Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Unspinning Political Momentum With Futures Contracts

In the wake of super Tuesday, multiple candidates are busy spinning the results, claiming they are doing well and riding a surge of momentum into the front-runner position in the battle for the nomination.

Consider the following quotes from campaign Clinton, which stand out as especially propagandistic.
  • "Tremendous victories...Hillary yesterday won the largest states and the most coveted prizes, California and New York. Hillary won red states, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Tennessee, blue states, Massachusetts and New Jersey, and a purple state, Arizona. Hillary won both with and without institutional support, overcoming high-profile endorsements in Massachusetts to pull the upset of the day." (source)
  • "It is Hillary Clinton who is seen as being both ready to be commander in chief on day one and is ready to deal with the big challenges we face as a nation. Yesterday's results confirmed Hillary's strengths as a candidate" (source)

But, let's consider some facts:
  • Hillary Clinton is badly loosing the fund raising race and injected $5 million of her own money into the campaign (source)
  • Obama raised over $5.8 million online after super Tuesday alone (source)
  • Obama won a majority of states (source)
  • Obama won more delegates (source)
Recently, I ran into a rather objective way of measuring momentum: an electronic futures market where contracts are traded. The futures market where these contracts are traded is Intrade. (For background on futures markets, see: Investopedia, Wikipedia). Consider the following graph of the futures contract that predicts Hillary Clinton's chance of being the democratic nominee:



What does this chart mean? What does it mean that Hillary's future contract is trading at 43?
"43.0 means the market predicts there is a 43.0% chance that this event happens." (source).

Consider the following graph of Barack Obama's future contract, which shows his incredible surge of momentum after the February 5 primaries:

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