October 21, 2015

This One Simple Trick Will Allow You to Make a Killing Betting on the Presidential Race

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Jim Tankersley examines the presidential odds at PredictWise today and concludes that punters are probably underestimating Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning. Why? Justin Wolfers explains that it’s likely due to something called “longshot bias”:

The favorite tends to win in betting markets more often than indicated by the odds. So if the markets say she’s a 47% chance to be president, history suggests that the true odds are a bit better than that.

….There’s another way to get at this though, which is simply to ask whether the odds make sense. I think the idea that Clinton is only a 75 percent chance to win the nomination is nuts — she’s essentially the only serious candidate running, and it’s now clear that her campaign is not going to implode. With any candidate there are risks that secrets may come out, but with Mrs. Clinton, we’ve had several decades for them to surface. So my (personal!) judgment is that she is at least an 85 percent chance to win the nomination, and maybe 90 percent is a more realistic assessment.

OK. But what I want to know is why the betting markets say that Democrats have a 58 percent chance of winning the presidency, but the combined chance of all the individual Democratic candidates is 63 percent. There must be some way to arbitrage this so that you’ll make money no matter what happens. Right?

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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