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Ed Kilgore is aghast that Politico ran a story using prediction markets to figure out who won Wednesday’s debate:
I’ve been known to joke that at its worst Politico gives you a snail’s-eye view of American politics. But this is self-parody: hourly variations in betting market!
Obviously Ed is a killjoy. But I kinda think he’s wrong too. Betting markets are an interesting and sometimes useful tool for getting real-time feedback on high-profile races. For example, here’s a chart from PredictWise, a Microsoft research project that aggregates several betting and prediction markets:
The winners: Fiorina, Rubio, and Bush. The losers: everyone else. Since this precisely matches my own post-debate judgment, I declare this an excellent analytic tool.
