I don't bet politics but it's been an interesting market to follow this year as a bettor who's used to betting sports almost makes me want to start but I guess this year has been pretty unique.

On betfair biden seems to be drifiting? and trump who I swear was like 42 to be next president yesterday is now 13.5 on there but the only info i can find gives trump close to no chance at all, it's very confusing to me in the sense that it seems to be "free money" but the logical part of my brain tells me i'm missing something and the market knows best so I just pass (i dont care about politics and am not from US so have no bias).

Just read some of the Trump supporters in this thread. They're so far gone many of them are throwing money at a futile cause. That's what's distorting the market.

Yeah maybe. I've had a hard time getting unbiassed analysis from anywhere for either side even from bettors i trust in other areas, guess that's politics in a nutshell. I put a few units on the line but I feel like a square just betting on something without knowing the market or having a model/good way to predict a "fair price", the logic of its close to impossible to lose and fair price should be 1000/1 or w/e just doesn't sit right with me on any market for obvious reasons but maybe I'm just a life nit /shrug.

The chance of a Trump win at this point is literal 0%. It's impossible. The only reality the markets are reflecting right now is the reality that there are far too many delusional folks who think they're going to score a big win because their brains are full of worms.

Hillary was getting bet to win the nomination after the states had closed for filing the paperwork to run etc

Every cycle the Libertarians are 1% or whatever to win the election at some point even though they're actually 0% just this cycle the Republican Party has gone off the deep end. You could get Biden to win California at 1.02 etc on election day when he was literally closer to 100 percent than 99.99 percent to win the state etc

Never underestimate the delusion of the Qanon crowd

I still have Trump backers I know who think he's going to magically lock up the satanic blood drinking democrats and that he'll win re-election etc

These people are divorced from reality.

Some of the Trump backers are people cashing out their Biden wins early, a bunch of them are deep in the cult and see a long price thinking 'but Breitbart/Infowars etc says he still might win' via lawsuits/recounts/aliens/whatever

Obviously some of this exists (I closed my own positions to bet big against a UK reality show contestant last weekend then got back in on Monday), but I doubt it's a significant factor. For example there is no similar thing going on the 3rd in the popular vote market for people trying to close out Jorgensen positions.

Nobody was betting against Jorgensen at 1.65 or whatever the average Biden price people for was though she was a huge fav for most third party votes and a ridiculous longshot for the presidency all the way so it attracts a diff betting crowd the +10000 layers or -1000 backers etc

All you need to know about the Trump supporters here is that whb predicted Trump would win states like Washington and Oregon and was actually surprised when he didn't.

We'll never truly know if Trump won those states or not...

It appears the entire state of Pennsylvania is crazy. Looks good for our Dems 30-59 bets.

i need a the big short style explanation for who the people on the other side of all the biden bets are. do the people offering 1.08 on biden winning the election actually know something or are they just insane (or is it some kind of weird hedge)?

Insane + people who are poor and can't wait to get their money so they sell (see this more on exchanges)

what books still take action on next president?

predictit, polymarket.....??

You have said this 2 or 3 times now. Are you being serious?

Pretty sure he is joking, at least I hope so....the 30-59 bet is dead. 1,000-1 odds at best.

The entire Trump-will-flip-states meme is over. Only extremely gullible people like DITS are still taking it seriously:

Thankfully these people are signing up for PredictIt in droves! And while each individual market only gives like $100 of free money, there's so many markets where they're donating money that its gonna end up being thousands if you have a high enough balance.

The guy reasoned that with Florida surveys being very wrong, and against Biden, that the other swing states would go that way too. So early on he bet against Biden when he was the favorite with good value. He was partially right but not enough. The Michigan and Wisconsin pre-election surveys were also way off but not by enough to change the eventual outcome in those states. IMO only a few polling companies did a proper job in predicting this election outcome. Looking back maybe the best way to have bet the election would have be to arb it.

That's really great domer. Happy for you. Maybe you can use your profits from this election to sign up your fat ****ing hog of a wife for a Weight Watchers program so that you don't have to beat off in the shower every few days to fend off testicular cancer.

Maybe if you really hit it big this election cycle you can forget about WW, let her stay on the couch and go get yourself a hooker once every couple months until 2024 rolls around.

Living it up!

Crazy Trump bettor here, would still consider taking 18:1 against Biden for $1k-$3k/bitcoin equivalent.

You win if Biden or Harris is sworn in during January. I win if Trump or anyone else is sworn in or outlier scenarios like no one is sworn in/country breaks into civil war/20% or more of the population secedes to a non-Biden government.

Fairlay (btc) is also open, not aware of anywhere else with worthwhile volume. Non-US people have betfair of course.

Um did I miss something?

i get the reasoning why he would think one could extrapolate florida being 2 pts further right vs 2016 -> country being 2 pts further right (even though it's way way way oversimplified and was proven wrong)

what i don't get is if we actually could have made the leap that florida was dust based on early voting data and stuff that was released pre 7 pm in florida

IMO, the ideal hindsight betting plan, which was perfectly reasonable if you believed the mail-in vs in-person voting polling splits, was to bet trump for states that would be counting in-person first and then bet biden once the mail votes started rolling in and biden early in states that counted mail votes first then trump later.

Wasserman noted before the election polling underestimated repubs consistently in certain states (e.g. florida) and underestimated dems in others (Arizona for example). That also was a big hint to where the polling misses would matter, i think. And when early Florida and other states' results were coming in, Wasserman was saying how biden was overperforming in suburbs to the point that would suggest biden would be fine in Midwest states.

As far as I can understand Florida reported the mail in vote count, which usually favors Democrats, early on election day. Then they reported the early in person votes which usually favors Republicans. The in person vote bias was more heavy than expected and greater than the mail in vote bias. So early on election day you could predict a Republican win. At least thats what the podcast guy was saying I think.

An excellent summary of the markets

they just reported party ID, tho, right? if they are reporting the actual votes then florida becomes -1000 trump mid day

Haven't listenend to the podcast but that sounds like what the website JoeIsDone.github was saying. The guy that ran that website reasoned that the Democrats would underperform and the Republicans would overperform on the Florida in person voting and then he applied that logic across all the battleground states and came to the conclusion that Biden would lose in a historic landslide. A lot of pro-Trump forums and communities were saying stuff like this.

It was grounded in reality and was compelling enough that I considered betting for Trump to take Florida actually. It was well reasoned, there was some decent data behind it and it wasn't based in utter insanity like Qanon.

The issue in this type of thinking was that they attempted to apply the voting environment in Florida and apply it to all 50 states which is not how it works. The conditions that would create a Biden/Trump voter in Arizona or Michigan might not exist in Florida or vice versa. A lot of pro Trump communities however ignored that and applied it to all 50 states. I was doing my own research into this election during the lead up and there were legitimate supporters to believed that states like New York, New Jersey, Oregon, Washington State were all in play and would be swing states while actual battleground states like Pennsylvania and Florida were actually dark red states. In reality, the pro-Trump sites were even further off than the mainstream polling outlets. I think that is a big reason why this landslide loss comes as such a huge surprise to a lot of Trump supporters. They've enveloped themselves in a bubble of their own creation for the last 4 years and as a result, have not had to grapple with even the possibility that ANY negative Trump news was real.

For my part, my reason for betting on Biden just came down to combinatorial math.

538 gets a lot of flack for their polling but I thought people ignored the real gem of that site which is that it lays out the path to victory which is just as important. 538 model said that Trump HAD to win both Florida and Pennsylvania to open up a path to victory and then from there he had to win various combinations of battleground states to win.

Biden didn't really have to win any state. There were a number of states he could have won that would have put him in a 95% chance+ situation and a few that would have basically ended the night early. He could have lost Pennsylvania and Florida and still won - which for a while looked like it was gonna happen.

Even if you were super generous and gave Trump a 70-30 chance to win every single battleground state - which would be ridiculous to do even by the most delusional Trump supporter, he still would have been an underdog because he had a much narrower set of combos than Biden did and he had to do in such a specific way.

This is all hindsight 20/20 now though, it's easy for all of us to do our post game predictions. At this point I'm just waiting to get paid like everyone else.