Prediction markets didn’t get the Pope right, but this did
New Governor ratings, Trump approval on 52 issues, what makes a good Democrat or Republican, AI replacing new grads — and McKinsey consultants
⛪ Conclave 2025
The prediction markets did not predict the new Pope:
But a group of Italian scholars was able to call the surprise election of Cardinal Robert Prevost using network analysis to examine the cardinals’ relationships to each other to gauge who was most influential. Here’s how it worked:
The research team reconstructed a multilevel model of the ’Vatican network” using three main sources:
Official co-memberships (Roman curia dicasteries, commissions, councils, academies): these data reveal who works with whom and in what institutional contexts.
Lines of episcopal consecration: each cardinal was ordained by others, and these “spiritual genealogies” build strong bonds of loyalty and recognition.
Informal relationships: mapped through authoritative journalistic sources, these include ideological affinities, mentoring relationships, and membership in patronage networks.
By superimposing these levels, the group produced the first true systemic map of the College of Cardinals.
Here was their ranking of the status of cardinal electors:
✅Robert Prevost (moderate, US)
Lazzaro You Heung-sik (soft liberal, South Korea)
Arthur Roche (liberal, UK)
Jean-Marc Aveline (soft liberal, France)
Claudio Gugerotti (soft liberal, Italy)
Nate Silver has a look at why the markets failed, and notes that pretty much every condition for them to work well doesn’t apply to a closed papal election.
In contrast, for a papal election, pretty much the opposite is true on every indicator. The choice of the pope presumably doesn’t have broader implications for financial markets, so well-capitalized institutional investors are unlikely to be involved. The modal trader probably knows little about the Catholic Church. Papal elections occur extremely rarely. And papal conclaves include relatively few participants, and they’re sequestered to prevent any leaks to the outside world.
In such situations, the conventional wisdom can just feed back on itself. Maybe it was reasonable a priori to think that Parolin or Tagle were more likely choices than Prevost, for instance. But these probably ought to have been pretty weak priors. Once the media begins to write about them as frontrunners, however, those perceptions can become entrenched. Everyone assumes that everyone else knows something, when in a case like this, they probably don’t.
The markets really are aggregators of conventional wisdom, a way to assign neat probabilities to what people already think. But very rarely can they access material non-public information that would cause the probabilities to shift well beyond the bounds of conventional wisdom, something downright impossible in this situation with all communications shut down.
In a sense, this was a “Speaker Mike Johnson” pick, where more famous names may have started out ahead but were possibly more polarizing and thus unable to muster the required supermajority. In that situation, a well-liked backbencher can easily leapfrog more visible names.
A majority of Catholics say they want the church to become more inclusive.
🇺🇲 2026
The Center for Politics released their 2025/2026 gubernatorial ratings.
📊 Public Opinion
The Gen Z gender gap continues to be wider than any other previous generations.
Most Americans believe that the tariffs will end up costing America then we bring in.
YouGov polled Trump approval on 52 different issues. Inflation continues to be the 🚩🚩🚩since that’s what he was elected on.
Silver Bulletin is also tracking Trump approval on the issues and intensity of approval.
“First, we’re now tracking his approval ratings on a series of issues that have been especially salient early on in his presidency: the economy, immigration, trade/tariffs, and inflation.”
“Also, we’re now monitoring how many voters strongly approve or disapprove of Trump, as opposed to somewhat approve or disapprove. As you’ll see, these numbers have become lopsided; there are more Trump haters than lovers at the moment:”
YouGov also polled party members’ criteria for inclusion in their respective parties. Inclusion in the Democratic coalition among Democrats is defined by culturally-inflected issues like DEI, vaccines, abortion, and LGBTQ issues.
🤖 Artificial Intelligence
The job markets are showing new signs that AI might be competing with recent grads for jobs.
McKinsey consultants have a powerful new in-house AI — and it’s hard to see how it or something like it doesn’t eventually replace the consultants.
📻 Intersection Radio
Shout out to Jordan Lieberman and Powers Interactive on the launch of The Consultant’s Cut, a summary of all the week’s political operative podcasts.
