A week after the 2025 NYC mayor election, I will put out a poll titled “Did Mamdani appease centrists? | Would it have helped or hurt his campaign?” with four options.
The market will resolve to the option that receives the highest number of votes in the poll.
“Will Mamdani flirt with centrism” is an interesting question to me because it would be difficult to convincingly reconcile with his past views and statements.
(I won’t bet in this market. Trading closes a week after the election, to allow for swings and hindsight opinions. You are betting on what you think the average Manifold user’s opinion will be, not your personal belief. If you have strong feelings on the topic, the poll itself will be the place to express them. For example, I think Mamdani shouldn’t turn centrist, but I don’t know if Manifold would agree.)
I may be persuaded to add options to this poll depending on interest.
Update 2025-11-05 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): Trading will close when the resolution poll goes up (approximately one week after the election)
Update 2025-11-12 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): The resolution poll is now available at the linked market. The market will resolve based on which option receives the highest number of votes in that poll.
1,000🏅 Top traders
| # | Name | Total profit |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ṁ425 | |
| 2 | Ṁ376 | |
| 3 | Ṁ273 | |
| 4 | Ṁ271 | |
| 5 | Ṁ189 |
People are also trading
@JackP my take as someone who likes mamdani is that the current top 2 answers are simultaneously accurate, it just depends which wins out. I think the current rates make sense given it says "centrist" instead of "moderate", as I think those are kinda different definitions. I think the correct view of his campaign is he rejected moderation on most axes, but he did intentionally moderate on policing quite a bit in his messaging. I think both those decisions helped his campaign. I also expect he probably threw some bones to the policy wonks and yimby types, but I'm not tapped in enough to really know.
If I had to vote for one of the two, I'd go with he didn't appease centrists and it would've hurt, because an actual effort to truly appease centrists for him would mean ceding a lot and would really throw his political role into question. Given his very dominant position after the primary, it would also have been quite odd for him to make a significant effort like that. But I think he made some smart tactical calls on moderation that did improve his chances, though you can say the same for his primary campaign too.
The trick to all "What will Manifold believe?" markets is almost always to just look at the number of YES bettors in each respective option.
@Balasar Huh. Is there any way to create a market next time that doesn’t have these problems?
If thats an assumption that several traders are making, wouldn’t this overvalue the top choice ?
@KJW_01294 no because it settles on a poll, predicting something is likely to go in line with the beliefs. Because manifold is open about who trades and how much they put down, it’s pretty easy to figure out whose winning.
In this case the popular option id fairly value at 95%+
@DanielTilkin i think it's probably just gonna come down to how people held in this market and then voted to give themselves the win
Trading will close when the resolution poll goes up next week FYI.
(This is a reminder, not a change)
To get the juices flowing, here’s one thread by a leftist on Bluesky talking about this topic:
https://bsky.app/profile/taliajane.bsky.social/post/3m3lk36iggs2b
(As market creator I don’t have a stake in this market and I’m curious about the outcome but I don’t have strong opinions on how it should resolve, just posting informationally)