On this blog I review things. I review music. I review cocktails I’m developing, and today I’m going to review yesterday’s republican debates. For those here for the cocktails, don’t worry my next set of tasting notes will go up later today, this post won’t doesn’t replace my usual series.
Cocktails are subjective, I might like a drink with a more bitter note while someone else might prefer it to play down the bitter and use more sourness to provide punch. For a primary, the goal of the candidates is to win and winning provides an objective measure. So instead of rating the candidates on their overall goodness (or badness as the case may be) I’ll go over what the debates made me think about their chances to win.
As you probably can tell, I’m a big believer in rigor and precision as well as thorough documentation. For elections, the prediction markets give a sense of where a candidate is at any moment and how that changes over time. I’m going to cash out my intuitions into a buy or sell order at the current stated price from Predictwise. Then at the end of the election, we will objectively know if I had a clue.
All quotes will be from the time a post was written, if it gets published a bit later they may be dated. Buy / sell and sizing is based on my gut without any deliberative number crunching. With those preliminaries out of the way, let’s get to content:
Bush was enh. His closing statement was quite weak and a few answers were fumbling even if he did have a few good moments. I feel like other people were better at this than him. He has raised a lot of money and gotten a lot of endorsements though.
Sell 100 @ $0.407
Rubio is surprisingly well spoken. He was by far the best at the basic task of just talking and sounding clear, crisp, and not rambling. He had by far the most “presidential” demeanor. I feel like he is a very likely pick for the primary. He cut very far to the right on abortion here giving an answer that says he opposes life of the mother exceptions (though he has proposed and advocated for them previously). That could hurt in the general, but he said it in a way that would be hard to quote.
“Well, Megyn, first of all, I'm not sure that's a correct assessment of my record, I have never said that, and I have never advocated that. What I have advocated is that we pass a law in this country that says all human life, at every stage of its development, is worthy of protection. And in fact I think that law already exists. It's called the Constitution of the United States."
His quote never uses the word "exception", or the phrase “medical necessity”, or “life of the mother”. This would make it difficult to quote in an attack ad. This, to me, shows that he is very careful and good at the basic task of phrasing and can make things easy to quote for sound bytes or make things hard to quote for doublespeak.
Buy 300 @ $0.101
Ted Cruz just looks too smug. No chance, people who see his face are just going to want to punch him.
Sell 200 @ $0.028
Walker looked and sounded surprisingly out of his depth. He really just didn’t seem presidential. Some coverage (inc the Times) seems to think he did well, but seeing this debate I’m sure he won’t make it. If America wasn’t making it very difficult for its citizens to use prediction markets I would put real money on a bet against him.
Sell 200 @ $0.167
Carson isn’t happening, no need for much detail.
Sell 500 @ $0.021
Same with Huckabee, but he sounds more off putting and extreme.
Sell 200 @ $0.034
Rand Paul isn’t going to make it either, too many of his positions are out of alignment with the republican mainstream. What I wanted to see was if he was going to walk back his positions or try to stick with them and get a few delegates to horse trade with. He seems to be walking back from many of his positions and that’s not going to work.
Sell 100 @ $0.043
Christie seemed surprisingly capable to me. He was the only candidate able to talk numerically and precisely about any issue. I don’t think his numbers are actually correct, but he demonstrated an ability to at least engage with substance.
Buy 100 @ $0.029
Kasich seemed and sounded like a surprisingly decent human and seemed less “phony” than the rest. That said, he didn’t focus on his record as governor and kept forcing questions in odd directions to speak about his time in Washington during the Clinton administration (when the budget was balanced). Obliquely reminding people how great the Clinton years were is a not a good strategy for republicans.
Buy 100 @ $0.049
Trump didn’t seem great to me, but he also didn’t seem apologetic or to be changing his core strategy / persona. People who like him will probably continue to like him. That said I don’t see him as playing well in Iowa or New Hampshire so the wind may go out of his sails after those two primaries.
No trade, I don’t feel I understand this one well enough.