This is a guest post by Alex Keeney. Alex created Star Spangled Gamblers (RIP), the OG prediction markets podcast, and recently launched Eventual, news by prediction market traders for prediction market traders.
If James Talarico wins a Senate seat this November, it would be the ultimate breach of Republicans’ most impregnable fortress: Texas, the Lone Star State, where Democrats haven’t won statewide office since 1994.
But this story is boring.
Everyone already knows it, and no one has much to add. The only thing left between now and Election Day is to find out how real the caricatures of each of these candidates are: James Talarico, the optimistic girly-man running for Senate in America’s most macho state, versus Ken Paxton, who is so scandal-plagued that his own Republican colleagues in Austin impeached him.
Yawn. I’ll see you in November.
The markets have correctly sniffed out that this is a near-50/50 race. And I don’t like trading in markets where my only option to turn a profit is to be right. Better to get ahead of things and make some buys in races where the public hasn’t figured out that the winds are changing.
And in Texas, that place is along the border, all the way from the outskirts of El Paso to the Rio Grande Valley.
Traders would be wise to look at four congressional districts there that Texas Republicans gerrymandered hoping to flip or maintain control of — but where they may come up short. These are: