On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything

by Nate Silver

Politicians and political parties, by contrast—especially in a highly polarized two-party system like the United States—don’t subscribe to this way of thinking and really don’t want you to think that way about elections either. Instead, they see their victories as being morally righteous—not reflecting contingencies like butterfly ballots or the Electoral College or what the inflation rate happens to be,[*4] but rather as embodying the “right side of history” or even God’s will. They see every election as uniquely, existentially important—not drawn from some probability distribution of possible outcomes, as expected value assumes, but its own special snowflake. They also don’t want to permit a whole lot of room for nuance or complexity or pluralistic and probabilistic thinking—it’s hard enough to keep your coalition together, so you don’t want people on your “team” arguing with one another. And they view the whole idea of betting on politics as cringey and morally suspect.