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Notes -
Is non-public information leaking into election betting markets?
Prior to the debate, on Predict It, Biden had something like an 85% chance to secure the Democratic nomination. After the debate, his odds fell to around 60%. By last night, it had eroded further to 50%.
Last night the flippening happened. The bottom fell out of Biden shares and went to Kamala. As of this moment, Kamala Harris trades at 51% and Biden is at just 29%.
As far as I can tell nothing has changed since 24 hours ago, so what gives? A few possibilities I can think of:
Someone is manipulating the markets to create a false consensus. I think this is the most likely. Mega-donors will spend billions on this election. A Biden campaign is doomed. Spending a couple million to move markets could have an outsized effect.
Non-public information is leaking. A source high in the Democratic party is talking and his friends are betting.
A whale is making a giant bet. I view this as the least likely because moving the market this much tends to be extremely unprofitable. Without inside info, this would be a very stupid bet.
Edit 1: I wouldn't rule out manipulation, but it does seem there was some public information to move the market.
Edit 2: Michelle Obama is up to 12%, which is the same as Newsom. Normally, the lower percentage bets are not liquid, but 12% rises to the level of "something, not nothing". Michelle Obama solves the Kamala Harris problem. And if we're electing useless figureheads she's better than Biden. But does she even want to run?
"and went to Kamala." This indicates insider information about insider coordination.
I can’t believe Obama would sign off on Kamala but maybe he just doesn’t care anymore.
I can’t imagine him capstoning his career by stepping over a black woman.
It is her turn after all.
Was Obama ever particularly identity-focused in his politics? Honest question, I didn't pay attention to politics during most of his presidency (and haven't paid much attention to him since then).
Somehow Tea Party Republicans got it in their head that Obama was the anti-Christ, but he both ran for election and governed as a fairly center-left technocrat and leaned on very main-street rhetoric that wasn't too charged. As an example, he didn't support gay marriage until a good chunk into the presidency. He mostly tried to ignore us-vs-them, at least in 2008. He got bogged down a bit into more partisan warfare later in his second term, but frankly I think the Tea Party really did "start it". Hillary at the end was pretty night-and-day culture warry in comparison, though some of the shift in rhetoric was visible for a few years beforehand in some left-wing higher-ed type circles. At least that was my impression.
This is a popular take, but I don't think it's the right one. 2009 had Obama's first meeting with GOP leadership summarized as "I won", the Affordable Care Act was 2009 and passed on party lines during infamously flametastic discussion where anything but the Democratic proposal was demanding people die in the streets by the thousands or tens of thousands, and the only reason someone could oppose this was Racism. By May he was joking about IRS audits of organizations that didn't agree with him enough. He instructed the Department of Justice to not defend DOMA in federal court in 2011.
Not all the worst of the 2008 culture wars were downstream of Obama directly -- there was a conspiracy theory that Palin's youngest child was 'really' her grandchild, and she had an involuntary biographer take up residence as a neighbor, and afaik that were genuinely just nuts (Andrew Sullivan, everyone!) that media groups latched onto rather than promoted by the Dem party directly -- but a lot of them were.
Perhaps more critically, many seeds were planted for future culture wars, even fairly early. The ACA threw in expansive mandates for gender-related stuff, and took over a large portion of higher education loans, for example.
I mean, I see all of these as somewhat partisan but not necessarily or explicitly identity politics. For example, although he nominally supported affirmative action, and a few of the bills ended up having those kind of effects, IIRC most of his efforts were fairly ambivalent and he would usually say things to the tune of 'well we need to make sure we're accounting for poor white students and their disadvantage too'. He talked about being the first Black president not in a Black pride/power way but more couched in generic "American Dream" language about equality. In other words, he was on the equality train, but not the equity train, not anything like what it would eventually become. Personally, I don't think that many center-left folks had any idea what some of these seeds would sprout, and I correspondingly imagine that it wasn't by and large deliberate, up until perhaps the last two years, maybe?
Of course there was also a period from about 2011-2013 roughly where I was a bit tuned out from politics, so maybe I missed a bit there.
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