Political markets see Clinton vs Giuliani contest

[rs]

Wow. Breaking news: Money predicts political results...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071029/pl_nm/usa_politics_markets_dc

By David Alexander Mon Oct 29, 10:30 AM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Traders on the Iowa Electronic Markets, which have been predicting U.S. elections with surprising accuracy for 20 years, are expecting a tight presidential vote next year, with the Democrat narrowly defeating the Republican.

And the most likely match-up? Hillary Clinton vs. Rudy Giuliani.

The non-profit market, run by professors at the University of Iowa in the key early voting state and allowed to operate since 1988 by special permission, is unique in the United States because it is the only one where investors put real money -- small amounts under $500 -- on the line.

Yeah, right, unless you include PAC money, lobbyists, 527 groups, etc. The only difference here is the small amount of money involved, hundreds instead of millions.

It was started by the academics to see if markets, which are good at translating economic and financial information into a price, would be as good at synthesizing political information.

Yes, and yet again science comes to the rescue to "prove" that money can reliably predict political outcomes. What new stuff will these scientists think of next?!?!

Joyce Berg, an accounting professor and member of the Iowa markets board, said the markets turned out to be better than national polls in predicting the final election results just days before the vote.

They scored even better against polls the farther away they were from the election.

"In just about 75 percent of the cases," Berg said, "the price in the market is closer to the actual outcome of the election than the polls were."

Though more than a year away, traders now are betting the November 2008 election will pit the two New York politicians against each other in the run for the presidency.

Recent trading gave Clinton, the senator and former first lady, a 70 percent chance of winning the Democratic nomination, versus a 16 percent chance for her closest challenger, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama.

Giuliani, the former New York City mayor, had a 40 percent shot at the Republican nomination, versus a 31.5 percent chance for former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

Those figures are stronger than recent polling might suggest. Clinton's numbers have been 44 percent to 48 percent in most surveys; Giuliani's between 24 percent and 32 percent.

Traders predicted the Democratic candidate would ultimately win the election by about 4 percentage points.

RAPID GROWTH IN PREDICTION EXCHANGES

But Berg cautioned the numbers were constantly shifting as new information reached the market. Candidates can surge and plummet.

"It's not like you look in the magic crystal ball and you can see what's going to happen in the future," she said. "It's pulling together all the available information that's out there, saying ... this is what we think is going to happen."

The number of prediction exchanges has grown rapidly with the advent of the Internet.

Some offer contracts on politics and geopolitical events -- like whether the United States is likely to take military action against Iran -- while others project movie box office sales or the value of money-making ideas.

Industry growth prompted the leading players this month to create a trade group -- the Prediction Market Industry Association -- to promote their interests.

Intrade, the Dublin-based firm that claims to be the largest political prediction market, uses real money but also runs non-cash political exchanges for the Financial Times and the National Journal newspapers on the Internet.

Trading on its sites produced numbers similar to those from Iowa. Clinton is projected to have a 70 percent probability of winning the Democratic nomination, while Giuliani has a 44 percent chance of being the Republican candidate.

And the Democrat has a 62 percent chance of capturing the presidency, versus 36 percent for the Republican.

John Delaney, the chief executive of Intrade, said the similar results are a sign the markets are trading on the same information. "We are in a world of information overload and prediction markets can summarize, aggregate, distill a huge amount of thought, opinion and expert view into single probabilities," he said.

 

[Youngfox]

All hail Hillrudy!
(oh, and its running mate Mr. 911bombiran)

A vote for Hillrudy is a vote!

 

[Hildegarda]

Hillary and Giuliani are neck to neck in the Israel factor:

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/rosnerPage.jhtml

so yes, I think the match-up is a given; Giuliani leads there though so not sure yet how things will turn out

 

[Joe]

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/143221

Beware Rudy Giuliani - George Bush With Brains

New York's former mayor Rudy Giuliani is living up to his reputation as someone who will do and say anything for power

People of Britain: congratulations are in order. You have now joined ferret owners, sidewalk artists, hot dog vendors, publicly funded attorneys for poor people, low-income community college students, museum curators, a couple of innocent black men shot dead by the police, the sections of the New York City charter governing rules of succession to the mayoralty and, of course, Hillary Clinton, as objects of Rudy Giuliani's demagoguery and wrath.

You may by now have heard the story. In a radio ad that his campaign prepared for New Hampshire voters, Giuliani tells listeners that he was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2000 and goes on to say: "My chance of surviving cancer - and thank God I was cured of it - in the United States: 82%. My chances of surviving prostate cancer in England: only 44% under socialised medicine."

The numbers are false. The actual five-year survival rate in Britain is 74%, which is still lower than America's, but obviously high enough for the figure not to have constituted fodder for a campaign commercial. (Even the remaining, much smaller difference, is largely explained by more widespread screening in the US, which catches many more incidents of prostate cancer that are non-lethal).

It turned out that Giuliani's numbers were from a seven-year-old article in a conservative policy journal. The article was written by his own healthcare policy adviser, who admitted that his comparison was a "crude" interpretation of a study by a respected health policy group. The group, in turn, said the article's author had grossly misused its numbers.

That's about as red-handed as anyone in politics gets caught these days. But when asked if the campaign would continue to use the figure, a Giuliani spokeswoman said, "Yes, we will."

I know the form all too well. I covered Giuliani for a dozen years in New York (note to angry American rightwingers preparing to email me a warning to keep my foreign nose out of their business: I'm as American as a Ford F-150).

The man lies with staggering impunity. But here's the thing: he does it with such conviction and such seeming authority that people who are not inclined to study the matter will believe him - will in fact be utterly convinced that Giuliani is speaking the gospel truth, and they will prove almost impossible to shake from this conviction.

Giuliani's hypocrisy with regard to this ad doesn't end with the fake statistics. As Joe Conason noted on www.Salon.com, Giuliani was at the time of his treatment the mayor of New York and enrolled in a nonprofit health maintenance organisation for government employees - that is, mini-socialised medicine. And as Ezra Klein noted on Comment is free, the treatment that saved Giuliani was developed in Denmark - which, as Klein drolly notes, "is both in Europe and has a universal healthcare system".

But none of this will stop Giuliani. He will say and do anything he feels he needs to say and do to get power.

Newspapers write that he was "liberal" on social issues in his mayoral days, as if his positions on abortion and immigration were matters of conviction. Nonsense. He took the positions he needed to take to be elected in an overwhelmingly Democratic city. (Although to grant him a speck of humanity, I'd guess that his pro-gay rights views were more or less genuine: anyone living in the city gets to know many gay people.)

And now he is saying and doing whatever he needs to say and do to get millions of rightwing Americans to support him. He recently told a meeting of social conservatives that his reliance on God "is at the core of who I am". As mayor he was known to attend mass almost never, he obviously cheated serially on the wife (wife No 2) he married in the Catholic church, and the only occasions on which I can remember him invoking God when he was mayor were the two times he was forced to say "so help me God" in taking the oath of office.

But forward he will charge, telling more lies with even more impunity. And immunity, because in a culture where a sense of history is largely limited to remembering certain stirring television images, he will for the most part get away with it, confident in the knowledge that the main thing most Americans will ever recall about him is the film clip of him running from the rubble of the World Trade Centre on September 11. A far smaller percentage will know that the reason he had run was because he had catastrophically decided to place his emergency command centre in the tower complex - the only building in New York that had previously been the target of a major terrorist attack.

And by the way: shame on Gordon Brown for inviting him to No 10 in September. Yes, there's a long tradition of presidents and prime ministers welcoming party standard-bearers from across the pond. But Giuliani isn't yet that. Brown had no business giving him the kind of special benefit that an audience with a prime minister bestows.

Brown and all of Britain will be better off the sooner they figure this out: Giuliani is a dangerous man. George Bush with brains. Dick Cheney with better aim. Consider yourself warned.

Comment: The salient point of this article?

"The man lies with staggering impunity.But here's the thing: he does it with such conviction and such seeming authority that people who are not inclined to study the matter will believe him - will in fact be utterly convinced that Giuliani is speaking the gospel truth, and they will prove almost impossible to shake from this conviction."

This trait, dear readers, is the trait of the psychopath. The ability to tell the most blatant and horrendous lies right to the faces of millions of people, without thinking twice.

As the author of the Guardian article says, you have been warned, but sadly not nearly enough by the mainstream media.