Presidential Election of 2020

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      The Betting on the Presidential Election Has Begun

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      While two leading prediction markets are fighting regulatory restrictions in court, wagers on politics and economics are still being made.Financial journalists love Wall Street aphorisms. I use them whenever I can.“Don’t fight the Fed” has been handy this year. “The stock market climbs a wall of worry” is useful whenever investors are fretting.Here’s one I’ve never been able to drop into an article — not yet, anyway: “It is an old axiom in the financial district that Wall Street betting odds are ‘never wrong.’”But nearly a century ago, on Sept. 28, 1924, one of my anonymous predecessors at The New York Times (bylines were uncommon then) used it. That hallowed saying could be repurposed today, except for a formidable problem. It refers to the betting on elections that took place on Wall Street, which was commonplace back then — and covered extensively in The Times and other major newspapers, as an important source of information about national, state and local political contests.Today, except for indirect and elaborate financial hedges on the policy implications of election outcomes, outright betting on elections is no longer a core part of American finance.Legal battles are underway to change that, however. And in the meantime, three prediction markets — PredictIt, Kalshi and the Iowa Electronic Markets — continue to operate and generate compelling insights. With any of them, it’s possible to make bets on who will win the 2024 presidential election and on a host of other consequential matters.Markets Versus PollsI’ve used prediction markets for years, especially during election season, much as my predecessors presumably used the Wall Street election betting markets — not to place bets but to obtain information.I don’t depend on these markets, and don’t buy the notion that they are superior to other means of obtaining information — or that they have the ability to reliably predict the future or change the world.Even so, they are illuminating. Some studies have found prediction markets to compare favorably with polls, especially when you are weeks or months away from voting. And when an issue or an election is important, one can never have enough data.Right now, for instance.The latest New York Times/Siena College poll shows that for the 2024 election, President Biden is trailing former President Donald J. Trump in five of six swing states. Both PredictIt and the Iowa market indicate, however, that most people placing wagers on those sites believe that in the end Mr. Biden will win.Which Question?John Aristotle Phillips, who runs the PredictIt market on behalf of Victoria University of Wellington, a New Zealand institution, said in an interview that there were frequently major differences between the findings of the polls and the prediction markets. That’s entirely normal, he said. “Polls and prediction markets ask different questions.”A poll asks who, right now, you would prefer as a candidate. But a functioning market that demands real money for a trade asks something else, he said, “not who you want to win but who you think will win.”As a sports fan, I understand the difference.If you asked me which baseball team I wanted to win, I’d always pick the Mets. But over many decades, they have usually disappointed me. So if I had to put money down, I’d never bet on them.What do I really think? It depends on which question you ask.The State of PlayKalshi, PredictIt and the Iowa market operate legally but function under specific limitations.One general problem is that “no states allow betting on political events and, if it was allowed, it would be on a state-by-state basis,” said Cait DeBaun, vice president of the American Gaming Association, which represents the gambling industry. You can’t avoid enticements for betting on sports if you watch a game on television in most major markets, but you won’t see ads for bets on politics. They aren’t permitted.But both PredictIt and the Iowa market offer overtly political wagers under academic exemptions granted by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.The Iowa market, which started in 1988, is the most purely academic of the three. It is devoted entirely to research and teaching, but is open to anyone who wants to place a wager.PredictIt is operating under an academic exemption, too, but it has had to fight to retain it. The C.F.T.C. withdrew its permission in August 2022, and ordered the site to shut down, saying it had strayed from its academic mission. But PredictIt won a court injunction allowing it to continue operating, and it is suing the C.F.T.C., seeking permanent authority to run its market.It has 19 contracts running now, but Mr. Phillips said he expected to offer “hundreds” soon. “We aren’t going anywhere,” he said. “We’re going to keep operating.”Kalshi, the biggest of the three sites, is the most constrained at the moment in betting on politics. As a commercial derivatives market, it can accept trades amounting to scores of millions of dollars.It already runs prediction markets on inflation, unemployment, oil prices, Federal Reserve policy, government shutdowns, the temperature in Austin, who will win an Oscar and President Biden’s approval rating. The consensus forecasts are often on the mark and extremely useful.But what Kalshi has been unable to do is run a market predicting which political party will control Congress. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has turned it down, saying that would violate prohibitions on election contracts implied by the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010. So Kalshi sued the C.F.T.C. this month.In an interview, Tarek Mansour, a founder of Kalshi, said that he would ultimately like to start markets on presidential elections and on a range of other contests. “Betting on elections is as old as the United States,” he said, adding that if that betting isn’t done through a careful marketplace like his, it will happen elsewhere anyway.Already, he pointed out, sophisticated and well-financed investors can hedge against the risks of election outcomes through bespoke derivative contracts arranged by investment banks. “Why limit these trades to the very rich?” he asked. “We want to make this kind of hedging available to the average investor.”I said that I would call these “trades” bets.He said, “I wouldn’t disagree.”Betting on U.S. elections takes place abroad. Betfair in Britain runs a robust market. And unregulated offshore betting is conducted on Polymarket, which uses cryptocurrency and was fined $1.4 million by the C.F.T.C. for running afoul of its rules. Then there’s FTX, the failed cryptocurrency exchange that was headed by Sam Bankman-Fried, who was convicted this month on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy. It ran an unregulated, offshore prediction market in the 2020 election cycle.“Driving these markets offshore doesn’t make sense to me,” Mr. Mansour said.I’ll leave these legal matters to the courts and the regulatory agencies to decide.But like my journalistic predecessors, I welcome the data trove that betting on elections provides. I’m hoping the entrepreneurs who run prediction markets will keep the information flowing, so we can really test the truth of the old saying, “Wall Street betting odds are never wrong.” More

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      Swing State Voters Are Souring on Biden

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      Mooj Zadie and Marc Georges and Marion Lozano and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicIn a major new campaign poll from The New York Times and Siena College, former President Donald J. Trump leads President Biden in five of the six battleground states likeliest to decide the 2024 presidential race. Widespread discontent with the state of the country and growing doubts about Biden’s ability to perform his job as president threaten to unravel the diverse coalition that elected him in 2020.Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, explains why the results are less a reflection of Trump’s growing strength than they are of Biden’s growing weaknesses.On today’s episodeNate Cohn, The New York Times’s chief political analyst.In contrast with four years ago, the poll finds a disengaged, disaffected and dissatisfied electorate, setting the stage for a potentially volatile campaign.Taylor Glascock for The New York TimesBackground readingIn the Times/Siena poll, voters in battleground states said they trusted Mr. Trump over Mr. Biden on the economy, foreign policy and immigration.Here are detailed tables from the poll.Less engaged voters are Biden’s biggest problem.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.Nate Cohn More

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      Why Biden Is Behind, and How He Could Come Back

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      A polling deficit against Trump across six key states is mainly about younger, nonwhite and less engaged voters. Kamala Harris performs slightly better.Four years ago, Joe Biden was the electability candidate — the broadly appealing, moderate Democrat from Scranton who promised to win the white working-class voters who elected Donald J. Trump.There are few signs of that electoral strength today. More

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      Man Who Stormed Capitol as Princeton Student Gets 2-Month Prison Term

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      Larry Giberson was a sophomore studying political science when he joined the riot in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021.A 22-year-old New Jersey man was sentenced to two months in prison on Wednesday for taking part, as a Princeton University student, in the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, by a mob loyal to former President Donald J. Trump.The man, Larry F. Giberson Jr., pleaded guilty in July to civil disorder, a felony, after federal prosecutors charged him with that crime and several misdemeanors, according to court records. At the riot, according to a federal agent’s affidavit, Mr. Giberson cheered on others as they used weapons and pepper spray to attack the police officers guarding a tunnel and tried, unsuccessfully, to start a chant of “Drag them out!” among other actions.The misdemeanors were dismissed as part of Mr. Giberson’s plea agreement, court records show. He was also sentenced to six months of supervised release under home detention.Larry Gibersonvia FBIBefore being sentenced, Mr. Giberson, of Manahawkin, N.J., expressed remorse in court for what he called his “careless and thoughtless actions,” The Associated Press reported.“I don’t believe my defining moment was there on the Lower West Terrace,” he said, referring to the section of the Capitol he had entered, according to The A.P. “Instead, I believe my defining moment is now, standing before you.”He was sentenced by Judge Carl J. Nichols of U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., who was appointed to the federal bench by Mr. Trump. Judge Nichols called Mr. Giberson’s actions “reprehensible” and said the two-month sentence was “something of a break,” The A.P. reported.“I do believe that his expressions of remorse, generally and then again today, are candid and truthful,” the judge said. “That’s important to me.”The maximum sentence for civil disorder is five years. Prosecutors had argued in court filings for a prison term of 11 months to be followed by three years of supervised release. The office declined to comment on Mr. Giberson’s sentence.Charles Burnham, Mr. Giberson’s lawyer, had sought a sentence that did not include prison time or supervised release. Mr. Burnham did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Mr. Giberson graduated from Princeton in May, Mr. Burnham wrote in a court filing. The Daily Princetonian, a student newspaper, reported in July that Mr. Giberson had earned a bachelor’s degree in politics and certificates in values and public life and French.It is unclear whether Princeton took any action against Mr. Giberson as a result of his arrest. A university spokesman did not respond to an email inquiry on Wednesday.Mr. Giberson is one of more than 1,100 people who have been charged with crimes stemming from the Capitol riot amid an investigation that is continuing, according to the Justice Department. More than 400 have been charged with assaulting or impeding law enforcement authorities.He was among a group of rioters who pushed against a phalanx of officers defending the Capitol at a tunnel entrance on the Lower West Terrace, according to an affidavit filed by a federal agent. With Mr. Giberson at the front of the crowd, one officer was briefly crushed between the rioters and the tunnel doors, the affidavit says.Mr. Giberson had traveled to Washington with his mother for the “Stop the Steal” rally that day after seeing Mr. Trump’s social media post urging his supporters to descend on the city to protest Congress’s imminent certification of President Biden as the winner of the 2020 election, court records show.Mr. Burnham, Mr. Giberson’s lawyer, wrote in a court filing that his client had not been motivated to come to Washington because of “membership in radical groups” or a belief in “online conspiracy theories.”Rather, Mr. Burnham wrote, Mr. Giberson had “studied the issues surrounding the 2020 election and concluded that state actors had interfered with the electoral process in unconstitutional ways.”Mr. Giberson and his mother became separated after making their way to the Capitol from the rally, court records show. After entering the tunnel and joining the push against the officers, he waved other rioters in and joined a second round of shoving against the officers, the federal agent’s affidavit says.Mr. Giberson could be seen in publicly available video footage wearing a blue “Make America Great Again” cap on his head and a Trump flag around his neck and climbing toward the tunnel entrance, the affidavit says.Federal investigators matched a photo of Mr. Giberson from the day of the riot with images posted on social media and the Princeton website, as well as with photos from his high school, the affidavit says. He was arrested in March.There is no record of his mother’s having been charged in connection with the Capitol riot. More

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      Election Day Guide: Governor Races, Abortion Access and More

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      Two governorships are at stake in the South, while Ohio voters will decide whether to enshrine the right to an abortion in the state constitution.Election Day is nearly here, and while off-year political races receive a fraction of the attention compared with presidential elections, some of Tuesday’s contests will be intensely watched.At stake are two southern governorships, control of the Virginia General Assembly and abortion access in Ohio. National Democrats and Republicans, seeking to build momentum moving toward next November, will be eyeing those results for signals about 2024.Here are the major contests voters will decide on Tuesday and a key ballot question:Governor of KentuckyGov. Andy Beshear, left, a Democrat, is facing Daniel Cameron, Kentucky’s Republican attorney general, in his campaign for re-election as governor.Pool photo by Kentucky Educational TelevisionGov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, is seeking to again defy convention in deep-red Kentucky, a state carried handily by Donald J. Trump in 2020.He is facing Daniel Cameron, Kentucky’s attorney general, who was propelled to victory by an early endorsement from Mr. Trump in a competitive Republican primary in May.In 2019, Mr. Cameron became the first Black person to be elected as Kentucky’s attorney general, an office previously held by Mr. Beshear. He drew attention in 2020 when he announced that a grand jury did not indict two Louisville officers who shot Breonna Taylor.In the 2019 governor’s race, Mr. Beshear ousted Matt Bevin, a Trump-backed Republican, by fewer than 6,000 votes. This year, he enters the race with a strong job approval rating. He is seeking to replicate a political feat of his father, Steve Beshear, who was also Kentucky governor and was elected to two terms.Governor of Mississippi Brandon Presley, a public service commissioner who is related to Elvis Presley, wants to be the state’s first Democratic governor in two decades.Emily Kask for The New York TimesGov. Tate Reeves, a Republican in his first term, has some of the lowest job approval numbers of the nation’s governors.Rogelio V. Solis/Associated PressIt has been two decades since Mississippi had a Democrat as governor. Gov. Tate Reeves, a Republican in his first term, is seeking to avoid becoming the one who ends that streak.But his job approval numbers are among the lowest of the nation’s governors, which has emboldened his Democratic challenger, Brandon Presley, a public service commissioner with a famous last name: His second cousin, once removed, was Elvis Presley.Mr. Presley has attacked Mr. Reeves over a welfare scandal exposed last year by Mississippi Today, which found that millions in federal funds were misspent. Mr. Reeves, who was the lieutenant governor during the years the scandal unfolded, has denied any wrongdoing, but the issue has been a focal point of the contest.Abortion access in OhioAs states continue to reckon with the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court last year, Ohio has become the latest front in the fight over access to abortion.Reproductive rights advocates succeeded in placing a proposed amendment on the November ballot that would enshrine the right to abortion access into the state constitution. Its supporters have sought to fill the void that was created by the Roe decision.Anti-abortion groups have mounted a sweeping campaign to stop the measure. One effort, a proposal to raise the threshold required for passing a constitutional amendment, was rejected by voters this summer.Virginia legislatureIn just two states won by President Biden in 2020, Republicans have a power monopoly — and in Virginia, they are aiming to secure a third. The others are Georgia and New Hampshire.Democrats narrowly control the Virginia Senate, where all 40 seats are up for grabs in the election. Republicans hold a slim majority in the House of Delegates, which is also being contested.The outcome of the election is being viewed as a potential reflection of the clout of Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican with national ambitions.Philadelphia mayorAn open-seat race for mayor in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania’s foremost Democratic bastion, is down to two former City Council members: Cherelle Parker, a Democrat, and David Oh, a Republican.The advantage for Ms. Parker appears to be an overwhelming one in the city, which has not elected a Republican as mayor since 1947.It has also been two decades since Philadelphia, the nation’s sixth most populous city, had a somewhat competitive mayoral race. More

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      Some of the Lawyers Who May Fill a Second Trump Administration

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      Donald Trump’s allies are hoping to install a different species of legal gatekeeper throughout the federal government. Here are some of the potential prospects.Election Day is a year away, but key allies of former President Donald J. Trump are already thinking about staffing a potential administration, including by filling White House and agency legal positions with aggressive and ideologically like-minded lawyers.Trump allies are preparing to populate a new administration with a different breed of lawyer — a departure from the type that stymied part of his first-term agenda and that despite their mainstream conservative credentials are seen as too cautious by people close to the former president. They are seeking lawyers in federal agencies and in the White House committed to his “America First” ideology and willing to use edgy theories to advance his cause.It is too early to say with any certainty whom Mr. Trump would select were he to win a second term starting in 2025. But several conservative nonprofits, staffed by people who are likely to take on senior White House positions if there is a second Trump administration, have been putting together lists of prospects.At Project 2025, a well-funded effort by the Heritage Foundation to prepare personnel and policy for the next conservative administration, John McEntee, one of Mr. Trump’s most trusted aides, is part of a team searching for potential lawyers.A person familiar with the Heritage 2025 project said it was listing multiple options for every position. Some of the names under early and unofficial consideration are:Joseph E. Schmitz as the Pentagon’s top lawyer. A Bush-era Pentagon inspector general, he argued after the 2020 election that the Supreme Court or the vice president, Mike Pence, should intervene to overturn Mr. Trump’s loss.Joseph E. Schmitz in 2004.Jamie-Andrea Yanak/Associated PressWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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      Supreme Court Weighs When Officials May Block Citizens on Social Media

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      The justices struggled to distinguish private conduct, which is not subject to the First Amendment, from state action, which is.The Supreme Court worked hard in a pair of arguments on Tuesday to find a clear constitutional line separating elected officials’ purely private social media accounts from ones that reflect government actions and are subject to the First Amendment. After three hours, though, it was not clear that a majority of the justices had settled on a clear test.The question in the two cases was when the Constitution limits officials’ ability to block users from their accounts. The answer turned on whether the officials’ use of the accounts amounted to “state action,” which is governed by the First Amendment, or private activity, which is not.That same question had seemed headed to the Supreme Court after the federal appeals court in New York ruled in 2019 that President Donald J. Trump’s Twitter account was a public forum from which he was powerless to exclude people based on their viewpoints.Had the account been private, the court said, Mr. Trump could have blocked whomever he wanted. But since he used the account as a government official, he was subject to the First Amendment.After Mr. Trump lost the 2020 election, the Supreme Court vacated the appeals court’s ruling as moot.Justice Elena Kagan said on Tuesday that Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed was in an important sense official and therefore subject to the First Amendment.“I don’t think a citizen would be able to really understand the Trump presidency, if you will, without any access to all the things that the president said on that account,” Justice Kagan said. “It was an important part of how he wielded his authority. And to cut a citizen off from that is to cut a citizen off from part of the way that government works.”Hashim M. Mooppan, a lawyer for two school board officials, said none of that implicated the First Amendment.“President Trump could have done the same thing from Mar-a-Lago or a campaign rally,” Mr. Mooppan said. “If he gave every one of those speeches at his personal residence, it wouldn’t somehow convert his residence into government property.”The cases argued Tuesday were the first of several this term in which the Supreme Court will consider how the First Amendment applies to social media companies. The court will hear arguments next year on both whether states may prohibit large social media companies from removing posts based on the views they express and whether Biden administration officials may contact social media platforms to combat what they say is misinformation.The first case argued Tuesday concerned the Facebook and Twitter accounts of two members of the Poway Unified School District in California, Michelle O’Connor-Ratcliff and T.J. Zane. They used the accounts, created during their campaigns, to communicate with their constituents about activities of the school board, invite them to public meetings, ask for comments on the board’s activities and discuss safety issues in the schools.Two parents, Christopher and Kimberly Garnier, frequently posted lengthy and repetitive critical comments, and the officials eventually blocked them. The parents sued, and lower courts ruled in their favor.“When state actors enter that virtual world and invoke their government status to create a forum for such expression, the First Amendment enters with them,” Judge Marsha S. Berzon wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco.Mr. Mooppan said the accounts were personal and were created and maintained without any involvement by the district.Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh pressed Mr. Mooppan on what it would take to make the accounts official and so subject to the First Amendment. “Is announcing rules state action?” the justice asked.Mr. Mooppan said it would be if the announcement was not available elsewhere. He gave a more equivocal answer to a question about notifications of school closures. But he said a general public safety reminder was not state action.Pamela S. Karlan, a lawyer for the parents, said Ms. O’Connor-Ratcliff’s Facebook feed was almost entirely official. “Of the hundreds of posts, I found only three that were truly non-job-related,” Ms. Karlan said, adding, “I defy anyone to look at that and think this wasn’t an official website.”The second case, Lindke v. Freed, No. 22-611, concerned a Facebook account maintained by James R. Freed, the city manager of Port Huron, Mich. He used it to comment on a variety of subjects, some personal and some official. Among the latter were descriptions of the city’s responses to the coronavirus pandemic.The posts prompted critical responses from a resident, Kevin Lindke, whom Mr. Freed eventually blocked. Mr. Lindke sued and lost. Judge Amul R. Thapar, writing for a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati, said Mr. Freed’s Facebook account was personal, meaning that the First Amendment had no role to play.“Freed did not operate his page to fulfill any actual or apparent duty of his office,” Judge Thapar wrote. “And he did not use his governmental authority to maintain it. Thus, he was acting in his personal capacity — and there was no state action.”Justice Kagan told Allon Kedem, a lawyer for Mr. Lindke, that Mr. Freed’s page did not look particularly official.“There are a lot of baby pictures and dog pictures and obviously personal stuff,” she said. “And intermingled with that there is, as you say, communication with constituents about important matters. But it’s hard to look at this page as a whole, unlike the one in the last case, and not think that surely this could not be the official communications channel.” More