Biden Gives PredictIt Zero Chance of SurvivalUsers of the crowdsourced prediction site say Joe Biden has a 20 percent chance of being reelected in 2024. Now federal regulators are trying to put the site out of business.
By Jeffrey H. Anderson
August 16, 2022
These days, the website PredictIt is about the only place to go for unfiltered opinions of everyday Americans speculating on the future of U.S. politics. PredictIt users have registered their collective opinion that Joe Biden has only a 20 percent chance of being reelected in 2024—a staggeringly low number for a president who’s barely a year and a half into his term.
Naturally, the Biden Administration wants to shut it down.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), headed by Biden appointee Rostin Behnam, has decreed that PredictIt must cease operations by February 15, 2023. The reason is unclear. The CFTC’s Division of Market Oversight (DMO) explains PredictIt “has not operated its market in compliance with the terms of the letter” that authorized its operation. As a result, the DMO has withdrawn its authorization. And that’s it. That’s all the agency thinks Americans need to know.
For its part, PredictIt “maintains that all open markets are within the terms of the . . . letter.”
PredictIt lets everyone see what everyday Americans, rather than just “experts,” think about future political events, without filtering those opinions through potentially biased pollsters. This makes the site a valuable resource.
For example, when Nate Silver asserts that Donald Bolduc is the likely Republican senatorial nominee in New Hampshire and bases both his state and national forecasts on that claim, it’s helpful to see that the collective opinion registered on PredictIt is that that nomination is very much up for grabs and is actually more likely to be won by Chuck Morse. It’s similarly useful to see that the collective prediction on PredictIt is that Liz Cheney had just a three percent chance of winning Tuesday’s Republican primary for the Wyoming House seat. And it’s perhaps especially informative to see that Americans think Ron DeSantis (29 percent) and Donald Trump (25 percent) are each more likely than Joe Biden (20 percent) to win the 2024 presidential election.
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Source:
https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/16/biden-gives-predictit-zero-chance-of-survival/
