The first article I ever wrote for this site was about recency bias: The habit of people to focus on the last bit of information they got on a topic and overstate its importance. As with many biases, it crops up again and again and the Johnson survival market right now is a classic example. So far this month the odds on a 2022 departure for the Prime Minister have fallen after the local elections, shot up in advance of…
I should state upfront I’m not as confident of the tip at the end of this article than normal. I’ve written before about the GOP’s apparently weak candidates for many winnable Senate seats, and the prospect of that helping the Democrats hold on to a New Hampshire Senate seat. But how about Pennsylvania, where candidates will be selected next week? Even more than New Hampshire, this is a genuinely purple state. Won by Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020….
On ‘Election Eve’ it is traditional for some cheeky punters to stick a small mortgage-worth of cash onto a sure thing to try and bag a quick if small return. Apparently during the week of a general election even seats as short as 1/100 see 5 figure bets on this basis, since in theory the annual equivalent ROI of such a bet is very good. Browsing the local election odds over the last couple of days, I think there are…
As a long-standing gambler on elections, I’ve always found the day itself to be somewhat odd. The betting speculation reaches a crescendo, and judging by the betting exchanges the punting itself does so too. But it’s the only day for months where we don’t actually get any new information to update our predictions. This causes endless speculation on turnout trends, and we should really stop. The fog of law No opinion polls are released on election day, either for legal…
After the brawl, the duel. The French Presidential election has been in full swing for the best part of a year for many voters, but we’ve now entered the final fortnight where the top two candidates face off. Polls show Macron consolidating his position and his lead returning to roughly 55:45, but I feel markets are too confident that the polls are spot on. Learning from our mistakes The French polls are good, but they aren’t infallible. Back in 2017,…
It’s not a good time for Democrats right now, but it’s going to get a lot worse. Nothing in Biden’s approval rating or other key indicators have changed my view from last November that the midterms coming up this year will see Republican gains – probably enough to give them control of both the House and the Senate. Yet that doesn’t mean nothing is going their way. In the purple state of New Hampshire, their incumbent Senator is looking pretty…
It’s hard to believe these days, but London used to be a swing city politically. Labour tended to have an edge, but the Tories were frequently hot on their heels. The ‘popular vote’ across local elections in the city was frequently within a couple of percentage points, such as the 1990, 2002, and 2006 elections. In 2006 the Tories even swept control of half a dozen councils off Labour and governed 14 of the city’s 32 boroughs (Labour controlled 7,…
Back in 2020 there was a lot of pre-election excitement about Texas flipping blue. But on election day and onwards the attention turned to events in Georgia. Democrats hadn’t come within 5% of winning the state since the Clinton era (won in ’92, just lost in ’96) but Democrats won it by the narrowest of margins. Then, after both senate seats went to run-offs, they flipped them both too. The reason was widely held to have been, in no small…