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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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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