I have to bet? Sheesh, I’ll probably take the under. I think Trump still has somewhere around a 30% chance of a win, so a 20% chance of him losing by fewer than six is all I need for the under to be a winning bet. That said, I could just as easily see this election as Clinton +17.
Adaher–She’s won about 55% of the pledged delegates. Not a landslide of Reagan-Mondale proportions, but a more convincing victory than in any presidential race since then. She’s far ahead right now, and we don’t need to consider superdelegates at all.
This is the second completely erroneous thing you’ve said in this thread; are you always this poorly informed?
I took the Under position, because I think there are way too many people that simply vote party and don’t really care about the candidate. A potato in a funny hat would get 48% of the Republican vote.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
Good one!
Without actually researching the topic, it seems to me as if, over the last few presidential elections at least, there has been a tendency for the polling gap to narrow as the election drew near. In 2012, for example, I recall that polls were showing Obama and Romney as virtually neck-and-neck coming into Election Day, though Obama won by a few percentage points. So I’d bet on under 6, regardless of who actually wins…
Clinton will win by 12-15%.
Obama should have crushed McCain by double digits in 2008, but eventually only won by 7%. So I’m cautious.
That wasn’t the actual election number result. Are you referring to the 47% comment?
That would truly surprise me. Not that she might win, but that the margin would be so large.
I’d be tempted to say over. I bet one of the reasons she’s letting Bernie keep competing is the DNC wants all the Republicans, or as many as possible, to get on the Trump ship so the Dems can sink the entire thing. Most of the GOP endorsements are tepid ones. It might kill Trump’s main appeal that he’s now accepting big money after eschewing it. It’ll be harder for Bernie fans to jump on the Trump Train now, or even the GOPers who liked his “independence.”
That being said, its still possible Trump wins, if the Dems let Trump get the center.
I voted over. I think that Clinton’s negatives are all mostly baked in already. I can’t imagine that there are a whole lot of people who right now are for Clinton but by Election Day will be for Trump. I also think that the Clinton campaign has just barely started unloading on Trump, while Trump and the Republicans have already taken their best shots against Clinton. On CNN, FOX, etc., the Clinton stories are usually about the scandals, whether it’s the e-mails, Benghazi, the Clinton foundation, her speech for Goldman Sachs and so on. The other stories that get air time about Clinton are about her weakness, including how Sanders keeps doing better than expected or about the Quinnipiac poll showing Trump doing well in the swing states. Once Clinton really starts in on Trump, it’s all over.
With Sam Wang talking about Utah (thank you Romney!) being a swing state, things definitely bode ill for Trump. http://election.princeton.edu/2016/05/09/can-trump-scramble-the-electoral-map-definitely-starting-with-utah/#more-15608
Trump is certainly capable of putting up Goldwater-like numbers. But there’s a lot of unpredictability in this race. Predictit favors Clinton, but not by as much as you’d think(59%). Odds of a Democratic landslide are 31%(370 electoral votes or more).
Just bumping to note that at 170 d before the election it’s 25 over to 21 under, so overwhelming sense one way or the other.
Last week has seen two polls that put Trump ahead, one Clinton up, and the RCP avg drop to Clinton +3ish. It will be interesting to see what confidence posters have as the season progresses.
Anyone wanting to change how they voted if they could?
Ditto
It’s been over a month and the Clinton national rolling average margin has shrunk and come back up to the same baseline in the interim.
We left this with pretty much even willingness on the over and under positions (53% over to 47% under).
Anyone want to change their bets?
Nope.
A lot has happened and we are this much closer to Election Day.
Anyone want to change their bet or reinforce their old one?
Would anyone have actually been willing to make different bets right after the GOP convention?
I’m pretty comfortable predicting a Clinton win here, but I’m inclined to take the under, if only because those of us who can’t stand Trump don’t HAVE to vote for Clinton assuming she has a real lead. If she’s in a neck and neck race we’ll have to hold our noses, but if that happens she’s still only winning by a small margin.
I also believe, from a betting perspective, that since Democrats tend to be an apathetic bunch, that if polling consistently shows her with a big lead, a lot of them will just stay home and the end result will be a little closer than the polls predicted. If Clinton is at 10 or more, why shouldn’t the Sanders fans just cast a protest vote for Stein?
I missed this thread earlier, but I’ll take the ‘over’.
All along, my thinking has been that we’d have a pretty good idea once we’d waited a week for the dust to settle after both of the conventions were over, but that things would be in flux during and around the conventions. So I wouldn’t have placed any sort of bet two weeks ago.
Of course, the dust NEVER settles on the Trump campaign, but it’s been a week, and the landscape seems clear enough.
Trump +3: 30-1 against. Even GWB, running as an incumbent against a weak opponent in John Kerry, with the demographics of 2004 at his back, was only able to win by 2.5%.
Hillary +17: 12-1 against. That level of win would normally be flat-out impossible, given the level of polarization in our politics, and it’s still very unlikely. But there’s a real chance that Trump just might self-destruct sufficiently to enable that margin.
Six points is a large margin. It isn’t impossible but right now I’d bet the under.
I would not bet a lot, though. It’s just too early and too weird.
Trump +3: This seems really unlikely to me but not impossible; Wikileaks could fake something, there could be a brutal terrorist attack that Trumps plays well, who knows. I’ll take the bet at ten to one.
Clinton +17: A true electoral massacre happens now and then; in my lifetime there have been two, in 1972 and 1984. I actually think this is a possibility. I’ll take eight to one odds.
I know that sounds weird, but - while I am probably using the wrong mathematical terms here - each subsequent percentage point above a certain number isn’t an independent event from the last one. There isn’t some little thing that will push Clinton from a nine point win to a ten point win. What is likelier to happen, in my humble opinion, is that something will turn the race from Clinton winning a la OBama in 2008/2012 - a healthy but not ridiculous margin - to Clinton winning like LBJ did in 1964 or Reagan did in 1984, an absolute circus riot.
If Trump can keep his shit more or less together, run a campaign and keep drilling Clinton on her weak points, he can at worst lose by a respectable margin, the way most losers have since 1992. He’ll maintain the Trumpist base and reflexive Republicans, pick up 45% of the vote to Clinton’s 52, and the map will have a fair amount of red on it.
But if Trump melts down, his campaign falls apart, and he quits and has to be replaced by a sacrificial lamb, or the GOP disavows him, or he just goes gorillashit in the debates, or Ted Cruz runs a third party campaign just because he’s an asshole too, or any number of things that were unthinkable in most election but are totally plausible this year, then it would change the dynamics of the election from “something like what we saw last time and the time before and the time before that” to “the early returns are in and Clinton won South Carolina by twelve points oh my God she might get to 500.” It’s not going to be an in between ass kicking like Bush-Dukakis in 1988; it’s either going to be fought along the same perimeter as the last four elections, or it’s going to be a once in a generation slaughter a la Dennis Miller’s joke about 1984; “Poor Walter. I didn’t even run, and I almost tied him.”