The FBI seized a cellphone and other electronic devices of betting site Polymarket’s CEO, Shayne Coplan, in a raid on his New York City apartment early Wednesday, according to a source familiar with the matter.
The company’s markets wagered correctly and controversially in Donald Trump’s favor in bets on who would win the presidential election, even though opinion polls showed a tight race.
Coplan, 26, was home when numerous agents entered his apartment Wednesday and he turned over his devices to authorities, the source said, adding that he has not been arrested or charged. The source said it is not clear whether Coplan or Polymarket are targets of an investigation.
Polymarket, which Coplan founded in 2020, has recently been the subject of intense debate and scrutiny over its creation of election betting markets. It brought in more than $3.6 billion from bets placed on the presidential election, including $1.5 billion on Trump and $1 billion on Vice President Kamala Harris, according to an NBC News analysis.
Speculation has swirled around the identities of major bettors who wagered on Trump and whether or not the odds and the existence of the markets could have had an effect on voters.
I haven’t seen any update since 2 weeks ago.
I made some comments on the volume traded on these propositions, but there are two bits here being speculated on:
somebody manipulated these markets (and most of the ones we see here are, if anything, underpricing Trump and Republican wins)
But if somebody should be investigated, how about the pollsters and predictors who were way off?
(note: I don’t think they should be investigated)
Failed Predictors: Two Types of Reactions
A lot of people were going over one odd Iowa poll result from Ann Selzer pre-election — and post-election it was obvious her results were poor. Probably a very bad sampling technique.
Two weeks after her firm incorrectly found Vice President Kamala Harris surging in increasingly red Iowa, pollster J. Ann Selzer said Sunday she is leaving election polling and ending her longstanding relationship with the Des Moines Register, which dates back to 1997.
“Over a year ago I advised the Register I would not renew when my 2024 contract expired with the latest election poll as I transition to other ventures and opportunities,” Selzer wrote in an op-ed for the newspaper.
The final Des Moines Register poll, released the Saturday before the election, found Harris (47 percent) and Donald Trump (44 percent) neck and neck, a shocking result in a state not considered competitive. According to unofficial results, Trump won Iowa by 13 points, 56 percent to 43 percent.
Going from +3 in favor of Harris in polling to +13 for Trump in actual results… that’s quite the “whiff”.
People were melting down before the election over that result (and it was a bipartisan meltdown), and people after the election were absolutely losing it.
My reaction:
I will not show who that was in reply to (you can find via search, if you really care). People had been pinning way too much credibility on one poll way out of whack with others.
So here is something interesting: look at the VOTE column. ALR = “Already voted”. “DEF” = “Definitely will vote” Check out the difference in proportions for the weighted sample for Harris vs. Trump.
Early voting differences for Trump voters were a thing in 2020, but in 2024, I believe the strategy differed. Just a thought. That might be one sign something is up here.
Enough on Selzer - she’s done with that stuff.
Then there was the admission, recently, that campaign pollsters for Harris knew she was behind the entire time.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ advisers whinged in an interview released Tuesday that they were “surprised” to see public polling showing her ahead of now-President-elect Donald Trump in September and October of the election — because internal campaign surveys were always showing her way behind.
“We were behind. I mean, I think it surprised people because there were these public polls that came out in late September, early October, showing us with leads that we never saw,” David Plouffe, Harris’ senior campaign adviser, revealed on “Pod Save America.”
Now it’s interesting - polling firms hired by media outlets vs hired by campaigns. Campaigns are going to want accurate and detailed info.
Media wants something that gathers eyeballs.
These aren’t the same thing. Media wants something that may look a lot more interesting than what the campaigns are seeing.
The Keys to a Loss
But finally, you’ve got the campaigns who seem to have had accurate polling, Selzer with a bad sample in Iowa, and now a predictor who will not admit he flubbed it.
Historian Allan Lichtman fumed during a heated discussion on Tuesday when he was confronted by “The Young Turks” host Cenk Uygur over botching his call on who would win the 2024 presidential election.
The exchange happened during a segment on “Piers Morgan Uncensored” when Uygur brought up Lichtman’s “13 Keys to the White House” projection that Vice President Kamala Harris would beat Donald Trump.
“Don’t blame the voters,” Uygur told Lichtman. “I think, look, we can get into this discussion, but one, I think you’re blaming the voters. I think that’s a terrible idea.”
“And look, I debated Professor Lichtman before,” he continued. “I told him his theories about the keys were absurd. I was right. He was wrong. I said he’d lose his keys, couldn’t find them before the election.”
Lichtman exploded: “No, you were not right and I was not wrong!”
Alan Lichtman has his “keys” to predict the election result, and he leaned heavily on those keys to get the result he wanted: Harris. Others pointed out that if he had other opinions in giving values to his “keys”, they would have predicted a Trump victory.
I’m not going to appeal to other’s authority here, but go to the keys I that are more subjective:
Foreign military/policy success: Lichtman claims this is true re: Ukraine
No scandal: Lichtman claims this is true
Uncharismatic challenger: Lichtman claims this is true
No social unrest: Lichtman claims this is true
For Lichtman’s prediction to flip, one doesn’t need 4 above to flip to false. It requires only 3.
I can argue that all four are false, but you can see how these are subjective.
It doesn’t matter whether I believe the four are true or false - I can easily find examples that make them true or false, depending on what result I want for the ending prediction. Other “key” items are objective, and don’t depend on making squishy arguments.
But the main problem is that Lichtman is taking his failure personally, and instead of considering where his model is weak. Or, perhaps, it just doesn’t work anymore.
This is the key video clip from Piers Morgan Uncensored (I cannot embed here, the way substack works — it would put the entire 1-hour show here.)
But going back to the main point: Alan Lichtman is finished if he cannot course-correct. He was wrong. Saying “I wasn’t wrong! The voters were wrong!” doesn’t fix the situation when his model was supposed to predict what the voters did.
So I’m going to dig into my own prior writing, because I am big on failure (not just talking the Museum of Failure here):
Look, I am willing to allow for mistakes — we are all human, after all. But when I come across people unwilling to admit to any mistakes, well, I am not going to trust them in the future. I’m not that foolish (or young) any more.
….
But now we have people trying to hide their screw-ups. When we remember they screwed up. It was not that long ago, dudes.
Given such behavior, why would we trust such people at all?
….
I am annoyed.
If these people just admitted they were wrong in the past, and will try not to make such mistakes in the future, that would go a long way in establishing future credibility.
That many people have decided to take the “nuh uh, I never wrote that” route has made it much easier for me to carve down who I will actually pay attention to.
So, “experts”?
If you wonder why people aren’t paying attention to your profound pronouncements after you have scrubbed your past?
[Wizard of Oz clip… really most sincerely dead]
You were the ones who decided your credibility was really most sincerely dead. Not me. Not others.
You did that.
I don’t want to hear any whining about what you did to yourselves.
Lichtman, by the way, also threw a snit fit, saying he was leaving X/Twitter for bluer skies … and then came back, deleting said tweet.
He doesn’t seem to have learned a damn thing. Yet.
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That's traditionally been the case. But it's been increasingly obvious that the mainstream media has been practicing "advocacy journalism", which is to say it's really biased. All the conservatives have completely walked away from the mainstream media because it's so biased.
And after the debacle of the polling for the elections, even the liberals are realizing that they are being lied to, and that they would have been better off if they had gotten the cold hard truth.
If they had gotten the cold hard truth, the wokesters in the democratic party might not have kept their stranglehold.
"Media wants something that gathers eyeballs."
That's traditionally been the case. But it's been increasingly obvious that the mainstream media has been practicing "advocacy journalism", which is to say it's really biased. All the conservatives have completely walked away from the mainstream media because it's so biased.
And after the debacle of the polling for the elections, even the liberals are realizing that they are being lied to, and that they would have been better off if they had gotten the cold hard truth.
If they had gotten the cold hard truth, the wokesters in the democratic party might not have kept their stranglehold.