Who should the Democrats and Republicans nominate in 2024?

Smarkets have introduced some new conditional markets for the 2024 US Presidential election.

These conditional markets take the form of "What are the chances of the Republican/Democratic party winning the White House IF they nominate x?". If the named candidate does not end up being the nominee, the market is voided and stakes refunded. You will sometimes hear commentary along the lines of "the party would be crazy to nominate this person, they would have no chance of winning". Now you have an option to back your judgement on such opinions.

These markets could theoretically become quite useful for primary voters. Instead of having to guess who would be the most electable, the markets might be the best information source. One could of course use the polls as a guide - pollsters often try to test hypothetical head-to-heads even this far out and I would expect that sort of data to have a significant influence on the odds. However, it's not clear how useful these sorts of surveys are when taken a long way out from elections; name recognition tends to play an outsized part. I think there is a case to be made that, at this stage, people willing to risk their money on these markets are likely to be better informed about the relative strengths of various candidates than your average voter.

On the GOP side, we've released markets on Trump and DeSantis who currently dominate the betting for the nomination. The opening odds would suggest DeSantis would be a more likely winner, although Trump is still better than a 50/50 shot.

For the Democrats, President Biden and Vice-President Harris are understandably the favourites. Just as a comparison, we've also added Michelle Obama who sometimes tops primary polls which leave out the current ticket. Obama has never indicated she is thinking of running and it's hard to imagine she would contest any primary with either Biden or Harris as an option. Still, the opening odds suggest she'd be a much more likely general election winner than either of those two.