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Is non-public information leaking into election betting markets?
Prior to the debate, on Predict It, Biden had something like an 85% chance to secure the Democratic nomination. After the debate, his odds fell to around 60%. By last night, it had eroded further to 50%.
Last night the flippening happened. The bottom fell out of Biden shares and went to Kamala. As of this moment, Kamala Harris trades at 51% and Biden is at just 29%.
As far as I can tell nothing has changed since 24 hours ago, so what gives? A few possibilities I can think of:
Someone is manipulating the markets to create a false consensus. I think this is the most likely. Mega-donors will spend billions on this election. A Biden campaign is doomed. Spending a couple million to move markets could have an outsized effect.
Non-public information is leaking. A source high in the Democratic party is talking and his friends are betting.
A whale is making a giant bet. I view this as the least likely because moving the market this much tends to be extremely unprofitable. Without inside info, this would be a very stupid bet.
Edit 1: I wouldn't rule out manipulation, but it does seem there was some public information to move the market.
Edit 2: Michelle Obama is up to 12%, which is the same as Newsom. Normally, the lower percentage bets are not liquid, but 12% rises to the level of "something, not nothing". Michelle Obama solves the Kamala Harris problem. And if we're electing useless figureheads she's better than Biden. But does she even want to run?
Wasn't the timing that Obama's public support on Friday helped stem the tide for a few days, but then on Tuesday/Wednesday stories started coming out saying that Obama was now privately highly concerned? WaPo tuesday night: Obama shares concerns after shaky debate, offers Biden his advice, and then a bunch of articles came out from other outlets based on that report, with harsher headlines.
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Rather than non-public information leaking in, I think this is actually just public information taking a while to leak in. I've been on the record as claiming that Biden was suffering from age-related cognitive decline since this site was on reddit - if you take off the partisan blinkers the decline is obvious, undeniable and easily predicted even without any video evidence of his gaffes.
Yes but it wasn't just 'the debate happened and Biden started plummeting'. There was a bunch of movement against Biden during the event, it largely wound back, and then about 24 hours ago a second far-stronger push of money started happening without any particular headlines to motivate it.
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Michelle Obama's random 10-15% position in every market has been a thing since 2020. Some people believe she's waiting to jump out of the proverbial bushes.
I personally think it's a mix of a large whale making a large anti-Biden bet, the market being rather spooked at the moment (Polymarket only took $200k~ approx to move Biden from 60% to 48% due to potential non-public information and a lot of enthusiasm to bet non-Biden candidates for the Dem nominee at the least provocation.
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Scott Alexander needed years to realize that yes, Biden is on his path to dementia. Maybe it is just that now more bettors have finally realized what is going on.
With the public information we had strong priors that Biden shows signs of likely dementia and if true, it will be progressing. Recently we saw how much it had progressed. Now we can estimate how much worse Biden will be in 1 month, 2 months, 4 months etc. with quite narrow confidence intervals.
As Anatoly Karlin says – it is all programmed. Previously people just refused to believe these bad news.
Similarly it was with effectiveness of masks in preventing covid. I didn't see any prediction markets but many people wanted to believe them to be effective despite all the evidence. When it was all reviewed and Cochrane review was published many still refused to believe that the evidence for any benefit is non-existent. Politicians are especially resistant to negative scientific findings but eventually they will be forced to accept reality in one way or another.
I’m not convinced that there’s “nothing going on”. The democrats are leaking bits of information about Biden’s mental state, and none of it has been reassuring. And I think that by itself is telling. If they thought he still had a chance, they would not be leaking what they are because there’s no way to back off from “he’s only good between 10 and 4.” Or that he’s not always with it at important meetings like G7. If they weren’t pushing for a change, it doesn’t make sense to leak that your president has dementia this bad.
I think this is what prediction markets are picking up on. If this is what’s being made public, then I don’t think they can actually continue with Biden. Kamala seems a reasonable choice, as she can step in as President and save the day.
The issue with Biden's dementia was revealed by Biden himself 4 years ago. In one response to Trump he revealed that he knows the details of the test used to assess dementia. Apparently he had been evaluated by doctors already then. We just have never been told the results and how they have changed with time.
Leaking this information would reduce uncertainty but essentially it would be the same that we can infer from videos but more precise.
I'd imagine anybody at that level of politics at his age would be subject to a lot of medical screening.
Not that Biden doesn't clearly show signs of pre-dementia, but I'd be surprised if Trump etc hadn't also been screened at some point.
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1 and 3 wouldn't work. The bet sizes you're allowed to place are not large enough.
Yeah Polymarket in particular didn't really move on that much money. 200k approx from 60% to 48% Biden.
Admittedly it was on no headlines during US overnight slot
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There's been a lot of reporting over the past few days on what Biden and his team and donors and congress are thinking, people in the house calling for him to drop out, and polls continue to coming out clarifying what voters think of Biden's performance. Just today
So information is leaking, but it's public information leaking via the media
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2, but it's less heirarchal than you're thinking. A chunk of prominent insiders have decided to see if they can push out Biden. They are getting the press to run damaging stories and contacting other Dems to rally support.
So there are a lot of people who know what's going on, it's not just their close friends.
Michelle Obama's name always comes up on these things because she's one of the few prominent people that the Dems could unite behind easily. I don't think she wants it. Her current life involves hanging out with celebrities and the super wealthy who all tell her how awesome she is. Then she gets paid to give talks to people who tell her how awesome she is.
There's nothing in her history that suggests she'd rather go to Michigan and listen to the problems of the hoi polloi. Or that she's particularly interested in having to make decisions about geopolitics.
Looking at the "Career" section of her Wikipedia page, while Michelle Obama has been involved in politics plenty, she's never even run for an elected position herself. I really can't see the Democrats going for her, in addition to her being pretty clear about not wanting the job.
Correct, she would be running on ‘Obama’s third term’, not ‘Michelle’s first’.
I mean, obviously, the bigger problem either way is that her life in which she doesn’t run for office is one in which she’s paid to hear about how great she is, and her life in which she does run for office is based on getting insulted by Trump while people call her a tranny and the media pries into minor facets of her personal life for an outside shot at having the most difficult job in the world.
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I don't think the Democrats would let a wee thing like qualifications or experience stand in their way. And there is an argument to be made that Barack Obama and his former staff would just run the show anyway.
Obviously, it's not great for our nation when spouses and reality TV stars win office, but the culture war is hot enough that people want victory more than doing the right thing and losing.
The only impediment is her not wanting the job. She now enjoys a sterling reputation that would certainly be tarnished rather quickly if she ran.
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Something weird is definitely going on. Looking at the charts on Election Betting odds, Biden's chances went from 36% to 22% on June 28th, the night of the debate. It then stayed relatively constant for several days, before collapsing to <9% on July 3rd, which is very strange. The first drop was obviously the debate performance, but then Biden stayed steady despite a barrage of articles demanding he exit the race, and little public comment from Biden other than that he would "talk with his family" about what to do. Then we have this second drop when, if anything, Biden is receiving some positive news. He's saying he's going to stick around, the barrage of negative articles has mostly stopped, and other Dem leaders are more publicly supporting him.
I've checked with a few of the people I know, and none of them are really saying much has changed, so either this is very private stuff, or it's just an issue with the markets being thinly traded and subject to the whims of the whales.
The big plunge happened during the middle of the night US-time on not much volume. I think thin liquidity + assumptions of whoever's moving the market having private info has created the current state of affairs.
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In my mind it's The Dog That Didn't Bark situation. The backlash hasn't come. Biden hasn't done anything to flex back. People aren't defending Biden very aggressively. A week has come and gone with no organized resistance. That's probably more important than the debate itself.
Compare that time Hillary collapsed at an event and got thrown into her limo like a side of beef. Really bad, but immediately her surrogates (essentially the entire establishment media) were out there fighting it hard and within a few days she was doing appearances where she was shaking it off.
The lack of response might be more indicative than the initial crash.
If Biden's debate was a Category 5 Hurricane of a PR storm, Hillary fainting was at best a weak tropical storm. Yeah the optics weren't good but an aging politician fainting in hot, humid weather (presumably over-dressed and maybe a decent coating of makeup) isn't some great disaster as long as it's not a sign of some other problem. Much more of an embarrassment to shove under the rug than a critical failing.
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I just checked it to show my friends, it now shows Biden at 45 and Kamala at 37.
So it may have come around again.
Algorithm-triggered Biden flash crash!
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My friend who bets on these things bought as many shares as he could (I guess it's not that much) on Biden stepping down by end of day.
Edit: Karine Jean-Pierre is doing a press conference right now. Say's there's been no discussion of suspension of campaign or resignation which I don't believe but seems odd to say if Biden is going to stop down today. Just don't have a press conference.
Him stepping down now creates a bad situation for Harris, it either sets up an open convention or a farcical situation where everyone is voting for him at the convention only for him to accept the nod and have the committee give it to her afterward
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His staff will be saying he's not stepping down up to and through the point where he's walking up the podium to resign.
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"and went to Kamala." This indicates insider information about insider coordination.
Not necessarily. I've seen multiple commentators assert that Kamala is the only possible alternative. They might be wrong, but it's not unreasonable the betting markets might buy that.
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I can’t believe Obama would sign off on Kamala but maybe he just doesn’t care anymore.
I mean, the case for replacing Biden isn’t that a different democrat could win, it’s that a different democrat would do less damage to turnout among people who won’t vote R.
I’m not sure that’s true in the case of Kamala, but it’s not ipso facto impossible.
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Depends on whether Kamala does more damage to down ballot races?
If you're gonna lose anyway, why not let her take the hit? It might be better than trying to dislodge her.
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I can’t imagine him capstoning his career by stepping over a black woman.
It is her turn after all.
Was Obama ever particularly identity-focused in his politics? Honest question, I didn't pay attention to politics during most of his presidency (and haven't paid much attention to him since then).
Somehow Tea Party Republicans got it in their head that Obama was the anti-Christ, but he both ran for election and governed as a fairly center-left technocrat and leaned on very main-street rhetoric that wasn't too charged. As an example, he didn't support gay marriage until a good chunk into the presidency. He mostly tried to ignore us-vs-them, at least in 2008. He got bogged down a bit into more partisan warfare later in his second term, but frankly I think the Tea Party really did "start it". Hillary at the end was pretty night-and-day culture warry in comparison, though some of the shift in rhetoric was visible for a few years beforehand in some left-wing higher-ed type circles. At least that was my impression.
Obama tried to come off as a center left technocrat until after his reelection, albeit with occasional slips(clinging to their guns and religion), but stuff like IRS targeting scandals and fast and furious gave the lie to the idea that he genuinely was one.
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The "dear colleague" letter and the subsequent title ix witch hunts alone should dispell that belief. How much of that was Obama vs people he empowered in his administration is debatable, but irrelevant.
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Identity politics didn't meaningfully exist in 2008. He also governed in extremely capricious ways that were more than "fairly center-left technocrat". If you watched any Fox News at all circa 2009, you would have heard over and over again Obama promising to "fundamentally transform the United States of America" in his campaign stump speeches.
Obama personally might not have given a damn about equity as such, but he filled his administration with people who did: Eric Holder, Valerie Jarrett, Susan Rice. Eric Holder practically enshrined disparate impact at DOJ, which is just equity by another name. Many of the key inciting incidents that made woke morals blow up -- George Zimmerman, Michael Brown -- were made worse by his administration and his personal actions.
We could go down the list all day.
The Tea Party started as blowback over Obamacare. It really started as spontaneous protests and town hall meetings where constituents were livid over what Obama and Congress wanted to do with healthcare. Eventually, it got co-opted by Republican officials who made it another part of their vendetta against Obama. But it started with Obamacare, a piece of legislation which made American healthcare more expensive and more complicated, which people understood at the time, and pissed them off. No Obamacare, no Tea Party.
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This is a popular take, but I don't think it's the right one. 2009 had Obama's first meeting with GOP leadership summarized as "I won", the Affordable Care Act was 2009 and passed on party lines during infamously flametastic discussion where anything but the Democratic proposal was demanding people die in the streets by the thousands or tens of thousands, and the only reason someone could oppose this was Racism. By May he was joking about IRS audits of organizations that didn't agree with him enough. He instructed the Department of Justice to not defend DOMA in federal court in 2011.
Not all the worst of the 2008 culture wars were downstream of Obama directly -- there was a conspiracy theory that Palin's youngest child was 'really' her grandchild, and she had an involuntary biographer take up residence as a neighbor, and afaik that were genuinely just nuts (Andrew Sullivan, everyone!) that media groups latched onto rather than promoted by the Dem party directly -- but a lot of them were.
Perhaps more critically, many seeds were planted for future culture wars, even fairly early. The ACA threw in expansive mandates for gender-related stuff, and took over a large portion of higher education loans, for example.
I mean, I see all of these as somewhat partisan but not necessarily or explicitly identity politics. For example, although he nominally supported affirmative action, and a few of the bills ended up having those kind of effects, IIRC most of his efforts were fairly ambivalent and he would usually say things to the tune of 'well we need to make sure we're accounting for poor white students and their disadvantage too'. He talked about being the first Black president not in a Black pride/power way but more couched in generic "American Dream" language about equality. In other words, he was on the equality train, but not the equity train, not anything like what it would eventually become. Personally, I don't think that many center-left folks had any idea what some of these seeds would sprout, and I correspondingly imagine that it wasn't by and large deliberate, up until perhaps the last two years, maybe?
Of course there was also a period from about 2011-2013 roughly where I was a bit tuned out from politics, so maybe I missed a bit there.
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His campaign portrayed him as black to blacks, non-white to other minorities, and post-racial to whites.
His actual views are a bit harder to pin down...
His mother raised him with stories about what a great African leader his father was. Obama was probably initially planning to go into the state department. He seems to have been recruited before he went to Columbia U and his assigned roommate just happened to be the son of a prominent politician from Pakistan (or some other Muslim country, I'm not 100% sure).
While at Columbia he seems to have had a change of heart.
He decided he wanted to be a black leader in the US, and moved to Chicago after graduating. So from 85-97 you can find some more identity focussed quotes from him because he was trying to get accepted by Chicago voters for an eventual run.
Michelle used to baby sit for Jesse Jackson, so getting an in with the Chicago political machine was part of her appeal.
He seems to have realized that he sold much better to white liberals than Chicago blacks. They wanted someone with stronger links to the community. Becoming president was more realistic than becoming mayor of Chicago.
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His main schtick in 2008 was post-racial, post-partisan unity of the United States. "Not red states or blue states" etc.
See his Philadelphia speech on race in 2008. Progressive activists thought he was kind of a sell-out or too much a naive believer in white goodwill.
Of course, he then lit a lot of that goodwill on fire by bungling the Trayvon Martin case, needlessly blowing the Skip Gates silliness way out of proportion (remember the "beer summit" at the White House?), etc.
I don't think he bungled anything there. To secure his re-election he needed to repeat the crazy high black turnout of 2008. That might not have happened if race relations were cool and calm.
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2008 was a different time. Post-racial unity was the way to do anti-racism back then. Esoteric critical theories were only starting to show up on obscure nerdy spaces, and even die-hard Democrats thought they were way off.
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She has really high negatives, but fewer negatives IMO than Biden at the moment, and her negatives are pretty much limited to people who closely follow politics. If she is kept away from improvisational moments, the narrative will become a series of hyped up "Girl Boss" and "Yass Queen" memes with a lot of media cheerleading. Democrats and their sympathetic social media drones will easily fall in line for "the first female president." How much the middle is persuaded by "making history" is a gamble, but it revives enthusiasm temporarily.
Her negatives include public speaking and generally negative charisma. She is less likable than Trump and Biden alike.
I don’t think the HRC campaign strategy will work better the second time around.
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The flip side is Trump is now sitting on a boatload of cash. You can get out all of the embarrassing Harris videos. You can point out how her role in the admin was…the border.
I think Harris at this point is a better bet than Biden but only slightly.
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Also, if there's a concern that Biden's ticket replacement will have their political career tanked by an inevitable loss, no one will shed a tear for Harris. She's an acceptable casualty rather than some actually promising future candidate.
She'll be the American Kim Campbell; we'll have to hear a similar story about how the first woman president was set up to fail.
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There was a report that 25 house Dems are going to go public asking Biden to step down. Similarly there is a report that Clyburn is going to have a talk with Joe.
There is a sense blood is in the water.
There's this concept in football politics (and business politics in general) of the "full support of the board", this is usually what you are told you have two weeks before you're sacked. Beware the CEO who has been given such a backing, he's a dead man waking. I remember reading SBF getting it and knowing as I read the phrase that it was over for him. And surely enough, a week or so later...
I think Obama's "bad debate nights happen" was just this. He gave Joe the full support of the board. Now everyone's rushing to position themselves before his fate becomes concrete.
I don't know about football, but in normal business, "full support of the board" is typically followed after a short cooling off period by "resignation to spend more time with one's family".
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Yep. Kiss of death. You never need “full support of the board” unless things have gone terribly wrong. Same here.
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Blood is in the water, but it isn't clear who the sharks are just yet.
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To my knowledge, you're only allowed to have $850 per contract on PredictIt (i.e. you could bet $850 on Biden-No and $850 on Kamala-Yes, but couldn't go above $850 on either). Thus, I'm not sure how a whale would be moving the market - there's tens of thousands of shares moving each day on those contracts...
How good is their security- is it possible to dodge the system by making a ton of burner accounts? Alternatively, is this just one influencer tweeting at all their followers?
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NYT dropped either a leak from someone with high-level access or somebody floating a tester this morning. Whatever happens, this is wild to watch.
I'm still confused why, if the intent is to regain momentum and fight the narrative, he's doing an interview on Friday, which is normally the day to bury news that will disappear over the weekend. Today would have been a much better day. As it is, Biden's fitness is going to be one of the biggest casual conversation pieces at family get-togethers tomorrow.
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That link doesnt seem to load
Loads for me. Here's the original link if you want to give the scoundrels at the paper of record some views.
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