So a few days ago, I was anchoring the CNN Mac show, State of the Race, basically

a politics show, and I was talking to CNN's senior data reporter Harry Enton about who Trump

might pick as his running mate. And Harry said this.

Betting markets and sort of measure the conventional wisdom and try and give you an understanding,

okay, where does it seem like the conventional wisdom is standing right now?

And what we see here is...

I have to admit, I've heard him talk about betting markets before, but this time I just, you know, I had to clarify.

And to be clear, in the slide from before,

those are like Randos betting on this, right?

Like, the market for betting on elections

is wild woolly and maybe meaningless?

It is Randos betting on it, but in fact,

one of the more interesting things I'll tell you, Audie,

is that in studies that have been done on polling versus the betting markets, oftentimes the betting markets beat the polling.

So that interaction got me thinking, how popular is election betting?

And what can we learn about the future of our elections from political prediction markets?

I'm Audie Cornish. This is the assignment. And joining me is Thomas Gruca.

He's a marketing professor at the University of Iowa's Trippy College of Business.

More importantly, he is the director of the Iowa Electronic Markets, which is an online futures market

that includes political betting.

Thomas Gruca, welcome to the assignment.

First, there are all kinds of what are known as predictive markets, right?

...