RFK, DNC, TMZ … WTF?

Beyoncé was 95% likely to be the DNC surprise guest — but didn’t show? Meanwhile, RFK Jr. dropped out — but only in certain states? An explanation of the political situation, by Jacob Cohen (@Conflux)

Can you believe Taylor’s performance got cut from the Democratic National Convention? It’s true!

Wait, did you think I meant Taylor Swift? I was obviously referring to six-time Grammy Award winner James Taylor¹, whose performance of “You’ve Got a Friend” was cancelled due to speeches running over time. (The delays also led to Joe Biden’s speech being removed from primetime, though there was doubt over whether this was intentional, especially as other speakers also got pushed into the late night.)

Although if you were checking markets last Thursday, you may have thought there was a 20-40% chance Swift would appear at the DNC. (Her jet flew to Nashville, close to the convention in Chicago.) The DNC schedule had a mysterious gap. Perhaps it would be a prominent Republican politician, such as Mitt Romney, George W. Bush, or Mike Pence. Or perhaps Beyoncé. Between 12 and 2pm, the Manifold market thought each of the three theories (Swift, Republican, and Beyoncé — I’m not sure why the market creator chose to lump all the Republicans together) were each around 30% likely. 

The White House political director tweeted a bee emoji. The Huffington Post deputy editor seemed to believe the theory. And then TMZ — a tabloid which has received plenty of criticism, but is usually more accurate than not (Wikipedia likes debating it) — revealed the scoop: Beyoncé was coming. 

Queen Bey, at the DNC!

Our market reached (shudder) 98%.

But Beyoncé didn’t show up. She “was never scheduled” to attend, according to her representative. 

In fact, there was no Taylor Swift, no Mitt Romney, no George W. Bush. 

No surprise special guest…at all!

(Well, depending on who you ask, the surprise guest was COVID. But still.)

There was another market (also created by Manifold user Mark Hamill (the actual Mark Hamill from Star Wars (parody))) asking “Who is the unannounced special guest at Donald Trump's August 23, 2024 rally in Arizona?”

This event had a special guest: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who dropped out and endorsed Donald Trump. 

Or did he?

Nate Silver summarized the situation this way:

Like everything else about his presidential campaign, Robert F. Kennedy’s withdrawal from the presidential race was weird.

Kennedy endorsed Donald Trump yesterday and announced that he was “suspending” his campaign. But he’ll only attempt to remove his name from the ballot in roughly 10 swing states, Kennedy said, leaving himself on the ballot in the many other red states and blue states where he’d gone to great effort to qualify. And his swing-state efforts may not be entirely successful, either. Our research suggests it’s probably too late to get off the ballot in Wisconsin, for instance. In North Carolina, the first state to begin early voting, his name has already been physically printed on the ballots in around 30 counties, so he’s probably stuck there, too.

Despite controversy, our Manifold market asking “Will RFK Jr. drop out and endorse Trump” resolved YES — although we had to un-resolve some markets on whether he’d get at least 5% of the popular vote. While our estimated odds of this are in the low single digits, he could scrape together enough with his current ballot access (not even accounting for write-in votes), so our mods deemed it premature to resolve the market.

Let’s examine the electoral impact. RFK Jr. voters seem in polls to be more likely to back Trump than Harris. Combined with the endorsement, that could make a dent — even if many will stick with Kennedy.

SemioticRivalry, currently the #3-ranked Manifold trader, said this on the main election market prior to the campaign suspension:

i think my median [change in popular vote caused by RFK dropping out] is somewhere around 0.5%, but it's totally plausible for that to shift markets by 5%. the election is very close right now. The Nate Silver model on August 14th had Kamala +2.5 nationally and 56.7% chance at presidency.  The model on August 16th had Kamala +2.1 nationally and 54.2% to win the presidency. 5% shift in margin from a 0.4% shift in the popular vote.

So this must move the needle on Harris vs. Trump, right? 

Well, it’s hard to say. The DNC received favorable reviews, including on Kamala Harris’s final speech. (Trump pointed out that Tim Walz “was an ASSISTANT coach, not a COACH,” to which Stephen Colbert responded “Walz was only qualified to become some sort of vice president, if you think about it.” But I didn’t really watch the DNC so I’m not able to thoroughly cover it.) Harris’s polls have been going up; some of it is likely a “convention bounce” that will fade in due time, but there’s a chance it persists.

So perhaps Democrats’ good convention would increase Harris’s odds at the same time as RFK’s campaign suspension would increase Trump’s — and the effects seem to have cancelled each other out.

PSA: The 538 Model is Sketchy

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention another piece of data: the new 538 model finally re-released with Harris instead of Biden. It claims that Harris has a 59% chance. 

But it’s clear something fishy is going on. The Biden-Trump version showed Biden favored even toward the bitter end, ignoring his precipitous drop in the polls. As I discussed this in a previous newsletter, the novel weighted “fundamentals” like the economy and incumbency more than the polls. But over time, it became obvious there was even more weirdness — like performing a weighted average of -2.7 and 0.2 to get 1.3. There could have been substantial bugs in the code.

They’ve taken three weeks to re-release the model (though still released it right before RFK Jr. dropped out, bafflingly) and… it seems like they made substantial changes under the hood?

As Nate Cohn puts it, “the previous model made Biden the favorite bc it gave 4:1 weight to fundamentals > polls -- a view that would make Trump stronger today and perhaps still ahead. Now it gives 4:1 weight to polls > fundamentals -- which would have made Trump a large favorite before.” They haven’t provided transparency into these changes, and it seems like they may be making things up as they go.

Since the last election, ABC/Disney fired most of the staff behind FiveThirtyEight. Nate Silver is not in charge of their model; G. Elliott Morris is. (They didn’t retain the intellectual property rights.) 

And, well, Manifold traders have not been rushing to bet based on what their new model says.

RFK Jr. in Retrospective

Former FiveThirtyEight columnist Clare Malone was among those unceremoniously laid off. She now works at the New Yorker, where she wrote an article titled “What Does Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Actually Want?” In it, she revealed the following:

One day, in the fall of 2014, Kennedy was driving to a falconry outing in upstate New York when he passed a furry brown mound on the side of the road. He pulled over and discovered that it was the carcass of a black-bear cub. Kennedy was tickled by the find. He loaded the dead bear into the rear hatch of his car and later showed it off to his friends. In a picture from that day, Kennedy is putting his fingers inside the bear’s bloody mouth, a comical grimace across his face. (When I asked Kennedy about the incident, he said, “Maybe that’s where I got my brain worm.”)

After the outing, Kennedy, who was then sixty and recently married to Hines, got an idea. He drove to Manhattan and, as darkness fell, entered Central Park with the bear and a bicycle. A person with knowledge of the event said that Kennedy thought it would be funny to make it look as if the animal had been killed by an errant cyclist. The next day, the bear was discovered by two women walking their dogs, setting off an investigation by the N.Y.P.D. “This is a highly unusual situation,” a spokeswoman for the Central Park Conservancy told the Times. “It’s awful.” In a follow-up piece for the Times, which was coincidentally written by Tatiana Schlossberg, one of J.F.K.’s granddaughters, a retired Bronx homicide commander commented, “People are crazy.”

In the subtitle, Malone described Kennedy as someone with “a troubled past, a shambolic campaign, and some surprisingly good poll numbers.” He’s a vaccine skeptic, and he revealed — in a divorce court deposition, where he was trying to make the case that his future earning potential was lower — that he had a brain worm. (He notoriously tweeted “I offer to eat 5 more brain worms and still beat President Trump and President Biden in a debate. I feel confident of the result even with a six-worm handicap.”)

This foreshadows some of Kennedy’s drop in the polls. In part, the public has learned more about him besides his last name. In part, third-party candidates almost always lose polling support over the run of a campaign. (Some people tend to expressively respond to polls toward the beginning, saying they’ll vote third party when they’ll eventually “come home” to the Democrat or Republican.) In part, though, the switch to Harris — and the decline in “double-haters” (people who dislike both major-party candidates) has made Kennedy’s campaign seem even more remote. It seemed for awhile that he would stick it in the race nonetheless (we estimated his drop-out chances at 16% in July). 

But the bear article — which caused the campaign to preempt the article — felt like a turning point. And when his running mate Nicole Shanahan said they were debating dropping out, the markets spiked to the seventies. In my opinion, when a political campaign says they’re considering dropping out, they’ve gotten most of the way there.

Possibly related to RFK Jr.’s motivations: Trump is about 50-50 to appoint him to a cabinet position…

 

Wait, Was the Beyoncé Thing Predictable?

I’ve been thinking about this, and it’s hard to say! TMZ has gotten things wrong before, but it seems infrequent. In this Hollywood Reporter article, it seems that even many people on the staff thought Beyoncé would show up. SemioticRivalry mentioned that “WaPo was pretty insistent for No well before TMZ's report,” but they weren’t as emphatic as TMZ. Then again, nikki made the biggest profit, and they attributed this not to deep trust in the reporting of the Post, but instead to luck. (I would add a fair amount of Manifold market savvy …) 

To a first approximation, I do think it’s fair to say that it was genuinely unlikely that Beyoncé wouldn’t show up. But perhaps this is what separates the superforecasters from the supersuperforecasters…

One Last Market

My tradition in these articles is to highlight a “fun” market. This one is hard, because Jimmy Carter has defied 2% odds and is now 88% likely to be the first president to turn 100 years old (knock on wood), while Manifold’s pivot to real-money sweepstakes markets has been perpetually delayed. Currently the market is at 84%, implying that Carter’s immortality is a more powerful force than our delays… which is good…

 

As usual, I’ve given the market a M$1,000 subsidy to encourage accuracy.

Alright, that’s it for today’s newsletter. I’ve been Jacob Cohen, known on Manifold as Conflux. I blog at tinyurl.com/confluxblog, make 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/elections, or via its Politics or 2024 Election categories. And if you enjoyed this newsletter, don’t forget to like, share, and/or subscribe to Above the Fold on Substack!)

PS: I’m going back to school in less than a month! (I’m indeed rather young…) While exciting for me, this means that frequency of political newsletters will likely drop. This could be the last newsletter before then — depends whether there’s news in the next two weeks. After that, until it’s actually Election Day, I make no promises.

By the way, on Election Day, come hang out at the Manifold Election Day Watch Party in Lighthaven, Berkeley! I’m already planning to run some fun activities, which may include “retrodicting” the anonymized stories of historical elections (also some other more complicated schemes … we’ll see what happens).

1. Who is mentioned in her song Begin Again and is actually — this I did not know before writing this newsletter, despite having a worryingly vast amount of Taylor Swift knowledge — her namesake!