- Wired – BLASEY FORD–KAVANAUGH TESTIMONY TELLS A TALE OF TWO INTERNETS
AMERICA WATCHED CHRISTINE Blasey Ford and Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh testify before Congress today. The country listened as they relayed their accounts of what happened 35 years ago, when she says he sexually assaulted her at a house party, and he says neither the party nor the assault occurred. But while viewers may have watched the same hearing, they did not interpret it through a neutral conduit. . … These stances are wildly, maybe disastrously, different. Each side casts the other as inappropriate and lionizes their own entrants into the fray. And as these narratives grow, change, and refract their way across the internet—being discussed and rehashed by people in their own corners of the political spectrum as they go—the gap between them is likely to widen. Partisan narrative has come to trump attempted objectivity. It’s hard to imagine a scenario where that’s less appropriate than when trying to determine whether a man is fit to be an objective arbiter of truth and justice for an entire nation. - Bloomberg – Kavanaugh Nears Key Committee Vote While Republicans Race Toward Approval
Nominee may be confirmed to high court by early next week
Kavanaugh denies Ford’s claim he sexually assaulted herSenate Republicans are pushing to confirm Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh early next week in a show of partisan power after his angry denial of sexual assault allegations in a hearing that devolved into a shouting match with Democrats. The Senate Judiciary Committee plans to vote Friday morning, and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the full Senate will vote “in the coming days” — although some key Republicans haven’t said whether they will provide the support needed to confirm President Donald Trump’s second high court nominee.
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The chart above shows the betting on whether or not that Kavanaugh would get less than 49 votes, resulting in a failed nomination. Yesterday after Blasey Ford was done testifying, this contract traded as high as 68% (32% he passes). After Kavanaugh was done it slumped as low as 8% and is currently around 25% (75% he passes). With volume for this market over 600,000 contracts traded yesterday, it was one of the highest ever seen on predictit.com
We have argued that this is more than one interesting Washington episode but an event that can turn the midterm election one way or the other. Voters will get a chance in about five weeks to tell Washington what they thought of this process.
Betting on this can be seen in the chart below. While the probabilities of the House and Senate did not move much, volumes did spike to new records for these contracts. We take this as an indication that the Senate hearing yesterday will matter in early November.
As always, we view the betting markets as an aggregation of consensus opinion into one probability and not an insight into the future. They also react far faster to incoming news.
The Wired story above highlights the polarized politics and how many people “silo” themselves in their own echo chamber, or two internets as Wired termed it. So for the vast majority of the public, the drama yesterday did not change their opinion. The election will turn on a small percentage of voters that can be influenced and how they view the Kavanaugh hearings.
As we highlighted last month, political polarization can be mathematically measured in voting patterns and we are seeing the most polarization since the Civil War. (click here for an explanation of the chart below). So the political polarization in the U.S. is real, significant and has been unfolding for over 40 years. While it may peak in intensity in the coming years, don’t expect it to go away for decades.
