Dem
51
GOP
49
Nate Silver is still the country's best-known psephologist. However, for various reasons, he's not quite the golden boy he once was (see what we did there?). He's now completely divorced from the site he founded, and he's also gotten in the habit of replacing analysis with punditry, and of getting into flame wars on eX-Twitter.
Now, perhaps in the process of squeezing as much value out of his fame as is possible, Silver has gone in a new, and ethically questionable direction. For better or worse, we are now in an era where betting on sports is as easy as it's ever been in the U.S. (and it's going to get easier). The various books that do business with American bettors are trying to drum up as much action as possible, and so have become increasingly enthusiastic about something that European books also do: taking bets on politics.
To that end, Silver has just been hired by a predictions market called Polymarket. At the moment, the site does not collect actual money from players. However, they do foresee that in the future, one way or another. It's not entirely clear what Silver's role will be; whether he will advise on broad organizational issues, or he'll be involved at a more granular level, perhaps even setting the odds for various possible outcomes.
We're not sure that Silver HAS crossed a line here. But we're also not sure he HAS NOT crossed a line. He's already well-known as a gambler (in particular, tournament poker). He's going to be in a position to set the markets' expectations for various political and news events. He's also in a position, as a pundit and analyst, to actually influence political and news events. It would not be too difficult, for example, for him to encourage the betting markets to add a wager that Donald Trump will drop J.D. Vance, and then for him to write a number-crunching piece about how Trump simply must drop J.D. Vance.
Undoubtedly, Silver has persuaded himself that he can maintain the walls between his careers as a pundit/psephologist, a professional gambler, and a professional gambling consultant. Maybe he can, but it's pretty easy for these things to get blurrier and blurrier over time. Certainly, the walls are already blurry to the point that we would not be comfortable saying "yes" if someone contacted us and asked us to consult on politics-based gambling. And we have nowhere near the reach that Silver does. (Z)