J.D. Vance won the Republican nominee straw poll this week at CPAC…and the markets shrugged:
In fact, if Vance’s win (53% to Marco Rubio’s 35%) did anything, it sent his market down a little this week. For the sake of relevancy, Vance also won the 2025 straw poll — but with 61% of the vote. So he’s technically down, year over year. But following that logic, we should see second-place finisher Marco Rubio have a bit of a jump up on Kalshi — and he didn’t. More context for the lack of movement? Finishing second last year was the Very Serious Candidate, Steve Bannon.
In fact, the history of the CPAC straw poll can be described best as “generally pointless.” We won’t paste the full table here (you can view the results on the CPAC Wikipedia page) but it’s basically followed a trend of conservative voter wishcasting in the midterms followed by bandwagon-jumping on the frontrunners as elections near, with a list of second-place finishers that make you say “oh righttttt… him!” — the list includes Rick Santorum, Bobby Jindal, Alan Keyes… and Scott Walker
And the straw poll is actually a horrible predictor of nominees: George W. Bush finished second in 1998 to Steve Forbes, then lost the straw poll again in 1999 to Gary Bauer. He finally triumphed at CPAC in 2000 — by then he was already polling ahead of Al Gore in hypothetical presidential matchups.
In 2005 it was Rudy Giuliani winning the poll and in 2006 it was George Allen (who had an incredible gaffe-filled spiral as he pursued the nomination; we’’ll allow an asterisk there if anyone demands it) before CPAC started riding Mitt Romney. John McCain, the actual 2008 nominee, made a cameo as the second-place finisher in 2008. It was then two more years of Ron Paul until they came back around to Romney in 2012 just in time for his presidential run. And then, in the run-up to Donald Trump essentially taking over CPAC (after his 2016 election), the straw pollers went Rand Paul/Rand Paul/Rand Paul/Ted Cruz. With Rubio finishing second twice.
In short, this group does not have foresight. They have people they like a lot, but it should not move markets. And so if you’re wondering why Vance or Rubio didn’t move at all on Kalshi after their CPAC finishes, you need not look much further than Wikipedia.
Also, if history is any indication, more often than not the straw poll is really far off when there are years to go until a nomination. Granted, things are generally not hewing to history or precedent at the moment, but if you’re staring at “nominee” markets, you might want to scroll down a little. Rand Paul at 2.4¢ isn’t looking terrible.
*****
QUICK PROGRAMMiNG NOTE! We’ve switched newsletter servers from Substack to Beehiiv. This should affect your lives in many ways, one of which is you’ll watch with us in real time as we learn how to publish properly on this new platform. Get excited. and thank you all for your continued support!
*****
We’ve followed Survivor 50 since the “preseason” here, and in the last “The Antenna” podcast episode we discovered that the spoiler issues we’re experiencing happened in Season 49…and stopped around Episode 7.
There’s now a $44k “Who Will Get Eliminated From Episode 6” market up and we are dropping the link here with a giant SPOILER ALERT warning — people still know something. So if you’re a fan of Survivor, just stick to the show for now. Although there is one interesting trend happening in this market that we’ll keep an eye on for the next few days. If it keeps it up, we’ll do our best to divine meaning from it on this week’s show!
In the meantime, enjoy the latest “The Antenna” here:
*****
Have a lovely day, everyone! See you again soon!