A PERITIVO HOUR IS UPON US IN A sun-drenched piazza on the edge of Lake Como, arguably one of the most romantic places on earth, and my boyfriend and I are drinking prosecco and talking about… Liz Cheney. We are wondering, on this mid-August afternoon, what percentage of the Wyoming primary vote do we think she will win?
This isn’t an academic question. I want to bet on Cheney’s chances through PredictIt, a political betting market, and I want my boyfriend, who has a doctorate in political science, to help me. (We are in Como to see his beloved Arkansas Razorbacks play basketball, so I figure he owes me.) He talks about former president Donald Trump’s crusade against Cheney while I pull up FiveThirtyEight on my phone. I then end up so far down the Google rabbit hole that I find myself reading a Republican Wyoming town council member’s MailChimp newsletter. Its analysis of new voter registration lays out a possible path to victory for Cheney, though I’m not sufficiently convinced to start cross-checking the data.
PredictIt allows me to choose from among 10 ways the vote could potentially go for Cheney, with her receiving anywhere between less than 29% and more than 41% of the vote. I shove aside nagging questions about how I wish the election would go—I want Cheney to win, because no Democrat is going to win a general election in Wyoming, and she has at least shown herself to have a conscience. I hover over the “yes” to her winning less than 29%, and try to decide how many shares to buy. Because betting on electoral outcomes falls outside federal and state law in a kind of murky regulatory backwater, PredictIt—which is run by Victoria University in New Zealand— operates under an agreement with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) that allows it to function as an educational effort. Among other things, this means I can’t place a single bet more than $850.
Still, I think about the advice—or was it a warning?—that I received from a PredictIt regular who goes by WineMom (most people operate pseudonymously, for reasons ranging from not wanting to attract IRS attention to preferring online anonymity, as WineMom does): “There’s enough money at stake that people will do anything to get an edge,” she says. “If anybody tells you they just have a really good
