Playing PredictIt, Day 534: Liz Cheney Is Toast

But the generic ballot is fire emoji!

Playing PredictIt is a paid feature where I chronicle my voyage to turn $10 into $1000 on the political betting markets.

De Civitate has picked up a couple of new paid subscribers (thank you!), so, in commemoration, here’s a new installment of Playing PredictIt!

I think I finally got the hang of PredictIt. 534 days ago, I started out with $10. I immediately went into the hole. After almost two years, I finally clawed my way back up to $10.

Today, just 90 days later, I’m over $15:

I’m up 50% since my last entry in this series. That’s a 362% annualized rate of return! Take that, The Stock Market!

If I keep this up, I’ll have $35 by the end of the year, $120 by the end of 2023, and $1500 by the end of 2025. And then I can buy a computer! (I probably will not keep this up, but man it does feel nice!)

How’d I do it?

Mostly it was the generic ballot, where I’m pretty reliably making money. I’ll divulge all my secrets at the end… after the paywall hits. Let’s quickly survey my other outstanding bets:

WY-AL ‘22: Cheney or Trump Challenger?

Wyoming has a single House of Reps seat, currently held by Liz Cheney. Cheney is being primaried by a pro-Trump Republican whose name escapes me. (Harriet Hageman, I looked it up.)

The bet here is “who wins the general election?” I bought “Not Cheney” at 84%.

I think Liz Cheney is screwed. Fairly or unfairly, she’s now seen as a centrist Republican and strong anti-Trump figurehead in a state that went Trump+40 in the 2020 election. The Wyoming Republican Party Central Committee formally censured her for her (very good) votes to impeach Trump. Then, in November, they passed a resolution (31-29) to expel her from the Wyoming Republican Party.

This is basically what happened to Lisa Murkowski in Alaska in 2010. Murkowski responded by running as an independent and winning (amazingly!) a write-in campaign for Senate. But Alaska is a much closer state (Trump+10) with a fierce centrist/independent movement. Murkowski won (barely) by “stealing” a little less than half the Obama votes and a little less than half the McCain votes, leaving her with 40% of the total vote. The Republican got 35% and the Democrat 25%, so Murkowski wins.

If Cheney tries the same Hail Mary pass… and miraculously succeeds at it… she ends up with 39% of the vote, but her challenger still has 42% and wins. Cheney can only win by winning a large share (more than half) of the 2020 Trump vote or by consolidating the entire Democrat vote behind her. The Trump vote hates her—I think she’d be lucky to get a third of them, much less almost half—and she isn’t progressive enough for the blue rump in Wyoming. So I think she’s toast.

I’ve held this for months. I’m thinking about buying more shares, since they seem low. But I’m worried that I don’t fully understand the Wyoming political landscape.

Next Speaker of the House?

This one’s simple enough. Who will be the first elected Speaker of the House in the 118th Congress? There are 16 options, and you can buy “Yes” or “No” for any of them. But I took the coward’s way here.