So I’ve been going to two websites, like 4,000 times a day for the past two weeks. The two sites are www.intrade.com and the New York Times Election Forecast page written by Nate Silver. Watching these two sites 4,000 times a day is making me nervous. Every tic up or down brings on euphoria or generates another gloom & doom blog piece. All this was true until I stumbled upon the following two graphics, thanks to an Intrade contributor.
Click on each graph to enlarge.
Somehow the correlation between the two graphics made me feel more confident that Obama will win this thing. The first is the Intrade betting results for the Bush/Kerry race in 2004. The second – with an offset in the time frame – is the recount of the current Intrade daily results for the Obama/Romney race. If you compare the two – even on a macro basis – you will see a fairly clear correlation. Only you have to switch the parties, because Obama is the incumbent. Obama will win, because – as I said before – he will win the state of Ohio, which made all the difference for George W. Bush in 2004. Obama’s the incumbent that all the pundits said could not win re-election because of the economy. Bush was the incumbent that all the pundits said could not be re-elected because of the Iraq War. So what happened? Bush was re-elected to preside over the greatest economic disaster in 80 years. So fast-forward to 2012: Obama has 4 years of little progress in fixing the economy, we’re still in Afghanistan after 12 years of losing because of Bush’s need to transfer troop strength to Iraq, and nobody feels good about anything. Mittens, the other candidate, is very Kerry-like in giving you the feeling that – if he were to somehow win – he’d lose control probably within the first 90 days, and that his response would be to offer nothing but excuses. Just like Kerry – who will probably be our next Secretary of State. Is this the best we can do? Unfortunately, at this point in our evolution, it is the best we can do. We haven’t sufficiently suffered to have anything better. But I’d say we’re getting close to that point, don’t you think?