This is so worthy of being sig material, but alas my current one is too full as it is. Maybe SwoLy-D can use this.
Did any of you hear about John Zogby's lecture at Rice University on Monday night? A questioner asked him about the 2008 Presidential Election, asking him how things were shaping up, who would be the nominees, etc. Zogby responded that he already knew who would win the 2008 Presidential Election: Hillary Clinton Zogby said she would serve two terms as President. When asked to explain, he did in two parts. One, she has a 61% approval rating in NY and it is across the board ideologically. She has gotten things done for the citizens of NY state and they have recognized it, regardless of how they have voted in the past. Two, he outlined how Hillary Clinton has been moderating her views on certain issues, including abortion and the war on terror. She is positioning herself, and she has assembled a team of political pros to run her campaign. Zogby feels she can't lose, no matter who the Republican nominee is. I was floored.
Slick, go retrieve the historic odds to back up your wild claim. I doubt that Lampley even wrote that. It's probably some chain email or something else made-up. By the way - Vik - you should start less threads, especially these r****ded conspiracy theory lies. You're in school, right? I would hope that you check the facts in your papers better than you do in your clutchfans posts.
I thought if you are pointing out that someone's source or fact was wrong, you are the one to provide evidence to back your claim up, instead of suspecting or second-guessing. How did you know it was from chain email or something else made-up? Do you always base your persistent irrational and illogical views on "I DOUBT"? No wonder.
I don't recall Kerry being an overwhelming favorite on election day. Anybody care to back up the original assertion?
Any sportsbook in Nevada that had odds on the presidential election, I can assure you did so for entertainment purposes ONLY . It is illegal to place wagers on any type of election. And if you pay close attention to the lines that oddsmakers use, they tend to be right less than half of the time. Their goal is not to predict the outcome of an event, but to make a line that ensures that they get two way action. That's it. Trying to figure out how the public is going to bet helps also, but not as much as you make it out to sound. Alot of bookies across the pond had shrub a slight favorite. I think it was $1.70 to win a dollar.
When the statement is clearly a conspiract theory, as Slickvik pointed out, he should defend his point. I asked him to find historical odds to prove his point. I'll be the bigger man and IGNORE your insults for the sake of the rest of the board. Let's keep it civil, please. Thanks in advance.
I think that based on the sportsbooks odds, the second biggest story of our lives has to be this year's Kentucky Derby. A 50-1 shot, edging out a 72-1 shot???? I blame Karl Rove.
McMarck posted a link to a thread and article that are worth looking at. There may be a case to be made, but Lampley's article isn't the one to do it. There is a discrepency somewhere, and it should be looked at. That doesn't mean it was fraudulent, though there are some interesting circumstantial indicators. I have heard of a number of precincts with diebold machines reporting abnormally high Bush votes, but having all other races voting toward their normal D v. R. ratios. These happened to be in battleground states, and also go against exit polling in those precincts. Of course the head Diebold guaranteed that Bush would win the election, and there were efforts to make sure the machines didn't have any paper receits. There were no instances that I am aware of where things like that happened and the abnormality was in Kerry's favor. Those kinds of stories aren't proof of anything, but they might warrant a further and deeper look.
The futures markets were shockingly ACCURATE during this election. Here is an article from Slate that says the same thing. It pretty much nullifies the whole statistics-based conspiracy theory. http://slate.msn.com/id/2109137/ Bettors for Bush Political futures markets claim they're more accurate than opinion polls. So, how'd they do yesterday? By Daniel Gross Posted Wednesday, Nov. 3, 2004, at 12:15 PM PT The exit polls were way off. The pre-election opinion polls weren't much better. But how did the markets do at predicting the outcome Tuesday night? The past few years have witnessed the rise of political futures markets—online trading operations that allow you to bet on (or, if you prefer, "invest in") candidates. The theory behind the markets is that they ought to do a better job of forecasting elections than polls. After all, if stock investors efficiently factor all available information into the price of a stock, why wouldn't they do the same for a presidential candidate? There are two main venues for trading political futures: the Iowa Electronic Markets, at the University of Iowa, which has been around since 1988; and TradeSports, a 3-year-old Dublin, Ireland-based exchange. IEM offers winner-takes-all contracts, which pay off $1 if your candidate wins and nothing if he loses, as well as contracts on the percentage of the national two-party vote share. (IEM limits investors to $500 in wagers.) TradeSports offers contracts on the candidates' election prospects, as well as on the outcome of individual states. Thomas Rietz, a University of Iowa professor and an IEM director, told me this summer that a comparison of 596 opinion polls with Iowa's presidential futures prices at the time the polls were taken shows that the futures prices were closer to the actual result 76 percent of the time. For its part, TradeSports says its investors successfully predicted the winner of every Democratic primary and tagged John Edwards as the vice presidential nominee in May. (There are criticisms of the political markets. So, how'd they do yesterday? The political markets performed creditably during this campaign, though by no means perfectly, especially on Election Day itself. Throughout the campaign, the IEM and TradeSports investors seemed quite effective at and dispassionate about processing information. Both markets generally had Bush easing to re-election. This graph of the IEM's winner-takes-all contracts shows Bush leading since early September. IEM's vote-share graph shows Bush pulling ahead in August and Kerry narrowing his lead but not catching up. On IEM, as of midnight on Nov. 1—just before Election Day started—the Bush winner-take-all contract traded at .512, meaning traders gave Bush a slight edge. They also thought the vote share would break down 50.45 for Bush and 49.55 for Kerry. In other words, IEM investors forecast the ultimate result (Bush victory) and were close on the vote split. (According to CNN's latest tally, Bush won the two-party total 51.6 to 48.6.) As Election Day dawned, TradeSports also had the right call, a Bush victory with 53 percent of the popular vote. But in the afternoon of Election Day, when exit polls started to leak showing surprising strength for Kerry, the political futures traders freaked out and rushed to dump Bush and buy Kerry. By 4:30 p.m. ET, IEM's Kerry winner-takes-all contract had risen from below 50 in the morning to more than 70. The vote-share contracts on IEM also shifted in Kerry's favor. TradeSports' traders, who had shown Bush winning for the entire campaign, suddenly bid the Kerry election contract up to 67—meaning they thought he had a two-thirds chance at winning. By 5:44 p.m. ET, TradeSports gave Bush just a 39 percent chance of winning Ohio and a 43 percent chance at winning Florida. All on the basis of a few stray data points. Surely, as voracious consumers of all information relevant to political campaigns, these financially motivated investors should have known that exit polls can be unreliable. But instead they panicked. As results started to flow in, and John Kerry's "seven-hour presidency" began to ebb, the traders—like the rest of us watching on television and the Internet—realized the exit polls were wrong. By 10:26 p.m., the Bush re-election contract on TradeSports was up to 68.9. The rest is history. So, what are we to conclude? Over the long-term of the campaign, IEM was quite accurate in projecting the vote distribution. And over the long term, both markets projected the winner. But so, by and large, did the polls. The furious and seemingly irrational Election Day market action stands as evidence that the traders are more poll-followers than poll-beaters.
Kerry WAS in fact the favorite....but its irrelevant. Its not like an underdog has never won a game outright before. These people understand which information to trust and which indicators to consult in determining where to place a dividing line to influence bets, and they are not in the business of being completely wrong. Exactly..and regardless of who the oddsmakers personally think would win....they made the line based on what would trigger the most play on both sides. Sometimes they are right and sometimes they are wrong. What is so hard to comprehend here?