Believe the money
It's been simultaneously disgraceful and highly amusing to watch the media, pundits and pollsters trot out all these pathetic, retro-rigged explanations as to why they got New Hampshire so horribly wrong. But meanwhile, check out the candidates' contracts on Intrade.
>Interesting, huh? Obama has never, ever cracked 40, not even during the 24/7 non-stop post-Iowa media lovefest. See, it's the easiest thing in the world for some pundit to pull some baseless predictions out of you know where, but when people are putting real money on the line, they tend to be much more serious and sober when picking a horse. That's why I'm such a fan of predictive markets.
Comments
Those are interesting numbers, but they're limited by the sampling size (the number of people both registered on site and engaged in the "trading").
Some other interesting numbers are Rudy at 27.5, but rising (according to the chart)...but based on what? No one's yet succeeeded with a "big state" strategy and so far, Rudy's done horribly and seems to be banking almost everything on Florida.
Some other interesting numbers from Intrade are Edwards at 1.4, still, he's slightly ahead of Gore (or the prospect that Gore becomes a candidate) at 1.0 and Huckabee at 17.9 and I like Mike Bloomberg at 0.4, although it would be amusing to see a Bloomberg candidacy siphon lots of northeast Liberal votes away from the Democratic candidate of choice.
Posted by: JMK | January 9, 2008 05:52 PM