Hillary Clinton Favored to Win

I have no special insight or skill to predict the outcome of November’s election for president, and I make no prediction. A lot can happen between now and then. In my ignorance, I rely instead on what prediction markets forecast. I recognize that these can go wrong, but they have a good record. The IEM predicts that Clinton will be nominated and then elected to office. This forecast has been in place since January of this year, and she has widened her lead since then. She’s a 60% chance winner of the vote share market and over a 70% winner of the winner-take-all market, the one that counts. The Predictit market is similar. She’s at 61 cents and Trump is at 41 cents for “Who will win the 2016 presidential election?” She’s held the lead for months. The market is almost sure that there will not be a brokered Republican convention.

I expect Clinton to be the next president, based on these probabilities. There is no apparent bubble in these markets. The markets think she’ll survive the e-mail scandal and Trump’s expected offensive against her; one market says she will not face charges in 2016 (77 percent probability). Quite often these races narrow as the election draws closer; this hasn’t happened yet. I suspect that the market players have counted up the votes and looked at the demographics and voting patterns to have reached this conclusion. Low probability wild cards can’t be anticipated to occur, but they are there nonetheless.

There’s a market for Trump’s VP choice on Predictit. Gingrich leads at 21 cents, meaning a 21% chance he’ll get it. This market is heavily fragmented and no big leader has emerged. Still, Gingrich is ahead. His rivals go like this:

Rubio, Kasich and Christie, each at 11 cents, Ernst and Sessions at 9 cents each, Martinez, Portman and Carson at 6 cents each, Webb at 5 cents, Perry, Ayotte, Cruz and Rice at 3 cents each, Walker and Haley at 2 cents each, Love, Palin and Petraeus at 1 cent each.

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8:57 am on May 6, 2016