SBSQ #3: Forget the polls — has Joe Biden been a good president?
Plus, ranking my 7 favorite US cities.
Welcome to the November edition of Silver Bulletin Subscriber Questions! Quick reminder of the rules: this is an opportunity for paid Silver Bulletin subscribers to ask me questions about pretty much anything. In the comments, you should feel welcome to riff on this month’s answers or to ask questions for the December edition. To upgrade to a paid subscription, you can use the button below.
We have some fun questions in this month’s edition of SBSQ:
What does Nate think of Joe Biden’s performance as president?
What are your 7 favorite American cities?
Should you bet on another large popular vote – Electoral College split?
Do you buy that algorithms are ruining sports and everything else?
What is your favorite way to study poker?
What does Nate think of Joe Biden’s performance as president?
Theo M. asks:
You've been slowly shifting to team "mystery Democrat" in your words. I'm curious about your view of Biden generally in line with your political philosophy. Were you rooting for Biden to win the Democratic primary in 2020 and how do you view his presidency?
So let me do some throat-clearing first.
It’s extremely important to my work to be able to decouple my personal political preferences from my forecast of how things might turn out. I don’t want to be one of those people who is tacitly advertising their political views by way of conducting ostensibly neutral electoral analysis.
^^^ I also acknowledge this is extremely hard to avoid sometimes.
I’m not sure it should be particularly important to you what I think of Joe Biden’s presidency. In terms of discussing my political preferences, I prefer to work in broad strokes – i.e. outlining the general principles I abide by – rather than advocating for or critiquing particular politicians.
With all that said, if a pollster called me and asked whether I approve of Joe Biden’s performance as president, I’d say “approve”. He’s passed a lot of bills in his first two years in office that I’d probably vote for, such as a climate bill, an infrastructure bill, the Electoral Count Reform Act, a same-sex marriage bill and a gun control bill. Several of these are notable bipartisan accomplishments given, for instance, the longstanding GOP opposition to gun control.
Meanwhile, on some issues where I’ve publicly broken with the left, I think the White House has actually been reasonable. They’ve taken the possibility of a COVID lab leak quite seriously, for instance. I’m not going to get too much into the Israel-Palestine stuff but personally I think Biden probably deserves more credit than he’s getting for his diplomatic work.
Now, a very, very big question is how much blame Biden and his progressive brand of economics bears for inflation. But voters weigh inflation so heavily that I’m not sure that should let that dominate my personal assessment of Biden.
I do think Biden’s age is an extremely salient issue for his second term — I’d really, really rather not have an 82-year-old president. Apparently unlike most Americans, though, I also think that Trump is way too old.
So all of this is just to say: I think I am doing a good job of decoupling here, of separating my personal preferences from my electoral analysis. My personal political preferences haven’t changed that much, or to the extent they have, it’s not in a way that would suddenly make me prefer Gavin Newsom to Biden from a policy and governance standpoint. To the extent I’d vote for someone other than Biden in the primary, it would be less about policy and more about age and/or electability.
What are your 7 favorite American cities?
HR Huber-Rodriguez asks:
Five favorite metro areas in the US outside of New York and Las Vegas (where I know you spend a lot of time)? (To hang out for a while, visit, maybe try living in in the short run, attend a conference, etc. Maybe long term/setting down roots if you you feel like you could comment in an intelligent way but I understand this is more difficult.).
I’m going to rely pretty heavily on revealed preferences here – places I go a lot, or maybe I don’t go to that often but when I do go, I feel like “gee, I ought to spend more time here”. There are cities like Houston and Denver that I have a favorable impression of, but just haven’t spent enough time in to put on the list. Really, I see redeeming qualities in most of the places I visit. But here are a top five – or really a top seven because as you correctly deduced, New York and Las Vegas would definitely rank toward the top.
Chicago. I moved to Chicago college in 1996 and stayed until 2009. A truly great American city. Great food, great sports town, good music scene, the lakeshore is beautiful, the architecture is great, the” L” is a great way to get around, people are unpretentious and know how to have a good time, and it’s generally quite affordable. Negatives: It’s cold as fuck in the winter. It’s not a city that’s on the cutting edge of new trends in art and fashion, if you care about that. Like Matt Ygelsias, I’m not sure how well Chicago will fare with work-from-home. The violent crime rate is indeed quite high relative to other great American cities. And it’s fairly segregated. But I’ll always love Chicago.
Los Angeles. You’ve got the beach, you’ve got the mountains, you’ve got great weather for much of the year, great art, and food that rivals New York for being the best in the country and the world. I really love LA’s architecture and how its aging gracefully, both from its Art Deco period and some of its vintage looks from the 1950s and 1960s. So what’s not to like? Well, the traffic, and the fact that you often have to plan nearly your entire day around getting from place to place. And from friends who have moved there, LA doesn’t seem to have the sort of intellectual life that you’ll get in New York. And California has a cluster of governance issues in general. But c’mon, LA is iconic.
Miami. Sorry, no apologies. Because with Miami, there are so many obvious negatives. The topology of Miami and Miami Beach makes it very hard to get around, to the point that it can be quite LA-like in terms of needing to plan your day around traffic. I’m very sensitive to humidity, so the weather is hard to bear for much of the year. It’s kind of a shitshow. There are good restaurants, but not enough of them, and there are some nice hotels, but they’ve very expensive. And yet I love it! I love the YOLO-ness, I love that Miami is a gateway to Latin America, it’s the city with the highest share of immigrants in the country, I’m intrigued by its purple-ish politics, I love the beach, it’s got a good art scene, and the Seminole Hard Rock (granted, a ways away from downtown Miami) is probably the best casino East of the Mississippi.
Philadelphia. OK, maybe I’m being a little hipsterish with this pick. I basically had two candidates for the last three slots: Philadelphia, Kansas City and Austin. Austin loses the tiebreaker, because while I mostly think it’s great (outside of when it gets overrun during SxSW) it’s also a very trendy pick. Philadelphia is anything but trendy. But when I go there, I’m always surprised that it doesn’t loom larger in the American consciousness. It reminds me a lot of Chicago: down-to-earth, good food, good sports, very affordable especially for the East Coast. Plus lots of American history and lots of highly distinctive architecture. If you ask me, we should have kept the capital there instead of moving it to DC.
Kansas City. This is a slightly more sentimental pick; my partner’s family is from Kansas City so we go there a lot. But KC has really grown on me — I think of it as the perfect realization of the mid-sized Midwestern city that the St. Louises and Clevelands and Indianapolises of the world are all a little jealous of. Kansas City is known for its many fountains and parks. It has great BBQ – and good food in general. It’s affordable. The housing stock is very nice with lots of well-maintained homes. Kauffman Stadium and Arrowhead are cool. Even the airport has finally been upgraded, though I secretly liked the weird old one. Now, truth be told, if I had to live out the rest of my days in one city, I’d sooner do it in LA or somewhere that there’s a little more going on. But I think KC is a big overperformer relative to its peer group.
Should you bet on another large popular vote – Electoral College split?
Michael asks:
Subscriber question: Betfair has the 'Winning Party' market around 50/50 for US Prez election but Dems favoured almost 80/20 to win the popular vote. With Trump seeming in decent shape vs Biden and his Electoral College edge potentially fading does that spread seem right to you? Is buying GOP at 20% to win PV a great bet?
All right, since we’re getting directly into gambling advice, we’re turning the paywall on at this point. Free subscribers, love ‘ya and see you soon.