Here's how this works:
This market closes the day before Election Day.
Once the final margins are known for every state in the U.S. - likely at some point in early December - this market will resolve as follows:
Most Democratic state, by margin: YES
Second-most Democratic state: PROB 98%
Third-most Democratic state: PROB 96%
. . . (etc.) . . .
Third-least Democratic state: PROB 6%
Second-least Democratic state: PROB 4%
Least Democratic state: PROB 2%
D.C. is not included, and neither are the individual congressional districts of Nebraska and Maine.
This creates an incentive structure for Manifold to correctly order the states of the U.S. from most Democratic to least - a very difficult task, and one I'm curious to see how well this site can pull off!
@evergreenemily They still display out of order for me. In fact, now all unlinked questions display out of order for me.
If we go from 100% to 0% by increments of 2%, including the endpoints, there have to 51 total elements. Since this doesn't include D.C. or Congressional districts, how will you fill all 51 slots? I guess you could just skip the middle and have the 25th most Democrat state resolve to 52% and the 26th most resolve to 48%. Or you have the skip occur between the Democratic state with the smallest margin and the Republican state with the smallest margin.
@JosephNoonan Oh, whoops, you're right! I'll fix that by having the least-Democratic state resolve to 2%. I'd include DC, but that's just free mana on YES...
Thanks for catching that so early!
@dittopoop Time! I've been sitting on these ideas for months. There's a reason I've been so rabid about wanting unlinked multiple choice markets - something about them just clicks with the way my creativity works!