I wrote a politics article about Joe Biden's chance of renomination for Manifold's newsletter, Above the Fold, published yesterday. If you enjoyed my old politics coverage (including a 2020 post on this very subject), or if you're curious about the topic, please check it out! Below is just a teaser for the post.
Hello and welcome to this experimental first edition of Above The Fold: Manifold Politics! (Well, first since the midterms, anyway.) As of late, Manifold’s politics arm has been building itself into a premier platform for viewing electoral probabilities. In this newsletter, we seek to supplement that with analysis, contextualizing a current news event with markets along with commentary from Manifold’s best traders. Right now, it’s unclear what the future format or frequency will be, so comments are extremely appreciated.
I’m Jacob Cohen, known as Conflux on Manifold, where I’ve had many roles (including site moderator, mana grantmaker, and cohost of the erstwhile Market Manipulation Podcast). A longtime avid political forecasting junkie, I ranked #3 in Manifold’s 2022 midterms prediction tournament. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t consider myself in the very top tier of political intuitions on Manifold: I’m currently ranked #18 in the politics category and #57 overall.
With the intro out of the way, let’s get right into today’s topic!
What Happened?
Just two weeks ago, a highly liquid Manifold market assigned Biden a 96% chance of being renominated in 2024. This makes sense, given that he faces token opposition and won the New Hampshire primary in a landslide despite not appearing on the ballot.
However, on Thursday, February 8th, a recent special counsel report characterized Biden’s memory as “hazy” and “poor,” and said he’d try to come across as “a well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.” In a press conference given by Biden to dispel this image, he conflated Egypt with Mexico. In general, many voters worry about Biden’s age: a recent NBC poll found that his “age and fitness top the list of voters’ concerns,” with 76% worried about his age, while an ABC poll had 86% saying he was too old.
In the days after the report, the market dropped to 93% and then 90%.
Amid other discourse, on Friday the 16th, Ezra Klein published a New York Times editorial titled “Democrats Have A Better Option Than Biden.” In it, Klein argues that while he thinks Biden has been a “good president,” and is still “sharp in meetings,” he nevertheless is “faltering in his campaign” as a result of his aging. Klein advocates that Biden step down and let delegates at the convention decide who would win — with the reasoning being that Biden is losing, “behind in most polls,” and “there is a ton of talent in the Democratic Party right now.”
Yesterday morning, FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver wrote a blog post backing up this view, saying that he felt Biden dropped from a 65-35 favorite to “probably the underdog.” He also states that “if the past couple of weeks are any evidence, [a convention switch] might nevertheless be Democrats’ best option for beating Trump,” though he isn’t definitive on the question of whether a switch would improve the Democrats’ chances.
The market now gives Biden an 89% chance (up from a brief low of 86% after the Klein article). And indeed, bettors don’t think that Biden will lose in the primaries to a declared candidate like former gelato executive Rep. Dean Phillips (his chance is under 1%). Rather, they think that Klein’s Biden-stepping-aside scenario is the most likely, and just maybe Biden will be replaced by a candidate who’s not currently running: perhaps Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, Michelle Obama, or Kamala Harris.
What Does Manifold Think?
So why does Manifold assign credence to this theory? Isn’t Ezra Klein just some reporter? Not according to superforecasters.
PS: I know I haven't done The Conflux for 2023; that's because it didn't feel like the time investment was worth it, especially since I'm writing so few posts a year now. Let me know if you particularly liked that series of posts!