I expect I am typical of a great many people in that I feel a good deal better or worse depending on my level of optimism about the upcoming election, and in that my optimism/pessimism fluctuates according to the information I take in from day to day and week to week.
And after battling the rising force of fascism in America since the early 1990s, I’m not as equipped as I used to be to deal with the stresses of worry. (As I like to put it, my shock absorbers are shot.)
I am buoyed up when I read Simon Rosenberg’s reliably upbeat Hopium emails I get every day, and I would be ready to list all the reasons he gives for hopefulness. (Polls, enthusiasm levels, GOTV ground game, etc.) I really appreciate the work he does, and his mantra of “I’d rather be us than them.”
I was likewise encouraged by kos’s recent excellent assessment of the “State of the Race: 1 Month to Go.”
But my Dad was a guy who believed in “grabbing the bull by the tail and looking the facts squarely in the face,” and I am my father’s son. So I require myself to grab the bull by the tail and look also at the worrisome signs, whatever the state of my shocks.
And one of those that concerns me — and that I’m wondering about — has to do with how the numbers for Kamala Harris have become less favorable on the future’s market, Predictit.org.
And I’d like to ask the members of this community how this movement should be interpreted.
In general, I believe in the idea that the “crowd” — i.e. the collective judgment of a large group of people — shows better judgment than the individuals that make it up. (For example, if there’s a contest to judge the number of jelly beans in a big jar, the average of all the guesses of individuals reportedly will be impressively accurate.)
A future’s market is one way that the “wisdom of the crowd” can express itself. People making bets on future scenarios will tend to create a “market price” that will tend to have some meaningful relationship with the actual probabilities. So if one scenario costs, say, 60 cents to place a one-dollar bet on, that means that the “wisdom of the crowd” assesses that this scenario has a 60 percent chance of happening.
I’ve been checking in on Predictit.org’s assessment of the presidential race regularly. I was delighted to see the strong upward movement of the market for a Democratic victory when Biden stepped aside and Kamala Harris’s campaign took off so impressively.
I hoped that rise would continue ever-upward as America woke up to their having a young, competent, sane, constructive, caring candidate and rejected the ugliness of Donald Trump. But then the rise stalled out with Kamala being given a 57-58% chance of winning, followed by a period of settling down to a lower level— above 50%, but just barely.
Then my hopes rekindled when in the aftermath of Harris’s evisceration of Trump in the presidential debate, and the probability of her victory again rose back into the high 50s.
But now, in the weeks since, it has settled back down so that she is again only barely favored. And indeed, in the Predictit market on the question of what the electoral college margin will be, there’s been a change from when two different levels of Democratic victory were the two most probable scenarios to now the “crowd” is saying that the most likely outcome is that the GOP will win by 65-104 Electoral votes.
My question is: do these movements in the future’s market reflect some reality, in which Trump’s chances of winning have really increased? Or is there some other reason that this “crowd” would have moved things in that direction that have no real connection with the political realities, and the real probabilities?
The “wisdom of the crowd” is not infallible. (I’ve followed futures markets for years.) But they are meaningful enough assessors of probabilities that I believe they are worth attending to.
I’d like to believe that in this case, these movements don’t reflect any real change in the likelihood of a Democratic victory (e.g. maybe it the Trumpy “Bro” faction is disproportionately represented in the betting population).
But I’m also wondering, from the patterns I’ve observed, whether — for example -- there’s some downward force operating that moves things toward Trump in the absence of some big Bombshell influence — like the emergence of Kamala, and her debate victory — that’s making our future darker.
If you feel you have any insight — whether this is worrisome, or can be responsibly disregarded in favor of the Hopium/Kos view — I would like to hear it.