I experienced a swirl of emotions when I saw Joe Biden’s post announcing the suspension of his campaign on Sunday afternoon. Gratitude to the President for staring straight into the face of his own mortality and making the right decision, which can’t have been easy. Relief that Donald Trump was going to get an opponent with the strength to mount a genuine campaign. Mystification that Biden used X (formerly Twitter) to make the announcement, which has become a cesspool of bots and right-wing shitposters after Elon Musk’s chaotic takeover. But most of all, I had the feeling that I really should have bet some money on this.
Late last month, sitting at the breakfast table the morning after Biden’s disastrous, incoherent debate, I said to my wife that the President’s performance was a huge deal, that he was probably going to have to drop out, that the race (and American politics) were going to be massively altered. She accused me of being, essentially, a news-addicted Boomer whose brain has been turned to goo from too much MSNBC. Stuff like a last-minute candidate swap doesn’t just happen in the real world, she said. Life isn’t The West Wing.
She was right about one thing: I have received irreversible psychic damage from the news––but not from cable (we don’t have it) or Aaron Sorkin (never seen The West Wing, gave up on walking and talking after Moneyball) or being a Boomer (born in 1989). Instead, like virtually everyone else who works in digital media, my affliction comes from spending too much time on the place that used to be Twitter. That website is notorious for producing unrepresentative echo chambers, and there are also the aforementioned Musk-related issues, but it’s unfortunately still the best place to stay on the bleeding edge of the news.
On X, it was understood that there was a good chance Biden would drop out, and the strongest evidence came from betting markets, where people wager real money on current events in a constantly-updating stock market-style trading environment. Prediction markets are not a new concept, but they have seen steadily increasing relevance during the recent chaotic news cycles. It doesn’t hurt that, in the wake of a 2018 Supreme Court decision effectively legalizing sports betting, we’ve become a nation of degenerates. When we have gambling ads during NFL games and every second frat guy in the country has a crippling Draftkings addiction, why not get yourself a little action and watch the news like Howard Ratner?
Prediction markets, at least notionally, have a more noble purpose than taking the under on a Week 7 Browns-Jaguars matchup. Some techno-utopians believe they will bring about an epistemic revolution that will fundamentally change society. More realistically, they are often promoted as an effective way to forecast elections and other unpredictable events. Nate Silver, who made his name aggregating and interpreting traditional polls, recently wrote in his newsletter that, when compared to a polling model, the situation with Biden after the debate “is one of those times when prediction markets are probably the more useful tool. That’s because political events have been unfolding faster than polls or models have time to catch up with them.”
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