For thsoe of us who just can't stop searching for data (and who, like me, can't participate in GOTV efforts), here is something else to slake the addiction and discuss.
The Iowa Electronic Markets (found here ) are an electronic marketplace that pay out cash based on the outcome of elections.
Basically, it allows you to speculate on the outcome of the elections and predict who you think the winner is going to be. In the past is has turned out to be pretty accurate. Current Stock Quotes and overview below the fold:
The data is pretty bad, but not without hope.
Based on the prices data for the generic control of congress, the markets predict a democratic senate and a republican house (big surprise).
This trend is pretty constant across exchanges; Traders in house commodities are looking to collect a 6 cent profit margin if they take the house, (price quotes here ). The house commodities market is much more volatile than the senate.
As the month of October went on, the yield on senate securities dropped, indicating increasing investor confidence that the democrats will hold the senate, and indicating that investors seem rather optimistic of the democratic brand in the senate.
Both exchanges continued their perfect run of failing to provide dividends or profits to their shareholders. Read all prospectuses carefully before buying. Past performance is not an indicator of furture events, (hopefully not for the house at least).
So there are neither surprises nor optimism there. However, it should be noted that because of the wall to wall negative news being pushed by certain news outlets, which may have a vested interest int he outcome of these trading events, this may constitute a pump-and-dump scheme in the works. The SEC has declined to confirm that an investigation is ongoing. </snark>
Dive into the data, I would love some analysis!