THE MORNING RANT: Election Prediction Markets Are Now Push-Poll Mechanisms, not Gauges of Likely Election Results

As Ace wrote about a few days ago, voters in the state of Georgia chose two state Supreme Court justices in Tuesday’s election. Although the “non-partisan” candidates couldn’t identify by a political party, in each race there was a clearly defined conservative and liberal. The conservative candidates won both races. While the big election takeaway is that Georgia is not going to get a “Wisconsin court” that will serve as a left-wing super-legislature, there is another big takeaway - the election prediction markets are now total garbage that should be completely dismissed.

Polymarket and Kalshi are among the biggest “prediction markets,” making it possible to trade/gamble on the likelihood of a specific candidate winning an election. In recent years these prediction markets have been treated as a form of polling. The assumption is that people gambling on election outcomes have their finger on the pulse of the electorate, and that they will rationally put their money on the candidate mostly likely to win.

Apparently these prediction markets were relatively accurate in predicting some prominent races in recent years. But political partisans are not rational, and liberal political obsessives have started putting money on their favored candidates so as to move the prediction market odds in their favor. They somehow believe those distorted odds will become real-world outcomes.

This is analogous to when I was a little child going fishing with my dad, and he told me that when the bobber goes under water it means I’d caught a fish. My little brain soon discovered that if I reeled the line in toward the rocks of the jetty we were fishing from, the bobber would go under water! That must mean I caught a fish! No, I merely had an underwater snag. But every time I snagged my line and the bobber was pulled under water by the resistance against my reeling, I still wanted to believe I had a fish on the line.

The Lightbringer himself, Barack Obama, had involved himself in these Supreme Court races, and left-wing political observers were very excited that trading at Kalshi showed the Supreme Court races to be breaking overwhelmingly in favor of the liberal candidates.

In the race between conservative Sarah Warren and liberal Jen Jordan, Ms. Jordan was maintaining about a 55% odds of winning until a few days before the election, when suddenly the odds broke further in her favor. By election day her odds of winning exceeded 90%. Once upon a time this might have meant that traders could sense the election was breaking Jordan’s way and they were therefore gambling heavily on the likely winner.

But the conservative candidate won. In fact, Sarah Warren crushed Jen Jordan by winning 61% of the vote to Jordan’s 39%. In the other race, won by conservative Charles Bethel, traders at Kalshi had his opponent, Miracle Rankin, as the likely winner at odds exceeding 80%.

At this point, using prediction markets to measure voter sentiment is as worthless as relying on candidate-produced push-polls, whose purpose is to influence voter sentiment, not measure voter sentiment.

Other Stuff I’m Writing About

My latest piece at the The American Spectator has been published. “There’s No Reason to Fear an Invasion of Chinese Electric Vehicles” discusses the preposterous media narrative that Americans will fall in love with Chinese EVs if/when they hit the U.S. market, and that Chinese auto manufacturers will capture significant U.S. market share.

Volkswagen’s U.S.-made ID.4, an all-electric car, was such a sales flop that when VW became desperate to unload its glut of unsold units, it offered a $99 lease promotion. But even at $99 per month, Americans still found the price to be about $99 too high, as the unsaleable ID.4 became America’s slowest-selling car. If Americans will not drive an electric Volkswagen for $99 per month, there is zero chance they will buy a Chinese EV of dubious quality at any price. (U.S. production of VW’s ID.4 has since been permanently suspended.)

This piece is not behind a paywall. I’d be honored if you’d give it a read.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

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