Conditional on a Democrat winning in 2024, will Republicans attempt a coup?
33
94
590
2025
15%
chance

Bill Maher claims to be certain that the answer is yes, that election deniers are being elected in the midterms now, in 2022, that will enable a coup by Trump on inauguration day 2025.

See https://twitter.com/billmaher/status/1446700866778456066 plus more recent interviews where he makes clear that he's fully serious.

PS: For reference, we're going to say that January 6th, 2021 would've half-counted as a coup attempt, meaning that if something like that happened again, this market would resolve to PROB at 50%. Other than that, I plan to use the related markets below to help adjudicate this in case of ambiguity.

And since that may be a judgment call, I've sold my shares so I won't have a conflict of interest.

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bought Ṁ10 YES

January 6th, 2021 would've half-counted as a coup attempt

Why only "half"?

I suspect that some participants in the Jan 6 insurrection were registered Democrats, Libertarians, and independents. (Democrats you say? Yes - see primary voting patterns in WV and KY).

This is like asking "Will Christians do a coup?" Or "Will Americans do a Coup?" It's silly to assign the acts of a tiny minority to a much larger group.

It's more accurate to ask "will a group of people (really the party affiliation doesn't matter) try to over turn the election results in favor of the Republicans"? A much cleaner question that is easier to resolve and has less political bias in it.

I think it's clear that some people attempted a coup on Jan 6th, and that those people would self-describe as Republicans. They were reality detached, it seems.

Suggestion: we have several more people make markets about this. I then set up a market on my market manager to resolve to the average of these people's judgements

This average could be weighted by whatever people argue about, but I would suggest by unique traders or equal weight

Would January 6 have counted?

bought Ṁ10 of NO

No, it has to be more blatant and with less plausible deniability than that. Great thing to clarify!

jan6 was pretty blatant, can you be more detailed about in what ways something would have to be more blatant to qualify as a coup attempt?

in particular, what features of jan6 made it disqualify as a coup attempt?

predicts NO

@L That Trump can deny it with a straight face? I guess that's a pretty low bar! Ok, let's say that something like Jan 6 might count. I would listen to the arguments for and against and do my best to adjudicate it. I don't want to get too bogged down by that question since "ambiguous coup attempt" is a fairly thin slice of the probability pie here. Maybe we could use resolve-to-market in that case, to get the consensus on what fraction of a coup attempt it was?

@dreev I think this is a very tricky question to adjudicate. FWIW in 2020-2021 there was a prediction question on this topic that used https://isthisacoup.com/ as the resolution source. It resolved YES as Jan 6 was considered an attempted coup by the site. But there definitely was disagreement about whether this classification made sense or not.

It's arguably not a super thin slice of the probability pie, given that in recent US history it's the only example that comes close.

Some options you could consider include to resolve PROB based on your own assessment, a poll, or a designated committee.

sold Ṁ1 of YES

Exiting the market, as J6 really ought to have resolved yes

@L If you polled Americans, what percent would say that it was a coup attempt? Here (https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/jan-hearings-change-public-opinion-ahead-midterms-polls/story?id=91861512) I see 65% consider it an "insurrection," which seems weaker than "coup attempt" due to being more vague.

predicts NO

@LivInTheLookingGlass Let's say that January 6th would've counted as half a coup attempt. So if something like that happened again, this market would resolve to PROB at 50%.

Conditional on a democrat winning in 2024, will republicans attempt a coup?, 8k, beautiful, illustration, trending on art station, picture of the day, epic composition