🔮Garbagegate is Fake
Garbagegate is Real
🔮 Welcome back to The Oracle by Polymarket, where we bring you the news through the lens of prediction markets. As we approach the election, we’re going to be sending a few more emails than usual.
With five days left, Donald Trump leads Kamala Harris in the general election odds 67% - 33%. In the final week, comments from surrogates have sucked media attention away from the candidates’ closing arguments, but are they actually impacting the odds?
Garbagegate 1.0
At Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.”
Outrage kicked in. Pundits claimed that the comments would cost Trump the election. And members of the Latino community organized protests in Allentown, PA, home to over 34,000 Puerto Ricans in the most likely tipping point state (🔮31% odds for PA to be the tipping point state).
At the core of the matter is the Puerto Rican population, which is larger than the 2020 margin of victory in five of the seven swing states.
Given how close the polls are, it does seem plausible that the comments could affect the race. For example, 5% of the Puerto Rican population in Pennsylvania is more than Biden’s margin of victory in 2020.
Throughout the election, we have seen Polymarket odds respond immediately to breaking news. For example, Trump’s odds moved by three points during the debate with Harris. And Harris declined about five points following her economic policy speech in August.
But this episode seems to have been a non-event, with no obvious movement in the general election odds or the key swing states.
Garbagegate 2.0
Joe Biden, speaking in comments released on the same day as Kamala Harris’ closing speech in DC, hit back: “the only garbage I see floating out there is [Trump] supporters…” The full quote, which some Biden supporters argued was misheard or taken out of context, is here:
Trump supporters seized on the comments, comparing it to Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” remark from 2016.
Google Trends data for the search terms “Biden” and “Tony Hinchcliffe” gives a sense of the scale of the reaction: an initial spike of searches for Tony, followed by an even larger spike for Biden - far above his baseline.
But in Polymarket odds, again, the episode does not stand out as significant. Trump has continued to inch up, but with no visible spike connected to the Biden remark.
It’s Not Over Yet
There may be time for another round of public polling to capture the impact of this news cycle. But for the moment, as much as some might be hoping for an October game changer, the Polymarket odds – which have shown to be a rapid-reaction indicator for election sentiment – are saying this isn’t it.
Did you really think they would let you off the ride early?
Disclaimer
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What Biden forgot is the Puerto Ricans that are in America because they left because they know what it is, otherwise they would have stayed there
Great insight. I really had expected EITHER of the Garbategate comments to move the odds markets at least a little bit.