There is no political wagering in Las Vegas casinos. Period. If he claims, identical to his article, that he checked Las Vegas sportsbooks for the odds on election day, then he is passing out bad info. I could use a stronger term.
Sheesh. I've gone over this so many times on DU. I like Lampley but if he keeps reporting the phony claim I'll shoot it down again. I would have called the show if I'd known he still didn't realize the betting angle info was garbage.
Kerry became a 2/1 (actually 1/2, for people who know gambling) favorite on Tradesports.com at about 5 PM eastern on election day. That is a man-to-man betting site so they can afford to leave the wagering open long after voting begins on election day.
Does Lampley really believe Las Vegas sportsbooks would leave the wagering open until exit polls came out? If so, that's scary ignorance. In his article on Huffington post, Lampley said he checked Las Vegas casinos and offshore wagering outfits at 5 PM on election day. Lampley is exactly right in one respect; places like that are not out to lose money. That's precisely why the offshore outfits close the wagering very early on election morning, long before any indication of the voting trends came out.
My friend Paul and I were among the overreactors who pushed Kerry to 1/2 favorite. That's all it was, a mad reaction to apparent advantage. No inside information. No sophistication. Just think of it as a larger scale version of a DUer who had seen the early exit polls calling a right wing friend who had not, and making a friendly small wager on the outcome.
Here's the relevant article from Slate, the day after the election:
http://www.slate.com/id/2109137"But in the afternoon of Election Day, when exit polls started to leak showing surprising strength for Kerry, the political futures traders freaked out and rushed to dump Bush and buy Kerry. By 4:30 p.m. ET, IEM's Kerry winner-takes-all contract had risen from below 50 in the morning to more than 70. The vote-share contracts on IEM also shifted in Kerry's favor. TradeSports' traders, who had shown Bush winning for the entire campaign, suddenly bid the Kerry election contract up to 67—meaning they thought he had a two-thirds chance at winning. By 5:44 p.m. ET, TradeSports gave Bush just a 39 percent chance of winning Ohio and a 43 percent chance at winning Florida. All on the basis of a few stray data points. Surely, as voracious consumers of all information relevant to political campaigns, these financially motivated investors should have known that exit polls can be unreliable. But instead they panicked."
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"The furious and seemingly irrational Election Day market action stands as evidence that the traders are more poll-followers than poll-beaters."