Comment Text:
I would like to know which candidates are or are not likely to win elections. Election outcomes have significant influence on where funding is directed in my field, which can make it hard to plan ahead both professionally and personally.
One option is of course to follow publicly-available polling data and try to guess who will win myself. This is time-consuming, and I'm not very good at interpreting the polling data.
A second option is to trust journalists or data scientists to interpret the polling data for me. Sometimes this works; 538 forecasts seemed reasonably reliable for a few years. However, it seems clear that 538 has experienced some sort of audience capture such that it is no longer focused on delivering accurate forecasts. More generally hard to tell which forecasters are honest, especially when that changes over time. In fact, the only reason I know I shouldn't trust 538 is because of how far its predictions have diverged from event contract prices.
Betting markets are much easier to interpret than raw polling data and much more resistant to ideological influences than forecasters. I have no interest in participating in betting markets myself, but the existence of large, liquid markets with publicly-viewable prices is very valuable to me.
