> I would assume 90% dudes with strong conservative leanings

So that would be a good place to make money, and ultimately make these markets better at predicting.

I remember Nate Silver speaking of the golden age of online poker, when amateurs were the dominant audience, and a decent (non-pro) strategy player could make a living. Word got out, and just like that, it was over.

This is something a number of people do on PredictIt, since that one does have a conservative lean. It takes a lot more than the individual limit to fully price correct, though.

I personally haven't maxed out on it (I think the limit is $800), but I've got a few hundred bet that Biden will be the Dem nominee / that Newsome won't be.

Not sure why we don't have more people picking up the free money, but given that I haven't picked up a much as I possibly can, I'm not one to criticize.

sure, and thanks for agreeing with my premise! but liberals are not really into stupid gambling games, so this "market" is inherently stocked with a limited supply of mindshare

mindshare on this site would probably vastly expand after you delete your account

As somebody who made a decent chunk of change (enough to get a 1099 from PredictIt in 2020 and 2021) off the situation... long shot bets are almost always overpriced on PredictIt.

PredictIt specifically encourages these long shots to be over weighted thanks to their $850 risk limit in any given market. If one long-shot bettor places a max buy order for YES at 10c per share, the order book has 8500 buys at that price point. I can come along, see that what they're betting on is absolutely nuts and max out NO... but at 90c per share I can only fill 944 of those orders before I'm maxed out at my $850 risk limit. I might be supremely confident and WANT to bet $7,650 on this but I simply am not allowed to. So it takes eight more people like me to come along and plunk that money down before we're moving the needle on the order book.

In the 2020 election they somewhat mitigated this by making a dozen markets that were all basically the same question: Is Trump going to succeed at overturning this? They had markets for each state, plus combo markets they added like "Will Trump win any of AZ, GA, PA", plus the electoral college markets, the margin-of-victory markets, etc. But it was still way more effort to go in with a big chunk of change and manage spreading your bets out across all those different markets to max your $850 caps as efficiently as possible.

This is in addition to the other factors, that it is simply more FUN for people to gamble on long odds because it's like buying lottery tickets (who wouldn't want a 10:1 return?). And that, when you factor in fees, opportunity cost (I could have this money in the S&P 500), and counterparty risk (how long will my money be tied up if PredictIt gets shut down), it's really not very attractive to put money in shares in the $0.90-0.99 range unless A. you already have the cash sitting in your PredictIt balance and B. the end date of the market is known and approaching rapidly.

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No conspiracy thinking required. Biden has a non-zero chance of dying before the election and Harris is very unpopular. It's not unthinkable that should Biden not be able to run, someone like Obama would step in at the last minute.

Would I pay 20:1 odds for that scenario? Hell no. But I might buy at 100:1 or greater.

I'm sorry, what? The line of presidential succession has been long established, it's in the constitution, and Kamala Harris is next in line. And then a lot of people who aren't Obama.

Lines of succession are a separate thing from winners of elections. If Biden were to die before election day, that doesn't mean Harris would be on the ticket as the presidential nominee. I'd wager against that for sure.

So who would be tapped to fill in for the recently-deceased candidate? Could be Harris, or Obama, or a dozen other hopefuls.

Elections have nothing to do with presidential succession. It will be a party decision, Harris is a guaranteed loss, and M. Obama is a possible win.

This is, again, a conspiratorial mindset considering Michelle Obama has repeatedly said she would never run and Kamala Harris would never be replaced.

Politicians always say that. Obama himself denied wanting to run for president repeatedly right up until he announced his run for president.

Notably Barack Obama was an actual politician in February 2007, unlike Michelle Obama. It's a nonsensical comparison.

That's a different issue. Presidental succession says who replaces Biden if he dies in office, but the question here is who would stand as the Democratic candidate for the 2024 election if he died.

Harris would be likely, but maybe not a 100% certainty.

The edge cases are people like Pritzker or Newsom, not Michelle Obama who has repeatedly said she would never run for office.

In the minds of conservatives and some leftists, the concept that Kamala being unpopular is so ingrained that they cannot believe that she would be the nominee no matter what the circumstances. In reality she's not much more unpopular than her President and would likely see a massive approval bump if the worst happens to the current POTUS.

Even without that, she's the odds-on favorite to be the nominee in 2028 by incumbency alone. Basically anyone that follows politics understands this, but the silly conspiracies are based on motivated reasoning.