Who Will Win The Election? The Money Game Tell You!

Thiago Thaylor
2 min readOct 31, 2020

Election Polls Are Not The Best Way To Forecast The Result.

It is not unusual to see elections results showing a very different scenario than the one drowns by the election polls. This makes many people suspect manipulation in the statistics or fraud in the election process. After all, are these people well-grounded in thinking this way?

Election Polls

Some surveys, if not well conducted, can be biased due to bad procedure in data collection or even due to intentional manipulation, but if we disregard these hypotheses, what is important to know is that surprisingly or not, election polls are not made to find out the chances of a candidate winning or losing the election. The outcome of an election poll refers to the scenario at the moment it was conducted and do not incorporate probabilities associated with future events that may change the voters’ opinion. Also, the outcome doesn't consider that many mail-in ballots may not get counted, or that many voters don’t tell poll takers the truth.

The Experts On The Media

You may already be aware of the number of different interests taking place during an election. It can make people say things they don’t believe in. Even when a pundit expresses his true opinion, a considerable level of subjectivity will be present regardless of whether it is based on data, because subjective factors like quality of data, data interpretation, and missing data or information may mislead the expert.

Take a look at the pundit’s opinions from different sources and see how divergent they are.

The Money Game

The most reliable predictor comes from people who bet on politics. Tracking betting sites around the world can give you very good information about how convicted people are about future events since they bet their own money on it.

Over time betting has been a better predictor than polls, pundits, and statistical models. Bettors do better than other predictors because they consider things that others miss.

Even considering each bettor having their own individual biases, the general bias tends to vanish the more bettors are in the game and the more money is involved. The result is an average value that is a reflex of some kind of collective intelligence.

The Winner

Still, most media until rely on polls and pundits to predict election results. But now you know how to find alternative information with better quality.

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