By Dennis Jiang

Ballotcraft is a fantasy politics game (think fantasy football, but for politics). Play against your friends and win by best predicting what’s going to happen in upcoming elections. Sign up and play here: www.ballotcraft.com.

As you can see in the chart above, John Kasich is currently the most popular candidate on Ballotcraft. Now when we say “popular”, we don’t mean that people think he’s the most likely to win (he’s currently trading around 4%). Rather, we mean that people have invested the most credits in him, betting either that he’ll win or lose.

This is surprising on a few levels, as John Kasich isn’t a particularly flashy or trendy candidate. Unlike Donald Trump or Ben Carson, he’s a conventional candidate who doesn’t inspire much passion among the grassroots.

However, on another level, it’s not surprising that candidates like Kasich, Bush, and Trump would be the most widely-held candidates for the September 16 Republican Debate contest. What the top candidates in this chart have in common is that they performed very differently from expectations at the last debate.

Kasich is case in point. He barely made it onto the last debate stage, and expectations for him were basically zero. Yet he delivered some of the most memorable moments of the debate, and his poll ratings skyrocketed (relatively) as a result.

On the other hand, Bush severely underperformed relative to expectations. To many, Bush came across as dry and unexciting at the last debate. While he didn’t commit any gaffes, he didn’t deliver a performance befitting his ostensible frontrunner status.

The lesson we can take away from this is that the most popular candidates on Ballotcraft are not necessarily the ones that people think are most likely to win, but the candidates who are most likely to over or underperform relative to expectations. This is a sound trading strategy, as you’re unlikely to win your league by following conventional wisdom.

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