Nate Silver’s compelling new book, Living on the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, is ostensibly about mathematical risk, and how it can be understood and used to benefit society accordingly. But I think it’s more about something else: the way we live now. It’s the book Trollope might have written if he had spent his life not as a post office employee but gambling, reading libertarian philosophers and hanging around on the underbelly of 4Chan and Reddit.

The first thing to understand about Silver, best known for his polling website FiveThirtyEight, is that politics does not come naturally to him. As he tells us: “I played poker professionally before I ever wrote a word about politics or built an election model. I still feel more at home in a casino than at a political convention.”

From this starting point, Silver guides us through his world, a particular group of people who he describes as living in “the River”. Poker players, he explains, love water metaphors, and the River is full of “tributaries and niches” inhabited by various types who have indeed spent their lives in the underbelly of the internet and, most importantly for Silver, in casinos. Often, they have played poker for huge sums of money. But the River also has “a canon of influences and ideas”. These range from “game theory and Nash equilibria to expected value and marginal utility” and various other things you have only dimly heard of.

These are people obsessed with numbers, especially ideas of probability so important to games like poker (the book’s first section is all about gambling). This has several effects, not least that it all makes you live a certain way. River people like Silver are “EV maximizers” (“expected-value maximizers”): Rivermen (and, as Silver points out, the River’s inhabitants are overwhelmingly men) take an analytical, strategic approach to gambling, investing and other aspects of life, trying to calculate the most optimal “play” in any given situation. This leads them down some curious paths, not least when Silver considers whether it’s “EV maximizing” to have fries with your sandwich or opt for the healthy side salad. “It might,” he concludes, “depend on how good the fries are.”

For the River, sacred places are not Harvard Yard or the Capitol, but Las Vegas, a “shrine to risk-taking, excess, progress, and capitalism”. All of this is, of course, an affront to what Silver calls “the Village”, which “consists of people who work in government, in much of the media, and in parts of academia (although perhaps excluding some of the more quantitative academic fields such as economics). It has distinctly Left-of-centre politics associated with the Democratic Party.” It is, in other words, the River’s nemesis.

See what’s happening here? Almost all that the Village, shorthand for the established elites, has traditionally prized is viewed by the River with scepticism, not least elite higher education. And this is probably no surprise. It’s hard to think of places that would be less welcoming to Rivermen. More than this, if the River esteems poker players, hedge funders and venture capitalists (gamblers of a different stripe), its emperors are Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Elon Musk — all college dropouts (Musk, admittedly, only at postgraduate level).

What emerges is by now familiar: suspicion of “experts” or “elites” — and the desire to disrupt, or more correctly, take an axe to them. Confrontation is unavoidable. As Silver writes: “Harvard is the grand cathedral atop the hill — there is no more quintessentially Village institution.” So, when hedge funders such as Bill Ackman, rightly enraged by Harvard President Claudine Gay’s tawdry failures to condemn calls for genocide against Jews as hate speech, led the successful drive to remove her, it was “a symbolic coup” for the River. (“Want another sign that the Village and the River are explicitly at war?” Silver asks. “The New York Times’s copyright lawsuit against OpenAI.) VCs, Tech titans, data scientists, hedge funders — these are the master-gamblers of Silver’s universe. As he concludes: “The quants won… We’re living in their world.”

Naturally, this can be problematic. First off, revolutionaries almost always curdle into the despised elites they worked so hard to overthrow. Considering the market dominance of Venture Capital firms, Silver concedes that “if success is concentrated only among a few elite firms… to the point where they essentially can’t lose, then VC is becoming more and more like the incumbent institutions that Silicon Valley would deign to disrupt”. The Ivy League’s elite capture doesn’t disappear; it’s merely replaced by that of Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Google and Tesla.

And who are these people? Well, many of them are just Riverman who hit the jackpot. Elon Musk may be a first-rate engineer and businessman, but he’s also an example of what happens when an incel makes $200 billion.

Back in the day, to amass a fortune as an industrialist or oil baron, you had to at least deal with people. Now, the Masters of the Universe are more comfortable with code than conversation. A few years ago, I watched Mark Zuckerberg launch the metaverse, which he did while performatively “chatting” with a grinning — and to my mind clearly terrified — young woman. It was just weird.

Silver understands this. “In the River, it’s common to find people, like Elon Musk or the poker player Daniel ‘Jungleman’ Cates, who self-identify as having Asperger’s syndrome or autism,” he writes. “It’s also common to hear people refer to themselves or others with terms like ‘Aspie’… Depending on the context, this may be derogatory, but it isn’t always so.” For the River, this is more of a cultural marker than a medical diagnosis. What the mainstream views with suspicion or does not understand becomes a source of pride. What it prizes, like Ivy League universities, the River eschews.

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The problem with gambling and risk is that, in irresponsible hands, it can be catastrophic. Silver tells the story of Sam Bankman-Fried, the crypto-king turned felon. SBF, he writes, is “a nerdy, overconfident, Adderall-popping, video-game-playing, youngish white guy who has a severe gambling problem and is probably somewhere on the autism spectrum”. This makes him “a common typology” for the River. But he is also a crook, which Silver well understands. SBF’s problem was that he could mouth all the platitudes about EV, Effective Altruism, Rationalism and all other River obsessions — one consequence of reading this book is that I finally understand Dominic Cummings’s blogs — but it made no difference. It’s not even that he didn’t understand risk: he just didn’t care.

So why did so many stats-literate, data-munching, probability-obsessed altruists and tech bros fall under his spell? Once more the answer centres on ideas about the way we live, or rather the way the River seeks to live, and how it will ultimately always fall short of its loftiest aspirations. You can try to game all aspects of life, seek out the EV in every situation, calculate the odds, run your models and algorithms, but in the end, you remain (for the moment at least) irreducibly human. In the words of Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz when assessing the SBF disaster: “It must have been the cult of personality. I guess it’s the only explanation.”

And it’s sometimes the only explanation elsewhere, too. It’s no coincidence that gambling, geopolitics and war all centre on the effective calculation of risk. Of course, there are vast and obvious differences between them in terms of cost, scale and repercussion; not least because risk in gambling is typically confined to the realms of chance and individual choice, while geopolitics involves a vastly greater degree of multifaceted interaction and its consequences can be global.

But there is a similarity too: if many of today’s finest minds are gamblers, history has thrown its greatest thinkers at geopolitics. And even when the stakes are life and death, when the players are so various, the same patterns persist. The cult of personality moves history — and it does so repeatedly. The River may have given us SBF, but geopolitics gave us Mao and Stalin and Putin. This is the price of being human, and it will continue to be so. You can bet on it.

The pollsters, after three or four days of intense anxiety and abuse, are basking in this last-minute reprieve. If, as is now likely, Biden ends up with 306 Electoral College votes to Donald Trump’s 232, that looks a lot like the comfortable win they predicted — and the final 4-5% popular vote advantage will be only a few points off. OK, they got Florida wrong, but basically the polls were right, right?

Of all people, I should be pushing this latest version of events. I predicted on election day that even if the polls were as wrong as they were in 2016, Biden would still win comfortably. So am I now vindicated too?

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Sadly not. The word ‘comfortably’ is not just a detail, it’s the whole story. And there has been nothing comfortable about the past week.

The overall story that the polls told was that this election was not even going to be close — as YouGov’s Doug Rivers put it with admirable candour in our pre-election interview, “either we’re badly off or this is not going to be close.” Trump obviously didn’t win, so the praise being heaped on Robert Cahaly, the pollster who forecast a Trump victory, is equally misplaced — but the President came a lot closer than he was supposed to, and that’s important.

One of the many facts Democrats have deployed for years when discussing the shock 2016 result is that as few as 70,000 voters across crucial swing states handed Donald Trump his victory. Poll watcher Nate Silver’s explanation for why he gave a Trump victory such a low probability at the time is that it was a genuine “low probability event” — a number of states that were incredibly close just all happened to flip into Trump’s column. It was kind of a fluke, in other words.

But contrary to the forecasts, we’ve just been through another nail-biter. As results stand, if just 25,000 voters across Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia had chosen Trump instead, Biden could never have reached the magic 270 electoral college votes. Commentators were right to observe that 2016 was weirdly close, but then so was 2020.

In 2012, the last “normal” presidential election, only 4 out of 50 states were even close, with final victory margins of under 5%; in 2016 that number more than doubled to 10, and in 2020 it was still 8. In 2012, there was only one state that had a final margin of under 1% (FL), but there were 4 such states in both 2016 (MI-NH-PA-WI) and 2020 (AZ-GA-PA-WI). If these four states had edged in the other direction, in both elections the other candidate would have won. No polling company can realistically measure a state-wide difference that small — in both elections those four states could easily have gone either way.

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Once again, the polls systematically underestimated the Trump vote across the country: states such as Ohio, Iowa and Texas were widely predicted to be close when they weren’t, and Wisconsin was predicted to be in the bag for Biden when it should have been too close to call. Looking only at states where 100% of the votes have been counted, the YouGov 50-state model has an average of over 5 points margin error in the Democratic direction, and in deep Red states such as Arkansas and Mississippi the error increases to over 8 points.

The reason this matters is not to give pollsters another shellacking — they have been doing their best to get it right — but to reckon with the profoundly important fact that, once again, there was a slice of the electorate that simply wasn’t showing up in the official measures. It is analogous to the wider political situation: just as these voters aren’t properly represented in opinion polls, they still aren’t well understood in the mainstream conversation. The fact that the 2020 result will probably end up with an identical Electoral College margin to the 2016 result, with just a few states flipped narrowly the other way, is a sign of how little we have moved on in the past four years in terms of understanding this hidden part of the population.

The New York Times’ graphics showing whether each county moved more Republican (red) or Democrat (blue) shows near-stasis this year compared to the strong red shift in 2016.

Pollsters will soon start coming out with technical postmortems which, while no doubt useful, must not be allowed to confuse the bigger picture. Sure, the demographics were different this time — this time it wasn’t poor white men that they miscounted so much as certain sections of the Latino and Black populations, alongside the college-educated and suburban white women.

But the fact that their blind spot has shifted does not make it less concerning. The two most common explanations — “shy Trump” voters not admitting the truth to pollsters (or perhaps even themselves), and the (in my view more salient) fact that less engaged members of each of these demographic groups are less likely to end up taking a survey in the first place — both point to the same bigger problem. There is a section of the population that is almost invisible to the mainstream and incomprehensible to polite society. They are as “unheard” as ever, and it must be our mission to understand them better.

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The opposite instinct, dangerously tempting for some American liberals, is to sit in moral condemnation of the over 70m of their compatriots who voted for Donald Trump. This attitude requires us to believe that 70% of the citizens of Wyoming, and 40% of the population of New York, are bad people — the idea is itself morally repugnant and will only lead to future electoral failure.

A more useful objective for Democrats would now be to focus, in a way they failed to do in the past four years, on what about Trump’s offer made it so attractive to so many good people, despite his glaringly obvious personality flaws. This is their best bet to taking their party out of margin-of-error territory next time round. Happily, in his remarks so far, Joe Biden has emphasised the need for healing and speaking for all Americans, but there will be many in his administration who take a sharper view and it will be a daily struggle to resist them.

I concluded my pre-election piece by saying that, if Trump ended up surprising everyone and actually winning re-election, “it would mean we have to rethink the basic epistemic foundations of our public conversation”. We didn’t reach that rather hyperbolic-sounding moment, but those foundations took another knock last week. The close result means that Donald Trump and his millions of supporters were not entirely wrong, even though they weren’t right either, to dismiss the opinion polls as part of a wider mainstream stitch-up; it means that his low approval ratings, endlessly referred to throughout his presidency, were probably also off by a similar margin, and that the whole framing of the race was misconceived.

It is a powerful reminder that we should be careful before writing off those who reject the establishment way of thinking alongside the sophisticated tools used to reinforce that reality. It also serves as a warning to the many wielders-of-charts to be more humble in their presentation of them (note to Nate Silver: “Fuck You, we did a good job” is not quite the right tone).

At points during results night, I had the eerily familiar feeling that Trump had gone and done it again. At those times it almost felt uncanny, as if he had been able to reach otherwise hidden voters using intuitions that the pollsters and pundits simply didn’t possess. In the cool light of day, with Biden’s electoral college victory now clear, that sensation is receding with all the speed of a bad dream. A few more months and perhaps the whole Trump era will start to feel the same way. But we mustn’t let it — the issues and people he spoke to remain all too real, and must now be taken seriously, not forgotten.

So what is the evidence about who is going to win in seven weeks’ time? Which way is the “herd” really facing? Currently the national polls show Biden ahead by 6-8 points; in the battleground states that will decide the election it’s closer, but he’s still solidly ahead. There’s a lot that can still happen, but in the coming weeks are the polls and media narrative more likely to be underplaying, or overplaying the chances of a Trump re-election? To find out, I spoke to some of the world’s leading experts — including one notable dissenting voice.

Watch the full interview below

Nate Silver runs FiveThirtyEight, perhaps the most famous polling website in the world; he faced a good deal of criticism after his 2016 eve-of-election model gave Hillary a 71.4% chance of winning the election (he’s keen to point out that this was lower than many other models — the New York Times had her at 85%, others at 99%). Right now, FiveThirtyEight gives Trump a 24% chance of winning, and Biden is at 76%.

“It’s a weird election because it’s a little hard to diagnose exactly what the conventional wisdom is,” he tells me. “There’s a meme that everybody is overconfident on Biden, but in fact… people are quite cautious on Biden.”

“If you go to betting markets, they have Biden as only about a 55% favourite. To me that seems hard to justify, low on Biden. He is up by 9 points — he does have disadvantages like the electoral college but I don’t think that quite computes… When our model was released, everyone kind of nodded and said, ‘70% seems about right to me’ … So for better or worse, our forecast and the conventional wisdom are aligned.”

But not everyone in Washington sees it that way. Republicans tend to think that the conventional wisdom is, once again, under-rating the chances of a Trump victory. The pollster-of-choice for this view is Robert Cahaly of Trafalgar Group. He may be a contrarian voice, but he deserves to be taken seriously: he was one of the few in 2016 to correctly call the crucial Trump wins in Michigan and Pennsylvania. His polls show Trump narrowly ahead, and winning enough of the battleground states to secure a victory in November.

So how is it that his numbers differ so dramatically?

“We think what’s happening is what’s technically called the ‘social desirability bias’ — people give an answer to a question being asked by a live caller which is less about honesty and more about being judged positively by the person asking the question. So when there is a candidate who is polarising that it isn’t politically correct to say you’re for, you tend to give an answer that makes you look best.” He estimates this “shy Trump” effect is between 3-5% and he suspects it could be more, and that “live caller” polling is the method in which the effect is strongest.

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It is not totally clear what methods Cahaly is using to assess the extent of the effect. He says it involves a combination of different polling methods (less reliance on live caller polls, more digital and robocalls) and asking additional questions such as “who do you think the majority of your neighbours are for?” to ascertain people’s true motivations. But the complexity of the method raises legitimate questions.

Another problem with this theory is that if such a “shy Trump” effect were a big factor, you would expect to see it most powerfully in districts that are overwhelmingly Democratic, and where being a Trump supporter was most shameful —  in highly Democratic parts of California, for example. Trump should have outperformed his polls there in 2016; but in fact the reverse happened. Clinton did even better than the polls suggested she would in those highly Democratic areas, and Trump outperformed in strongly pro-Trump areas.

In theory, those polling companies that do not use a live caller method should mitigate any “shy Trump” effect because you are not talking to a real person, but that’s not happening either. Doug Rivers is Chief Scientist at YouGov, an online-only pollster that makes use of its large panel of survey respondents:

“Hundreds of thousands of people have signed up to take surveys and we interview them repeatedly over time. What that enables us to see is the same people at different points in time and whether they’ve changed or not. What we’ve seen is about 7% of the Trump voters now say they will vote for Biden rather than Trump, and there’s only a 1% offsetting flow in the other direction. So that’s a big deal…

“We never had Hillary Clinton leading by more than 6 points in 2016. And we’ve had Biden at a high watermark of plus 11.” The YouGov model comes out with an estimate of 340 electoral college votes for Joe Biden (270 is the magic number needed to win).

This raises the opposite possibility that, in fact, the “herd mentality” in 2020 is underplaying the Biden advantage more than overplaying it. Pollsters and the media are so scarred from the 2016 shock that they seem to be doing everything they can to emphasise the ongoing chance of a Trump victory, and not blithely predict his defeat. Perhaps this effect is suppressing reporting of the Biden lead, and actually he’s even further ahead than is being reported?

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Says Silver: “There was a recent outcome that a lot of people found traumatising for many reasons. You combine that with the fact that people tend to overweight recent outcomes and more salient outcomes — so just from first principles you would think that people might overweight the chance of Trump winning, just based on their emotional reaction. A lot of what they are doing is emotionally hedging.”

At the technical polling level, this could happen by pollsters anticipating another exceptionally high turnout among white working class voters — like the one we saw in 2016 — when they could well turn out in more conventional numbers this time round.

There’s also the matter of minority voters, as Nate Silver explains:

“There’s also a more subtle form of overcorrecting. You take every step to ensure that you’re counting the white, working class, non-college Trump voters, but you don’t take as many steps to ensure that you’re counting hispanic and black voters. There were some states like California and Arizona and Texas where Clinton beat her polls in 2016 — nobody cared because she lost the key states — but there were groups among which Clinton overperformed… We could wake up and say, oh actually, boy, turnout among blacks and latinos was really high, while polls thought it would be mediocre, and so Biden won by 11 points instead of 8.”

The “smart take” you hear most often about the forthcoming election is that Trump is once again being underrated — people somehow feel it in their bones, and the betting markets confirm that, showing a much closer race than the polls indicate. In a way, “you watch, Trump’ll be re-elected” has almost become the new conventional wisdom, and it’s more uncomfortable to predict a big Biden win.

As Nate Silver says, “If I were looking to play the markets and I didn’t have an ethical problem with doing it, I would think the price on Biden is very favourable.” Doug Rivers agrees: “I think the betting markets, which are showing this about 50/50, are underestimating the chances of a Biden win.”

So is Donald Trump toast? “Not quite,” Rivers replies, “but close – he’s browning rapidly.”