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MrLittleTexas's avatar

More relevant for Biden's longevity is that his own father died at 86, meaning that he himself maybe has a 50-50 chance of dying by the end of his second term. The most relevant parallel here is LBJ, who commissioned an actuarial study on himself that showed he would die near the end of his second term, before deciding to drop out of the race.

If Biden did not have both terrible polls and a questionable actuarial forecast, then I would agree with you, but the closest historical parallel that we have indicates he may not win the nomination again.

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Richard Hanania's avatar

Biden isn’t going to look at an actuarial table, he doesn’t even know what that is.

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Mark's avatar

It's a callous calculation, but it's possible Democrats figure that if Biden runs and dies in office, it's not necessarily worse than if they ran someone else. Harris is probably less electable than Biden, so that would probably be an easier way for her to assume office than running; and for her there's the additional upside of getting to run her first time with an incumbency advantage and getting the chance to be the second person to serve >8 years as president.

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Maximum Liberty's avatar

I’m surprised you didn’t identify Michelle Obama as a potential Democrat nominee.

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Richard Hanania's avatar

What would looking at the base rate tell you about someone who has never shown the slightest interest in elected office suddenly becoming the nominee of a major party?

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TGGP's avatar

Trump had never held public office prior to becoming President.

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Richard Hanania's avatar

Trump had talked about running for three decades.

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Richard Hanania's avatar

And “as likely as the most surprising thing that’s happened in politics in our lifetime” doesn’t mean Michelle has a good chance. But even the Michelle scenario is more out there than Trump, since he had shown decades of interest in running, and even ran for the Reform Party nomination.

Michelle Obama, again, has never shown the slightest interest in any elected office. Her husband has written about how he had to talk her into letting him become a politician. It’s the biggest fantasy of all fantasies.

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Maximum Liberty's avatar

That’s what I was going to say!

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CC's avatar

You’re joking. She’s too busy making money over at Amazon, not to mention she just doesn’t have the ambition or the bandwidth.

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Arnold Kling's avatar

I agree that Democratic officials would view her as the strongest nominee. If she did not have to campaign (think back to Eisenhower), I would make her the favorite. But in today's world, I am not sure she wants to get into the process.

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Mark's avatar

Election betting odds now favor DeSantis over Trump. I think that's closer to the mark than you on this. I think Trump owes a lot of his support from the fact that everyone knows everyone else supports him. If there's a sense that he's being overtaken by DeSantis in popularity, I think a lot of people will change allegiances for that reason alone.

I'm curious what you think of the likelihood of Trump running as an independent if he loses the primary (and what effect that'll have). Strangely, Trump is still much more likely to win the presidency than DeSantis, according to the odds, even though DeSantis is both favored in the primary and in electability. I wondered if that's just an inconsistency in the betting market or reflects an expectation that Trump will be a spoiler if he loses the GOP primary.

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Matt Pencer's avatar

A major problem is the lack of ability to trade on margin. As I understand it, for the moon landing contract you're paying $0.92 today, and are paid $1 on Jan 1, 2025 (assuming the market resolves to No). That's a 3.4% annual return! You shouldn't buy this contract even if you're 100% sure.

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OneEyedMan's avatar

The most likely reasons for Biden to not be the nominee are 1) he feels old and tired and doesn’t want to and 2) he faces polling suggesting humiliating defeat. The first is mostly unanswerable but we might be able to get some estimates from looking at late career retirements in the entertainment and business careers data. What percentage of producers and CEOs working at 80 are still working at 82? The second we could get better estimates of from the larger sample of gubernatorial elections. Blanco (LA), Shumlin (VT), and Paterson (NY) are some recent examples of unpopular governors that chose to to run for reelection. I agree that the presidency is a bigger prize and president Biden has a bigger ego than the average governor, supporting a lower chance than a governor in a similar situation, but expecting to lose is a great reason not to run.

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John's avatar

It's only missing the prediction market Futuur, it works with real money (crypto), and they have a wide range of markets, more than 10.000

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Jun 22, 2022Edited
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Richard Hanania's avatar

The idea that you could beat Trump based on the issues, showing he’s not conservative enough, was the theory of 2016. It didn’t work because Republican voters don’t care all that much about ideology but want someone to flatter them and insult liberals.

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