VENI, VIDI, BUTTIGIEG: Crowd Names Mayor Pete the Democrat Most Likely to Topple Trump, and a Half-Finished Sentence Takes Silver

Hear ye, hear ye: the crowd has delivered its verdict, and one must ask whether history has ever moved so briskly. In a market that opened less than a day ago, asking which Democratic figure is likeliest to beat Donald Trump in a US presidential election, the opinion markets on Morfi have handed the laurel wreath to Pete Buttigieg at 30% consensus. Alea iacta est, as Caesar said at the Rubicon, though Caesar at least had the decency to take a few weeks over it.

Now to the runner-up, which is the most philosophically interesting result I have seen in a long and distinguished career of looking at results. Second place, at 22% consensus, goes to a side called "Kandidat Partai Demokrat yang", which translates roughly as "the Democratic Party candidate who", and then simply stops. Who what? Who wins? Who has not yet been born? The crowd has backed a man with a name over a sentence without an ending. In my view that is a perfectly sound piece of statecraft: one cannot campaign on an ellipsis.

The rest of the field, 3 other sides, trails behind the leaders like senators who arrived at the Forum after the vote had already been taken. That is no disgrace, mutatis mutandis; the Democratic Party has a long and honourable tradition of arguing with itself, and this market looks like that tradition shrunk down to a fortnight's worth of quarrelling squeezed into a single afternoon.

I would caution, cum grano salis, that this verdict comes from 24 traders who between them have staked $125,786 on their convictions. That is a modest senate, but a senate nonetheless, and every one of its members put money where their oratory was. The crowd has had other recent run-ins with the gentleman in question; my colleague Viktor Dispatch chronicled one in the Trump ecocide skirmish, and this crowd clearly does not shy away from a fight with the man.

Is the matter settled for all time? Of course not. Markets, like empires, rise and fall, and an unfinished sentence may yet find its predicate. Readers who think Mayor Pete's coronation is premature, or who know at last how "the Democratic Party candidate who..." is meant to end, are warmly invited to join the market on Morfi and put their own denarii behind their opinion. Vox populi, vox pecuniae.