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Following a televised debate of the Delaware Senatorial campaign between Republican and Tea Party favorite Christine O’Donnell and Democrat Chris Coons, O’Donnell’s chances of winning fell another couple of percentage points to 9 percent based on the gambling public’s sentiment at online wagering exchange intrade.com. More than 3329 individuals had bet on O’Donnell, either to win or lose, most to lose this Election Day.
Prediction markets have proven highly accurate especially as they pertain to political elections.
From Wikipedia:
Steven Gjerstad (Purdue) in his paper "Risk Aversion, Beliefs, and Prediction Market Equilibrium," has shown that prediction market prices are very close to the mean belief of market participants if the agents are risk averse and the distribution of beliefs is spread out (as with a normal distribution, for example). Justin Wolfers (Wharton) and Eric Zitzewitz (Dartmouth) have obtained similar results, and also include some analysis of prediction market data, in their paper "Interpreting Prediction Market Prices as Probabilities” In practice, the prices of binary prediction markets have proven to be closely related to actual frequencies of events in the real world.
As for the substance of the debate itself, James Fallows of the Conservative media publication The Atlantic calls O’Donnell “more dangerous than Sarah Palin”, referencing her ability to connect via media outlets.
He writes:
In this debate tonight, O'Donnell has not seemed uncomfortable for one second** -- even in her most obvious dodge, about whether she really thinks evolution is a "myth." The difference is, she is a talk show regular.
Most of the nation outside of Delaware missed O’Donnell’s one major gaffe of the night, her inability to name a single recent Supreme Court decision. CNN had cut into its live debate coverage to broadcast the final miner being brought up to the surface in Chile.
Another highlight of the night was when O’Donnell stated that Coons learned his “beliefs from an articulate intelligent Marxist professor … that should send chills up the spine of every Delaware voter”. – Jagajeet Chiba reporting for Gambling911.com.
