Romney Surge Rocks UK Betting Market

Obama looked set to score landslide victory just a week ago

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
October 12, 2012

Just one week after it looked like Barack Obama would win the presidential election with a landslide, a surge in money being placed on Mitt Romney has caused a massive turnaround in the UK betting markets, traditionally seen as a good indicator of the outcome.

The UK’s thriving betting community responded to Romney’s debate success last week by sending the former Governor of Massachusetts’ odds into free fall.

Last night’s VP debate between Joe Biden and Paul Ryan, which polls suggest Ryan narrowly won, is only likely to fuel Romney’s surge. This follows last week’s presidential face-off which Romney won by the widest margin in Gallup poll history.

“Rarely has the cliche that a week a long time in politics been more apt. Seven days ago, the polls, media consensus and markets all pointed towards an Obama landslide, with the President trading at just 1.2 to win a second term. One bad debating performance and a slew of worrying polls later, Mitt Romney’s odds are in free fall. In the last 24 hours alone, the challenger has shortened from 3.1 to 2.9, with Obama now a 1.52 chance,” writes BetFair’s Paul Krishnamurty, noting how “The polls show an unmistakable shift of momentum.”

However, Krishnamurty sounds a word of warning to Romney, noting how challenger John Kerry comfortably won the first debate back in 2004 yet went on to be defeated by George W. Bush.

If Romney’s momentum continues at its current pace, Krishnamurty predicts that he will be the new favorite within the next week, unless Democrats are able to expose a perceived vagueness in Romney’s fiscal policies and portray him as a “flip-flopper,” a label that severely hindered Kerry’s chances in 2004.

Meanwhile, the In-Trade prediction market still has Obama significantly ahead of Romney despite a recent flip in their trending direction. Obama currently has a 63 per cent likelihood of winning the election compared to Romney’s 37 per cent.

A RealClearPolitics average of national polls shows that Romney is beating Obama for the first time in the 2012 campaign. However, despite recent gains Romney is still struggling in key swing states such as Ohio, where Obama holds a 6 point lead. Polls for three other key swing states, Florida, Colorado and Virginia, show a tie or Obama slightly ahead.

Last week’s surprise fall in unemployment to 7.8 per cent, a figure which several analysts claimed had been manipulated by the Obama administration, went some way to clawing back the points Obama lost after he was crushed in the debate.

UK betting odds across all the bookmakers still clearly have Obama as the favorite, but if Romney continues to build on his momentum there could just be enough time left before November 6 for him to complete an unprecedented turnaround.

That is unless we see an “October surprise,” potentially involving Iran, which could serve to rescue Obama’s geopolitical street cred in the aftermath of the Benghazi attack, a potential twist that has been forecast by the likes of ABC News.

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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show and Infowars Nightly News.

This article was posted: Friday, October 12, 2012 at 5:54 am

Tags: domestic news

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