Charlie Cook goes after Intrade

Here is a suggestion: if Cook really believes that he is a lot better at guessing political outcomes than Intrade, he has a chance of making a lot of money. From the National Journal:

. . . On that Monday, the Intraders saw Republicans as having a 74.9 percent chance of keeping their House majority. Democrats had a 29.8 percent chance of regaining the chamber. These predictions strain credibility a bit, as the odds add up to more to than 100 percent, but that’s another matter. On this one wager, the numbers are not too far off The Cook Political Report’s prediction that Republicans have a 75 percent chance of holding the House (and, yes, Democrats have a 25 percent chance of taking it). In the Senate, Intrade says that Republicans have a 56 percent chance of taking control (its phrase, not mine). Democrats have a 27.9 percent chance. My hunch is that the odds of neither side controlling the Senate are 100 percent. At The Cook Political Report, we see the Senate as purely a 50-50 proposition. But it’s the 58.8 percent chance of Obama winning that interests me today, because that prediction stands in stark contrast to what most pollsters, Democrats and Republicans alike, whom I talked with privately, believe. The number crunchers who conduct and analyze polls, and others who study these things closely, see a lot of metrics pointing to a very close contest that could go either way. They don’t see an election in which either Obama, or Mitt Romney, is likely to have an almost six-in-10 chance of winning. . . .