Intrade’s assessment

Intrade, whose Irish CEO John Delaney recently died on the North Face of Mt. Everest, is always the best place to look for this sort of coming news question: who will be the Republican nominee?

If you’re not familiar with the website, its predictions are based simply on who is willing to buy “shares” in certain events occurring. It’s a stock market for news events, basically. If you paid $14 per share to say that bin Laden would be killed before December 31 of this year, you’d now have $100 for each of those shares, and if bin Laden had survived the year you would have lost all your money.

Anyway, here’s what they say about the Republican nominee in 2012 (I’m killing time waiting for the rain to stop in Venice).

It’s too early for this to be very accurate, but the Intrade clientele is more knowledgeable than the average poll respondent, so it’s worth keeping an eye on these.

Romney, 29.8
Pawlenty, 19.2
Huntsman, 15.0
Palin, 7.4
Rick Perry, 5.5
Bachmann, 5.5
Cain, 4.8
Chris Christie, 3.1
Giuliani, 2.0
Ron Paul, 2.0
Gingrich, 1.8

Everyone else is below 1.0.

Big loser here: Gingrich. Though Bobby Jindal at 0.3 is perhaps in an even more humiliating position with these prices.

I don’t think Romney can beat Obama, but at least Romney wouldn’t utterly embarrass the Republican Party, unlike some of the other names on this list. (However, a Romney nomination could well lead to a third-party run by a Pat Buchanan-style caveman, perhaps Rick Santorum himself.)

Incidentally, Barack Obama as the winner of the 2012 election is at 61.3. I’d put it at more like 85.0. If I were a betting man, I’d buy some Obama shares on Intrade. I just can’t picture him losing at this point.

The grimmest price is surely Joe Biden winning the 2012 election at 0.8, which is essentially the same thing as betting on an assassination. Then again, I suppose 0.8% probably *is* roughly the chance of a Presidential assassination, viewed in historical terms. In fact, it may even be slightly higher than that…

We’ve had Presidents since George Washington in 1789, or 222 years. During those 222 years, we’ve had 4 Presidents assassinated: Lincoln (1865), Garfield (1881), McKinley (1901), Kennedy (1963), or one assassination every 55.5 years. Worked out over the 17 months to the election, it’s around a 2.5% chance, historically. There’s also the chance of natural death (W.H. Harrison, Taylor, Harding, Franklin D. Roosevelt). But Obama is young and healthy. Or resignation (Nixon), but Obama doesn’t seem to be in the Nixonian category of rampant criminal/paranoid behavior.

Is this a more dangerous period for the safety of U.S. Presidents (U.S. especially hated by certain groups right now)? Or less dangerous (unprecedented levels of security)?

In either case, it would make me sick to buy shares in Biden winning the election. Shame on those investors.