Providing Closure for Election Day

'Twas a Republican sweep. At least we have funny tweets? A politics update by Jacob Cohen (@Conflux).

It’s 1:52am and I’m lying on a beanbag in Lighthaven, Berkeley, with absolutely no energy. But I promised a newsletter, and a newsletter ye shall have.

Previously, I thought this newsletter would be some kind of deep dive on the election details. I thought we might be headed for a scenario where news networks were saying it was close, but betting insiders dug into the tea leaves and figured out that Trump would win — a reverse of 2020. 

But it ended up much less climactic. The Manifold Markets Decision Desk can project the result in every state. Even the AP officially called the election an hour ago. (The Manifold Markets Decision Desk did so last night.) 

It’s real: America will have its second president to serve nonconsecutive terms (after Grover Cleveland in 1892). And its oldest inaugurated president in history — older, even, than Biden. And the first impeached president, and the first convicted felon, to take office: Donald J. Trump. 

The final map is not be very surprising: assuming all the remaining states go the expected way, it’s simply Trump sweeping the Seven Swing States and nothing else, for 312 electoral votes. The Silver Bulletin forecast, for all its indecision, said this was the single most likely map. The polling error this cycle seems not to be large — just consistent. 

On the other hand, Trump did win the popular vote, which was unexpected. (The result in some safe blue states, like New Jersey, was also surprisingly close.) There are some silver linings to this: Matt Yglesias writes, “If Trump had to win, I'm sort of glad that he won the popular vote and we can now talk about broad public opinion rather than BSing about the electoral college.” The clarity of the victory, in general, also reduces concerns about electoral illegitimacy, and will help set the stage for more democratic elections in the future. Major election riots only have a 17% chance right now. (Though that’s less about the margin and more about the fact that Trump was the winner.)

Congress

The Senate is going red: it’s just a question of the size of the majority. The Democrats will not pick up any seats — Nebraska won’t even go independent. Republicans are flipping West Virginia and Ohio. Probably Montana and Pennsylvania. Wisconsin, Michigan, and Nevada will be close. Outside chance for Arizona. We’re looking at a 53- or 54-seat majority, probably, which means that moderates Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski won’t control the balance of power. It’ll be someone more conservative. 

 

At first it seemed like the House would actually be in doubt, and we could get a “triple flip” of the party of the presidency, Senate, and House. Critical House seats are in states like California which count slower. But it seems like we’re now overwhelmingly likely for a trifecta. This means Republicans, if they can get their act together, will have a fair amount of scope to pass new legislation.

 

Manifold Debrief

A bright spot last night: our site didn’t go down! (A nice birthday present to our CEO, Stephen, who was cursed with this birthday.)

 

Also, in general, prediction markets did a good job in capturing the twists and turns of the election, consistently giving faster results than news networks. Our Election Day graph does not have a lot of twists and turns. Trump won Florida early, had good signs in the Sun Belt, which then turned to red indications everywhere. Our traders caught on early on moved the market decisively.

There was also the event we ran! It was fun, given the circumstances. I ran a somewhat successful Election Pastcasting event — although I made a critical mistake in my anonymized recounting of the 1896 election with The Bachelor-style names, revealing that the losing candidate was 36 years old, since people remembered we’ve never had a president that young. I wrote an election trivia game, which was won by the Birthday Party team of Matthew Fisher, Anthony Pickles, Verda Korzeniewski, and Ari Zerner. (Each of them won 20 sweepcash, although we’re still trying to get it awarded to them. If you are one of the above people, please email david@manifold.markets with your account information and we’ll get you the sweepcash!) If you would like to play the election trivia game from afar, you can do so by clicking this link!

I hunkered down in the Trading Floor tweeting boxes of projections (although I ended up not projecting Senate races for personal bandwidth reasons … and the de facto Trading Floor moved to a room with monitors). I only got one wrong — but it was because of a typo. https://x.com/ManifoldMarkets/status/1853949929787728244

 

Finally, our needles were a big hit! Although they weren’t perfect either :)

Speaking of tweets … shall we conclude with some random fun tweets?

Random Fun Tweets (some of which we wrote)

 

One Last Market

As is tradition (I know I didn’t do it in this morning’s newsletter, because of the unusual format), a lighthearted market with M1000 subsidy to finish off. Kamala Harris didn’t flip a state — but will she state a flip?

 

(The criteria: Resolves yes if Kamala Harris, or an official communication channel representing Harris, announces that the result of an election has changed from a previous result, and uses some form of the word "flip" in the announcement. I'll include announcements about regional results as part of a broader election. (i.e. flipping a state in the presidential election). Otherwise, this resolves no when all federal congressional races and presidential election state results have been called by credible media, or at the end of November, whichever is sooner. (Only the "main" elections count for this-If there are any elections after November 5th, they won't count for this condition))

Well, that’s a wrap from me for now. (I know, I didn’t think I could write a short newsletter either!) I’m Jacob Cohen (aka Conflux), a student at Stanford University. I blog at tinyurl.com/confluxblog, host puzzles at puzzlesforprogress.net, and don’t release any new episodes of the Market Manipulation Podcast on your favorite podcast platform. Check out Manifold Politics at manifold.markets/election.