The Worst Decisions of the Harris and Trump (and Biden) Campaigns

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Welcome back to Risky Business, a show about making better decisions.

I'm Maria Kanakova, and I'm Nate Silver.

Well, shit is getting real.

It's one week to go to the presidential election, and since this is a show about making good decisions, we're going to talk about some of the good and bad, spoiler alert, mostly bad, decisions that the campaigns have made so far in the race.

How are are they managing risk and reward?

And after that, since we are a week out, we're going to look at the silver bulletin model and see where we stand and what this next week is shaping up to look like.

The news this week has been, I think, more Trump dominant than it has been for a while.

Maybe since the assassination attempt, I'm not sure.

But I think think you actually did a Google Words analysis or something like that.

Yeah, the number of people searching for Trump is the highest that it has been since the second assassination attempt.

And you've not seen that spike for Harris.

So sometimes having Google news searches is good.

It might indicate voter interest.

But

this seems like it's at least potentially correlated with

the rally that Trump held.

outside my apartment basically.

Right, I was going to say in your backyard at Madison Square Garden.

I live near Madison Square Garden, which is tremendously convenient

when you're going to Rangers games or Knicks games.

I'm a fan of both teams.

Great start for the Rangers, by the way.

But Trump also decided to have a rally there

on Sunday.

went all day.

I was like, oh, maybe there's a Knicks game tonight.

I'm not doing anything.

Nope.

Trump rally woke up at 8 a.m.

You hear hooting and hollering outside your window.

And then all day, my block is cordoned off.

You have to show your ID to, you know, if you go get coffee, you got to go show your ID when you get back.

So a comedian named Tony Henschliff, I believe that's fanatic, made a disparaging comment about Puerto Rican.

Disparaging comment.

A joke.

Many disparaging comments, but yes, one in particular.

He called it a floating island of garbage.

Very dry humor at best.

Jon Stewart defended him.

I don't know.

But like, you know, Puerto Ricans, there's actually a fairly large Puerto Rican population in

Pennsylvania.

But, you know, you had the all-stars.

I don't know how to put it.

You got Rudy Giuliani.

You got Hope Hogan.

You got Elon Musk.

I don't know if he's jumping around.

I tried to avoid it.

But

this is kind of the major news cycle heading to the final week of the campaign.

It dovetails with some of the messaging that Kamala Harris is focused on.

She is giving recordings on Tuesday, early afternoon, Tuesday night, Eastern Time.

Harris is holding a rally in Washington DC at a location where Trump it's called the ellipse maybe or the eclipse or something I don't know DC

where Trump initiated the insurrection riot Some people call it a coup.

I think the coup experts say it's not it's sparkling insurrection and not coup or something

It doesn't come from the coup region of France yet yeah but trying to bring this home to uh January 6th and Trump's threats to democracy, which is,

oh boy, now I'm going to piss some of our listeners off.

A message that one has to wonder whether it might be a little stale.

This was a message that Joe Biden kicked his campaign off.

And look, I believe that

Trump, I mean, I think January 6th was really bad.

And I think he has no respect for the rule of law.

And the guardrails are weaker.

And, you know, to an elite

like me,

college-educated elite like me, this messaging has a lot of resonance, but I don't know that it has as much message with swing voters.

But anyway, Trepania is kind of the New York Twitter, what the New York Times called a closing carnival of grievances, misogyny, and racism.

Plays into her hands a little bit when she had lacked a closing message.

So I guess, are we saying good decision or bad decision to have this?

Well, so this is an interesting one because,

you know, there's the old saying that all publicity is good publicity.

But in this particular case, I don't actually know if that's the case because there are some people who did not endorse Kamala Harris for president before who all of a sudden rose up and were like, what the fuck?

You know, so we have, we have people, yeah, Bad Bunny, Mark Anthony, J-Lo,

Ricky Martin.

There are tons of people, people whose names, by the way, like obviously Bad Bunny, we hear all the time and J-Lo, you know, in the context of Ben Affleck, we hear recently.

But

like Mark Anthony and Ricky Martin, I'm like, whoa, blast from the past.

Do you have like a Mark and Ricky Martin

reunion tour?

It would sell out Madison Square Garden.

It absolutely would.

And that's when I started looking at the number of their followers.

I was like, holy shit, like, you know, this could actually, like, I'm not talking about like Bad Bunny who has over 18 million followers.

Like, these are people with massive reach.

And as we've talked about, like.

even fractions of a percent in swing states matter.

So I am wondering if that specific thing is going to matter on the on the margins.

And so in terms of good decision, bad decision, I'm not sure.

I don't know if all these,

I actually, I don't know if swing voters are listening, if undecideds are listening.

If they are, then maybe it was a bad decision.

What do you think, Nate?

Yeah, so I don't think hold people like Willow should have hold a rally in Pennsylvania.

I mean, he's had a lot of fucking rallies in Pennsylvania.

You know, the national press attention that you get from this, but these are, this is like some of the most negative headlines, yes, from the liberal media

that Trump's gotten in weeks, but also from some news outlets like Politico or Reuters that are studiously neutral in their headline.

Choices are pointing out comments that they call racist.

They don't say racially charged or

and those probably aren't great headlines for Trump.

And

I don't know.

I mean, again, he is relying on

picking up a substantial share of the vote from black and Hispanic voters.

If you look at the polls, there's something like a 15-point shift among black voters.

Supposedly, there's something like

an

eight-point shift among Hispanic voters that varies a little bit from poll to poll.

This is pre-rally.

Yeah.

Pre-rally.

But yeah, maybe if to look at the Puerto Rican demographics in more detail,

I think this coterie of people that Trump surrounds himself with, I mean, I don't know.

It's

a goofy lot of actors, you know, at sight.

I don't know what what why Mark did

some Australian accent there.

It's all good.

I love it.

It's not putting, yeah, I think it's a bad decision.

To have this guy

speak

and you had Republicans, you had Republicans apologizing for it.

That's kind of a relatively objective benchmark.

Yeah, first of all.

Rick Scott, the Republican Senate tour, one of them in Florida,

had to apologize for this.

Yeah, and Pennsylvania has approximately half a million Puerto Ricans.

So like to think that they thought that this was a good thing to do is just kind of crazy.

It just goes to show that Trump truly does think that he can get away with anything at this point, and it doesn't matter.

It's like this, you know, it's this hubris that's next level.

He's not a detail guy.

No.

I don't think Trump is going with a red pen.

What color would you use a red pen or a black?

I don't think Trump's going over with a sharpie.

Sharpie, Sharpie is his instrument of choice.

That's true.

I don't think he's going over with a a Sharpie and vetoing individual jokes, but

anyway, you want to talk about some earlier decisions?

So

I think we're coming down on the line of bad decisions.

But since we're talking about Puerto Rico and Pennsylvania and Puerto Ricans in Pennsylvania, let's go back in time to another pivotal campaign decision,

which is choice of a vice presidential candidate.

And

our listeners know what you think, Nate, and what I think.

But let's just talk through it right now with one week to go until the election.

Vice presidential candidate choice.

Good decision, bad decision, overrated, underrated in terms of a factor.

I think it was a bad decision to go with Tim Walls, who has been very much backgrounded after being part of this brat summer.

I mean, the argument was that at least he can kind of crack these like dad jokes and be a good public speaker.

They haven't had him do that many TV appearances.

When he has done them, he seemed very nervous.

He kind of sucked.

I'm not going to pull punches, especially in the early half of the JD Vance debate and then the whole message that, hey, buddy, we're just two guys hanging out having a debate when the rest of the Kamala campaign's been about like

what a unique threat is and how we should not normalize this.

I just thought was like, was very strange.

And you also would like to have um you know shapiro accomplishes two things the more important one of course is that he is the governor of this really important state uh called pennsylvania um an extra point pennsylvania it's the exact scenario that harris um would most want to have josh shapiro where michigan is polling half a point to a point ahead for harris wisconsin's polling half a point to a point ahead pennsylvania is a pure tie 0.3 points in favor of trump according to our polling average and so boy just to have one

extra percentage point in Pennsylvania so it doesn't kind of fall.

It's not the straggler falling behind the line.

Also, it would have like signaled more of a break toward this new generation of talent.

Democrats have a lot of talented members.

I mean,

boy.

One good thing is if

Harris loses for Democrats is that they actually have a really robust bench, right?

I mean, her career is going to be over.

Maybe she'll try to run for Senate or something again, right?

Probably get some university president job.

I don't know.

But, you know, but they have Shapiro and Gretchen Whitmer and Westmore

in Maryland and Rafael Mournock in Georgia.

And

they have a robust bench.

And like, you know, maybe the bench is better than the starting quarterback, but you are able to pick from the bench.

And instead, they went, I don't know what they did exactly.

They went and like drafted a guy from like the Arena Football League or something.

I just, I think this is a decision that has, I was critical of at the time, time, I think has not held up very well.

Yeah, I completely agree with that.

And let me add to what you said.

It's not just Pennsylvania.

You alluded to this, but I think Shapiro has much better debating skills, would have come off much better against JD Vance.

And in general, right now, would be probably hammering home more guided, pointed messages with kind of the end game, which is something we talked about last week, that the campaign has been a little bit wishy-washy, hasn't really figured out, you know, what are we going to hammer home, you know, like abortion or whatever it is in these last weeks.

And I think Shapiro would have actually probably been much better at that.

And so on the margin, that might have helped with other swing voters.

So I will agree with you.

Bad decision for all of these reasons.

If you're running on personality, because look, Harris.

doesn't really have ambitious new plans.

You go to like the issues section of her page, her home page, and it says, cumula harris was a prosecutor she cares about the people it's like no honey i want to know about the fucking issues that's why i clicked on the issues page enough bio enough fucking vibes what are your issues um

and she's been very afraid of that because on the one hand she doesn't want to own the unpopular accomplishments of like the biden-harris administration on the other hand she she wants to run away from her unpopular positions in 2019 and like ambitious new government spending programs are a harder sell in an environment where there's lots of concern about inflation and deficits and interest rates and things like that.

And so, I don't know, at least with Shapiro, you have two really strong personalities.

Maybe they clash a little bit, but you can do things with clashing personalities.

What are podcasts all about, Maria?

Clashing personalities.

Oh, man.

It just, it just, yeah.

And I think

there's something in there that we'll come back to because it's another kind of good decision, bad decision, because obviously Kamala Harris is in a really shitty position because she's still the VP.

Biden is still president, and

she's also running, and she has been put in this unfortunate

place where it does kind of

put a damper on the types of things that she feels that she kind of can't say.

But before we move on to that,

let's do this decision for the Republican camp as well.

J.D.

Vance, good decision, bad decision.

Also a bad decision.

I mean, there was like the season of J.D.

Vance, like couch jokes, which misinformation, by the way, but jokes are okay if

they're about Republicans.

But like he remains, I believe, maybe the most unpopular VP in history.

I think Sarah Palin's numbers were declining at this point, so it's probably a close two-way race.

Ohio is not a swing state.

It does have a competitive Senate race.

He is a good debater.

I mean, J.D.

Vance is like the blogger personality type, right?

J.D.

Vance would be a good podcaster and a good blogger.

And that probably correlates well with doing a relatively effective job at the debate.

Although, again, he was also hamstrung by not wanting to deny that Trump's an election denier.

I'm using a double negative, right?

But not willing to admit that Biden won in 2020.

Very inexperienced campaigner.

He ran, he's one, just run in and won just one election in his lifetime.

And the decision was made, apparently, after intervention from like the Trump kids.

And at a time when Trump was writing really high in the polls, this is when he'd just been almost assassinated, when Joe Biden was still trying to run as a candidate, but after the debate, and I think they just thought they're going to run away with this and we'll cement our legacy.

And that was a bad decision, too.

Yeah.

And I think that

we can,

I agree that it was a bad decision for Trump, but

I think that

another kind of element of that good decision, bad decision, is foresight, right?

Like

being willing to think that, oh, Biden might not be the person I'm running against.

So, kind of failure to look ahead, failure to consider the possibility that Kamala Harris might actually be the person that you're running against.

It does seem like the Trump campaign, we've talked about this before, really dropped the ball on this.

So, that's another bad decision in terms of campaign planning.

And I don't know if that has to do with, you know, overconfidence with the people he surrounded himself with.

I'm not quite sure what was behind that, but it does seem like a major oversight in terms of campaign planning.

And that was another decision point.

You know, when he picked J.D.

Vance, it was clear that Biden, you know, was not necessarily going to stay the presidential choice for the Democrats.

And Republicans, I don't think, believe that.

I think they thought, well, he's the Trump of the Democratic Party.

And

I think Republicans underestimated Democrats'

desire to win elections.

They'll fuck lots of shit up, right?

But like, Democrats know how to look at polls showing Biden behind in every swing state.

And there's a sizable minority of polling spinners and deniers in the party, but

cooler heads and saner heads prevailed.

But you want to go back, let's go way back to

March 2023.

I think I'm still working at ABC News at that point, kind of half-assidly.

And because the writing's on the wall.

And the writing was also on the wall for Joe Biden being really fucking old.

And to be fair,

the times when Biden consistently began to trail Trump in head-to-head polls was later in 2023.

By fall 2023, all these polls are coming out, and it's too early to look at polls, et cetera, but like these polls are coming out showing that Biden is now trailing Trump.

Again, a year plus in advance doesn't mean that much.

But also, that, like, depending on what poll you look at, like, 80% of Americans say he's too old and they have concerns about his ability to effectively serve out.

I'm sorry, how many percent?

What percent of Americans?

80 is 78, I think.

Zero.

Okay.

70.

That's that's a big percentage.

Kings versus kings versus queens.

You like to be on the 80s.

You know, that's pretty good.

But Biden decided that he was going to hit a two-outer and decided that he was going to run for election again.

But in March 2023,

Democrats eased his path by announcing there would be no primary debates.

I'm sure envisioning

Mary Ann Williamson and Biden and a circus or whatever that would have been.

So, I don't know, good decision or bad decision?

A horrible decision.

I think this was probably one of the worst decisions they could have made.

If we had had primary debates, I think that a lot of Biden's weaknesses would have come out immediately, right?

We wouldn't have had to wait until his debate with Trump.

And by the way, Democrats absolutely knew this, which is why there were no primary debates, right?

Like they already were.

I think maybe they didn't know it was going to be such a disaster, but I think they knew that he wasn't going to hold his own

in all respects.

I mean, he was already not doing much media.

Like, I don't know.

You're going to push back?

You don't think that they knew that he was going to not be a good debater?

I think, first of all, Democrats, whatever they're doing behind the scenes, managed to convince.

There was no credible opposition to Biden.

Maryam Williamson, I actually once wrote, no offense to Mary Ann Williamson and Dean Phillips, but XXX, there wasn't a serious primary.

And they both responded.

Dean Phillips was like, aha, no offense taken.

And Mary Ann Williamson's like, I do take offense.

I do joke.

I'm a serious candidate for president.

She's like a mid-Atlantic act.

It's like newscasts.

I can't, I don't know.

Never mind.

I'm not trying to do that first.

But like, yeah, I think to have Biden up on stage with Mary Ann Williamson wouldn't have accomplished very much.

And Democrats kind of live in fear of they confuse cause and effect is what happened.

Generally speaking, what happens is that when you have a primary challenge, that party loses.

The reason why is the only time you have a primary challenge is when a candidate is going to lose anyway.

And so he's vulnerable and you're trying to give voters another alternative.

So you're confusing cause and effect there.

And

look, Democrats, I mean, the rumors before 2022, Carolyn Maloney, my former congresswoman,

went out and said, oh, yeah, everyone knows Biden's going to retire.

He's a one-term president.

And then I think the reporting on this is still not entirely clear on whether Biden was leaning toward retirement and then changed his mind or if he had never announced any plans or if it's like, fuck these people.

You know, they can't make me retire.

I'm the president of the United States.

And then, but,

but anyway, Democrats had had this relatively good midterm and made a decision.

We want to clean our hands of anything that could muck up

this coronation.

I mean, they thought, you go back and look at this, right?

They thought, oh, my God, we're going to get another Biden-Trump rematch.

And we won that last time.

So this is awesome.

This is great.

And then after 9% inflation and 81 years old and...

some major increase in

illegal, undocumented, if you prefer, immigration across the Mexican border.

That's a pretty tough electoral environment.

And you probably need a stronger candidate.

Yeah, I agree with you that like if we look back on any one decision, Biden's decision not to retire and say, you know, I'm not seeking a second term is probably the single most pivotal decision of this whole campaign.

Something that then

let's dovetail that with the debate decision.

So the timing of the debates and that

first debate, you know, that I watched in fetal position

between President Biden and Donald Trump, where that was kind of the beginning of the end,

if we look at it that way.

So changing the debate schedule and having that debate when it happened,

I would say, you know, it was probably a good decision for the campaign because it actually forced their hand.

But

let's talk about that a little bit.

It's like when you think you're bluffing and your opponent calls you with the worst hand, it turns out it was a value bet.

So

look, the reporting is still

when Biden made that move or his campaign made that move, I kind of wrote like, you know, the one nice thing this does for Democrats is that if Biden is so bad he has to drop out, then finally you have some option of value to get rid of him.

I don't tend to think that his team was doing that on purpose.

I think they just were like, we have to try something.

We've been behind the polls for months, and the media narrative is not changing.

If there is reporting post facto, if Maggie Haberman writes a book or something that says, actually, someone in the Biden office was trying to get him out and this was their secret plan, but I don't think there's been any reporting on that.

So it's a decision that I guess worked out well.

I mean, Democrats do have this almost 50-50 chance with Harris that they wouldn't have had with Biden.

I think we'd be talking about like,

you know, hey, can 5% chances happen and things like that, right?

However, there's another hidden consequence to Harris, which is that, so Biden didn't just ask for an early debate, he also blew up the three debates that had originally been scheduled for the counts by the Commission on Presidential Debates.

I believe were in October.

Maybe one was in late September and then two in October.

I don't remember exactly.

But the normal timing of the campaign.

So you went from having three debates to two, one of which was taken up by

Biden.

And so now Harris, in one of her strongest formats, only has one debate.

I mean, Harris's best polling period of the whole campaign was after that first debate

and her honeymoon period, but like the first and only debate and like lost any leverage to claim.

I mean, I mean, once you blew up the calendar, then you can't really make hay of the fact that like Trump is also very unreliable and he didn't go to any of the GOP primary debates.

He had lots of gripes with the Commission on Presidential debates last cycle.

He might have been very strategic and not cared about like the reputational risk from looking like you're ducking a debate.

But like, if Kabbalah Harris had another debate last week, I think this might have been a meaningfully different race.

And the fucking Biden people fucked that up.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So

I don't know.

I don't know.

Okay.

So let's sum this up.

Obviously, there are lots of moving parts to this debate decision, but let's come to a net assessment.

So, Nate, what do you think?

In terms of kind of the end result, the decision of the Biden campaign to rearrange the debate schedule, have that one earlier debate, you know, blow up some of the later debates,

net positive, net negative, good decision, bad decision?

Are we focusing on process or not?

Or results, Maria?

I thought we were focusing on process.

Don't we test people on that?

That was a terrible decision.

Because if they actually thought that was going to make Joe Biden look good, they're the stupidest fucking people in the history of the world.

Well, not just politics.

No, I think we have to focus on process.

And we're taping this Tuesday, October 29th.

We don't know, right?

We cannot be outcome-oriented right now.

We know that what happened in terms of the Biden campaign, but we don't know what that means for the election.

We do know that they improved.

Yes.

Like Harris gives Democrats, in my estimation,

double the chances roughly, or more than that, right?

So like, so that part of the decision worked out well for them.

I guess if she loses by less, then nobody really cares, I suppose.

But sound like a poker tournament where second place gets like 80% of first place money or something.

Right.

It could be president half 40% of the time.

40% of the time.

You alternate.

You round up to like, it's a landslide and be like five days, Tuesday.

So Harris will be president Tuesdays, Wednesdays.

And I think Trump likes to play golf on Saturday.

So let's give Harris Saturday too.

I love it.

I love it.

But yeah, no, I think we do have to focus on process rather than outcome because as poker players, as people who talk about decision-making, that's the only way that you can, that you can actually evaluate the decision quality.

And in a case like this, where there are so many moving parts, I think that it has to be the swinging net determination.

Bad process.

And we'll be right back after this break.

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So let's talk about that moment when Biden drops out and Harris very, very quickly becomes the presumptive nominee.

I know that at that point, Nate, you were talking about potentially doing kind of this mini primary.

That's not what happened.

So let's talk about that decision to go straight from Biden to Harris.

I advocated at the time for having a mini primary and some other Democrats did that as well.

I think in retrospect that was

naive.

Maybe not because it was been a bad idea in theory, but like in practice,

you have the vice president

in a party that

doesn't particularly like nominating white men.

She did a very good job, by all accounts, of understanding that Biden was in trouble and consolidating her support and,

you know, having her chips ready to cash in the minute the cashier's window opened, maybe a few minutes beforehand.

Maybe she was

heading down the elevator to the to the to the wind cashier before even checking out of her hotel room maybe a little inkling of something um

and so you kind of have you know so if you have the following options right

harris wins in 36 hours or you have um

everyone agrees that we should have this primary process or you have you have a weeks-long fight and then Harris wins anyway.

I mean, I think we can agree that like the third decision is the worst decision, and maybe the second decision wasn't possible, therefore you get the first decision.

But again,

the timing matters here.

Even a few earlier weeks of a Biden announcement might have given things people a few more options.

So, I mean, this one I'm more forgiving of, but again, it comes back to Biden

should have left the race earlier.

And at first, the view was, well, she doesn't really have to go through like a normal campaign, and maybe that's helpful.

She won't get enough scrutiny.

July, August, September, was it?

Four and a half months is plenty enough time for scrutiny.

And her campaign kind of ran on this premise that we can just kind of run off the fumes of Brat Summer and like

and didn't find a second gear.

And like, again, like the problem is like all these fucking things are like foreseeable.

Like all these things I've like criticized in real time and they worked out badly and like and like, you know,

that she needs second gear.

People are going to ask, what's the issue?

Why are you, you know, you want change, but you're the incumbent vice president.

Like, how's that work, Harris?

And, like, the fact that she goes on interviews and gets asked, what's one thing you do differently than Joe Biden?

And she can't answer that fucking question.

Like, what the fuck is going on?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And people thought she'd be a

C-minus candidate, and she's been a B-minus, right?

She might win because Trump is unpopular.

She'll probably have a good ground game.

Trump steps in his own shit a lot, right?

But I think you cannot, like, quote-unquote objectively say that she's like, run a great campaign, you know?

maybe a B candidate and D campaign that averages out to a C.

And people thought she'd be worse than that.

I mean, I mean, luckily for Democrats, she certainly has improved like her

public speaking in like teleprompter settings, right?

She was, she's a very good debater.

So she has some attributes and she and she, you know, united Democrats around her.

So she's done some good things.

Her convention speech was good.

But the things that are less about the candidate and more about the campaign and the fact that the campaign is not prepping the candidate for that question, just I don't understand it.

Yeah, no,

I think those are all valid points.

And who knows, there's still a week left.

Maybe all of a sudden we'll get clear answers

and some issues.

But what about, you know, we're talking a lot about the Democratic decisions and we've talked about J.D.

Vance, but what about the decision to nominate Trump again?

Like, what do we think about that?

Obviously, we do not know the results of the race, but, you know, you just mentioned his popularity, good decision, bad decision.

There were other choices, and I think the Republican Party made a very conscious decision that they were going to kind of go into the Trump direction, the Trump camp, that they were going to be kind of the party of Trump instead of any number of directions that could have happened at that stage, especially since he had lost the last election.

So what do we think about that?

What do we think about that decision process?

That's something that is not talked about nearly as much.

That's because it wasn't a decision, it was the voters' decision.

I mean, look, one thing Republicans could have done is that when Trump

was

impeached,

they could have voted to convict him in the Senate, in which case he would not be eligible.

You need a two-thirds majority, so you have to have a lot of Republicans come on board, in which case he is not constitutionally eligible to be president ever again.

So, that's a point at which they could have, but look, everyone ran.

Mike Pence ran.

The then popular governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, ran.

Nikki Haley, the only half-decent candidate in the bunch, frankly, ran.

It's a star-studded field by objective metrics.

And the voters overwhelmingly picked Trump.

I mean, what did Nikki Haley win?

She won Vermont or something?

D.C.

Which is better than I thought.

The over-under is probably zero and a half states.

So

I mean,

would they be off with a more normal candidate?

I mean,

yes, on the one hand, I mean, when you had Haley versus Biden polls, Haley in the more quality polls was doing significantly better than Trump.

At the same time, it's a little bit like if a

dog had wings, it could fly.

I mean, it's like kind of like the Republican Party of today is not capable of not nominating Trump if Trump is on the ballot.

I mean, it just wasn't even close in any of these states.

By the way, nobody tried, I mean, you could blame like Ron DeSantis for like being, oh, we'll cozy up to Trump and not say any bad things about him.

And then magically something happens and I win.

I mean, he hasn't aged well, his strategy.

But like, it just, it's what the voters decided.

No, I, I, I, I, right.

Obviously, I was just kind of talking

about earlier, kind of rallying around Trump and like deciding that this was, you know, this was the way to go rather than kind of trying to distance themselves from Trump way back when, after January 6th, after, you know, or even, you know, the impeachment, as you said.

Like there were points in time where I think the party could have made different decisions and did not.

And we'll see how that turns out.

But I think that that is that does say something.

So I think where we come out on this is that it's complicated, right?

As with everything, there are lots of good and bad decisions.

But if Kamala Harris loses the election next week, I think we've crowned the single worst decision.

This will be squarely on President Biden's shoulders for not deciding to step away from the race

and say that he was not going to be running for a second term.

Do you agree with that?

Yeah,

absolutely.

Absolutely.

That's the core fact of this campaign.

And, you know, it's not as though people thought Harris was a great candidate before.

And look, they did make that decision, right?

Right.

I mean, so Biden running was a worst decision.

Replacing him was the best decision by either party in the campaign.

Trump's worst decision?

I guess J.D.

Van,

Maybe the campaign, the convention speech, where he had just gotten assassinated in the first half an hour of the convention speech was like

a softer side of Trump.

And then he just rambles for an hour, right?

You know,

he wasn't very prepped for that debate with Harris.

Maybe he shouldn't have accepted this early debate from Biden because that gave Biden a chance to skate free or Democrats a chance to skate free from Biden.

So, I don't think it's not a campaign where you would go and

give everyone high marks.

Yeah, so I think that with the Harris campaign, with the Democratic Party, we have one clear, absolute worst decision and one clear best decision.

With the Trump campaign, we have a lot of bad decisions, but unclear which one is like the worst decision.

They didn't do anything as egregious as the Democratic camp when it came to, you know, when it came to the Biden decision.

But let's see what happens.

Let's see what happens.

Yeah, and from there, it's still approximately 50-50 race.

And it's still, yep, it's still approximately 50-50.

So after the break, Nate, let's talk briefly about the model.

A quick break and then a

quickie little model horse race looking.

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All right, one week to go, Nate.

What are the models saying?

I know we're 50-50, but are you seeing movement?

Are you seeing anything important?

Kind of,

are we and what's happening?

The latest numbers.

Kamala Harris.

Every time you need to get a new voice going, I love it.

Kamala Harris has a 45.3% chance of winning the Electoral College.

Are you trying to be the AI version of yourself?

No, you see, you have these automated, we're dating ourselves,

and a 71.4%

probability of winning the popular vote.

It's basically 55, 45 Trump, or 54, 45 with a small chance of a tie.

It's been a little weird.

I mean, look,

it's gradually drifted to Trump over actually a fairly long period now.

I mean, you know, two out of every three days, Harris has lost ground on the forecast

since roughly early October.

You know, it looks like it stabilized a bit, maybe.

I don't think we're going to learn very much in this last week of the polling in fact um

i kind of trust pollsters less this they all every time a pollster oh every state is is just plus one every little every single state's a tie no you're fucking hurting you're cheating you're cheating your numbers aren't all gonna come out at exactly one point leads when you're sampling 800 people over dozens of surveys you are lying you're putting your fucking finger on the scale i will not name names but some pollsters are really bad about this all these all these go p leaning for it's always

we're not going out too far on a limb, Trump.

It's just Trump plus one in Pennsylvania every fucking single time.

No, that's not how fucking polling works.

That's not how polling is supposed to work.

There's a margin of.

Hey, tell us how you really feel.

So you get hurting, and like everyone just says, oh, well, I mean, basically, the pollsters are...

50-50 is a forecast because not all base rates are 50-50, right?

The pollsters are just fucking punting, except the New York Times.

It actually has balls, right?

The pollsters just fucking punting on this election for the most part.

I mean, not just the New York Times.

There are some of the other high-quality polls will actually publish numbers that surprise you once in a while.

If a pollster never publishes any numbers that surprises you, then it has no value.

Information that has no potential to be surprising has no value.

It should already be kind of like priced into your worldview or kind of priced into like the model.

In my case, the model had become one in the last week of the election.

But look,

all seven swing states are still polling within, it looks like a point and a half here.

Maybe Trump's leads up to almost two points in Arizona.

Yeah, two points in Arizona.

So everything's polling within two points.

And Harris has got a good poll in Arizona that we haven't encountered for yet, right?

So within two points.

It doesn't take a genius to know that if every swing state's a tie, that the overall forecast is a tie.

You know, Pennsylvania is that one state, though.

If you just add up the states where

Harris leads, then she is one state short.

She is 0.4 points behind in Pennsylvania.

And guess who is the governor of Pennsylvania, Maria?

Does his last name start with an S and

with an O?

John Fetterman?

No.

He's a senator from Pennsylvania.

Bob Casey, no?

The others, they have two senators, actually.

If the polls are exactly right, then actually

it says even in Nevada.

So then Nevada is tied.

I don't know what happens there.

They go play roulette, I think, is the rule in Nevada, if it's tied.

But Harris would come up one state short, and that state's name is Pennsylvania.

But again, so if you really are going over it with like incredible precision, but you don't want to have that precision, anyone who says that they know what's happening is

just is playing roulette.

They're guessing and half the fucking

pundit industry just kind of, they've always been on red.

been on red or been on blue every time and like and they just always make the same fucking bet and rationalize oh blue's lucky well you know it's blue's turn now blue's on a win streak

And half the time they're right.

And they're like, oh, my God, I'm a God's gift to fucking election prognostication.

Anyway, nobody knows anything.

Yeah, no, I mean,

I'm in Nevada right now and I'm actually, you know, looking at the updates.

And the Republicans are ahead in early mail-in voting.

It looks like Clark County, which is supposed to be, which is where I live, which is the kind of Democratic wall, the mail-in ballot rates are not good.

And so, you know, and both Trump and Harris are coming here on Thursday.

So stay inside.

Don't drive anywhere on Thursday.

Why is you at the fucking airport in Vegas?

Like, I love Vegas, but like, why?

Because there's lots of campaign events there.

Why is the airport so weird about this ground stop shit?

Yeah, I don't know, but I made the mistake of flying out one day when one of the candidates, I don't remember which, was flying in and basically missed my flight

because

there was no going in or out of the airports and nothing whatsoever could be done about it.

So yeah, so those are those are always fun moments.

But yeah, it's close.

It's a complete toss-up.

And

I'm glad that

your model with which you are one

agrees with that because that's exactly what it feels like here.

And I did think it was interesting, by the way, that they're both coming here as opposed to one of the other battleground states on Thursday.

But I guess that goes to show that, yeah, when you're short, you're trying to really rally those undecided voters, and they definitely exist here.

But yeah,

let's see what happens.

Next week, we'll actually be doing two episodes.

So we'll be dropping an episode for you right before the election on Monday.

So stay tuned.

We'll be doing some real-time visits to see what's happening with the election.

But I think I would like to end today and

you can end it however you want, but I would like to say, please, please, please, especially if you're in a swing state, but everywhere, just go out and vote.

Please do that.

I think that it's incredibly important.

Exercise your right to vote.

And yeah,

that I think is a really important message for this week.

Go out and vote.

Don't donate more money to campaigns.

They can't do anything with it at this point.

I'm serious.

Save it for like a good cause that money will do nothing for any candidate that you're voting for.

If you have to donate to a local race, right?

So vote.

I agree with that, Maria.

But save your money for a good cause.

All right.

And on that note, let's see what happens next week.

Let us know what you think of the show.

Reach out to us at riskybusiness at pushkin.fm.

Risky Business is hosted by me, Maria Kondakova.

And by me, Nate Silver.

The show is a co-production of Pushkin Industries and iHeartMedia.

This episode was produced by Isabel Carter.

Our associate producer is Gabriel Hunter Chang.

Our executive producer is Jacob Goldstein.

If you like the show, please rate and review us so other people can find us too.

And if you want to listen to an ad-free version, sign up for Pushkin Plus.

For $6.99 a month, you get access to ad-free listening.

Thanks for tuning in.

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