Seriously. It’s just another attempt to manifest their preferred reality into existence. It’s no coincidence that Musk and his ilk have been running around saying that betting markets are actually a better measure of public opinion than polls, as people actually have to put money on it. But the obvious flaw in this reasoning is that betting markets can be easily manipulated to make a candidate look better than they are. Republicans are already spending tons of money on bullshit partisan polls. The actual nonpartisan polls aren’t showing Kamala in a landslide or anything, they show her with a tiny edge but in what is really a true tossup. But conservatives pay for all these ridiculously biased polls. They try to flood the zone, dilute the polling average projections and make it look like Trump is doing way better than he really is. They want to make it seem like they’re winning so they can drive out the vote.

This is the only reason to bother spending millions on comically biased partisan polls. If you’re a campaign and want to actually plan out an effective strategy, you want a true unbiased poll. You want to know how well you’re really doing in order to plan your campaign and GOTV effort. The ONLY reason to spend millions on partisan polls is to manufacture a sense of Republican inevitability.

And if they’re willing to spend millions on fake polls, there’s no reason they won’t spend millions to tilt the betting markets as well. They do this to create the impression of winning. Also, it serves to bolster post-election bullshit claims of voter fraud. They can point to their own laughably biased conservative polls and their rigged betting markets and say, “look, the polls showed Trump way ahead, and the betting markets had him at 10-to-1 odds. Obviously if Kamala won it was because of voter fraud!”