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Early elections predictions

Who will win US presidential elections of 2024 ?

  • Total voters
    82
I find the betting markets mildly interesting even knowing they aren't generally predictive. Frankly, when the polls seem to all be within the margin of error, why see what the betting markets are doing. This year, they might be about as predictive as the polls.

I really hope for a Harris landslide, that's about the only thing that might shake the GOP out of its current crazy, I'll be surprised if its a landslide though.
 
ahhell said:
I find the betting markets mildly interesting even knowing they aren't generally predictive. Frankly, when the polls seem to all be within the margin of error, why see what the betting markets are doing. This year, they might be about as predictive as the polls.

I really hope for a Harris landslide, that's about the only thing that might shake the GOP out of its current crazy, I'll be surprised if its a landslide though.
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What is going to be interesting is what happens in the GOP when Trump kicks the bucket. There really is no clear sucessor.
 
Beelzebuddy said:
I wasn't saying that before, but I am now if Brainster's source is accurate. If all the survey companies are switching over to an in-house stable of pollees, that would go some way toward explaining the behavior that doesn't mesh with the rest of my political expectations, like how nothing seems to move the needle anymore. They can't help but preselect their people because they're the only people there to select.

When you ask follow up questions of a sample of people, you don't get another independent sample, you have a longitudinal study of a single cohort. A thousand likely voters sampled from a group of a thousand likely voters are the same people, who know they're being sampled and from the description are being actively encouraged to see themselves as representatives of their demographics.

That data can be still valuable, but it's no longer applicable to the same treatment as data from independent samples. You can't toss it into the same giant polling aggregator without skewing the results. I'm sure pollsters know this. It sounds to me like they can't think of any better solution, so they're just rolling with it. I'd say they're wrong. They'd say I'm wrong. Guess we'll find out in November.
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Even if they turn out to be right this time, it's only because of luck. Once you start weeding people out based on their responses to your priming questions, you're no longer looking to pick from a representative sample.

Hence why random polling is superior in the long run.

I think a lot of polling (or more accurately surveying) companies have fixated too much on the number of people that they need to get answers from and have forgotten that random sampling is the first rule.
 
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plague311 said:
Why do we care what the ******* betting markets say again? I'll never understand that. You know that betting markets don't reflect how people are going to vote, right? It's just a market for people to bet on who will win. I don't know how many times this needs to be said.

Check the odds on Sunday morning before football starts. Make note of who the betting lines say will win, then get back to me at the end of that Sunday. I bet you'd be shocked at how many games they get wrong, every Sunday. Every week.
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They don't get the games wrong. The idea of a betting line in football is not to predict the final margin of victory. It's to get half the people to bet on one team and the other half to bet on the other team. That way the losing bets pay off the winners with a little left over for the bookie (winning bets pay $100 while losing bets cost $110).

As for why we should care, you might as well ask why we should care what the polls say. They are both indicators of the likelihood of one side or the other winning. Not perfect indicators, certainly but given that there is still enough time for world or national events to swing the election in either direction, we should not expect perfection.
 
Brainster said:
They don't get the games wrong. The idea of a betting line in football is not to predict the final margin of victory. It's to get half the people to bet on one team and the other half to bet on the other team. That way the losing bets pay off the winners with a little left over for the bookie (winning bets pay $100 while losing bets cost $110).

As for why we should care, you might as well ask why we should care what the polls say. They are both indicators of the likelihood of one side or the other winning. Not perfect indicators, certainly but given that there is still enough time for world or national events to swing the election in either direction, we should not expect perfection.
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I think you pointed out exactly why they're not. They show the psychology of betters and bookies and that is it. Betting odds are based solely on attracting gamblers. Not the public as a whole.
 
Gulliver Foyle said:
Even if they turn out to be right this time, it's only because of luck. Once you start weeding people out based on their responses to your priming questions, you're no longer looking to pick from a representative sample.

Hence why random polling is superior in the long run.
I think a lot of polling (or more accurately surveying) companies have fixated too much on the number of people that they need to get answers from and have forgotten that random sampling is the first rule.
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Aye, there's the rub. Achieving a true random sample. I worked for a pollster for two years. Getting a random sample in the 1980s was hard then. And I believe it is harder today then ever.
 
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Brainster said:
They don't get the games wrong. The idea of a betting line in football is not to predict the final margin of victory. It's to get half the people to bet on one team and the other half to bet on the other team. That way the losing bets pay off the winners with a little left over for the bookie (winning bets pay $100 while losing bets cost $110).
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That's....literally my point, Brainster. You actually made it better than I could. Thanks, I guess.

Brainster said:
As for why we should care, you might as well ask why we should care what the polls say. They are both indicators of the likelihood of one side or the other winning. Not perfect indicators, certainly but given that there is still enough time for world or national events to swing the election in either direction, we should not expect perfection.
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Honestly, I don't know why people give so much credence to polling either. Especially in the last few election cycles.

So all around good post.
 
Brainster said:
As for why we should care, you might as well ask why we should care what the polls say. They are both indicators of the likelihood of one side or the other winning. Not perfect indicators, certainly but given that there is still enough time for world or national events to swing the election in either direction, we should not expect perfection.
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Makes sense, but how much weight should we assign given various sketchy factors such as:

Trump’s Election Odds Spike On Polymarket As Musk Touts Betting Site
 
Newsweek getting a lot of clicks today. They let them into Threads so I could see the claim. Some oddball poll has Trump winning by 7 points nationally.
 
Samson said:
Yes.
The poll is damning of the members at large.
A left wing forum collapses into a ludicrous poll result.
44 to 7 when the betting shops have Trump clear favorite.
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Your posting of nonsense is getting worse.

Trump is a very slight favourite with bookies, nothing like a clear favourite.

And let's not forget, Hillary was such an overwhelming favourite with bookies that Paddy Power paid out on her before the election and cost themselves 4M Sterling when she lost.

You are out of touch with reality.
 
ahhell said:
I find the betting markets mildly interesting even knowing they aren't generally predictive. Frankly, when the polls seem to all be within the margin of error, why see what the betting markets are doing. This year, they might be about as predictive as the polls.

I really hope for a Harris landslide, that's about the only thing that might shake the GOP out of its current crazy, I'll be surprised if its a landslide though.
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Well, Harris has squandered an 8 to 11 lead to trail 11 to 10.
Good luck!
Not sure who can stomach 4 years of her appalling contentless speech mannerisms, but democracy wins regardless.
That is the not China not Russia not Iran not Afghanistan paradigm.
Let's all celebrate that.
 
Samson said:
Well, Harris has squandered an 8 to 11 lead to trail 11 to 10.
Good luck!
Not sure who can stomach 4 years of her appalling contentless speech mannerisms, but democracy wins regardless.
That is the not China not Russia not Iran not Afghanistan paradigm.
Let's all celebrate that.
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Would you hate her less if she was not black?

Would you hate her less if she was not a woman?
 
Hercules56 said:
Would you hate her less if she was not black?

Would you hate her less if she was not a woman?
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I always find this retort bizarre; as if because of a person's sex or race we have to lower the bar; because of a person's sex or race they should be shielded from the critiques we usually lob at politicians.
 
Trausti said:
I always find this retort bizarre; as if because of a person's sex or race we have to lower the bar; because of a person's sex or race they should be shielded from the critiques we usually lob at politicians.
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You don't get it. His extreme hatred and criticism of Kamala is due to her race and her gender.
 
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