This market will resolve YES if the winning candidate of the U.S. presidential general election's margins in any two of the following are smaller in 2024 than they were in 2020:
The Electoral College
The popular vote
The tipping point state
I am using a best 2 out of 3 system from these three metrics, since each of them capture different ways that the election could be considered close. Note that, if there is an Electoral College - popular vote split, then the winning candidate's margin in the popular vote will be negative, which means it will be smaller than Biden's margin in 2020, which was positive. Likewise, if there's an Electoral College tie, then the winning candidate's margin in their tipping point state will be negative (they didn't win the tipping point state, since then they would have won outright in the Electoral College). It's also technically possible for the winning candidate to have a negative margin in the Electoral College, but only in a situation where more than two candidates get electoral votes, and none has a majority.
In 2020, the margin in the Electoral College was 74 (306-232), the margin in the popular vote was 4.46% (51.31%-46.85%), and the margin in the tipping point state (Wisconsin) was 0.63%.
1,000
3.00Okay, I think there are enough votes in to resolve this. The popular vote was closer than 2020 (estimated to be about Trump+1.5), but the electoral college margin was not. The tipping point state appears to be Pennsylvania, which is at Trump+2, with every swing state except AZ and NV at 99% reporting. The only way for PA to end up not being the tipping-point state would be for the remaining votes counted in PA and GA (which is at almost the same margin) to end of showing GA to be closer than PA, AND for at least one of {NV, AZ} to end of being closer than PA. But even this extremely unlikely scenario would have to lead to a TPS margin of at least Trump+2, since the TPS would be whichever of {GA, AZ, NV} is the least close out of those closer than PA, and GA can't be any less than Trump+2 with so few remaining ballots.
@AaronKreider The question for this market is meant to capture the intuitive idea of the election being closer, which neither of those metrics perfectly captures. I suppose markets on each of the three could also be interesting, but I don't really see anything wrong with markets that ask about how many of a set of things will happen.
@JosephNoonan To me, the intuitive meaning of "how close is the election" is "how many votes would have to change to change the result".