It's over? says the smart money

Professor Bainbridge uses the WSJ's Opinion Journal electoral map/calculator to show the implications of recent poll results.

As I've said, it's better to use election markets. The result, using Tradesport prices as of the time of this post, has Bush 279/Kerry 259, with 270 needed to win. Specifically, this puts every state where Bush futures are 40 or below in the Kerry camp. The toss-ups (40-50) are Iowa, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania.

In other words, Kerry loses even if he wins all the states in which the market perceives him as being clearly ahead, plus the states in which it's close. On the other hand, the election is closer electorally than the betting market makes it in election outcome, with Bush futures at 70.

So the most probable outcome right now is a Bush victory, but there's a decent probability that Bush wins the popular vote but loses the election.

I guess we might see a lot of "Bush won" bumper stickers after November 2.

Correction: I changed my original post to clarify that the Tradesports market is on election outcome rather than popular vote.

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