I’m sorry, I was loose with my words there. I am thinking of non-partisan political reporters rather than partisan commentators. Those who make a living off telling the world what’s happening rather than those who are aiming to persuade others.

With regards to your second point, I find it unsurprising that many commentators are correct in their predictions. They’re predicting a binary variable with information that gives them a far better than 50% chance of being right. I’d expect them to get it right most of the time with those odds. However, whether they are right or not, I think they have an incentive to TALK about the election as though it’s a close race.

The kinds of people who are political reporters are self-selected to enjoy commenting on the race as if it’s a game , simply because talking about politics day in-day out requires them to do just that.

There is a stat doing the rounds lately that ~80% of the coverage of minor parties around the time of the last election was not to do with their policies, but the ‘game’ of possible coalition partners. Really quite a deplorable situation.

I got the 2005 election right and Centrebet did not. In an earlier series on the blog, predicting the election date, the market was right. Colin James boasts that he has correctly predicted every election result (bar one).

it was interesting to look at the development of the Obama/McCain stocks on iPredict in that respect, though. They consistently favoured Obama far more than InTrade’s prices for the first month of trading. Perhaps this can, in part, be explained by the more politically liberal stance of NZers?

I don’t know anything about financial markets, so is this a common phenomenon — for people to be influenced in their predictions by their preferences?