Upgraded to Plus.

Democrats, would you like 1:3 odds by riding with Biden, or would you like 1:1 odds by riding with someone competent?

If we are doing alternative reality scenarios (since exactly zero candidates with 1:1 odds have shown up) I wouldnt give a rat's ass if Dems dug up the corpse of JFK and ran with him, as long as Republicans ran someone interested in keeping the US a democracy, instead of Donny-come-lately fascist (orange edition).

Betting markets for the result conditional on Trump and not-Biden have been hovering around 1:1 for a while, though sure, not exactly 1:1.

Too late for Rs to nominate someone else.

Betting markets have take a huge L after another when it comes to predicting any recent election-related shenanigans. Even the polls suggesting people's odds against Trump are dubious at best and maliciously misleading at worst. They are mainly based on name-recognition which is only one part of electability, and none of the other qualities have been put to test for anyone besides Biden and maybe Harris. Like I seriously doubt Michelle Obama would actually crush Trump 60-40

Also too late for Dems to nominate someone else.

Conditional prediction markets are currently so wildly inefficient there's no reason to put any stock in any of them unless they are both highly traded and likely to have the conditional met

This market and others have been trading for years including periods with loans and periods where P(Biden) have been 50-75% which is enough to read off the odds at least to a 1:1 level of precision.

Betting markets have taken Ls for a decent while when it came to election related stuff. PredictIt had Trump winning the GOP primary at 25% at one point lol, these people like to speculate way too much.

betting markets have taken an L relative to what? is there another systematic method of forecasting that has outperformed betting markets? Especially one that can deal with conditionals. It is very easy to look back and say that some value in a betting market was legibly dumb, but that only really has value if you say so beforehand, and have your own track record of similar predictions. Anyone can say afterwards that something was dumb.

@SemioticRivalry Sure. In this case, it would be that betting markets had a view that comported less with reality than mainstream pundits. Personally, I bet on Trump over RDS because the idea of Trump being unseated when the party was so massively loyal to him even in the wake of J6 was insane. Mainstream media figures didn't come out and say their internal odds, like "oh, I'm 93 +/- 2% sure that Donald Trump will be the nominee," but I can guarantee you their internal odds were lower than 75%, probably lower than 50%, probably lower than 25% for RDS becoming the GOP nominee.

If they weren't, then I'm sure you would see a lot more mainstream figures, a lot more people inside the Republican Party, coming out in favor of DeSantis. Not just Matt Walsh and Ben Shapiro. Plenty of people don't like Trump. If they weren't, you would see a lot more media coverage of Ron DeSantis in the same way that the media is blowing up about Biden right now. You didn't.

Mainstream pundits were absolutely in love with DeSantis though? I feel like he was covered as almost the guaranteed next President for a while. I've very rarely seen any Republican get that kind of love from the media. And like even if pundits were more right than the markets, that's just 1 example out of hundreds or thousands, it doesn't exactly prove which is more efficient, of course in such a large sample there will be plenty of examples where the mainstream wisdom is superior.

@SemioticRivalry How was the coverage of DeSantis compared to the coverage of Trump. Was it, perhaps, 3 to 1?

Better question, actually. How many Republicans endorsed the "75% favorite" to be the nominee? You would think if a guy is 75% the favorite truly and this is the critical period for him, it would be strategically very smart to, no?

And like even if pundits were more right than the markets, that's just 1 example out of hundreds or thousands, it doesn't exactly prove which is more efficient, of course in such a large sample there will be plenty of examples where the mainstream wisdom is superior.

This is true, but is also responding to a point which was not made. The point as originally stated was that "recently" betting markets have taken an L w.r.t. "election stuff." Betting markets being a pretty good way to aggregate information does not mean that markets saying something so-and-so about Michelle Obama should always be taken at face value. Similarly, polling being an insight into how people feel about a candidate doesn't mean that polls can't be, sometimes systematically, wrong.

The fact that it is literally impossible to extract a percentage forecast from the media coverage is a good reason to use betting markets. You can actually get useful predictions from them. It is also unclear whether you would cover a guy "3 to 1" even if you think he's a 75% favorite. Former Presidents are newsworthy. People who are internationally known celebrities before their presidency are also newsworthy. But DeSantis got a drastic outlier level of coverage from the mainstream media.

Most Republicans didn't endorse at all while it was unclear, like in most races, because they don't want to get on anyone's bad side. Flashback to 2016: prediction markets were bullish on Trump in the primary, having him >50% even before Iowa while almost nobody endorsed him and the entire world endorsed Rubio.

This is true, but is also responding to a point which was not made. The point as originally stated was that "recently" betting markets have taken an L w.r.t. "election stuff."

This was stated as a reason why betting markets should be ignored, not merely for sport.

Most Republicans didn't endorse at all while it was unclear, like in most races, because they don't want to get on anyone's bad side.

2) This was stated as a reason why betting markets should be ignored, not merely for sport.

Didn't plenty of Republicans, even Florida Republicans, endorse Donald Trump while it was still unclear? Rubio did before Iowa IIRC. Additionally, wouldn't you really get on DeSantis's good side if you endorsed him before everyone else did (from the view that you think RDS will win) and were there with him from the start?

2) Did anyone say that betting markets should be ignored in general? If you don't believe that betting markets are credible for this specific instance, it would make sense why you wouldn't want them for that instance.

In March 2023, prediction markets had the R primary tied. At that time, Donald Trump had only 28 representatives and 5 senators endorsing him, per 538. So 12% of House Representatives and 10% of senators. Trump announced in November 2022, so they had plenty of time if they wanted to immediately endorse him. Trump was the clear favorite as early as May 2023 and he still only had 56 Reps and 10 Senators.

Okay. How many Senators and Representatives did DeSantis have?

I never said that DeSantis had a similar level of endorsements, I said that the vast majority remained undecided, which you contested.

That's a fair enough point. I intended plenty to mean "significantly more than those who endorsed any other candidate combined," although I should have been more clear, especially since I replied to your message saying that "most didn't endorse" which is true.

In any case, we should expect confidence levels to roughly map onto how many national level Republicans endorse who, right? My main point was that if DeSantis was the 3:1 favorite from these people's points of view, you would expect endorsements to roughly track that. I would argue that you would actually expect a little more than that if anything. I think if the GOP candidate was nominated by some private ballot between GOP senators (dunno about reps), they would much prefer to toss Trump in favor of DeSantis or Haley. That's just speculation though

I think Trump already had an existing base in the party from being President so he would start out with a couple dozen endorsements virtually by default, I don't think that had much to do with their confidence in his chances. Again the advantage of betting markets is that we have to do 5 layers of speculation to come up with a probabilistic forecast from mainstream sources.

Again the advantage of betting markets is that we have to do 5 layers of speculation to come up with a probabilistic forecast from mainstream sources.

Agree with this, getting that out of the way.

I just want to know if you think that, if the average confidence level of Republican Senators and Representatives for DeSantis beating Trump was 75%, he would get a grand total of 0 senators and 6 representatives. We can't know exactly what their internal odds were. We can, however, pretty confidently say "not this."

Ballotpedia has DeSantis peak at 46%, btw.

https://ballotpedia.org/Prediction_markets_in_the_2024_Republican_presidential_primary

If that's the case then I was wrong about that. I could have sworn that DeSantis peaked higher, but ballotpedia has no incentive to lie + is less faulty than my memory.

That said, find/replace every mention of 3 to 1 with 2 to 1 and I think all the points I made still hold. I don't believe that elected Republicans at the national level were ever behaving in a way that indicated that they thought DeSantis was the likely pick. Like Democrats are doing with the idea that Biden might really drop out right now.

One detail about prediction markets that I like is that if you feel a certain way strongly, you are expected to act on it. If I claimed that I thought that Biden had a 2/3 chance of staying in and did not bet it up at 20%, then perhaps I do not really believe Biden has a 2/3 chance of staying in. I do not think that elected Republicans acted in accordance with the betting odds like Democrats are doing now, which indicates to me that the betting odds did not track with reality in the GOP Primary.

This market was looking pretty sleepy but after the debate we have a 20% chance of Biden dropping out!

Arbitrate:

Kinda crazy odds. If R voters nominate Trump their odds in the general drop from 75% to 35%.