By comparison with real-world financial markets, prediction markets have lately grown quite boring. As was the case yesterday, the changes in the 2008.PRES.McCAIN Intrade contract (down .9 at 51.6) and 2008.PRES.OBAMA (up .4 at 47.2) Intrade contract are very marginal. There is also very little movement in the state-by-state contracts, so based upon my (somewhat arbitrary) cutoff price point of 55 for allocating Electoral College votes, it still appears that Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain are virtually tied (with 264 and 265 Electoral College votes respectively), with only Colorado (and its 9 Electoral College votes) “undecided”.
Similarly, Nate Silver’s PECOTA model (see FiveThirtyEight) shows little change from yesterday, allocating 280 (instead of 281) Electoral College votes to Mr. McCain and 259 (instead of 258) electoral College votes to Mr. Obama.