First Reading is a daily newsletter keeping you posted on the travails of Canadian politicos, all curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here . Today is the U.
S. presidential election. It is likely to rank as one of the most-covered news events in history, and one of the few times when most of the world’s newspapers can reliably be expected to put the same story on their front page.
With all that said, here is our hubristic attempt to tell you things about the election that you may not have already known. Polls are cartoonishly close, but the prediction markets have it for Trump It’s famously difficult to accurately poll an election involving Republican nominee Donald Trump, since his supporters are disproportionately composed of Americans who wouldn’t otherwise vote. You’re not modelling a conventional voter cohort; you have to account for tens of thousands of potential wild cards.
The poll analyst FiveThirtyEight — generally the most trusted source on this subject — delivered this incredibly unsatisfying forecast on the morning of election day: In 100 simulated elections, Democratic candidate Kamala Harris would win 50 of them, Trump would win 49, and one would be a tie. The betting markets are much more unequivocal: Most gamblers are putting their money behind a Trump win. According to the prediction market Polymarket, Trump is favoured 62 per cent to Harris’s 38 per cent.
But this is .
