week asserting more federal control over elections, for instance. The EO doesn’t seem that worrying on the surface: The courts will fight back, and I’m somewhat sympathetic to conservative concerns about both voter ID laws and the prolonged delays in calling elections because of mail voting. Also, from a strictly partisan standpoint, making it harder for “marginal” Americans to vote may not benefit Republicans in a country where so-called “low information” voters increasingly vote GOP.
However, I don’t love the White House sniffing around this territory. Nor do I like Trump making any pretense of running for a third term, however unlikely this is to succeed judicially.2 And, I really don’t like Elon Musk heavily “incentivizing” voters to participate in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election by writing million-dollar checks.
The base case remains that the American system is bowed but not broken. Particularly the elections component of the system. But I’ve increasingly found myself thinking that contrarian centrist types, a group of which I suppose I’m a card-carrying member, are too complacent about this, too insistent on mean-reversion and related heuristics when things clearly aren’t going well.
What is Elon’s endgame?
Jimmy Dooley asks:
I have a straightforward question that gets into economics, politics, and risk taking 'riverian' behavior.
What's the endgame for Musk? I don't see a world (other than a straight up American oligarchy) where politicizing himself (and by extension his companies) helps his bottom line. Am I missing something? Is it shooting from the hip?
Let me try to put myself in Elon’s shoes. It’s not easy because it requires certain things — such as endorsing Trump and running a social media company — that I’d never have done in a million years. I’ve never met Elon, but I suppose I have just the slightest modicum of sympathy by being a nerdy, slightly socially awkward person3 who was somewhat thrust into the public spotlight, although to many fewer orders of magnitude than Elon has been.
It’s 2021. You’re Time Magazine’s Person of the Year. You’re one of the wealthiest men in the world and as admired as the Pope. You’ve built rocket ships — but more importantly for your bottom line, you run Tesla, which investors have incredible faith in since at pretty much every turn, you’ve proven the haters wrong.