There have been many markets on who would win the first GOP primary debate held on Wednesday, and these three in particular have ended up with some controversy over their resolutions.
/Gabrielle/short-fuse-who-will-win-the-august
/AlexKirigiya/who-will-win-the-milwaukee-gop-deba
/SteveSokolowski/will-vivek-ramaswamy-win-the-august
The first two both made the controversial decision to declare Ron DeSantis the winner because of a FiveThirtyEight article that contained a poll in which the plurality of Republican primary voters said he had the best performance. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/republican-debate-august-poll/
The trouble is, the article doesn't actually state who the winner was, and it also shows that Nikki Haley gained the most ground in terms of support and favorability from the debate, while Ron DeSantis didn't gain that much. For the first market, this is an issue because the description and answer choices seemed to imply that the winner would be determined based on which candidate gained the most ground. However, it only said this because that was how 538 said they would be assessing the winner, and the creator discussed with other Trustworthy.ish users and determined that the 538 article said DeSantis was the winner, despite this differing from the criteria that 538 was expected to use.
The second market did not have any clear resolution criteria, other than a vague statement by the creator buried in a comment that it would resolve based on polling data. However, given the lack of clear criteria, it's hard to argue that the resolution was wrong because it's not clear what the correct resolution would be to begin with.
The third market resolved on the basis of CNN articles, which mostly agreed that Nikki Haley had won the debate and strongly criticized Ramaswamy's performance. To be clear, I think this one is unambiguously correct because the market's description explicitly stated that it would be resolving according to whatever the most prominent CNN articles about it say, but some people complained that CNN isn't a good source to judge the winner of a Republican debate.
Will the resolution to any of these three markets change before this market closes? Re-resolving to a different option/combination of options, resolving N/A, or unresolving one of these markets would all count for a YES resolution here.
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@Conflux Yeah, that is presumably why they resolved the way they did, though there is a debate over whether that actually means 538 is saying he won. I personally think that they are not saying he won, and that a 50-50 resolution between DeSantis and Haley would have made more sense, though I don't think that will happen on the first one, since the creator already discussed with other Trustworthy.ish users who agreed that 100% DeSantis was correct. Plus, there wouldn't be much point in re-resolving due to controversy when the re-resolution would cause just as much, if not more controversy.
@Conflux The entire article is titled "who won the debate" and it shows 3 other statistics, all of which have Haley in first place. The first sentence of the article, trying to give an overview of the data, says equally that 3 candidates won. I do not think there was a great amount of intent in whatever intern titled that graph such that 538 would endorse the idea that that single data point is the only one that matters, when that completely contradicts the rest of the hard work they did on the article and their care in choosing their words to not declare a single winner. If this is actually the reason why it was resolved to DeSantis, that is very disappointing. I don't know if everyone had all this information, but I think this resolution is clearly incorrect with all the context.
@SemioticRivalry I believe Haley only won two out of four. DeSantis received the highest grade and the most people saying he performed the best, while Haley gained the most favorability and the most people considering supporting her. I definitely agree, though, that the title of that plot doesn't imply that 538 says DeSantis was the winner. It's pretty obvious that it's titled "Who won and lost the debate?" because it's a graph of the results of a poll that asked that question.
@JosephNoonan The first graph is titled "The over- (and under-) performers"
and relates to how respondents thought candidates would perform vs how they actually did. DeSantis had the highest overall score, but Haley overperformed the most. The blurb afterwards emphasizes Haley's performance as being more impressive. I think that should count as a W for Haley, but I can somewhat see the case for it being a push.
"Each candidate largely performed as well as Republican voters were expecting them to, according to their average performance and expectations scores.2 DeSantis received the highest average grade for his performance, followed closely by Haley and Ramaswamy. This was more impressive for Haley, though, considering that expectations were just slightly above average for her going into the debate."
And yeah, the graph is certainly titled "Who won the debate?" because that was the question asked to respondents, not because it's 538's conclusion. And the idea that the number of 1st place votes is the only relevant factor for determining the winner is both extremely dubious on its face and is also directly contradicted by 538 presenting plenty of other data.