Politics

I’m relieved that Bush appears to have won, but I was pretty nervous earlier. Here’s an Intrade screenshot (emphasis added) from Tuesday afternoon, after the pro-Kerry exit-poll rumors but before there were any strong public indications that Bush would do well.

Maalox Moment

I am a bit concerned that Bush’s margin of victory in Ohio will not be enough to forestall a Kerry challenge. There is still enough uncertainty as I write this, at 2:00 AM EST, that Intrade’s Bush re-election contract is trading at only around 93. It should be at 98 or 99 if Bush has a lock on it. I hope that Kerry will have enough sense not to drag this out, and that Bush will soon emerge as the clear winner.

Wild. Exit poll results are being leaked, or manufactured to boost morale, or a combination. It’s like watching a volatile futures market near expiration. Intrade’s Bush-reelect numbers are all over the place, on huge volume. I don’t believe most of what I’m reading. This is already a very interesting election, if only because so much more information is being broadcast in almost-real-time than ever before. Except that a lot of this information is undoubtedly wrong.

This situation is like the “fog of war.” There is always uncertainty about fast-moving events, and technological improvements don’t necessary improve information availability. What the tech improvements do is compress the uncertainty in time and shift it into areas where, in the past, nobody expected timely information (e.g., those exit polls).

Stay tuned. (But of course we all will.)

Just want to get my election predictions on record.

I think Bush will win with in excess of 52% of the popular vote and in excess of 300 electoral votes.

The scope of the victory may be just wishful thinking on my part. I want whomever wins to win big so we don’t have some kind of lawyer-driven nightmare that could permanently cripple our democracy. I also want the Democrats to lose big so that, just maybe, they will launch some kind of internal reform that will make them once again the forward looking, new-idea party instead of the leftist reactionaries they are today. I also believe that a resounding Bush victory will save hundreds of lives in Iraq and elsewhere.

I think an unexpectedly strong Bush showing may happen because of the tenor of the basic theme of each candidate. Bush’s implied vision of America is an optimistic vision of a nation that is powerful, morally capable and engaged in a heroic struggle for the betterment of humanity. Kerry’s implied vision of America is a pessimistic vision of a nation that is weak, immoral, incapable and engaged in a venal exercise in mass murder. Which vision will voters want to embrace in the privacy of the voting booth?

In essence, this election is less between two individuals than it is between these two conflicting visions of America, for which the individuals are mere proxies. Historically, Americans have chosen the optimistic vision and have done so strongly.

Let us hope they do so again.

If I knew nothing else about this election or recent history, I’d vote for Bush based solely on who his enemies are. The anti-Bush roster includes: the international Left — including MSM, academia and much of the entertainment industry; the governments of France, Iran, Germany, Venezuela, Canada, Cuba, N. Korea, Syria, etc.; the Palestinians; probably the Saudis and the Chinese; the UN; the US State Department bureaucracy; and numerous intellectuals who have been getting the big picture wrong for years.

When you think about it that’s not a bad way to make complex decisions: look at what the groups that have big stakes in the matter are doing, then vote with the ones that share your interests and against the rest. That’s how I vote on issues I don’t know a lot about. For example, on a referendum item that would cap lawyers’ fees in medical-liability cases, I am split. On the one hand I think medical liability is out of control, on the other hand I oppose price fixing. But I know that the trial lawyers favor the measure and the doctors oppose it, so I vote against.

All I need to know about this election is that the UN crowd wants Kerry to win. (As the WSJ pointed out in today’s editorial, the UN has already voted, by ginning up the missing-explosives story.) So to all the clever bloggers who are publicly agonizing about whom to vote for, I say, look at the obvious. Figure out who your enemies are, observe their preferences in our election and take the opposite position.

UPDATE: One of the commenters raises the issue of rational ignorance. I agree that that issue overlaps the issue that I discuss, as my main reason for using my “enemy of my enemy” heuristic is that I don’t have the resources or ability to evaluate each issue by myself. However, the overlap isn’t complete. I argue that by observing the behavior of better-informed players I am able to obtain, more economically than by conventional methods, the information that I need to make good decisions. It is a little like trading stocks based on market behavior, as opposed to trading on fundamental analysis of underlying economic conditions. Maybe I could learn enough about each company’s fundamentals to trade its stock successfully. But if I can trade just as well, with less effort, solely by observing the stock’s behavior and making reasonable inferences, why not do so? It is similar with voting decisions, especially when I am having difficulty making up my mind using conventional decision criteria.

UPDATE 2: Here’s someone who gets it.

I’m watching Intrade’s Bush-reelection mkt and reading comments on Lex’s recent post about the election.

I agree with the commenter who suspects manipulation. The mkt’s acting like there’s a big, aggressive seller: there are size bids, but only small resting offers below about 53. The seller is the only one tightening the mkt. Also, IIRC (and I may not be), it appears there’s been huge volume in the past hour or so.

This behavior doesn’t quite fit the pattern that observers noticed in the mkt earlier, where someone came in when the mkt was thin and spiked it down quickly by taking out a lot of bids. Today’s price action looks more like the scenario I hypothesized about, where someone is willing to spend hundreds of thousands to hold the mkt down, for an extended period, by entering a stream of sell orders in small units. Not as dramatic as the big plunge, but perhaps more believable to uncommitted or easily-discouraged voters. (And anyway, there are probably now so many resting bids at lowball prices that the mkt can no longer be spiked.)

If I were George Soros I’d do the same thing.

(Related post here)

UPDATE: Don Luskin shares another theory.