If Trump is elected President in 2024, will he have won the popular vote?
332
817
1k
2025
45%
chance
This question resolves to "YES" if Donald Trump is elected president of the United States in 2024, and has won the popular vote. This question resolves to "NO" if Donald Trump is elected president of the United States in 2024, and has not won the popular vote. This question resolves to "INVALID" if Donald Trump is not elected president of the United States in 2024.
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@SemioticRivalry why the spike?

opened a Ṁ1,000 YES at 40% order

@cece not based on any news, this market just seems way too low to me. I'd probably predict 65-70% for this.

bought Ṁ50 NO

@SemioticRivalry interesting. Curious, why you think it should be 65-70%? Trump didn't even beat Clinton in the popular vote.

sold Ṁ7 NO

@DanielBets Conditional on Trump winning, he's much more likely to win the popular vote than he is conditional on losing. If the presidential race is a tossup, then P(Trump wins pop vote | Trump wins) is about twice as high as the unconditional probability, since Trump is very unlikely to win the popular vote if he loses. And current polls suggest that P(Trump wins pop vote) is not nearly as low as this market initially thought.

@DanielBets Say the odds of the popular vote are 70/30 for Biden. Say the odds for the electoral college are 50/50. Say that whenever Trump wins the popular vote, he also wins the electoral college. With these assumptions, we get 30/50= 60% chance.

@SemioticRivalry makes sense. I would quibble with your odds of popular vote. Since dems have won the last 4 popular votes by >2 million votes each time I'd put it at least at 80%. But maybe that's recency bias :)
The swing from Clinton to Biden 2020 was +4 million votes so I'd be shocked if it swung back by >7 million votes so that Trump would actually win the popular vote. But we'll see!

bought Ṁ20 of NO

I can hardly see him performing better than in 2016 (against the deeply unpopular Clinton, and before 1/6). I think he's likely to win the electoral college but lose the popular vote.

It's more likely than you think.
predicts YES
OP, if Trump does not end up as the candidate of any major party in 2024 do you plan to go ahead and resolve this N/A, or are you waiting til the end of the election regardless?
No Republican since I was born has won the popular vote without being the incumbent. I doubt it will happen.
bought Ṁ20 of YES
@LivInTheLookingGlass we also haven't had significant inflation or a land war in Europe since you were born. Past performance is not indicative of future results. xD
predicts YES
(major land war, that is)
predicts NO
@MattP it might not be a *guaranteed* indicator of future performance, but taking that too far leads to craziness like "one should not have priors"
predicts YES
@LivInTheLookingGlass fair - I think the question is more what one's priors should be given any specific piece of evidence. Re: inflation for example, I think a lot of people assumed that since it hadn't happened in a very long time, it was less likely to happen soon - when in reality, the correct prior was probably something closer to "economies are cyclical so we're about due" or (probably more correct) "negative economic events are inherently stochastic so it's more like a poisson process". A lot of stuff in the economic field is kinda like that tbh. Take stocks, for example. If there was a good reason for an informed person to expect the stock price tomorrow was going to be higher, the market (aka aggregate of all people with opinions about the stock price) would drive it higher today. Thus, the day to day fluctuation of stocks is (from our perspective) about the closest you can get to a random process. What the price has been doing over the past few days really shouldn't affect your opinion about what it'll do tomorrow much if at all. Now.... is the question of GOP presidential candidates winning the popular vote in this category? Maybe, maybe not. I'd argue it is closer to being in that category than you think it is, probably.
predicts NO

@MattP

Re: inflation for example, I think a lot of people assumed that since it hadn't happened in a very long time, it was less likely to happen soon

Who thought this? I guess people thought inflation was unlikely to happen super soon before the pandemic, but that was because they weren't expecting such a massive, unpredictable event to come and demolish the economy for a while. And I don't think that expectation was unreasonable. Having a low credence in something like a global pandemic was rational, and just because it happened to be wrong in that particular case doesn't prove that it was bad thinking.

If there was a good reason for an informed person to expect the stock price tomorrow was going to be higher, the market (aka aggregate of all people with opinions about the stock price) would drive it higher today.

But elections are nothing like this. People aren't trying to predict how well the GOP will do in the future when they choose who to vote for today. Elections are still somewhat unpredictable, but I don't see any analogy between them and the stock market. And I definitely that past performance is a predictor of future election results, in the short term at least. A significant change in the electoral results either requires a significant portion of people to change their mind, a significant change in the composition of the electorate, or a significant change in what the parties stand for, and none of those things happen overnight.

@LivInTheLookingGlass

https://xkcd.com/2383/

Why are you only counting elections that happened since you were born and not counting elections where the incumbent was republican? That seems completely arbitrary to me.

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