I've been following the bidding on the Mayor's race on the Iowa Electronic Markets ( click on IEM current quotes), as well as using the yard sign indicator. There's not a lot of trading on the market, although in the last few days, trading has picked up. As of noon on May 8th, Nutter's price is 43.5, Knox is 30, Fattah is 15, and Evans and Brady are at around a penny in the winner-take-all market. Things are closer in the vote share market, but there hasn't been any trading there in days, so I think it's out of date.
In a two block radius from my house in West Philly, there are signs supporting every major candidate. On my block, as of this morning, there are four Nutter signs, and one Evans sign. Around the corner are Knox and Fattah signs. A neighbor told me there's a Brady sign nearby, but I haven't seen it myself. Last week there were only two Nutter signs, although all the rest of the signs were out there already. Some Knox folks must have been going around posting signs in public spaces, but those have been removed. There's a Fattah sign stapled to a telephone pole at the corner, which I hear is illegal. But in my experience, Fattah was a little loose with the separation of officialdom and election campaign staff rules (I've helped him watch returns on election nights back before the internet made such things so easy). I don't think he reports such in-kind donations.
My sense is that the IEM is overstating the Nutter surge. I suspect Nutter is being hurt by the racial profiling issue. On the other hand, he is also probably being helped by the anti-Knox coalescing. Historically, polls and the IEM get closer and closer to predicting the actual vote the closer we get to the election. But I wonder if the relatively small amount of trading on the IEM exagerates the movement in the general public.
Personally, I'm happy about the Nutter surge. I've been on his bandwagon ever since the anti-smoking legislation was passed. As far as I'm concerned, that did more to improve quality of life in this city than just about any other legislation. Health improvements for people working and making it safe for nonsmokers to go to bars and jazz joints all in one piece of legislation! I'm no longer forced to go to concert halls to hear live music! I can take my kids. I can actually go out and play my horn without worrying about whether I'll be able to breathe!
I think this symbolizes Nutter's approach. Do things because we know they work, and make concrete improvements in our lives. I suspect that he'll use science in making his decisions, rather than being swayed by politics. And I trust he really means it when he says he'll do things for the right reasons, and not because he's giving favors to political "friends."
As a trader on the IEM
As a trader on the IEM mayoral prediction market, I've been quite disappointed with the system. I think it needs more traders and smarter ones. Everyone can have differences of opinions about who is likely to win or get what percentage of the vote, but the small number of participants in the market leads to what I assume are just a few bad traders dominating the market with irrational transactions. The Vote Share market in particular is rife with traders who don't understand the way the market works: for every share you have in a given candidate, you will earn a fraction of a dollar equal to the portion of the vote that candidate wins. If, say, you own two shares of Brady, and Brady wins 31 percent of the vote, you will receive 31 x 2 or 62 cents. This means, of course, that you should never spend more on a share (in cents) than you expect the candidate to win (in percentage points). With a five-person election as close as this one, it is unlikely anyone will get over 40 percent of the vote, but in the Vote Share market, the lowest asking price on three of the candidates is over forty cents: Knox is at 0.44, Nutter 0.47, and Fattah a whopping 0.95. No one in their right mind would think anyone is going to get a share of the vote that high, and that's why no one can afford to buy shares in the market and no shares are moving. But apparently someone does think that way: the last price for Fattah was 0.925--which means the owner cannot make money on that share unless Fattah wins over 92.5 percent of the vote. Maybe if this were the USSR...
Futures Markets
I suspect that there's a lot of national attention (due to the murder rate specifically, and the challenges urban areas have faced generally), which I think may skew such a local and regional event.