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Guest Essay
I Have Been Studying Poker for Years. Kamala Harris Isn’t Bluffing.
Mr. Silver is the author of the book “On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything.”
In recent years, for a new book, I have spent time in a community of like-minded thinkers who take calculated risks for a living. These people, from poker players to venture capitalists — I call them the River, and they are from Silicon Valley, Wall Street, sports betting, crypto — make decisions based not on what they know at the moment but on expected value. For them, when it is time to make a decision, the question is: Do the risks outweigh the rewards?
The River is the rival of the group of academics, journalists and policy wonks that I call the Village. This term might be more familiar: It’s the East Coast expert class. Harvard and Yale. The New York Times and The Washington Post. Together, these communities make up only a small percent of the population — in short, they are elites.
The Village tends toward risk aversion, as evident in its Covid caution and its increasing wariness about free speech (which very much can have sticks-and-stones consequences). It tends to make decisions by consensus, with dissenters punished by ostracization — or if you prefer, cancellation.
The River has been on a winning streak in terms of its impact on society and our economy: Its core industries, tech and finance, continually grow as fractions of the economy, and Las Vegas is bringing in record revenues. Not just baseball but pretty much everything has been “Moneyball”-ized, which is to say quantified and then monetized in some way.
Looking at politics through the lens of the River and Village communities, and their approaches to risk, can offer some interesting insight — and surprise.
The groups don’t map equally clearly onto our political institutions. In Trumpian times, with voting highly polarized along educational lines, the Village is overwhelmingly Democratic. The River’s politics aren’t quite as straightforward. Aloof and analytical, preoccupied with pursuits such as poker, not everyone in the River is a G.O.P. partisan. In fact, if you surveyed people I consider part of the River about their preferred presidential candidates, my guess is that Kamala Harris would get more votes than Donald Trump — although with an outsize third-party vote.
Yet since the book went to press, something surprising has happened. So far in the 2024 election, the Village has been making better risk-management decisions — out-Rivering the River. The presidential race remains close, but at least for now it looks like the Village is winning.
At least the Village got the most important decision right: kicking President Biden to the curb. In so doing, they roughly doubled their chances of winning, from Mr. Biden’s 27 percent chance in my election forecast model at the time he withdrew from the race to Ms. Harris’s 54 percent the week of the Democratic National Convention.
To understand why, it helps to know that the River can be prone to contrarianism. As the Village has become bluer and bluer, some communities within the River have rebelled by becoming, to varying degrees, red-pilled in response. The hedge fund manager Bill Ackman’s war against the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard and M.I.T. marked an inflection point in open warfare between the River and the Village.
But the River is by no means a bloc, whereas the Village’s penchant for consensus helped it, when Mr. Biden stepped aside, to consolidate quickly around Ms. Harris. She seized the opportunity by effectively locking up the Democratic Party’s nomination within 48 hours.
Ms. Harris’s choice of Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota as her running mate at first seemed too consensus-driven and risk-averse. Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania had more of a track record of appealing to swing voters in a purple state — and Pennsylvania has around a 40 percent chance of being the decisive state in this election in my model, versus less than 1 percent for Minnesota. The poker player in me would have played the percentages and taken the calculated risk in Mr. Shapiro. The choice of Mr. Walz has grown on me as Ms. Harris has sustained her momentum in the polls — but Pennsylvania still looms large.
It’s much harder to see the upside for Mr. Trump’s choice of Senator JD Vance of Ohio.
Mr. Vance, a former venture capitalist, is in some ways a quintessential member of the River — although as a Yale Law School graduate, a best-selling author and a former anti-Trump intellectual, he has some Village traits, too.
What he doesn’t have is a lot of appeal to the 98 percent of Americans who live outside of these elite communities — in fact, he has one of the lowest favorability ratings of any V.P. pick in decades.
Mr. Trump himself straddles the River-Village boundary awkwardly as a former casino magnate (though not a successful one), but he’s more intuitive than analytical and obsessed with his news coverage in the Village. The Trump campaign made two classic mistakes with his V.P. choice, though Silicon Valley’s conservatives cheered. One was counting their chickens before they hatched. According to reporting by The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta and others, Mr. Trump thought he had the race in the bag — which is probably why he thought he could gamble on a candidate who could be a younger, more intellectual MAGA protégé. But since Mr. Biden dropped out, the race is far from decided.
The second error was a failure to practice strategic empathy, meaning a willingness to put yourself in your opponent’s shoes. This is generally something that people in the River are good at; it’s essential in poker. But the Trump campaign didn’t think Democrats would replace Mr. Biden — and in so doing, they underestimated their opponents.
There’s another term from the poker world that describes Mr. Trump’s recent decision-making: He may be on tilt, the condition of making suboptimal choices because your emotions get in the way. Every poker player has seen it: An opponent builds up a huge stack, looks forward to treating himself to a steak dinner and bragging to his buddies. But then he loses a big pot — and before he knows it, the rest of his chips are gone as he tries to chase his losses.
About 30 minutes into Mr. Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, when he spoke movingly about the bullet that nearly took his life, I was tempted to chuck the probabilities out the window and conclude that he was bound for victory. But then he rambled on for another hour. And then, three days later, Mr. Biden was persuaded to drop out. Although tilt is usually associated with playing poorly after losing a hand, another common form is winner’s tilt, when a player becomes overconfident after going on a hot streak — as the River recently has been.
Now Mr. Trump is picking fights with the Republican governor of Georgia and falsely accusing Democrats of using artificial intelligence to exaggerate their crowds. It’s a dubious strategy when there are so many other valid lines of attack, like voters’ lingering concerns about the economy and the border or Ms. Harris’s left-wing presidential primary campaign in 2019.
Ms. Harris’s 2019 primary campaign was indeed a flop. But not everyone is the political equivalent of Tom Brady, seemingly born to handle pressure. Mr. Biden’s first two bids for the presidency were failures. Barack Obama lost his first race for Congress in 2000. Bill Clinton’s first big moment on the national stage — as the keynote speaker at the 1988 Democratic National Convention — nearly ended his career. It helps to get some reps in with the spotlight on you — like touring the world and giving speeches, as Ms. Harris has done in her four years as vice president.
If, as is usually the case after a party holds its convention, Ms. Harris continues to rise in the polls after the convention, she may find herself in a new position: the perceived front-runner.
That can bring different risks, such as complacency, heading into what will surely be the next pivotal moment of the campaign: a Sept. 10 debate in Philadelphia. She’ll need to resist the Village tendency toward triangulation.
Polls considerably underestimated Mr. Trump in both 2016 and 2020, and there’s something to be said for campaigning as if you’re behind. But so far Ms. Harris has defied the Village stereotype by acting cool under pressure.
Nate Silver, the founder and former editor of FiveThirtyEight and the author of the book “On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything,” writes the newsletter Silver Bulletin.
Source images by Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters and Aaron Foster/Getty Images.
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