What if you love Silver Bulletin... but hate sports?
Or love sports but hate politics? Here's how to manage what you get in your inbox.
Politics was not my first love. When I founded FiveThirtyEight in 2008, it was only after I’d already built a baseball projection system called PECOTA for Baseball Prospectus. And all of this came amid a career transition. After I’d quit my management consulting job to play cards for a living, I landed in politics almost by accident after the government essentially banned online poker.
So if you’re one of those Silver Bulletin readers who feel like our sports coverage is intruding into the politics and elections coverage you’re expecting from the newsletter, recognize that for me it sometimes feels like the other way around.
However, we do know that some of you don’t care at all about sports. One of the ironies of the newsletter business is that although publishing new content is the best way to gain subscribers, it’s also the best way to lose them. In our experience, it actually isn’t spicy or controversial takes that trigger a high rate of unsubscribes. Rather, it’s just stuff that people don’t find interesting or relevant. Especially if there’s been a long politics-heavy streak, the first sports-related newsletter usually results in shaking some of the loosest leaves off the mailing list.
The reverse is less true, but we know others of you are here mostly for our sports coverage. Our working estimate is that about a quarter of our paid subscriptions are driven primarily by sports. (We’re going to commission a user survey at some point soon.)
How to (mostly) only get politics or sports emails
If you’re in one of those buckets, we’ve started to use Substack’s “sections” feature just for you.
By default, Silver Bulletin subscribers get all of our emails in their inbox. But we’re now putting most of our posts into one of two sections: politics or sports. (You might have already noticed those categories on our homepage.)
To opt out of a section, visit your Silver Bulletin account here or navigate to this URL: https://www.natesilver.net/account. You can then use the “Notifications” tab to turn emails from a particular section on and off. The image below shows what the Silver Bulletin notifications dashboard looks like by default. You’ll initially get emails from every section, but you can simply toggle the politics or sports buttons off to change that.
If you do choose to opt out of a section, you’ll still be able to read posts from that section on our website (or on the Substack app1) as usual, you just won’t get emails about them anymore. You can also opt back in to emails from a section at any time using the same process.
For organizational purposes, we also have a third section for models and forecasts, which includes the landing pages for both sports models like ELWAY and politics ones like our Trump approval ratings. This is not very many emails — only a couple of times a year when a new model launches. So we’d recommend keeping that green “Models & Forecasts” button toggled. We suspect even some of our sports readers will still be interested in the launch of our midterms model, and some of you politics junkies will still want help with your March Madness pool.
A handful of posts don’t fall into any of these categories: namely, SBSQs, “meta” posts like this one, and sometimes forays into other topics ranging from AI to air travel. When an article doesn’t fit into any of our main sections, it’ll go out to all subscribers. Honestly, these “off-topic” posts are both pretty popular and relatively rare. We’d love to be at a point someday where, say, there’s enough tech/AI coverage at Silver Bulletin to warrant a new section, but we aren’t there yet.
Sustainable growth toward a better Silver Bulletin
We are, however, gradually ramping up the amount of content that we publish. There are three of us now — Nate, Eli, and Joseph — and we’ll begin interviewing for another position in January. The past month or so has been busy between elections, the government shutdown, and a series of federal gambling indictments.
We’re also at the point where you should expect to see multiple politics and sports models running on the site at any given time. Right now, we have our Trump approval ratings and Musk favorability ratings on the politics side of things, and QBERT and ELWAY for sports. But we’re also planning to launch our generic ballot polling average early next month. After that, we’ll have COOPER (the new version of our college basketball team rating model), then we’ll begin work on RAPTOR 2.0 (our NBA model). And, of course, next year will feature our 2026 midterm election forecast and, hopefully, a model for the World Cup.
No matter what you’re here for, we’d like to thank you for your continued support of Silver Bulletin. And if you’re not subscribed yet, just use the handy box below! New subscribers also control which emails they receive whenever they sign up.
We generally recommend the web experience as the graphics and tables render better than in the app.
Although as an Englishman I have no interest in American sports in themselves, I often (though not always) find Nate’s writing sufficiently diverting that I’m happy to read a whole article about baseball or NFL despite only understanding about 70% of it. And that’s a tribute to the writing quality in Silver Bulletin.
Kinda one and the same for me. Sports are my diversion from politics. When my teams are losing I turn to politics.