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This is just implausible. Nobody with a brain is going to throw away 4 million on the speculative hope that a prediction market price is going to magically manipulate media coverage on the election.




That's a lot of money for an individual, but if the (dark) money originates from a donor or PAC, it's just another campaign expense.

It's still a lot of money from a donor or PAC for this kind of change. I find it remarkably hard to believe that lines moving on Intrade would have a bigger impact than an equivalent amount of money spent on battleground state television ads.

Modern presidential campaigns are absolutely saturated with money, and everywhere they spend has diminishing returns. You might be able to spend $50-100M in ads and get some value from it, but a second or third $100M? By that point you've reached every possible voter many, many times and each successive ad can be zero or even negative value.

Given the immense sums of money, little to no accountability on how it's spent, and a finite list of traditional spending targets I expect campaigns have dabbled in all sorts of unusual approaches.


It's not much different than other forms of advertising.

Compared to typical total advertising expenditures during a presidential election, my guess is that $4M is close to a rounding error.


4 million is absolutely nothing for vested interests trying to steer a US presidential election.

People spend more money on sillier things on a regular basis.

Not sure why you’re downvoted. Not only are you obviously right, nobody cared about prediction markets in 2012



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