Who is this magical “Other” that people keep betting up to 25%? From my view basically anyone who has any realistic chance of winning is already included in the market. People coming completely out of left field to win the Democratic primary basically does not happen. Let’s take a look at previous candidates — At this time in the campaign cycle,

• In 2023, Kamala Harris had just been elected VP

• In 2017, Joe Biden was ab to step down after serving as VP, and after having strongly considered running in 2016

• In 2013, Hillary Clinton was about to step down after serving as Secretary of State

• In 2005, Barack Obama had just been elected to the Senate with 70% of the vote in Illinois, the largest margin ever.

• In 2001, John Kerry had been a senator for 16 years and had been considered for the VP slot in 2000.

• In 1997, Al Gore had just been re-elected VP

• In 1989, Bill Clinton had been governor of Arkansas for 10 years and had been rumored to have considered a presidential run in ‘88.

• In 1985, Michael Dukakis was serving in his second stint as governor of Massachusetts.

• In 1981, Walter Mondale had just lost the election to Reagan as Carter’s VP nominee.

• In 1973, Jimmy Carter was entering his 3rd year as Governor of Georgia.

I could go on, but rando nominees just don’t happen.

@PaperBoy in your list, Obama was a freshman senator, Clinton, Dukakis, and Carter were governors of no particular note. Do we have all such senators and governors listed?

@robm you can disagree with my characterizations of the national relevance of each of these examples, but as a different argument, see that Kalshi has essentially all of the top choices in this market included and their combined odds add up to ~95%. Unless I’m misunderstanding something, this would imply that “Other” here should be significantly lower. https://kalshi.com/markets/kxpresnomd/democratic-primary-winner

@PaperBoy Most of Kalshi's numbers seem sensible enough, but they do have Michelle Obama at 8%, which is about 8% too high. Mark Cuban's 4% should also go down by about 4 percentage points. Manifold has both at 2%; if Kalshi did too, they'd have ~13% on "Other", which is close to our current 17%.

@NcyRocks genuine question — why should we trust manifold more than Kalshi?

@PaperBoy I’m not sure we should trust Manifold more than Kalshi in general; Manifold has a great track record of being well-calibrated and has a lot of great forecasters who use it every day, but I’m sure you could make an equally good case for Kalshi. My point is more that both Michelle and Mark have been very adamant that they will never run - Michelle in particular, since she hates being in the public eye so much. In that one case, Kalshi seems to have more dumb money than Manifold, although that might be due to fees rather than epistemics.

@NcyRocks I assume that Kalshi also suffers from interest rate issues more than Manifold does.

On Manifold, I’m happy to throw a few thousand mana at a stupid option to bring it down to 0%, even though my annual rate of return is like 2%. On top of that, Manifold has loans, so I’m not really committing the mana for that whole time. But on Kalshi where I’m betting with real money, I’m better off putting my money in US treasuries instead betting the dumb options down.

That said, perhaps Kalshi has something similar to the loan program to make longer term markets right? I’m not very familiar with their market mechanics.

Going back to that list, we can actually see that the equivalent to Dukakis, Maura Healey, is included in Other. Now, maybe she’s unlikely (she’s still a first term governor and a lesbian, but she’s also a very popular governor in a blue state that’s doing pretty well at the moment), but I’d probably give 1% odds to her.

I could pick other cases like that too - basically any Democratic Senator has at least a bit of a chance - consider JFK who wasn’t a particularly notable Senator prior to running for the presidency. Or someone like Pete Buttigieg, who was merely a mayor before his presidential campaign. If Biden hadn’t run in 2020, Buttigieg had a real chance at taking that middle lane.

Now sure, all of these are unlikely, but I think they can collectively add up to 15% or so, especially when there isn’t any leading figure this year.

@Gabrielle I was probably a bit needlessly provocative in my first comment (but it was good as it’s started this discussion! 😁). I would agree that 15% is probably a reasonable number. I was saying that it “doesn’t” happen (that someone comes out of the blue), but of course it could potentially happen. My initial thought was just that 25% was almost certainly too high, and so I keep betting it down to more like 15-20 since this is a Plus market and those distinctions can be profitable.

@Gabrielle You can earn interest on your Kalshi predictions! kalshi.com/blog/interest-cash-open-positions

@Charlie Good to know! There’s probably still a little bit of interest rate effects, since Kalshi is at least somewhat less safe than treasury bonds, and people might want to invest in something with higher returns than treasury bonds (eg. literally anything), but that should help a lot with the main issue. I feel somewhat less confident in my position now, but only slightly - at least now I think I’m actually disagreeing with the users instead of with the system.

I'm shocked that no one is saying Beto O'Rourke.

@BonjTwo he cant even win a state office in Texas, what would he possibly do for national electability?

@robm you could argue that texas is more difficult to win in for democrats than winning national races - the tipping point state in the electoral college in 2024 was 7 points more blue than texas was

@robm Texas? A solid red state? Or am I missing something here?

@BonjTwo sometimes a candidate wins in an opposite color state, and that makes them a strong contender for national office, because they can bring their home state along and have appeal to swing state voters. I'm just saying Beto doesn't have that. He'd do fine among democrats in a general election, but has shown he can't bring enough people across the line.

@robm good points, but have you considered that he's just born to be in it?

Big Tech is censoring free speech about Josh Shapiro's height so I am offering a 1000 mana bounty to the first person to give authoritative proof/info about this man's height. If it's deductive, it doesn't need to be exact, but i need to believe it's very close. This is highly important for this market as we saw with DeSantis and bootgate

@dlin007 imdb has him at 5'8.
Josh Shapiro - IMDb

@JDTurk he's doomed

@JDTurk He absolutely is cooked. America (and Dems) will elect a transgender atheist communist before it elects a 5'8 man.

@JDTurk i'm inclined to believe this so i'll tip 500m for now, and 500 later this week if no one disputes this

@dlin007 https://s.abcnews.com/images/Politics/josh-shapiro-kamala-harris-1-rt-bb-240723_1721750647744_hpEmbed_3x2_992.jpg

Seems believable (Harris is 5'4")

Where is the Biden option?

@EoinTyrrell It's currently sitting at 0.1%, you might have to expand to see it.

@BoltonBailey to be clear, I was joking.