This market is part of my Battleground States group, a series of markets relating to key competitive swing states in the 2024 US Presidential Election. These markets allow users to bet on a state-by-state basis how they foresee the results of election day (November 5th, 2024) playing out. Be sure to check out the entire category to see which races are up for grabs!
As Texas trends further towards the Democrats, Florida is seen today as the new safe Republican stronghold. A combination of demographic shifts, immigration from different states, and Ron DeSantis' impact as Governor has transformed the Sunshine State from a perennial competitive toss-up state to one that is solidly in the GOP camp. This trend can be demonstrated in the past few election cycles with Trump in 2020 building on the margin of victory that he accomplished in 2016.
2004: Bush (5.0)
2008: Obama (2.8)
2012: Obama (0.9)
2016: Trump (1.2)
2020: Trump (3.3)
Will Joe Biden and the Democrats be able to buck this trend and score an election victory? If so, market will resolve as YES, if Florida stays red, market will resolve as NO.
Related questions
Big donors have fled the Florida Democratic Party (FDP). Campaign spending is down. Voter registration down. Gerrymandering has tanked its number of Reps. Democratic voter turnout is down. The party's leadership is either unknown or constantly changing and generally incompetent.
Bad presidential campaigns in 2016 and though less so in 2020 as well. Low-quality candidates and bad (also very much broke) campaigns in local races (Donna Deagan is an exception here). Somewhat bad policy priorities, not enough bread&butter stuff. To me it seems that FL is unfortunately more like Iowa or Ohio (way too religious, though less evangelical) than it is like Colorado or California. I am not sure the FDP realizes this. Add to that a constant influx of new (mostly older) voters who break for the GOP 50 to 25...
Yeah, blue Florida won't happen for a while. Unless repubs mess up big time. Or the FDP gets its act together - in which case it will still need to fundraise big time, which takes time...
The odds are low; they are not 6% low.
If Trump somehow loses the nomination, he will likely run as an independent candidate and as a write-in candidate if he can't get on the ballot, which would probably flip a number of otherwise uncompetitive seats blue. That's also not a likely scenario. But it is among the set of potential futures which, cumulatively, account for more than 6% of the probability distribution.
@Jai Usefully, we can use the bottom markets to determine Manifold's probability for that scenario. 0.27 * 0.36 ~= 0.10. Since my bet may have been too large, I've sold some shares to move the market to this probability.
@parhizj He also won the 2022 gubernatorial election 59.4% to 40.0%, a margin of 19.4% (?!?!?!) - which shows that Florida is firmly red now, and also that something is deeply, deeply wrong with Florida.
@evergreenemily And unfortunately that consensus means it’s even more likely that less DNC money will be funneled into Florida which in turn makes it even less likely to flip. You can also look at Trump’s performance in 2020 vs 2016 where he did so much better in the state:
