Irish Presidential Election - Review and Prognosis For Future Edges

So Catherine Connolly won the 2025 Irish presidential election in a landslide. Congratulations to all who took that pick; and just to think some though that this would be the most boring presidential election in Irish history. It contained everything: serious muckraking, candidates pulling out, record numbers of spoiled votes and keepie uppies on social media. The end result was an emphatic rejection of the government candidates and the biggest electoral blowout in Irish political history. From a betting point of view, this market was for me this year was what the US presidential election was last year. The question now becomes what can we learn from this election and how can we apply it to find other potentially significant sources of edge in other political markets.

Political betting is unlike sports markets because the nature of the edge is very different. Whereas sports betting relies much more on technicals, building models of composite probabilistic events, political betting is much more fundamental analysis driven. In sports betting, the probabilities are measures of uncertainty over events that are subject to variability, such as whether a goalkeeper will make a save or a striker will manage to put the ball in the net. The uncertainty in political betting is in the fog of war that exists with limited data; an expression of probabilities that one candidate will will over another is in effect a measure of the likely and unlikely bounds of variability from errors in our estimation of what is in the ballot box. The contents of the ballot box are much less so a matter of probability because the sample size is so large that the probabilistic variance is very small. This is why political betting has such high edges compared to sports betting.

The premise of my initial analysis of the potential field of candidates back in March was that the Irish presidency is a role where the electorate will generally vote a candidate who transcends the politics of government and opposition and will act as someone who represents the Irish people on a more fundamental level of ideals. This was a large part in the success of the previous president Michael D Higgins and the initial candidates that I built starter positions for were those who were strong in some combination of ideals, understanding of the Irish constitution and political trust that transcends government and opposition. Two of those candidates didn't run but Connolly did. From a fundamental analysis point of view, she was ideologically very close to Michael D Higgins and had good reason to run so from that point of view, her price of 6c back in March was heavily undervalued.

How can we apply this to other political markets? Every election is different on some level and is unique to that country's politics. We should look to short narratives, not only mainstream political narratives, but even dissident narratives, when they are not airtight. I have seen quite a number of takes on the presidential election that were based on shaky foundations, both from inside Ireland and outside. Irish elections are not left vs right in the way it is in other countries, there is a lot of crossover to the extent you have socially conservative leftists, centre-right environmentalists and woke independents. One of the defining features of Irish politics is the consensus on Irish neutrality, which is one of the major reasons Ireland joining NATO was never seriously suggested even while Finland and Sweden were joining soon after the start of the special military operation in Ukraine. Connolly was a hardliner on neutrality which was one of the big drivers of cross party political support for her. There will be idiosyncrasies in other countries' elections that drive political results that would seem highly irregular outside of that country.

I noticed also that there were a few Polymarket sharps who were on Humphreys. One of them was especially known for sharp political analysis. You don't get to that level of recognition and profitability without knowing what you're doing, which is why I was surprised to see him on that side of the trade and I couldn't think of anything that he was seeing that I might have missed. This highlights two points: one is that there is an inherent folly in blindly copytrading someone (and there is enormous demand for copytrading successful accounts right now). You never know when an account which posts massive profits is sorely mistaken in its analysis, and if anything it's inevitably going to happen every so often for high volume betting strategies. You also never know when a big account is playing arbitrage and you're tailing the counterparty. The second point this highlights is that knowledge asymmetry does translate to edge. It is simply unfeasible for every party of a market to have highly detailed and specialised knowledge of it. Sometimes profitable traders have a blind spot for crucial information. Sometimes generally unprofitable accounts are profitable in this one kind of market. Over a large number of markets the former may well outperform the latter but it says nothing of the edge of these markets individually. Doing proper deep dives on these markets is how you find where the real market inefficiencies are.

I did learn a few new things about political betting and the subtle shifts in probabilities as election seasons takes its course. Knowledge of a candidates positions, which subsections of the voting public respond well to it and which don't is very crucial information. It is also very important to understand each candidates general style and how they handle themselves in debates and how they respond to curveballs thrown at them by the media. It became clear from a very early point that Jim Gavin was woefully unprepared to launch a political campaign and thus he as the favourite for a while was heavily overvalued. Heather Humphreys had political baggage associated with her, had come out of retirement to replace a previous candidate and based on her track record was far better suited to Dáil campaigning and ministerial work than she was to embodiment of national ideals. Connolly said quite a few controversial things but in long form interviews it was obvious to see that whatever convictions she held, however controversial, were sincerely held and the electorate responded much better to that than to the other two candidates, who were never truly able to demonstrate why they wanted to run or what their vision for the presidency was.

Over the course of the presidential election season and before, I paid attention to social media to gauge the mood in the room. Twitter was largely noise as it attracts the most dissident voices on both sides. I only really find Twitter useful for reading the deep dives of other people who have approached electoral prognostication. I very ironically found Reddit useful, not because I take anything said their seriously (quite the opposite, most political opinions coming out of Reddit are an instant fade, as anyone who has followed Redditisms on Trump and US elections will be able to tell you). Rather I found it useful because it gives you a real time way to track shifts in opinion, particularly on the political left. People will now say that Connolly's victory was inevitable (as they said for the victory of Michael D Higgins) but if you go onto Reddit a few months ago, they were divided on her, mainly because she was not on board with Project Ukraine. After the first debate, I saw a decisive shift in opinion to align behind her. I read that as significant because it was an early sign that the Irish left would mobilise behind her and hence turn out for her on election day. When polling data is scant (and believe me, it is for Irish elections compared to US elections), you have to resort to other methods to find what the prevailing narratives are and hence fade them.

Another general thing I noticed is that bookmakers were slow to move their lines in response to new information. There were numerous times where underpriced lines were available before the bookmakers caught up. It's not just fundamental analysis that matters here, it's also being able to look at a line and determine that it has not taken into account a new and very important piece of information. This is a form of information asymmetry and at the very least it presents an arbitrage opportunity. Sometimes the market is just slow to react.

I will be looking for new political markets to enter and seek good edges on. Hopefully you will too. It may be more difficult from here on in because most election markets beyond the immediate future will be ones in countries where English is not the primary language. This means that nuances that are specific to the native languages of these countries can easily get lost and that's to say nothing of the initial asymmetry that exists between prospective bettor and a country that he or she has never set foot in never mind understand the intricacies of said nation's politics. We'll see what we can find. Keep your ear to the ground and always be on the lookout for angles that not only the mainstream but also the sharps have missed.