538 is now giving Biden the 9 in 10 chance of having a majority of delegates.
So come Tuesday I suppose it will actually be settled.
Bernie had better drop out once the writing’s on the wall.
I’m still pissed about him dragging out the fight to the bitter end in 2016. Given how close the 2016 election was, there were many things that could have tipped the balance. And IMHO, this was one of them.
…if Biden can win in Michigan, which looks likely, but you never know.
So this election it will be a crazy person versus someone in the early stages of dementia. Should be an interesting series of debates.
Weren’t Knowledgeable Pundits awarding the nomination to Sanders less than a week ago?
Much can yet happen. Biden could commit another major Gaffe like calling for working with Republicans.
Sure, but who will Trump’s opponent be?
I will be looking at the Veep slot very closely with these two old people in the top slot.
I have little hope he’ll do that. He’s now running ads attacking Biden. It’s one thing to talk about differences, but pure attack ads on people in your own party are shitty.
No, they weren’t. He was always under 50/50 for a majority of pledged delegates. A week ago “no one” was the board leader.
Which isn’t to say that things cannot change.
As much as some people don’t like to look at betting odds I think they’re generally at least a useful add on to what any particular analyst or pundit says. RCP odds average peaked at ~57% for Sanders (to be nominee, not specifically to arrive at the convention with a majority of delegates) late last month with Biden under 10%. Now it’s mid 80’s % for Biden with Sanders a little over 10%. So broadly similar now to what Silver says (as is often or usually the case, though one might argue that betting odds follow Silver; but I think again looking at betting odds and reading Silver probably gives at least a little more information than just reading Silver, and no one is forced to choose just one).
IOW ‘they’ were saying Sanders was relatively speaking in the drivers seat post NV pre SC but ‘they’ were not saying he had it locked down. Now ‘they’ are saying Biden basically has it close to locked down. In fairness to the original comment you can probably find some pundit somewhere who said Sanders was a lock after NV, though still a larger number saying Biden is a lock now.
The betting markets mostly measure momentum. It’s people trying to jump on the bandwagon and make some money before the momentum fades. Warren never lead the polls but for a time she lead betting markets.
But there’s a real good reason to ignore the betting markets: they give non-zero odds for people who can’t possibly win. Like Hillary or Michelle.
Saying that is a “lock” is the same thinking that has people saying the polls were wrong when 538 said Hillary had an 85% chance of winning.
What that means is that in 9 out of 10 simulations, Biden wins. In 1 out of 10 simulations Bernie wins.
What 538’s numbers meant was that Trump won in 15 out of 100 simulations. As it happened, 2016 was one of those 15 simulations.
Is this like the time Hillary Clinton couldn’t be elected because she had Parkinson’s Disease? Turns out that was a lie, right?
I don’t disagree with your basic thought but you are mistaken on the numbers. It does NOT mean that Sanders wins in 1 out of 10 simulations. In the 1 out of 10 simulations that Biden does not have an outright majority of the pledged delegates he has the plurality in half. Sanders wins with an outright majority in only 1 out of 50 simulations and has the plurality in 1 of 20, with other delegates as won by suspended campaigns, free to vote as they believe they should in good conscience.
It is still not “a lock”.
I’m pretty sure I said that in a post here. I pointed out that in Russian Roulette you also had around an 85% chance of not shooting yourself in the head, but that didn’t make it good odds, it made it terrible odds. I looked it up and I had pointed that out, back in October of 2016.
Biden likely will have a majority of primary votes and delegates to win the nomination for a race rigged against Dems, where under 45% of the population, mostly in red states, controls a majority of electoral votes. A popular supermajority won’t be enough. So, once Biden is nominated, let’s see what he does.
No, as in the dedicated thread some days ago, your ideas on this are unsupported and unconvincing. You couldn’t give any examples of where betting odds were obviously wrong except in hindsight. Likewise you simply asserted that inefficiencies in the betting market are big enough to arbitrage, it was implied by just any old person interested, for example yourself if you were to ‘make it your hobby’ you said. I could say inefficiencies in any given financial market are big enough for ordinary people to do the same by making it their hobby. But I’d expect to be laughed off without direct knowledge or evidence of ordinary people doing so consistently.
And here your abbreviated reprise of the argument is even weaker, betting odds that showed Warren leading must have been flawed because
a) she wasn’t leading in the polls…which assumes that poll results even from sparse and stale polls must be more accurate than betting odds. But that’s what you’re trying to convince us, here you’re just assuming it.
b) she later led in neither polls nor betting odds, because she did poorly in actual primary votes. Well, it’s fine to just go with primary votes if you forego discussing anyone’s chances till the primaries are over. 
Usefulness of betting odds or other market based indicators isn’t based on the idea they magically create a crystal ball. Just simply that people generally don’t lose money on purpose, whereas they often do spew bullshit even they themselves don’t really believe. The idea that Warren was the strongest candidate was the most likely expectation at that time. It later turning out otherwise proves zero about ‘it’s useless to look at betting odds’.
Especially for the purpose of this particular discussion, evaluating the statement ‘the pundits all thought Sanders was going to win, now they all think Biden will’. It’s IMO absolutely a better value for one’s time to get an idea of this with a 2 second check on the RCP betting avg graph over time than embark on a project to look up, collate and evaluate 100’s or 1,000’s of ‘pundit’ statements then and now. The betting odds, whether exactly ‘right’ then or now are probably a good gauge of what people seriously thought and think (again it’s much more painful to make wrong bets for $‘s then try out half-thought arguments on a web board, or even a paid pundit piece). It seems they think considerably more of Biden’s chances now than they did of Sanders’ a couple of weeks ago.
Biden has been gaffe prone since his early days.
Lol. The Warren odds were wrong with mere foresight. There is simply no mechanism by which bettors can predict elections over adequate polling. There is no magical future predicting hand of the market. But I’m not saying they are always obviously wrong.
I have no problem with this right now – it’s a competitive race, and Sanders has earned the right to keep fighting as long as the race is still an open-ended question. I’d say that Biden’s still fair game until late this month. But if Sanders gets steamrolled in Michigan, Ohio, Florida, and elsewhere, then Sanders needs to bow out.