Tradesports Presidential futures market in the WSJ

A long write-up in the Wall Street Journal looks at Tradesports.com and its presidential elections futures market. We've been following this since January, and our contention that the futures market run there would be more accurate than polls has been borne out so far. The idea is that markets are more accurate than polls because they are measurements of what a large group of people believe is going to happen, rather than a measure of a small selected group of people want to happen. Precisely because anyone can participate (and therefore add their information to the market), and precisely because they can do so making a large amount of money if they are correct, it's been my hunch that this would give a more reliable and creditable sense of the trends in the election than watching the polls, which are plagued with methodological problems driven primarily by technology which interferes with the ability to get a truly random sample of the population.

And where is the market at today? The "Bush reelected" contract is trading at $71, only $4 below its all-time high after the capture of Saddam.

UPDATE: Vodkapundit has the roundup of the polls and the electoral markets. It's not quite "Party like it's 1984" but we're getting there.....