I haven't followed this thing closely enough. What was illegal about it?

If an American politician engages in corruption in another country and then uses US aid as leverage to avoid punishment, it seems standard that his opponents would push for the crime to be investigated and punished, if given the chance.

If the DNC had info that Trump was messing around with teenage girls in a foreign country, and if they knew Trump had bribed that foreign government to avoid facing justice, should they not put some kind of pressure on that foreign nation to bring that information to light? Would the DNC simply look the other way and say, "Welp! It happened in another country, and we don't want any foreign meddling in our elections!"

It seems important to understand the psychology of voters' perspective on this, as this event will likely be one of the most important running up to the election.

Federal election law makes it illegal to solicit or accept contributions from foreign nationals, with contributions defined by statute as money or "a thing of value". The reason for that is straightforward -- if you take something from someone, you owe them. Trump was clearly soliciting valuable opposition research. Even without a quid pro quo, that's illegal.

Add in the context that prior to the conversation Trump had suspended aid to Ukraine with no explanation, and it becomes clear that Trump was using the official levers of government to aid his re-election. That violates bribery and/or extortion laws.

If the shoe were on the other foot? I think a lot of Democratic supporters would want that other government to investigate. I think the DNC and other officials would be aware of the law and not directly solicit an investigation, and certainly would and should not use foreign aid and other diplomatic tools to make it happen.

The Fox News fever dream that Hillary Clinton will somehow swoop in to snatch the nomination is heating up. Hillary at 20% to run and 12% to win. Free money in both cases.

I feel like Hillary running is a more viable option than most people think. Everybody loves a sequel, especially these days. She would absolutely give Trump a run for his money, moreso than most would imagine.

Ask any liberal whether they want Hillary to run again. If she did run, she'd never make it through the primaries. The Clinton-Trump rematch is a right-wing fantasy, because she'd be the weakest opponent of any of the major Dems. It's people like Laura Ingraham and further down the wacko-news food chain pushing this stuff.

There exists:

Treaty with Ukraine on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters;
Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

Biden(s) do not get a get-out-of-jail card solely because Joe is running for Prez. This will likely end up in the Supreme Court if Barr finds anything juicy. And with the dems performing their opp research in 2016 with UK they don't have a lot of solid ground to stand on.

HILARY CLINTON AGAIN LOL?!?!

This is why it's called a hot take d00d.

All of this speculation about Clinton running again is ******ed it's an easy no to clinton running and no to clinton nominee, she's not running in 2020 ever.

Yeah I agree with this more now, but 10 days ago she was the one seemingly implying it.

why bother to kill epstein if she wasn't going to run

Killing Epstein was JuStIcE

Take it up with her, not with me.

I'm part of the Democratic base, you're not

We don't want her to run, and if she did she wouldn't get the nomination

Liberals loathe the fact that she lost and that led to Trump and she was already disliked by a good portion of Sanders backing progressives the first time - this time around moderates have plenty of other options in Biden/Buttigieg etc

Liberals don't hate Hillary or anything but it's basically unanimous that she shouldn't run again

No one on the left is thinking about/pining for Hillary, that comes from the right

She's not going to run, and if she did she wouldn't win

Will happily take 10k at Predictit prices against her running if anyone wants to escrow and lose money etc it's currently at 18c so that'd be 10k vs 1800 (I need to agree in thread first to exact terms of escrow just to clarify for anything to be booked)

Also Clinton's DOJ didn't oversee the prison where Epstein died - it's far more likely if he was killed (and it's likely he was) that it came from those currently in power if that's how it went down - he had compromising info on both Clinton and Trump potentially remember as well as a ton of other powerful figures both on the right and left.

lol Hilary Clinton!!???

As a professional gambler turned empirical political scientist, this thread really amuses me. The ratio of narrative/bend/conspiracy to objective analysis is notable. It's been said that, in the realm of politics, the general population tends toward "strong opinions, weakly held". Clearly this thread is no exception.

Does anyone here have any success at, or interest in actually modeling electoral outcomes? If so, I would be interested in collaborating. I can't help but think that there is crazy edge to be gleaned out there, particularly given the absurdity contained herein (where I'd expect a sharper mindset than the general public).

Nate Silver has consistently decimated the betting markets in elections. There might be better hybrid sources of information out there, but none obviously so.

of course youre an academic. As Ive grown older, one thing that has really surprised me is how awful just about anyone in higher education is. Youre all basically the same person with the same basic viewpoint. You offer nothing to the discussion except for your own 'credentials" (you guys love your little made up titles too) which we're supposed to just accept, and the critique that the discourse is below what youd have thought. Wow, thanks for coming by! We're all so much better off that you did.

Most people in this thread are not professional gamblers. I think maybe 2 are? Its a thread that morphed into general talk about the election...no one is claiming to be solving the worlds problems here. The only people who do that are "academics".

Also, NickyJ, what are you bets? You seem to think the betting market is widely beat able. You can bet hundreds of thousands of dollars on this election. If you know so much more than the market, please tell us what your bets are and for what price and at what books. Surely youre putting money down right? I mean if its that easy

Like killing it.

This is a classic 2+2 play. "Wow I am so much smarter than everyone in this thread" Yet I am still not going to put out any ideas or have any of them vetted. Being smarter than everyone doesn't really mean anything unless you have skin in the game.

If your ideas are so great, why not put them out there and have them critiqued? You could be lauded as a genius and show us rubes exactly what is going on. The reason people in here aren't talking about modeling this election is because it is far more complicated to model than most binary outcomes. This is why most of the discussion is narrative and not stone-cold analytics.

How exactly did these fancy models perform last election? Sharp money was still able to profit because it's not always all about modeling, sometimes it's just about being quick on your toes. Sigs told an anecdote in another thread about how he made a killing last election, but it wasn't a super analytical approach. He just had skin in the game and was quick on his feet. The data is less reliable for this election and the markets failed to reflect this last time.

There have also been some really solid posts in this thread, parttimepro has been putting out some great stuff consistently. The thing about true knowledge is that anyone who is serious about learning has to eventually be open to learning from anyone. People who really care about learning don't feel the need to "one up" anyone else. They get their hands dirty and really get down in the muck. If your ideas are truly that much better than ours than every posts presents an opportunity to demonstrate this.

In the 2008 cycle I built a real-time model that took in partial precinct-wise returns and used demographic and past voting results to predict the returns of the unreported precincts. I won every primary contest. Now there no edge, because Nate Cohn of the NYTimes built a similar model and they host it for free in every election.

Similarly, 538 does a fantastic job compiling and evaluating polls. If you really worked at it, you might get something a couple percent more accurate, but probably not. The value would definitely not be worth the time investment.

There's plenty of money to be made, but it's not from analytics, it's from just shorting outright stupidity.

Lol Like, it's kind of annoying when somebody randomly comes into a thread and starts being a know it all assh*le, isn't it? Haha.

Good post, but yeah I would say pretty much this. I think markets (whether they be the stock market, sports betting markets, Prediction markets or whatever) are all pretty much the same. Basically, you make money by buying value and shorting hype (at the appropriate time, of course). I would imagine you could make probably make a decent ROI just by shorting each candidate / buying the other candidate coming out of their respective primary bumps as an example.

And by primary bumps I meant convention bumps.

I mean, Trump controls the DOJ and is just as tied to Epstein as Clinton is... but at the end of the day the rich and powerful in general have no interest in figuring out who had him killed/deliberately allowed him to kill himself. Even the British Crown would have wanted him dead.

She's trying to sell a book

And to the people going on and on about how 'Nate's model sucks' because he predicted a 70/30 chance of Clinton winning clearly don't understand that 70% does not equal 100 percent, obviously the candidate who got over 2m more votes is more likely to win, but Trump just happened to run the table on the swing states in the exact manner he needed to win, just low how AQ sometimes beats AK when they flop a queen in poker. Like obviously Nate's sports predictions are semi worthless, but I don't see any better models out there to handicap elections

The easiest money thought is in fading the conspiracy crowd this far out from the election, I can't imagine Trump gets reelected often because this is going to come down to turnout and it's going to be very hard for 2020 to be a low turnout election (which the republicans need to win) given the current political climate in America but anything's still possible - the D nominee would have to be very offputting to moderates while also failing to energise the base for them to lose. I'd say Trump is about a 70/30 dog to be reelected atm and that's about as big an underdog as any incumbent could be this far out. Even then, it's not really worth tying up large sums for a year for a smallish ROI. I'm sure I'll have bets the month of the election but unless you're backing a big dog (say when Warren was 10-1 to be the nominee) at worst you're still going to get to back Trump at evens or fade him at -200 or whatever around the conventions so unless you literally have so much money you can max it now and have it not affect your roll's liquidity at all for the next year and change why fire anything now. I mean Trump's at -140/+138 back/lay on betfair right now and while I feel like laying him now is huge value, the value will still be there a few weeks out even if the price has changed a bunch in either direction by then

For now just fade the QAnon garbage conspiratard questions for free money as well as obvious stuff like there is absolutely no way Hillary is running in 2020, or stuff like Comey and the other targets of the conspiratard crowd to get convicted of random **** it's not going to happen.