This market will resolve YES if the winning candidate of the U.S. presidential general election's margins in any two of the following are smaller in 2024 than they were in 2020:
The Electoral College
The popular vote
The tipping point state
I am using a best 2 out of 3 system from these three metrics, since each of them capture different ways that the election could be considered close. Note that, if there is an Electoral College - popular vote split, then the winning candidate's margin in the popular vote will be negative, which means it will be smaller than Biden's margin in 2020, which was positive. Likewise, if there's an Electoral College tie, then the winning candidate's margin in their tipping point state will be negative (they didn't win the tipping point state, since then they would have won outright in the Electoral College). It's also technically possible for the winning candidate to have a negative margin in the Electoral College, but only in a situation where more than two candidates get electoral votes, and none has a majority.
In 2020, the margin in the Electoral College was 74 (306-232), the margin in the popular vote was 4.46% (51.31%-46.85%), and the margin in the tipping point state (Wisconsin) was 0.63%.
@AaronKreider The question for this market is meant to capture the intuitive idea of the election being closer, which neither of those metrics perfectly captures. I suppose markets on each of the three could also be interesting, but I don't really see anything wrong with markets that ask about how many of a set of things will happen.
@JosephNoonan To me, the intuitive meaning of "how close is the election" is "how many votes would have to change to change the result".