Traditional polls currently give former Vice President Joe Biden a double-digit lead over the rest of the 2020 Democratic field, and he hasn’t even declared his candidacy yet. However, armchair analysts willing to put their money where their mouth is believe that Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) has the best chance of winning the 2020 Democratic primary.
Two websites that look at election voting odds have Sanders leading Biden by several points after the former vice president endured a tough week of negative reporting.
The bigger they come, the harder they fall
PredictIt, a virtual marketplace where participants purchase “shares” representing their prediction on certain events, is selling a Sanders primary victory at 24 cents per share, versus just 16 cents per unit for Biden. Winning shares pay out at $1 apiece, making the price of each share correspond approximately to the likelihood of an event occurring.
Meanwhile, electionbettingodds.com, which combines PredictIt’s conclusions with a complex gambling formula, gives Sanders a 21.9 percent chance of winning the Democratic primary, compared to just 12.9 percent for Biden. The former Delaware Senator suffered a 7 point plunge after a week of negative publicity.
Bad press
On Friday, Lucy Flores, Nevada’s Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor in 2014, published an op-ed revealing how Biden made her feel uncomfortable at a campaign event, smelling her hair and kissing her on the back of her head.
“He proceeded to plant a big slow kiss on the back of my head,” Flores wrote. “My brain couldn’t process what was happening. I was embarrassed. I was shocked. I was confused.”
In addition, Biden reawakened feelings of resentment among women voters at a Tuesday night event when he referenced his handling of the 1991 Anita Hill hearings. As the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time, Biden has been widely criticized by progressives for how he allowed the panel to question Ms. Hill’s allegations of sexual misconduct aimed at Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
“[Hill] was abused in the hearing. She was taken advantage of. Her reputation was attacked. I wish I could have done something,” Biden told an audience at the Biden Courage Awards this week.
Of course, if Thomas’s accuser was mistreated, no one shared the burden more for this injustice than the head of the committee, Biden himself. He went on to point the finger at “a bunch of white guys” who sat on the committee, an absurd irony that captured the attention of progressive and conservative critics alike.
Who to trust?
As a result, Biden has taken a hit in online gambling polls, and a self-described socialist appears primed to lead the Democratic Party in 2020. But should the oddsmakers be trusted?
A 2008 study published in Public Opinion Quarterly concluded that “debiased prediction market-based forecasts provide more accurate probabilities of victory and more information than debiased poll-based forecasts.” In other words, don’t trust the traditional polls, and certainly don’t put any stock in political pundits who promise a “lock” in any given election.
Who can forget the 2016 presidential election, when a conglomerate of respected polls were wildly wrong? State-level polling vastly underestimated Trump’s support in key battleground states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
Looking ahead, electionbettingodds.com sees Trump as the clear favorite to win in 2020, with a 40 percent chance of remaining in the White House. His next closest contender, Sanders, only has a 13 percent chance of defeating Trump.
For the moment, Biden has just a 6 percent chance of sitting in the Oval Office, with odds inching ever closer to those of Pete Buttigieg, a virtually unknown small town mayor from Indiana.
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