” Just the fact that both camps are saying it’s tight “
Neither camp would EVER say “yeah, we’re winning big”, that would just be foolish because it would probably result in people not turning out to vote for them.
Yes, but the data in the polls should be enough to make these people more cautious.
Look, on the afternoon of election day in 2004, the crappy exit polls came out and Intrade went to 90-10 Kerry victory. Meanwhile, coming back from last minute efforts for Bush in Iowa, I heard Sean Hannity talking about the exit poll results on the radio and said “Never in a million years.” I could tell Kerry was going to lose because of where he and Bush had been stumping the last two weeks of the campaign. I’m not an “insider,” I just knew that if Kerry and Bush were fighting over states Bush lost in 2000, that meant that Kerry was losing. But the guys at Intrade figured that if it came over the AP wire it was gospel. They didn’t have sense enough to do what I had done, much less be enough of an “insider” to be able to call some Dem and/or GOP bigwigs in swing states and say, “How’s turnout looking?”
When Intrade “predicts” something the media has already said is likely, it gets trumpeted in the media as a prescient market. When it fails to predict something, it doesn’t get a mention. That’s why it’s given credibility it doesn’t deserve.