The post-debate news chatter and spin rooms are still mostly talking as if it’s a 3-person race. I don’t think much will fundamentally change until more candidates start dropping out and until we get closer to the start of primary season.
Unless there is a health crisis for one of them the top three will remain Biden, Sanders and Warren, probably in that order until after Iowa and New Hampshire. Of those onstage last night I’m not sure who will drop out before then but if I had to guess I would expect it to be Castro. He did nothing last night to help his campaign and actually did some damage to his image. All the others will probably hang at least through Iowa.
Castro not only hurt himself last night but I think he could have a hard time recovering from that beyond this race. I doubt it hurts him in his district, but it limits his cred as a legitimate national player. Some of the Dems have overdone it with this identity crap, and I’m glad Castro apparently overplayed his hand.
Three debates in and can anyone note a policy position of Castro?
There has to be a reason to run for president. The ones who were making vanity runs have all been dismissed. He’s really the only one standing on that stage who I have no idea what his is or who he is.
Decriminalization of illegal border crossings. The thing he attacked Beto about.
Here are the latest odds from Predictwise. Warren has gained a little, mainly at Harris’ expense.
Democratic Nomination
36% Warren
23% Biden
12% Sanders
8% Harris
6% Yang
4% Buttigieg
2% Booker
1% each - Klobuchar, O’Rourke, Gabbard
Republican Nomination
89% Trump
3% Pence
2% Haley
1% each - Ryan, Rubio, Cruz
Democratic Control, 2021
73% House of Reps
53% White House
34% Senate
(Several Dopers, including myself, have recently turned to Liz Warren as our best practical hope. Cross your fingers.)
LOL at 6% for Yang.
Agreed. I’ve never really understood why anyone, including Julian and Joaquin, seriously thought he had a chance at the Presidency in 2020. His appearances as a pundit on the news shows always seemed lackluster and empty. His performance in the latest debate makes it clear to me he’s little more than an opportunistic dick. I don’t see him doing too well on a national level going forward.
And I say this as someone who has serious concerns about Biden as the nominee.
Let’s consider the people she could be VP to:
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Biden: are you fucking kidding me? Her philosophical differences with Biden are way too great for her to handcuff herself for four years. She’ll want to be in the Senate, where she’ll have a bully pulpit to push Biden to be better than he’d otherwise be.
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Sanders: OK, there’s a possibility here. Sanders has a lot of big visions for how he wants to change things, but he’s not the guy you want to turn to for implementation. (I wonder whether Bernie has the self-awareness to realize this, though.) If Bernie somehow wins the nomination, I could see a Sanders/Warren ticket where, once in office, they had a similar relationship to Bush and Cheney, where Warren was President in all but name.
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Pretty much anyone else (Harris, Buttigieg, Booker, Klobuchar, whoever): they’re all way younger, and likely to be two-termers if they win in 2020. So if Warren ran for President in 2028, she’d turn 80 about six months into her first term. So that seems an unlikely prospect to hold out for. Being veep would have to be the reward for her, in and of itself. (And if the nominee is Harris or Klobuchar, there’d already be a woman at the top of the ticket; being first woman VP wouldn’t be that big a deal under those circumstances.)
Just how many people are putting money down on the Democratic primary outcome, and what sort of people are they?
I will confess I’m skeptical of the predictive value of political betting markets.
I have to disagree about the political effects - this will help Beto politically.
Three reasons:
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People really like politicians who take a stand. Beto did this.
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Polling shows that Beto’s position on an assault weapon ban and mandatory buyback is pretty popular among Dems. In a Democratic primary, there’s a market for a politician taking that stand.
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Where was Beto before this? He was in danger of disappearing off people’s radar. He’s fixed that. Will this help him win the nomination? No, but what he was doing up until El Paso wasn’t helping him do that either. But I bet he’ll rise a bit in the polls. Double digits? Doubtful, at this point. But maybe back up to mid single digits, which would still be a big improvement for him.
We’ve had this debate before. There are scholarly papers leading to the conclusion that such betting markets tend to outperform other predictors. You’re right to wonder if the size of the market is adequate to be a good predictor. Over $1.6 Million has already been wagered on the Democratic nomination market just at Betfair, if I’m reading this correctly; but that might be far too little for the predictions to be very reliable.
But whatever the prediction’s margin of error, are its results meaningful? Let me ask a simple question:
*At present, Biden is significantly ahead of Warren in polls, but Warren is way ahead in betting markets.
If you were to guess (or bet!) right now, which of the two do you think is more likely to be the nominee?
*
I’m not sure.
Let’s say we figure, for the sake of argument, that going into the debate he didn’t really have a shot at being the Democrat who runs against Trump next year; per the polls (and the betting) in the days leading up to it, just grant for a moment that, no, it’s going to be Biden, or Warren, or Sanders, or Harris, or Buttigieg. Let’s say, too, that O’Rourke instead is where Biden was circa the ‘08 race: the guy who could, at best, get tapped as a running mate and then become VP.
Biden is now trying to parlay that into a presidency — kind of how Bush did, once it became clear that the best he could do in the ‘80 race was get tapped as a running mate and then become VP; he then parlayed that into a presidency. Would you say that O’Rourke helped — well, not his BETO 2020 chances, let’s leave that out, let’s leave that all the way out, it’s too silly; one or two or three of the folks ahead of him could still flake out or flame out, and it still wouldn’t happen for him. But would you say that he helped his running-mate chances?
Damned if I know. My best guess is that Biden has a slightly better chance of winning the nomination than Warren does.
How that tells me which one is more meaningful, again, damned if I know. The polls are certainly more meaningful to me. But if the point is to get away from subjective opinions, that doesn’t help.
(Nitpick: you mention “the prediction’s margin of error” and I expect that was just a more or less accidental turn of phrase. But it should be said that (a) while betting markets are essentially predictions, they have no defined margin of error, and (b) while polls have margins of error, they’re snapshots, not predictions.)
Counter nitpick and off-topic 
: The phrase was poorly chosen but was not accidental. As a thought experiment I imagine a hypothetical excellent predictor — near-perfect at analyzing the present, though with no special power to foresee the future. (Nate Silver on super-steroids, or a super Deep Mind trained on politics and perhaps with microphones in every household!) In the thought experiment, there would be an Excellent Prediction.
At issue is to guesstimate the expected deviation between such an “optimal predictor” and a real-world Nate Silver or Betfair.
Given the 36-23 score at Predictwise, I would certainly have enough faith in such predictors to bet a considerable sum at even money, e.g. Win $10,000 with Warren, Lose $10,000 with Biden, Zero otherwise.
I pretty much find myself in agreement with all of this.
Beto is finally becoming…‘Beto’. The kind of punkish, long shot candidate who seriously challenged Ted Cruz for the US Senate. He looked really stiff and wooden in his first debate, and he took some sucker punches from an aggressive Castro. It seemed then that his candidacy was going nowhere, but the more people see him, the more they like him. He’s like a vulgar RFK or something.
Beyond this, while Biden might be the front-runner, there is still a lot of anti-incumbent energy among the electorate, and that’s still something that Biden may have to confront at some point - Biden being the closest thing to an incumbent in the Democratic field.
Silver on that. Is It Really A Three-Candidate Race? | FiveThirtyEight
IOW, some of them are likely betting their loyalties and hopes, rather than their best reasoned judgment.
I can relate to that, certainly - I’ve done it often enough, myself. Still do from time to time, just somewhat less frequently than when I was younger. ETA: But it’s a good reason to be somewhat skeptical of the betting market as a predictor of outcomes.
Exactly. (Scottish teens! :D)
Septimus, do you really think if we run this primary race a million times, Yang gets the nomination almost as often as Harris does, and over one-fourth as often as Biden does?
ETA: I also question the ability of markets like this to properly value darkhorses generally. Who wants to short Yang at 16 to 1, to make six dollars next summer for tying up $100 over the interim?
Since I’ve been creating my own average for five weeks now, here’s a summary of how the numbers have changed over the period:
Candidate Date 8/14 8/21 8/28 9/04 9/12
Biden 30.1 28.6 28.5 29.8 26.5
Sanders 17.1 15.2 16.9 16.0 17.9
Warren 17.0 16.2 16.8 19.0 17.6
Harris 8.2 7.2 7.2 6.8 6.6
Buttigieg 5.6 4.7 4.7 5.2 5.0
O'Rourke 2.6 2.7 2.1 1.4 3.0
Booker 2.5 2.3 2.3 2.1
Yang 2.0 2.5 2.6 2.5
Everyone else < 2.0
I’m thinking a bit too much of the variation from one week to the next is an artifact of which polls were added to and dropped from the survey. I’m thinking in particular of Bernie’s low numbers the week of 8/21, Warren’s high numbers the week of 9/4, and Biden’s big drop from 9/4 to 9/12.
I was dropping polls two weeks after the midpoint of the time they were in the field, and I think that might be a bit too quick. I’m going to extend that to 2.5 weeks, starting the week of 9/25, to see if that smooths out the changes a bit.