If Biden is nominee his odds of victory are 76%

[Awsi Dooger]

35. That's a brutal interpretation of the numbers

Sorry, it doesn't work that way. You can't merely multiply numbers from different markets, ones that are not absolutely working in concert.

A similar example would be late in the NFL playoffs and a team that let's say has a 25% theoretical chance at winning the AFC Championship Game, and 19% chance of winning the Super Bowl. Then that 25% team pulls the upset and wins the AFC title game. You don't merely multiply the 19% by 4 and proclaim they have a 76% likelihood of winning the Super Bowl. It depends on the other market, the NFC Championship Game and who comes out of there. Both games and how they unfold will determine perception and odds, just like the separate political campaigns and conventions of both parties.

We will never be 76% likely against Donald Trump. Incumbents receive enormous benefit of a doubt. That's why perception here differs so strongly from the betting markets. Even when posters here were proclaiming that Trump had no chance in 2020 he was still trading at reasonable numbers in the markets, and the GOP as a whole was only a minor underdog toward 2020.

It is difficult for me to tell how Biden will fare during the primary season. But I am not going overboard on the chances of someone who has attempted this multiple times previously and never been a serious contender down the stretch. That signals vulnerability. And vulnerability doesn't decrease once a candidate reaches that age.

Biden will have to dominate the debates and the polling to become nominee. I think the 25% is overstated toward his true odds. In a huge field the last thing a sharp gambler does is take the lukewarm marginal favorite. The Kentucky Derby had a 20 year stretch of the favorite losing, from 1980-1999. The common denominator during that period was that the great odds-on favored horses like Seattle Slew and Spectacular Bid were no longer showing up, and instead the oddsmaker was forced to make somebody the favorite among a 20-horse field of mush. The mush favorite would typically be in the 3/1 or 4/1 range and none of them got there.