I don't know who exactly is the patron saint of elections, but this article from "America" magazine from 2020 does suggest likely candidates (ha!) to invoke.
"St. Barsabbas and St. Matthias. Perhaps the saintly duo we need to invoke most this Election Day, they are the only pair of running mates ever canonized. Both followed Jesus throughout his ministry, without seeking reward or to be counted among the Twelve. In the end, St. Barsabbas lost to St. Matthias when lots were cast to replace Judas Iscariot after he betrayed Jesus. Still, St. Barsabbas went on to proclaim God’s word among the people and do good. Little is known of St. Matthias after his election. We hope, through these saints’ intercession, whoever wins might receive the same grace to recede from public office and avoid making the daily headlines."
Imagine being voted in to replace Judas. That's a tough act to follow and a hard row to hoe!
Personally, I'd go for St. Thomas More but yeah, probably too conservative for the majority on here. Might be a good pick for JD Vance, though 😁
"St. Thomas More, patron saint of politicians. Another martyr for the faith, St. Thomas More was once one of the richest and most powerful politicians in England—until he refused to bow to the will of the tyrant Henry VIII and recognize Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn. “I am the king’s good servant, but God’s first,” he said before he was executed. Let us pray that politicians on both sides of the aisle act with integrity in office and render unto God the things that are God’s. (Side note: St. Thomas More would also put Donald J. Trump to shame in a war of insults. He once called Martin Luther “a pimp, an apostate, a rustic, and a friar.”)"
Thomas More wrote the proto-communist "Utopia", so he hardly seems particularly 'conservative'. The Soviets back in the day had a statue of him (along with Thomas Muntzer) in Red Square, i believe (might have the details wrong).
> But the simple story seems wrong. Other real-money markets rose approximately in tandem with Polymarket. For example, Smarkets got to Trump 59% on 10/16, and peaked at 64% on 10/30. Kalshi followed a similar path. Both tracked Polymarket, not Nate Silver or Metaculus (neither of whom ever went above Trump 55% since Harris joined the race).
Isn't it possible it was just arbitrage? If Polymarket's offering 60-40 odds, and Smarkets is offering 50-50 odds, you buy Trump on Smarkets (driving up price) and Kamala on Polymarket. If Polymarket's underlying market cap is much larger, this means Trump goes up on Smarkets without a visible impact on Polymarket.
(Also, IIRC, around this same time, Musk tweeted about it, which also disrupts the pool of people doing the betting.)
(I used to be a professional gambler, and) I agree this is likely.
There's another step where traditional bookies are used to looking at markets as their market-makers - they aren't bothering to make complicated forecasting models for non-sports events, so they follow the wise money. In this case, they're following the dumb money. They don't care much if someone tries to arb with them as long as they think their odds are accurate, but their signal for the latter is incorrect.
For whatever it's worth, I have 4 figures on Harris at 38c.
Edit: Oh, and I think the lesson for this is that increased liquidity isn't purely good for prediction markets. You need the ecology too - people who have understanding of the market.
I've read papers on this being the case for sports betting markets (home/away bias exists, increased liquidity increases the bias), and I think their value rises after this incident.
In principle yes, you can have one mispriced market, and then all other markets can be driven by arbitrage towards it (which should also bring that mispriced market down). But you need an explanation for why one whale has more pricing power than "everyone else in the world who thinks the odds haven't changed and can bet". E.g. Betfair has a trading volume in the hundreds of millions of dollars on this market. As I write, Trump is at 57-60 on Kalshi, Betfair and Polymarket.
>In principle yes, you can have one mispriced market, and then all other markets can be driven by arbitrage towards it (which should also bring that mispriced market down).
Agreed, but with a caveat...
The natural policy conclusion from this is "The markets need more liquidity.". And that sounds reasonable, and matches the first order expectations for how markets should behave...
But - this _also_ matches the policy conclusion, infamous from government programs: "What we are doing isn't working. Lets make the program bigger, and do more of this."
Well, perhaps it wasn't clear, but I was merely describing an argument to explain why I don't find it convincing. Given the amount of money traded on these markets, I don't find "well, there was insufficient liquidity" very convincing at all. I think many people were pricing information not contained in polls. Of course an individual could do so "wrongly", but I just mean that there exists plenty of relevant information that isn't accounted for in polling averages etc, and obviously prediction markets should incorporate this information, and appealing to "but the polling averages haven't moved, so how come the market has" assumes its own conclusion.
Well, it looks like the markets were correct where e.g. 538 was wrong (at least, as far as I've seen, both ended up making close predictions but 538 with the edge to Harris & the markets giving the edge to Trump)... although, as Scott notes, it's hard to really tell too much from one trial.
Still, they don't look as bad as Scott evidently thought they would.
(That's what you get for voting for someone who supports price controls, Scott: you are cursed to have bad takes for the next four years! oooOoOoo! 👻)
Yeah, agree you can't learn anything really from n=1 purely from the predictions and the outcomes. If you predict 50-50 and one of the sides win (which of course they must), does it even mean anything to say you were wrong? (I don't think so, and similarly a 60-40 prediction isn't wrong/right by virtue of the outcome).
So to make a claim of rightness/wrongness you need to make a statement about some external factor. Call the information set used by polling-based models I_A. Call the information set captured by the betting markets as I_B (of which I_A is a subset. Then it can totally be true that:
E(Trump wins | I_A) = 0.5
E(Trump wins | I_B) = 0.65
There is nothing contradictory here. It is however a bit silly for the person possessing I_A to look at the betting market and say "they could not possibly have any additional information". That's just a really high benchmark!
In this specific case, i am not entirely sure what information bettors were using, but I think there was available public information from the early voting data that looked promising for Republicans and inconsistent with polling. I suspect betting markets were picking this up to at least some degree.
>(That's what you get for voting for someone who supports price controls, Scott: you are cursed to have bad takes for the next four years! oooOoOoo! 👻)
>Given the amount of money traded on these markets, I don't find "well, there was insufficient liquidity" very convincing at all.
Many Thanks, sorry for misinterpreting your views!
>I think many people were pricing information not contained in polls.
Agreed, and that is a sensible thing for them to do. Amongst other data, everything that each candidate says is an additional datum, and can validly drive an update.
>appealing to "but the polling averages haven't moved, so how come the market has" assumes its own conclusion.
No worries, I'm pretty sure the problem was just I worded my original comment too cryptically. It sounds like we agree on the merits. (Like you, I also would not argue for "well we need more liquidity". If spreads are large, you can arguably say that. But that wasn't the first order issue here).
I think there was a co-equal effect of Harris suddenly doing an interview surge. According to the biased diet of my twitter algo they were seriously bad - Dana Bash: "She didn't close the deal". Wild comment for a CNN person to make in the last stretch of the election
GPT says the first interview was Oct 7 on CBS, which famously included an answer they later edited after it went viral
If you're temperamentally biased towards Trump, and that happens, you're thinking Harris' internal polling was a disaster and it was a failed Hail Mary. Then betting up Trump only for the polls to not move, resulting in a rebound. This may explain the rise and fall of the odds, and may have changed perceptions among more online bettors more durably than for the public. They may have transferred their perception of a big late flame out to "it'll strengthen the polling bias that understates R support"
Another possible contributing factor is people betting on Trump not because it's positive-EV in pure financial terms but because they're hedging against the circumstance where he wins and makes a bunch of other things worse. No idea if significant numbers of people did this, but I thought about it. It seems to be a potential weakness of the predictive accuracy of (some) prediction markets in general.
Yeah, a quick google search finds articles reporting businesses being boarded up *now* in DC and Portland. Portland is well known as an antifa hotspot. Maybe both cities expect to be descended upon by MAGA types if Harris wins. But I suspect the free market is telling you something here.
Also, two separate individuals tried to assassinate Trump these last few months. An experiment by Professor Eric Kaufmann found that 1/3 of Democrats admitted that they would have preferred Trump be killed! (See here: https://unherd.com/newsroom/third-of-democrats-wish-donald-trump-had-been-killed/) Lots of people on the left openly compare Trump to Hitler. You do not have to like the guy one iota to think that there is a non-trivial risk of left wing violence if Trump wins.
The first guy definitely wasn't, since he was under 18 the last election, and only voted in the midterm elections. Don't know much about the second guy, except that he was very critical of Trump's view of Ukraine.
The first shooter, Crooks, was registered as a Republican but his social media history was supporting Biden and specifically his covid lockdown and soft on immigration policies.
The second shooter, Routh was not even registered as a Republican. He was a registered as an independent since 2012. He did claim to have voted for Trump in 2016 after voting for Bernie in the Democratic primary.
The likely truth is, as with with most people who tried to assassinate presidents in the past 150 years, they don't really have coherent politics, they're just nuts.
Undoubtedly the free range anxiety over trump centers him as a totem of wrath, but trying to inflict coherence on these people is a mistake.
To a fairly large degree, agreed. We're dealing with people who (a) seem to have unstable but strongly held views over time, (b) by virtue of their actions are selected from some extreme tail of the population.
I think the stat in the Kaufmann article I linked is more meaningful than the precise political ideology of the two wannabe assassins.
The Kaufmann assassination dilemma always strikes me as interesting.
Surely no-one who takes Trump's threat seriously (including relative moderates) wants the man to continue to be alive. But obviously wishing someone dead and wishing they become the victim of political violence are two different things. It's difficult to untangle whether people who don't wish he'd been killed: 1) genuinely wished Trump good health (i.e. hopes he lives a long and healthy life for purely altruistic reasons); 2) would like him to die, but were afraid of being seen to be condoning political violence; or 3) would like him to die, but were afraid of the potential escalation and destabilisation of a successful attempt.
I suspect 2) and 3) make up the vast majority. So the people who wish he'd been killed: a) Are less afraid of being seen to be condoning political violence; b) Are less afraid of escalation and destabilisation (either because they don't believe it will happen, or because they embrace it).
I don't know how to interpret this in terms of predicting greater future violence, to be honest.
Also, there’s a non-trivial chance that Trump looks like he’s losing, so some supporters riot, but after three days of counting he actually wins. That’s a really bad outcome because it makes it look stolen, but it’s completely possible even with a completely correct count and the riots having no effect on the counting.
Are you really saying that fake money betting markets are more trustworthy than real money betting markets?
Seems extremely counter intuitive, I don’t really see an argument for this. Large whales can influence the price of prediction markets so we should use fake money games instead and disregard them entirely?
Was going to post about people arbing polymarket against other venues but it seems like someone did below. What you mentioned in your blog as “people arbitraging the wrong way” isn’t really an arb but just a bet on the other side when the odds were favorable. An arb seeks to make “free money” due to a spread/odds discrepancy on different venues.
If Trump win, prediction markets are the future of forecasting
Is Trump lose then they are a massive scam and we should never look at them again 😆
"Are you really saying that fake money betting markets are more trustworthy than real money betting markets? Seems extremely counter intuitive, I don’t really see an argument for this."
The argument is:
1. This has been true in the past whenever people study this question.
2. We know why Polymarket and the fake-money markets are different: it's because one whale contigently bet on Polymarket. Unless we want to abandon our faith in the wisdom of crowds in favor of the wisdom of one rich French guy, we should assume the other markets are the well-calibrated ones.
3. It's just inherently harder for one guy with $75 million to screw up a fake money market.
(also, I wouldn't call the two best non-real-money predictors - Nate Silver and Metaculus - "fake money markets". Nate Silver is just a guy. Metaculus is a wisdom-of-crowds engine that weights people's responses by their history of being right in the past. These are different structures from prediction markets and it's not obvious which one should be better.)
I can't help but wonder if this would have been avoided if the highest-liquidity prediction market was legal in the United States. Did this stop it from getting corrected quickly?
Yes and no. If it was legal in more places, it would have more liquidity, but the example shows that just adding more liquidity does not help in itself. Rather than one French guy distorting the market by betting $75m, you might well have one American guy distorting the market by betting $750m.
That's only true if the whale turns out to be wrong. Even if the odds favor the whale being wrong, if it turns out the whale is right, "smart" bets still lose.
Of course, in the long run, the odds will even out, so that the actually smart bets will end up winning. But anything can happen in single bets.
> Unless we want to abandon our faith in the wisdom of crowds in favor of the wisdom of one rich French guy, we should assume the other markets are the well-calibrated ones.
Wait, I thought that the whole point of real-money prediction markets was to move money from from dumb people to smart people, and use wealth as a proxy for forecasting ability.
The Platonic Ideal of a prediction market, sure. In our world, it's "people who want to get rich/think they see an opportunity to make money", and whether that's the stock market or plain old betting on slow horses and fast women, there's always plenty of people to lose their shirts because they think they have a sure thing or a system that will definitely beat the house.
So people betting on prediction markets with real money will attract all sorts, not just the rational smart superforecasters. And then that turns such markets into lotteries. Because we humans can't resist thinking there is indeed such a thing as a free lunch and dollar bills just lying around on the ground waiting to be picked up.
"use wealth as a proxy for forecasting ability"
I do remain slightly amazed and slightly humbled by the simple, trusting, American belief that "Joe made a lot of money, so he must be really, really smart! And the bigger the fortune, the smarter the guy! So I should trust his opinion on the price of eggs" (fair enough, Joe probably knows about things like that) "and what colour to paint my front door" (maybe ask an interior designer instead?)
From cursory reading about the great American fortune-makers of the past, what they had in abundance was not so much massive intellects as massive ruthlessness, the ability to spot the main chance earlier than anyone else, and the drive to spend every possible moment making money. A slice of luck helped them along, as well.
This is true, but it happens too slowly, and in too small numbers, for it to make a difference in big markets like Harris v Trump. The vast majority of the money bet on such markets is not money made from prior bets in prediction markets but comes from elsewhere. I expect this to remain true for a while.
This is an "in the long run we're all dead" situation I think. On average the money will flow in that direction, but while it's flowing the market numbers can be pretty far off from the true odds.
It's also true that there's a lot of random chance in "who gets wealthy", but you never hear about those who lost because of random chance. It's quite probable (based on histories of the successful) that there are more who failed because of taking a risky high-stakes bet than who succeeded. What's not clear is how they differed from the average. A reasonable guess is that there are many different patterns that occasionally succeed, but much more often fail. And that following the advice of those who succeeded because of that kind of pattern is opting for a pathe with a very high chance of failure.
So my guess is "If you're going to take advice of a guy who's super successful, check and make sure it isn't mainly luck that made him successful.". Here I'm counting inherited wealth as a kind of luck, though that's not quite fair, as some families do seem to inculcate skills.
I suppose it's possible. Are you suggesting that crypto whales are the kind of people who hop on a bandwagon just for the sake of being on the winning side, and don't actually care as much about which candidate is better? Maybe that that kind of "back a winner" instinct correlates with being able to make a lot of money on crypto?
I'm not super tied into that culture but my impression is that crypto people seem to at least pretend to have real political preferences, beyond just who they think is more likely to come out on top. But maybe you know better.
I wish we had clearer terminology here. Pro-<candidate> usually mean that someone _prefers_ that <candidate> wins, but what we are talking about here is really whether someone _predicts_ that a candidate wins. Maybe we should talk about expects-Trump and expects-Harris in this context, rather than pro-Trump and pro-Harris?
Any suggestions for better terms? Expects-<candidate> seems clumsy, even to me...
> It's just inherently harder for one guy with $75 million to screw up a fake money market.
Why do you think this? I'm not an expert but I bet $75M could buy a lot of bots and/or Mechanical Turks. Maybe you want to say "one guy with $75M is less likely to _want_ to screw up a fake money market"? But again that's unclear, since modelling Theo as a rational actor maximizing his own utility doesn't seem like a great fit.
Or maybe this is exactly why we shouldn't call Silver/Metaculus "fake money markets", since they aren't susceptible to Sybil attacks the way every fake-money market must be.
It seems like polymarket and real money markets had it right all along. It was a landslide victory, and not close to 50-50 as these gamified markets and the pollers suggested.
It also wasn’t just one wealthy French guy. JPM and hedge funds were allegedly trading on polymarket. Polymarket feed was also integrated into Bloomberg terminal and other trading software.
REAL prediction markets are legit. This proves it.
By what standard does 295 electoral votes and 51.7% of the popular vote count as a "landslide"? I count only two Presidential elections in the past hundred years with the winner scoring lower than Trump/2024, both of them involving a guy named "Dubya".
Everybody who said this election was "too close to call", or "leaning Trump but really too close to call", was approximately as right as everyone else who made such claims. Everybody who claims their predictions were better than those, is deluding themselves.
I think it's clear that polls are not as good a source of information as we'd like, probably because of incredibly low response rates that introduce a bunch of biases. But still, if your expectations of the election were "what Nate Silver says" or "what the RCP polling aggregator says," you had a pretty good picture of reality.
We know people gamble with real money markets. So to believe they're better-calibrated, you need to assume savvy investors with deep pockets are watching them like a hawk, and can tell the difference between stupid gambling and insider trading.
Not even the efficient market hypothesis protects helps much here, AFAICT. If it's extremely difficult to tell whether a big bet is stupid gambling or insider trading, the rational thing to do might just be not to participate since you have opportunities to make better returns elsewhere.
This reasoning sort of applies just as much to the NYSE as prediction markets, tho: to the extent the market is not efficient, it's an issue of scale & liquidity.
$1 million in damage or ten hospitalisations is not that high a threshold but I don't exactly expect CNN to have a running counter so it'll be difficult to get accurate figures.
Remember 2016 and "you're more concerned about glass than lives?" from the knuckleheads out smashing windows of businesses and setting bins on fire, eve of the election result, leaving the ordinary workers who came in to work the next morning to clean the mess up after them (and maybe lose a day's pay if the business really did have to close).
But they were punching Nazis (insert eye roll here) so that made it all okay!
I think it's less likely for the prediction market to resolve that there were election riots if there are left-wing election riots, which is important in placing your bets.
Why is it so unlikely he'd run again and win? I could understand wanting a new candidate if he loses, and maybe the democrats would find some way to bar him from running again, but 0.1%?
I would have just gone with "Trump in power for more than 10 years total", or "Trump in power against the current Constitution".
Wait, hold on, I just read the actual resolution criteria and they say the child question ("Trump in power beyond 2028") resolves No if Trump loses the 2024 election. Huh. I'm now as confused as Scott.
Okay, that is confusing. The real question seems to be "Trump is indeed fascist dictator who will declare himself president for life if he wins", not "if he loses in 2024, will he run again in 2028? and get elected?"
I presume (and am too lazy to check, plus sometimes it's more fun not to know) that the market is badly named and is meant to only apply to winning this time and exceeding a normal term. Because otherwise, as you say, the odds should be much higher. But also because by a literal reading, this election is for POTUS for Jan 2025-Jan 2029, which last I checked goes beyond 2028.
Good point on the actual term timeline! I'd bet a lot of people would be claiming a win even if Trump was peacefully on his way out of office Jan 6 2029.
I had read the odds of 2029 Trump in power as pretty reasonable, given that he is getting fairly old, and probably won't be up for running for election again if he loses this time. There is also a pretty solid chance that if he loses this election he gets jailed for something or other if he remains any credible threat to the administration's power. So less than 1% seemed pretty reasonable to me.
Also, it is not straightforward to translate bets into actual probabilities. I came across this article a couple weeks back, when the odds started doing weird things
but tl;dr there is a region where probabilities/bets are linear, but when extreme things happen you should actually expect the prices to not reflect probabilities
Another major problem is that Musk and similar folks have been promoting these betting markets, which means conservatives are over-represented in them. In theory, you'd think that this would result in these people being taken advantage of, but I think in practice there's not enough people who are willing to bet in these markets (at least not in large quantities) to withstand this sort of systemic monetary bias in messing up the odds. Even if it is, in theory, easy money, in practice, I am not even willing to bet on these markets even if I am certain I will win. I think there's a lot of folks like me, which further limits liquidity if you end up with hive mind style situations. I'm more willing to participate when only fake money is on the line, as I don't actually like RL gambling at all.
There's also just the general fact that the moment people started trying to use these markets to predict the future, it was obvious that it could be used for various manipulative purposes and as such, were going to stop being useful for these purposes. Once the mainstream media started regularly posting about this stuff and Elon Musk started trumpeting about it on Twitter, it was obvious to me that we were in the territory where it was no longer going to be based on anything coherent and would no longer be reliable (or well, even less reliable than it was before).
Speaking of statistics, Nate Silver recently showed that the polls are herding really badly (to the tune of 1 in 9.8 trillion odds of them being genuine poll numbers and not tweaked ones), so there is a very high level of uncertainty.
A lot of people think this election is going to be close, but it could well not be. Ann Selzer released a poll in Iowa - one of only a handful of polls that happened in that state - showing Harris +3 in Iowa. She was right the last two times.
If she's right again, this probably won't actually be a close election.
A question I haven't seen asked: what's the main mechanism of the poll herding? Publication bias (they do polls which show divergence, then decide not to publish); systematic weighting or sampling issues (their methodology and prior assumptions about likely voters or demographic turnout gives less room for variance); ad hoc weighting tricks (they do polls, but shift the weighting on an ad hoc basis so that polls skew less); or just total bullshitting/making up the numbers?
In brief, he suggests that there's some self-censorship going on (a file drawer effect of not publishing outliers), but the more fine-tuned way to herd is to selectively apply weighting factors, particularly with respect to turnout models. For example, Silver writes:
> [Nate] Cohn discovered that in 2012, the racial composition of PPP’s polls was correlated in an unusual way with President Obama’s performance among white voters in their surveys. If Obama was performing especially poorly among whites in one PPP poll, it tended to have a higher share of nonwhite voters, which boosted Obama’s result. And if Obama was doing relatively well among whites, PPP projected less nonwhite turnout, keeping his lead in check. As a result, PPP’s polls tended to show an unusually steady race between Obama and Mitt Romney.
Polling firms don't always disclose their weighted or unweighted results in enough detail to show how the sausage is made, however. It's still sadly common practice to report a post-processed (weighted and likely-voter-modelled) 'topline' with some basic demographic crosstabs, whereas weighting itself can go two or three levels deep.
Thanks... What a shitshow. The irony is that if everyone just collected a bunch of raw data and published it, aggregators would surely get far more accurate estimates by applying a standardised weighting scheme.
Unfortunately, there's a conflict of economic incentives here. There's a difference between a poll and a prediction, but polling firms that take on private clients are essentially selling prediction services.
Outside of the election period, their bread and butter is companies commissioning surveys into whether their sales will go up if they use the red or blue logo for their new product. They want the answer, and "going with the polling firm that had the best election result" is a reasonable but inaccurate proxy for finding the best polling firm.
There was a period where Musk was gleefully posting about the surge in Trump's numbers on Polymarket, and kept making the hilarious joke about how it would be epic if Trump got to 69.420%. I'm sincerely curious why this isn't discussed more.
So in any analysis of Polymarket's behavior, it would seem appropriate to fold in that there's a good chunk if people doing meme-stock stuff rather than making rational bets..?
Isn't the overrepresentation of conservatives a potential opportunity for profit? You can buy close Democratic-favored races at a discount. I actually made a little money doing that last time.
Kalshi should bring smarter money to the game eventually but hasn't been live for long enough yet. Should prediction markets remain fully legal for a few more years I expect them to start to have decent predictive power. Until then it's mostly people having fun and betting on their ingroup, even the larger checks.
I don't see trump winning but I would be surprised if Republicans rioted when he loses.
I have a feeling the election will elicit minimal drama. 2020 was an entirely different climate than today and Republican coded people were frothing at the mouth in a way that just isn't happening in 2024.
I believe Republicans are not necessarily scared; they might just be somewhat more apathetic. In 2020 people on the right seemed to feel like caged animals which was thanks to the insane behavior democrat coded people displayed on social media. After Elon's acquisition of twitter people that are republican coded had a space where they could let off steam without being labeled "white supremacist misogynist monster/devil/nazi". This has had a dampening effect on right wing extremism imo.
Interesting. This is the opposite of my own intuition, mostly based on what I've seen on Twitter I think. I don't have much reason to be confident though. Do you have anything concrete to point to that makes you believe this?
Don't agree with Shelby's thesis, but some concrete evidence Republicans are less prepared to riot is that QAnon is gone. The "Trust the Plan" WWG1WGA network which organized Jan 6 on old Twitter doesn't seem to exist now. But that's more because all those accounts were banned before Musk bought the company.
I guess a Stop the Steal plan would happen on TruthSocial this time around.
Yes but I think many had moved on by then. QAnon was dead by then. Many had moved to Truth Social. Instead of QAnon drops they started reading that website that Tucker Carlson writer wrote that "book report" about here.
I endorse this, based upon my social group being largely very far to the Right. There was a sense, in 2020, that all was lost: insane identilingus-performin', pearl-clutchin' wokies had grasped the reins of power and would prosecute Trump & indeed conservatives as a whole, open the borders & let in floods of new Democratic voters, etc. etc., and there was nowhere one could even speak of it. (If you're on the left, you probably have no idea how bad the censorship on e.g. YouTube got—I can remember a couple experiments that seemed real suggestive re: posting the exact same comments and videos but with the perspective switched, and the left-wing versions staying up or even being promoted, the right-wing versions quietly disappearing...)
"What’s the world where Trump wins but there are still election riots?"
I'd guess "riots when the result of the election is long unclear, Trump gets handed the election in the end after months of recounts, court proceedings, and riots"?
That's what Nate Silver's 80,000 simulations came up with:
"At exactly midnight on Tuesday, we ran our simulation model for the final time in this election cycle. Out of 80,000 simulations, Kamala Harris won in 40,012 (50.015%) cases. She did not win in 39,988 simulations (49.985%). Of those, 39,718 were outright wins for Donald Trump and the remainder (270 simulations) were exact 269-269 Electoral College ties: these ties are likely to eventually result in Trump wins in the U.S. House of Representatives."
There's also the chance of riots if he tries to, well, actually follow through on his campaign promises. Like performing an ideological purge of government agencies, or sending in the military to forcefully stop protests.
I'd treat any riots after Jan 20 as something different from an election riot, to me that phrase means a riot over the outcome (whether disputing or being mad about it) not that any policy of his would lead to rioting within the next 4 years (highly likely IMO)
Why are threats or thoughts of "exile" (emigration) put next to threats of suicide?
Are the two felt to be akin in America? Elsewhere, emigration is something that some people do, and considering emigration seriously (landing on your feet takes years of preparation) if politics goes seriously south is doubly normal.
I suppose there are deeply traditional societies where exile is the last step before death penalty, in that it cuts you out from all ties to the gods of the place and from ties of reciprocity. But still, emigration != exile.
What people forget is it's actually hard to emigrate from the US for the overwhelming majority of Americans. Believe it or not most of the world is more anti immigrant than America.
Oh I agree with you and Matthias on that, my comment was simply on his last statement "People who want to emigrate typically just do it." In that THAT is patently false.
Snoop can't even visit Canada except for corruption. Generally Canada as a rule denies even visitors if they have any criminal record and they are renown for their strict adherence to it.
What, you never heard "Going to America is like going into the grave"?
The types who make the florid declarations about emigrating like to present themselves as refugees packing up and fleeing in the night before the Gestapo/secret police/insert bad guys of your choice kick in their front door, and they (present themselves as being) convinced that this time for sure, they (or their neighbours, LGBT+ friends, minorities, etc.) will be rounded up and imprisoned in camps, if not executed out of hand. Just like 2016, where it didn't happen either, but this time for sure! It's on page 4562 of the Project 2025 manifesto that Trump will implement on Day One!
Mostly it's all self-dramatisation, and for those really thinking of it, they are unlikely to be able to emigrate to Canada/Australia/Western Europe, because they're not in a position to get visas as needed workers (some of the examples I've seen online have been of the "I'm neurodivergent disabled queer non-binary and my partner is the same, we have degrees in underwater basket weaving but I/they are unable to work due to our disabilities, where in Europe will take us in?" kind and then they get the dispiriting answers from Europeans that "sorry, my country has rigid standards about economic migrants").
Hence why they need to portray themselves as refugees/asylum seekers, as there's little to no chance of them getting into a different country otherwise.
I think this stance maybe gives too much attention to the terminally online whiners. My partner is an academic and I'm an engineer, we live in the EU now. Getting a job and blue card was trivial (aside from the paperwork itself; disgusting). I certainly never vagueposted threats to leave on the internet, but Trump's first term was a factor when we were picking destination countries, and we're considering extending our stay instead of aiming to return to the US next year which was our original plan. A lot of people in similar boats here have this discussion all the time to the point where it's gotten incredibly tedious at dinners recently, along with weighing pros and cons of where to live.
It's not really a decision that can be distilled into a single issue, but elections and politics *do* make a huge difference. Some people do have the luxury of choice and they tend to be the ones you want to keep around. While it's true that there's a salary cut, when I drilled down into everything (cost of living etc) the real dollar difference isn't that significant and the benefits are significant. For the highly educated young people who don't have families yet, the ability and willingness to uproot and move to a different country is there.
Don't get me wrong, people will always want to go to America. I'm not trying to claim some massive brain drain. Just that there is a slightly increased willingness to consider other places to live, which isn't something I personally would have done ten years ago.
Ah, but you're an engineer. That's a proper job and you can do it. The terminally online ones are the ones threatening to flee the country, and they're also the ones with no marketable skills.
Bingo. Also you are missing the large number of people that simply don't qualify for a work visa but aren't rich (or old) enough to qualify for a retirement visa even though their social security / pension income is more than adequate to support them in that nation.
Or the fact immigration with a criminal record is difficult and given the near majority of Americans have one because the US criminalized everything.
>Still, this serves as a challenge to prediction market fans to figure out what went wrong and whether it will happen again
I doubt it. This is the first election with nearly this much scale, but it was still illiquid enough that one megawhale could bleed alpha and nobody would call him on it. By 2028, if Theo comes back for round 2 Jane Street or somebody will happily be a counterparty. These are just growing pains.
> Thankfully, San Francisco has ranked-choice voting, so voters will be able to freely choose their favorite among this diverse group of candidates.
Yeah, that's not how ranked-choice voting works (although it may be how most voters think ranked-choice voting works thanks to some of the... misleading messaging surrounding it).
Yeah, it's really important for people to understand the story here:
Smart people noticed that there are some really good voting systems that use ranked choice ballots (such as Borda count) and started agitating for 'ranked choice voting'.
The two main parties noticed that these methods would break their duopoly on power, but found a different, very shitty voting method that used ranked ballots BUT ALSO still preserved their duopoly (IRV).
The two parties made a huge bipartisan push to call IRV 'ranked choice voting' and back it as the only officially recognized form of voting reform, implementing it in small areas on a test basis.
Most smart people saw that they were doing 'ranked choice voting' like they wanted, were, fooled, and either went away o r actively supported these 'reforms'.
Thus, public energy for vote reform has been captured by a false flag in IRV, and we need to be aware of that and keep advocating for *real* vote reform, like Borda or Approval voting.
Arrow and his Impossibility Theorem would like a word. No mechanism satisfies extremely basic and inarguable criteria. Which is to say, *every possible mechanism* can produce really weird outcomes. The universe / math is weird. Them's the breaks.
I am officially ambivalent on RCV as a whole, but I would note that the countries with some form of RCV that I can think of off-the-top of my head use something like what you call IRV (which I would simply call preferential voting, i.e. you rank your preferences). Not the Borda count or Approval voting. Probably indicative of something, and it's not that IRV is a "false flag".
In D.C. Am praying. The anthropics didn’t convince me, but this did.
I don't know who exactly is the patron saint of elections, but this article from "America" magazine from 2020 does suggest likely candidates (ha!) to invoke.
(It's Jesuit, so it's liberal leaning).
https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2020/11/03/13-saints-and-2-marys-pray-election-night
The ones I think most relevant here are:
"St. Barsabbas and St. Matthias. Perhaps the saintly duo we need to invoke most this Election Day, they are the only pair of running mates ever canonized. Both followed Jesus throughout his ministry, without seeking reward or to be counted among the Twelve. In the end, St. Barsabbas lost to St. Matthias when lots were cast to replace Judas Iscariot after he betrayed Jesus. Still, St. Barsabbas went on to proclaim God’s word among the people and do good. Little is known of St. Matthias after his election. We hope, through these saints’ intercession, whoever wins might receive the same grace to recede from public office and avoid making the daily headlines."
Imagine being voted in to replace Judas. That's a tough act to follow and a hard row to hoe!
Personally, I'd go for St. Thomas More but yeah, probably too conservative for the majority on here. Might be a good pick for JD Vance, though 😁
"St. Thomas More, patron saint of politicians. Another martyr for the faith, St. Thomas More was once one of the richest and most powerful politicians in England—until he refused to bow to the will of the tyrant Henry VIII and recognize Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn. “I am the king’s good servant, but God’s first,” he said before he was executed. Let us pray that politicians on both sides of the aisle act with integrity in office and render unto God the things that are God’s. (Side note: St. Thomas More would also put Donald J. Trump to shame in a war of insults. He once called Martin Luther “a pimp, an apostate, a rustic, and a friar.”)"
That's the guy I'm named for.
Thomas More wrote the proto-communist "Utopia", so he hardly seems particularly 'conservative'. The Soviets back in the day had a statue of him (along with Thomas Muntzer) in Red Square, i believe (might have the details wrong).
> But the simple story seems wrong. Other real-money markets rose approximately in tandem with Polymarket. For example, Smarkets got to Trump 59% on 10/16, and peaked at 64% on 10/30. Kalshi followed a similar path. Both tracked Polymarket, not Nate Silver or Metaculus (neither of whom ever went above Trump 55% since Harris joined the race).
Isn't it possible it was just arbitrage? If Polymarket's offering 60-40 odds, and Smarkets is offering 50-50 odds, you buy Trump on Smarkets (driving up price) and Kamala on Polymarket. If Polymarket's underlying market cap is much larger, this means Trump goes up on Smarkets without a visible impact on Polymarket.
(Also, IIRC, around this same time, Musk tweeted about it, which also disrupts the pool of people doing the betting.)
This is a good point, thanks!
(I used to be a professional gambler, and) I agree this is likely.
There's another step where traditional bookies are used to looking at markets as their market-makers - they aren't bothering to make complicated forecasting models for non-sports events, so they follow the wise money. In this case, they're following the dumb money. They don't care much if someone tries to arb with them as long as they think their odds are accurate, but their signal for the latter is incorrect.
For whatever it's worth, I have 4 figures on Harris at 38c.
Edit: Oh, and I think the lesson for this is that increased liquidity isn't purely good for prediction markets. You need the ecology too - people who have understanding of the market.
I've read papers on this being the case for sports betting markets (home/away bias exists, increased liquidity increases the bias), and I think their value rises after this incident.
My condolences.
In principle yes, you can have one mispriced market, and then all other markets can be driven by arbitrage towards it (which should also bring that mispriced market down). But you need an explanation for why one whale has more pricing power than "everyone else in the world who thinks the odds haven't changed and can bet". E.g. Betfair has a trading volume in the hundreds of millions of dollars on this market. As I write, Trump is at 57-60 on Kalshi, Betfair and Polymarket.
>In principle yes, you can have one mispriced market, and then all other markets can be driven by arbitrage towards it (which should also bring that mispriced market down).
Agreed, but with a caveat...
The natural policy conclusion from this is "The markets need more liquidity.". And that sounds reasonable, and matches the first order expectations for how markets should behave...
But - this _also_ matches the policy conclusion, infamous from government programs: "What we are doing isn't working. Lets make the program bigger, and do more of this."
Well, perhaps it wasn't clear, but I was merely describing an argument to explain why I don't find it convincing. Given the amount of money traded on these markets, I don't find "well, there was insufficient liquidity" very convincing at all. I think many people were pricing information not contained in polls. Of course an individual could do so "wrongly", but I just mean that there exists plenty of relevant information that isn't accounted for in polling averages etc, and obviously prediction markets should incorporate this information, and appealing to "but the polling averages haven't moved, so how come the market has" assumes its own conclusion.
Well, it looks like the markets were correct where e.g. 538 was wrong (at least, as far as I've seen, both ended up making close predictions but 538 with the edge to Harris & the markets giving the edge to Trump)... although, as Scott notes, it's hard to really tell too much from one trial.
Still, they don't look as bad as Scott evidently thought they would.
(That's what you get for voting for someone who supports price controls, Scott: you are cursed to have bad takes for the next four years! oooOoOoo! 👻)
Yeah, agree you can't learn anything really from n=1 purely from the predictions and the outcomes. If you predict 50-50 and one of the sides win (which of course they must), does it even mean anything to say you were wrong? (I don't think so, and similarly a 60-40 prediction isn't wrong/right by virtue of the outcome).
So to make a claim of rightness/wrongness you need to make a statement about some external factor. Call the information set used by polling-based models I_A. Call the information set captured by the betting markets as I_B (of which I_A is a subset. Then it can totally be true that:
E(Trump wins | I_A) = 0.5
E(Trump wins | I_B) = 0.65
There is nothing contradictory here. It is however a bit silly for the person possessing I_A to look at the betting market and say "they could not possibly have any additional information". That's just a really high benchmark!
In this specific case, i am not entirely sure what information bettors were using, but I think there was available public information from the early voting data that looked promising for Republicans and inconsistent with polling. I suspect betting markets were picking this up to at least some degree.
>(That's what you get for voting for someone who supports price controls, Scott: you are cursed to have bad takes for the next four years! oooOoOoo! 👻)
LOL! Cute!
>Given the amount of money traded on these markets, I don't find "well, there was insufficient liquidity" very convincing at all.
Many Thanks, sorry for misinterpreting your views!
>I think many people were pricing information not contained in polls.
Agreed, and that is a sensible thing for them to do. Amongst other data, everything that each candidate says is an additional datum, and can validly drive an update.
>appealing to "but the polling averages haven't moved, so how come the market has" assumes its own conclusion.
Agreed!
No worries, I'm pretty sure the problem was just I worded my original comment too cryptically. It sounds like we agree on the merits. (Like you, I also would not argue for "well we need more liquidity". If spreads are large, you can arguably say that. But that wasn't the first order issue here).
>It sounds like we agree on the merits.
Yes, Many Thanks!
I think there was a co-equal effect of Harris suddenly doing an interview surge. According to the biased diet of my twitter algo they were seriously bad - Dana Bash: "She didn't close the deal". Wild comment for a CNN person to make in the last stretch of the election
GPT says the first interview was Oct 7 on CBS, which famously included an answer they later edited after it went viral
If you're temperamentally biased towards Trump, and that happens, you're thinking Harris' internal polling was a disaster and it was a failed Hail Mary. Then betting up Trump only for the polls to not move, resulting in a rebound. This may explain the rise and fall of the odds, and may have changed perceptions among more online bettors more durably than for the public. They may have transferred their perception of a big late flame out to "it'll strengthen the polling bias that understates R support"
Another possible contributing factor is people betting on Trump not because it's positive-EV in pure financial terms but because they're hedging against the circumstance where he wins and makes a bunch of other things worse. No idea if significant numbers of people did this, but I thought about it. It seems to be a potential weakness of the predictive accuracy of (some) prediction markets in general.
That would be like throwing money away and ought be quickly bought back down.
Looks like we don't even have much of a discrepancy to explain, though; the markets were right! 👍
<quote> What’s the world where Trump wins but there are still election riots? The Democrats riot?</quote>
Really? What's the world where the group that wins every popular vote yet controls no branches of government riots?
Yeah, a quick google search finds articles reporting businesses being boarded up *now* in DC and Portland. Portland is well known as an antifa hotspot. Maybe both cities expect to be descended upon by MAGA types if Harris wins. But I suspect the free market is telling you something here.
Also, two separate individuals tried to assassinate Trump these last few months. An experiment by Professor Eric Kaufmann found that 1/3 of Democrats admitted that they would have preferred Trump be killed! (See here: https://unherd.com/newsroom/third-of-democrats-wish-donald-trump-had-been-killed/) Lots of people on the left openly compare Trump to Hitler. You do not have to like the guy one iota to think that there is a non-trivial risk of left wing violence if Trump wins.
In all fairness, both the people who tried to murder Trump were Trump voters in the past.
The first guy definitely wasn't, since he was under 18 the last election, and only voted in the midterm elections. Don't know much about the second guy, except that he was very critical of Trump's view of Ukraine.
They were republicans but that doesn't mean they were Trump voters.
Taking Never-Trump Republicanism to new heights (depths?)
The first shooter, Crooks, was registered as a Republican but his social media history was supporting Biden and specifically his covid lockdown and soft on immigration policies.
The second shooter, Routh was not even registered as a Republican. He was a registered as an independent since 2012. He did claim to have voted for Trump in 2016 after voting for Bernie in the Democratic primary.
FWIW: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/9/18/what-we-know-about-trump-assassination-suspect-rouths-party-affiliation
The likely truth is, as with with most people who tried to assassinate presidents in the past 150 years, they don't really have coherent politics, they're just nuts.
Undoubtedly the free range anxiety over trump centers him as a totem of wrath, but trying to inflict coherence on these people is a mistake.
To a fairly large degree, agreed. We're dealing with people who (a) seem to have unstable but strongly held views over time, (b) by virtue of their actions are selected from some extreme tail of the population.
I think the stat in the Kaufmann article I linked is more meaningful than the precise political ideology of the two wannabe assassins.
The Kaufmann assassination dilemma always strikes me as interesting.
Surely no-one who takes Trump's threat seriously (including relative moderates) wants the man to continue to be alive. But obviously wishing someone dead and wishing they become the victim of political violence are two different things. It's difficult to untangle whether people who don't wish he'd been killed: 1) genuinely wished Trump good health (i.e. hopes he lives a long and healthy life for purely altruistic reasons); 2) would like him to die, but were afraid of being seen to be condoning political violence; or 3) would like him to die, but were afraid of the potential escalation and destabilisation of a successful attempt.
I suspect 2) and 3) make up the vast majority. So the people who wish he'd been killed: a) Are less afraid of being seen to be condoning political violence; b) Are less afraid of escalation and destabilisation (either because they don't believe it will happen, or because they embrace it).
I don't know how to interpret this in terms of predicting greater future violence, to be honest.
>Undoubtedly the free range anxiety over trump centers him as a totem of wrath, but trying to inflict coherence on these people is a mistake.
<mildSnark>
The extreme case of sanewashing? :-)
</mildSnark>
The democrats rioted last time Trump won.
Also, there’s a non-trivial chance that Trump looks like he’s losing, so some supporters riot, but after three days of counting he actually wins. That’s a really bad outcome because it makes it look stolen, but it’s completely possible even with a completely correct count and the riots having no effect on the counting.
Are you really saying that fake money betting markets are more trustworthy than real money betting markets?
Seems extremely counter intuitive, I don’t really see an argument for this. Large whales can influence the price of prediction markets so we should use fake money games instead and disregard them entirely?
Was going to post about people arbing polymarket against other venues but it seems like someone did below. What you mentioned in your blog as “people arbitraging the wrong way” isn’t really an arb but just a bet on the other side when the odds were favorable. An arb seeks to make “free money” due to a spread/odds discrepancy on different venues.
If Trump win, prediction markets are the future of forecasting
Is Trump lose then they are a massive scam and we should never look at them again 😆
"Are you really saying that fake money betting markets are more trustworthy than real money betting markets? Seems extremely counter intuitive, I don’t really see an argument for this."
The argument is:
1. This has been true in the past whenever people study this question.
2. We know why Polymarket and the fake-money markets are different: it's because one whale contigently bet on Polymarket. Unless we want to abandon our faith in the wisdom of crowds in favor of the wisdom of one rich French guy, we should assume the other markets are the well-calibrated ones.
3. It's just inherently harder for one guy with $75 million to screw up a fake money market.
(also, I wouldn't call the two best non-real-money predictors - Nate Silver and Metaculus - "fake money markets". Nate Silver is just a guy. Metaculus is a wisdom-of-crowds engine that weights people's responses by their history of being right in the past. These are different structures from prediction markets and it's not obvious which one should be better.)
I can't help but wonder if this would have been avoided if the highest-liquidity prediction market was legal in the United States. Did this stop it from getting corrected quickly?
Yes and no. If it was legal in more places, it would have more liquidity, but the example shows that just adding more liquidity does not help in itself. Rather than one French guy distorting the market by betting $75m, you might well have one American guy distorting the market by betting $750m.
Yes, but if it's legal more people could make money off that whale. Lots of hedge fund etc.
That's only true if the whale turns out to be wrong. Even if the odds favor the whale being wrong, if it turns out the whale is right, "smart" bets still lose.
Of course, in the long run, the odds will even out, so that the actually smart bets will end up winning. But anything can happen in single bets.
> Unless we want to abandon our faith in the wisdom of crowds in favor of the wisdom of one rich French guy, we should assume the other markets are the well-calibrated ones.
Wait, I thought that the whole point of real-money prediction markets was to move money from from dumb people to smart people, and use wealth as a proxy for forecasting ability.
The Platonic Ideal of a prediction market, sure. In our world, it's "people who want to get rich/think they see an opportunity to make money", and whether that's the stock market or plain old betting on slow horses and fast women, there's always plenty of people to lose their shirts because they think they have a sure thing or a system that will definitely beat the house.
So people betting on prediction markets with real money will attract all sorts, not just the rational smart superforecasters. And then that turns such markets into lotteries. Because we humans can't resist thinking there is indeed such a thing as a free lunch and dollar bills just lying around on the ground waiting to be picked up.
"use wealth as a proxy for forecasting ability"
I do remain slightly amazed and slightly humbled by the simple, trusting, American belief that "Joe made a lot of money, so he must be really, really smart! And the bigger the fortune, the smarter the guy! So I should trust his opinion on the price of eggs" (fair enough, Joe probably knows about things like that) "and what colour to paint my front door" (maybe ask an interior designer instead?)
From cursory reading about the great American fortune-makers of the past, what they had in abundance was not so much massive intellects as massive ruthlessness, the ability to spot the main chance earlier than anyone else, and the drive to spend every possible moment making money. A slice of luck helped them along, as well.
> So people betting on prediction markets with real money will attract all sorts, not just the rational smart superforecasters.
Yes, and the money will flow (on average) from the 'all sorts' towards the smart superforecasters.
Except, as we're seeing, the smart superforecasters aren't there, or not in large enough numbers.
Even smart superforecasters can be swamped by sheer numbers of idiots tilting the markets this way and that.
If they're forecasting the market, then they'd still end up with the money. The market, though, won't be making great predictions.
This is true, but it happens too slowly, and in too small numbers, for it to make a difference in big markets like Harris v Trump. The vast majority of the money bet on such markets is not money made from prior bets in prediction markets but comes from elsewhere. I expect this to remain true for a while.
This is an "in the long run we're all dead" situation I think. On average the money will flow in that direction, but while it's flowing the market numbers can be pretty far off from the true odds.
Spotting the main chance requires powerful intellect
It's also true that there's a lot of random chance in "who gets wealthy", but you never hear about those who lost because of random chance. It's quite probable (based on histories of the successful) that there are more who failed because of taking a risky high-stakes bet than who succeeded. What's not clear is how they differed from the average. A reasonable guess is that there are many different patterns that occasionally succeed, but much more often fail. And that following the advice of those who succeeded because of that kind of pattern is opting for a pathe with a very high chance of failure.
So my guess is "If you're going to take advice of a guy who's super successful, check and make sure it isn't mainly luck that made him successful.". Here I'm counting inherited wealth as a kind of luck, though that's not quite fair, as some families do seem to inculcate skills.
Why are there no whales who think the french guy is wrong and correct an alleged inefficiency?
Crypto whales seem to lean pro-Trump on average, but also by definition whales come in low sample sizes so a lot of it's just luck of the draw.
Maybe they lean pro Trump because he is more likely to win?
I suppose it's possible. Are you suggesting that crypto whales are the kind of people who hop on a bandwagon just for the sake of being on the winning side, and don't actually care as much about which candidate is better? Maybe that that kind of "back a winner" instinct correlates with being able to make a lot of money on crypto?
I'm not super tied into that culture but my impression is that crypto people seem to at least pretend to have real political preferences, beyond just who they think is more likely to come out on top. But maybe you know better.
I wish we had clearer terminology here. Pro-<candidate> usually mean that someone _prefers_ that <candidate> wins, but what we are talking about here is really whether someone _predicts_ that a candidate wins. Maybe we should talk about expects-Trump and expects-Harris in this context, rather than pro-Trump and pro-Harris?
Any suggestions for better terms? Expects-<candidate> seems clumsy, even to me...
On #2, isn't that undermined by real-money markets other than Polymarket also moving in that direction?
> It's just inherently harder for one guy with $75 million to screw up a fake money market.
Why do you think this? I'm not an expert but I bet $75M could buy a lot of bots and/or Mechanical Turks. Maybe you want to say "one guy with $75M is less likely to _want_ to screw up a fake money market"? But again that's unclear, since modelling Theo as a rational actor maximizing his own utility doesn't seem like a great fit.
Or maybe this is exactly why we shouldn't call Silver/Metaculus "fake money markets", since they aren't susceptible to Sybil attacks the way every fake-money market must be.
Well, following up today…
It seems like polymarket and real money markets had it right all along. It was a landslide victory, and not close to 50-50 as these gamified markets and the pollers suggested.
It also wasn’t just one wealthy French guy. JPM and hedge funds were allegedly trading on polymarket. Polymarket feed was also integrated into Bloomberg terminal and other trading software.
REAL prediction markets are legit. This proves it.
https://x.com/hosseeb/status/1854154029796073814
By what standard does 295 electoral votes and 51.7% of the popular vote count as a "landslide"? I count only two Presidential elections in the past hundred years with the winner scoring lower than Trump/2024, both of them involving a guy named "Dubya".
Everybody who said this election was "too close to call", or "leaning Trump but really too close to call", was approximately as right as everyone else who made such claims. Everybody who claims their predictions were better than those, is deluding themselves.
I think it's clear that polls are not as good a source of information as we'd like, probably because of incredibly low response rates that introduce a bunch of biases. But still, if your expectations of the election were "what Nate Silver says" or "what the RCP polling aggregator says," you had a pretty good picture of reality.
We know people gamble with real money markets. So to believe they're better-calibrated, you need to assume savvy investors with deep pockets are watching them like a hawk, and can tell the difference between stupid gambling and insider trading.
Not even the efficient market hypothesis protects helps much here, AFAICT. If it's extremely difficult to tell whether a big bet is stupid gambling or insider trading, the rational thing to do might just be not to participate since you have opportunities to make better returns elsewhere.
This reasoning sort of applies just as much to the NYSE as prediction markets, tho: to the extent the market is not efficient, it's an issue of scale & liquidity.
> What’s the world where Trump wins but there are still election riots? The Democrats riot?
I mean, yes? It happened last time, right? It's incredibly hard to imagine it not happening this time.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/11/11/protests-against-donald-trumps-win-turn-violent
$1 million in damage or ten hospitalisations is not that high a threshold but I don't exactly expect CNN to have a running counter so it'll be difficult to get accurate figures.
This was my thought too, is there seriously anyone who does not expect leftwingers to "mostly peacefully protest" a Trump win??
Remember 2016 and "you're more concerned about glass than lives?" from the knuckleheads out smashing windows of businesses and setting bins on fire, eve of the election result, leaving the ordinary workers who came in to work the next morning to clean the mess up after them (and maybe lose a day's pay if the business really did have to close).
But they were punching Nazis (insert eye roll here) so that made it all okay!
> But they were punching Nazis (insert eye roll here) so that made it all okay!
How I hated that sentiment. Especially since it typically rolled prosecution, judge and executor all in one.
I think it's less likely for the prediction market to resolve that there were election riots if there are left-wing election riots, which is important in placing your bets.
Interesting! I really didn’t remember that at all. But it sounds like it didn’t meet the bar that is cited for this time.
>I’m not sure why “Trump in power beyond 2028” needs to be conditional
If Trump wins, it's the chance he illicitly holds on to the presidency beyond two terms.
If Harris wins, it's the chance he runs again and wins.
Why is it so unlikely he'd run again and win? I could understand wanting a new candidate if he loses, and maybe the democrats would find some way to bar him from running again, but 0.1%?
I would have just gone with "Trump in power for more than 10 years total", or "Trump in power against the current Constitution".
Wait, hold on, I just read the actual resolution criteria and they say the child question ("Trump in power beyond 2028") resolves No if Trump loses the 2024 election. Huh. I'm now as confused as Scott.
Okay, that is confusing. The real question seems to be "Trump is indeed fascist dictator who will declare himself president for life if he wins", not "if he loses in 2024, will he run again in 2028? and get elected?"
I presume (and am too lazy to check, plus sometimes it's more fun not to know) that the market is badly named and is meant to only apply to winning this time and exceeding a normal term. Because otherwise, as you say, the odds should be much higher. But also because by a literal reading, this election is for POTUS for Jan 2025-Jan 2029, which last I checked goes beyond 2028.
Good point on the actual term timeline! I'd bet a lot of people would be claiming a win even if Trump was peacefully on his way out of office Jan 6 2029.
I had read the odds of 2029 Trump in power as pretty reasonable, given that he is getting fairly old, and probably won't be up for running for election again if he loses this time. There is also a pretty solid chance that if he loses this election he gets jailed for something or other if he remains any credible threat to the administration's power. So less than 1% seemed pretty reasonable to me.
He will have lost 2 presidential elections and be 82 years old. He's already showing signs of decline - nearly 0% seems about right.
Trump has said he will not run again if he looses.
That causes me to have a (slight) belief that he will try to run again if he loses...though not that he'll be successful in his attempt.
Also, it is not straightforward to translate bets into actual probabilities. I came across this article a couple weeks back, when the odds started doing weird things
https://open.substack.com/pub/quantian/p/market-prices-are-not-probabilities
but tl;dr there is a region where probabilities/bets are linear, but when extreme things happen you should actually expect the prices to not reflect probabilities
Another major problem is that Musk and similar folks have been promoting these betting markets, which means conservatives are over-represented in them. In theory, you'd think that this would result in these people being taken advantage of, but I think in practice there's not enough people who are willing to bet in these markets (at least not in large quantities) to withstand this sort of systemic monetary bias in messing up the odds. Even if it is, in theory, easy money, in practice, I am not even willing to bet on these markets even if I am certain I will win. I think there's a lot of folks like me, which further limits liquidity if you end up with hive mind style situations. I'm more willing to participate when only fake money is on the line, as I don't actually like RL gambling at all.
There's also just the general fact that the moment people started trying to use these markets to predict the future, it was obvious that it could be used for various manipulative purposes and as such, were going to stop being useful for these purposes. Once the mainstream media started regularly posting about this stuff and Elon Musk started trumpeting about it on Twitter, it was obvious to me that we were in the territory where it was no longer going to be based on anything coherent and would no longer be reliable (or well, even less reliable than it was before).
Speaking of statistics, Nate Silver recently showed that the polls are herding really badly (to the tune of 1 in 9.8 trillion odds of them being genuine poll numbers and not tweaked ones), so there is a very high level of uncertainty.
A lot of people think this election is going to be close, but it could well not be. Ann Selzer released a poll in Iowa - one of only a handful of polls that happened in that state - showing Harris +3 in Iowa. She was right the last two times.
If she's right again, this probably won't actually be a close election.
We'll find out in 24 hours.
A question I haven't seen asked: what's the main mechanism of the poll herding? Publication bias (they do polls which show divergence, then decide not to publish); systematic weighting or sampling issues (their methodology and prior assumptions about likely voters or demographic turnout gives less room for variance); ad hoc weighting tricks (they do polls, but shift the weighting on an ad hoc basis so that polls skew less); or just total bullshitting/making up the numbers?
Here's my mechanism: people are so sick of polls that only the same 1,000 people are willing to respond to all the pollsters.
LOL! Could be!
A 538 article from 2014, written by Nate Silver, discusses the issue for that year's midterm elections and goes into some detail on the likely mechanisms: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/heres-proof-some-pollsters-are-putting-a-thumb-on-the-scale/
In brief, he suggests that there's some self-censorship going on (a file drawer effect of not publishing outliers), but the more fine-tuned way to herd is to selectively apply weighting factors, particularly with respect to turnout models. For example, Silver writes:
> [Nate] Cohn discovered that in 2012, the racial composition of PPP’s polls was correlated in an unusual way with President Obama’s performance among white voters in their surveys. If Obama was performing especially poorly among whites in one PPP poll, it tended to have a higher share of nonwhite voters, which boosted Obama’s result. And if Obama was doing relatively well among whites, PPP projected less nonwhite turnout, keeping his lead in check. As a result, PPP’s polls tended to show an unusually steady race between Obama and Mitt Romney.
Polling firms don't always disclose their weighted or unweighted results in enough detail to show how the sausage is made, however. It's still sadly common practice to report a post-processed (weighted and likely-voter-modelled) 'topline' with some basic demographic crosstabs, whereas weighting itself can go two or three levels deep.
Thanks... What a shitshow. The irony is that if everyone just collected a bunch of raw data and published it, aggregators would surely get far more accurate estimates by applying a standardised weighting scheme.
Unfortunately, there's a conflict of economic incentives here. There's a difference between a poll and a prediction, but polling firms that take on private clients are essentially selling prediction services.
Outside of the election period, their bread and butter is companies commissioning surveys into whether their sales will go up if they use the red or blue logo for their new product. They want the answer, and "going with the polling firm that had the best election result" is a reasonable but inaccurate proxy for finding the best polling firm.
There was a period where Musk was gleefully posting about the surge in Trump's numbers on Polymarket, and kept making the hilarious joke about how it would be epic if Trump got to 69.420%. I'm sincerely curious why this isn't discussed more.
So in any analysis of Polymarket's behavior, it would seem appropriate to fold in that there's a good chunk if people doing meme-stock stuff rather than making rational bets..?
Isn't the overrepresentation of conservatives a potential opportunity for profit? You can buy close Democratic-favored races at a discount. I actually made a little money doing that last time.
Indeed, it wasn't close at all, as it turned out. Perhaps the markets weren't so dumb after all.
Kalshi should bring smarter money to the game eventually but hasn't been live for long enough yet. Should prediction markets remain fully legal for a few more years I expect them to start to have decent predictive power. Until then it's mostly people having fun and betting on their ingroup, even the larger checks.
Yes, the eco-system of people taking advantage of the noise traders needs some time to develop.
I don't see trump winning but I would be surprised if Republicans rioted when he loses.
I have a feeling the election will elicit minimal drama. 2020 was an entirely different climate than today and Republican coded people were frothing at the mouth in a way that just isn't happening in 2024.
Republicans are also now no longer under the conclusion that they'll be tried as Democrats if they're caught.
I believe Republicans are not necessarily scared; they might just be somewhat more apathetic. In 2020 people on the right seemed to feel like caged animals which was thanks to the insane behavior democrat coded people displayed on social media. After Elon's acquisition of twitter people that are republican coded had a space where they could let off steam without being labeled "white supremacist misogynist monster/devil/nazi". This has had a dampening effect on right wing extremism imo.
Interesting. This is the opposite of my own intuition, mostly based on what I've seen on Twitter I think. I don't have much reason to be confident though. Do you have anything concrete to point to that makes you believe this?
Don't agree with Shelby's thesis, but some concrete evidence Republicans are less prepared to riot is that QAnon is gone. The "Trust the Plan" WWG1WGA network which organized Jan 6 on old Twitter doesn't seem to exist now. But that's more because all those accounts were banned before Musk bought the company.
I guess a Stop the Steal plan would happen on TruthSocial this time around.
Didn't Musk unban tens of thousands of accounts?
Yes but I think many had moved on by then. QAnon was dead by then. Many had moved to Truth Social. Instead of QAnon drops they started reading that website that Tucker Carlson writer wrote that "book report" about here.
I endorse this, based upon my social group being largely very far to the Right. There was a sense, in 2020, that all was lost: insane identilingus-performin', pearl-clutchin' wokies had grasped the reins of power and would prosecute Trump & indeed conservatives as a whole, open the borders & let in floods of new Democratic voters, etc. etc., and there was nowhere one could even speak of it. (If you're on the left, you probably have no idea how bad the censorship on e.g. YouTube got—I can remember a couple experiments that seemed real suggestive re: posting the exact same comments and videos but with the perspective switched, and the left-wing versions staying up or even being promoted, the right-wing versions quietly disappearing...)
"What’s the world where Trump wins but there are still election riots?"
I'd guess "riots when the result of the election is long unclear, Trump gets handed the election in the end after months of recounts, court proceedings, and riots"?
Wouldn't a single faithless elector just lead to 269/269 then?
But that would indeed be amusing (if inconvenient).
That's what Nate Silver's 80,000 simulations came up with:
"At exactly midnight on Tuesday, we ran our simulation model for the final time in this election cycle. Out of 80,000 simulations, Kamala Harris won in 40,012 (50.015%) cases. She did not win in 39,988 simulations (49.985%). Of those, 39,718 were outright wins for Donald Trump and the remainder (270 simulations) were exact 269-269 Electoral College ties: these ties are likely to eventually result in Trump wins in the U.S. House of Representatives."
There's also the chance of riots if he tries to, well, actually follow through on his campaign promises. Like performing an ideological purge of government agencies, or sending in the military to forcefully stop protests.
would that still resolve as yes though?
I'd treat any riots after Jan 20 as something different from an election riot, to me that phrase means a riot over the outcome (whether disputing or being mad about it) not that any policy of his would lead to rioting within the next 4 years (highly likely IMO)
Why are threats or thoughts of "exile" (emigration) put next to threats of suicide?
Are the two felt to be akin in America? Elsewhere, emigration is something that some people do, and considering emigration seriously (landing on your feet takes years of preparation) if politics goes seriously south is doubly normal.
I suppose there are deeply traditional societies where exile is the last step before death penalty, in that it cuts you out from all ties to the gods of the place and from ties of reciprocity. But still, emigration != exile.
No it's not
US cost of living is insanely high
And your earnings are also insanely high and for many people more than make up for it.
Which makes moving a tradeoff, not a strict downgrade.
> Why are threats or thoughts of "exile" (emigration) put next to threats of suicide?
Because the kind of people who make these dramatic announcement don't follow through.
People who want to emigrate typically just do it.
What people forget is it's actually hard to emigrate from the US for the overwhelming majority of Americans. Believe it or not most of the world is more anti immigrant than America.
But we tend to hear these announcements from people for whom emigrating would not be very hard, like these guys: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/22/move-to-canada-celebrities-donald-trump
Oh I agree with you and Matthias on that, my comment was simply on his last statement "People who want to emigrate typically just do it." In that THAT is patently false.
Snoop can't even visit Canada except for corruption. Generally Canada as a rule denies even visitors if they have any criminal record and they are renown for their strict adherence to it.
What, you never heard "Going to America is like going into the grave"?
The types who make the florid declarations about emigrating like to present themselves as refugees packing up and fleeing in the night before the Gestapo/secret police/insert bad guys of your choice kick in their front door, and they (present themselves as being) convinced that this time for sure, they (or their neighbours, LGBT+ friends, minorities, etc.) will be rounded up and imprisoned in camps, if not executed out of hand. Just like 2016, where it didn't happen either, but this time for sure! It's on page 4562 of the Project 2025 manifesto that Trump will implement on Day One!
Mostly it's all self-dramatisation, and for those really thinking of it, they are unlikely to be able to emigrate to Canada/Australia/Western Europe, because they're not in a position to get visas as needed workers (some of the examples I've seen online have been of the "I'm neurodivergent disabled queer non-binary and my partner is the same, we have degrees in underwater basket weaving but I/they are unable to work due to our disabilities, where in Europe will take us in?" kind and then they get the dispiriting answers from Europeans that "sorry, my country has rigid standards about economic migrants").
Hence why they need to portray themselves as refugees/asylum seekers, as there's little to no chance of them getting into a different country otherwise.
I think this stance maybe gives too much attention to the terminally online whiners. My partner is an academic and I'm an engineer, we live in the EU now. Getting a job and blue card was trivial (aside from the paperwork itself; disgusting). I certainly never vagueposted threats to leave on the internet, but Trump's first term was a factor when we were picking destination countries, and we're considering extending our stay instead of aiming to return to the US next year which was our original plan. A lot of people in similar boats here have this discussion all the time to the point where it's gotten incredibly tedious at dinners recently, along with weighing pros and cons of where to live.
It's not really a decision that can be distilled into a single issue, but elections and politics *do* make a huge difference. Some people do have the luxury of choice and they tend to be the ones you want to keep around. While it's true that there's a salary cut, when I drilled down into everything (cost of living etc) the real dollar difference isn't that significant and the benefits are significant. For the highly educated young people who don't have families yet, the ability and willingness to uproot and move to a different country is there.
Don't get me wrong, people will always want to go to America. I'm not trying to claim some massive brain drain. Just that there is a slightly increased willingness to consider other places to live, which isn't something I personally would have done ten years ago.
Ah, but you're an engineer. That's a proper job and you can do it. The terminally online ones are the ones threatening to flee the country, and they're also the ones with no marketable skills.
Bingo. Also you are missing the large number of people that simply don't qualify for a work visa but aren't rich (or old) enough to qualify for a retirement visa even though their social security / pension income is more than adequate to support them in that nation.
Or the fact immigration with a criminal record is difficult and given the near majority of Americans have one because the US criminalized everything.
>Still, this serves as a challenge to prediction market fans to figure out what went wrong and whether it will happen again
I doubt it. This is the first election with nearly this much scale, but it was still illiquid enough that one megawhale could bleed alpha and nobody would call him on it. By 2028, if Theo comes back for round 2 Jane Street or somebody will happily be a counterparty. These are just growing pains.
> Thankfully, San Francisco has ranked-choice voting, so voters will be able to freely choose their favorite among this diverse group of candidates.
Yeah, that's not how ranked-choice voting works (although it may be how most voters think ranked-choice voting works thanks to some of the... misleading messaging surrounding it).
RCV (or more specifically, instant-runoff voting) fails the favorite betrayal criterion: https://electowiki.org/wiki/Favorite_betrayal_criterion
And here's a post regarding the effectiveness of favorite betrayal under IRV relative to other voting methods: https://voting-in-the-abstract.medium.com/the-effectiveness-of-dishonest-strategies-in-different-voting-methods-8fb9ff50a490
Yeah, it's really important for people to understand the story here:
Smart people noticed that there are some really good voting systems that use ranked choice ballots (such as Borda count) and started agitating for 'ranked choice voting'.
The two main parties noticed that these methods would break their duopoly on power, but found a different, very shitty voting method that used ranked ballots BUT ALSO still preserved their duopoly (IRV).
The two parties made a huge bipartisan push to call IRV 'ranked choice voting' and back it as the only officially recognized form of voting reform, implementing it in small areas on a test basis.
Most smart people saw that they were doing 'ranked choice voting' like they wanted, were, fooled, and either went away o r actively supported these 'reforms'.
Thus, public energy for vote reform has been captured by a false flag in IRV, and we need to be aware of that and keep advocating for *real* vote reform, like Borda or Approval voting.
Arrow and his Impossibility Theorem would like a word. No mechanism satisfies extremely basic and inarguable criteria. Which is to say, *every possible mechanism* can produce really weird outcomes. The universe / math is weird. Them's the breaks.
I am officially ambivalent on RCV as a whole, but I would note that the countries with some form of RCV that I can think of off-the-top of my head use something like what you call IRV (which I would simply call preferential voting, i.e. you rank your preferences). Not the Borda count or Approval voting. Probably indicative of something, and it's not that IRV is a "false flag".
Arrow's theorem is pretty meaningless in practice. Eg it Arrow's theorem only applies to deterministic voting systems.
What are the non-deterministic voting systems used in practice you have in mind?