By Noah Lieberman

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.

This is part one of our three-part series analyzing Ballotcraft’s market data during the second Republican Presidential Debate. We’re looking at how a savvy investor could use this information to their advantage in the future.

I was hesitant to back Fiorina in last week’s debate given our limited exposure to her debating skills in the past. While I didn’t think that she would be a bad debater, per se, I had major doubts that she would be the consensus top performer the market had her pegged as. But boy did she prove me wrong, not only winning the final vote (by a dominant margin), but also leading in the Ballotcraft market for almost the entire night. She started with the second highest chances of winning, tied with Ben Carson at 17.4 and behind John Kasich at 19.6, and had moved into a tie for first within the half-hour. After that Fiorina began a steady climb that lasted for the next 80 minutes, peaking at 10:03 with a price of 40.8.

The next five minutes were the weakest Fiorina appeared all night, entering a freefall that tanked her price by nearly 10%. Though she did rebound and end the night with a price of 40.3, those five minutes confirmed what I and many others had thought was the biggest possible weakness for Carly and the other outsider candidates. You see, Fiorina did not speak at all during her sudden and rapid decline, so her sinking price couldn’t be tied to some gaffe or awkward moment like Trump or Carson. Instead, it was merely that while the more experienced candidates were talking about foreign policy (in this case, Marco Rubio and Chris Christie), Fiorina’s outsider status seemed like more of a liability than a bonus. Once the conversation shifted back towards domestic issues and Fiorina spoke again she began her ascent back to the top.

How the other candidates’ performances affected Fiorina’s price should give us a good idea of what to expect in future debates. As you can see in the graph above, Fiorina’s night really broke down into two periods: First, she had to emerge as the leading outsider candidate, and as such her steady rise to first place was largely unaffected by the performance of the candidates she was not in as much direct competition with. Once the likes of Trump and Carson were dispatched, the night largely became Fiorina against the establishment Republican candidates, whose prices, despite not having much correlation to each other, all had a very clear relationship with Fiorina’s. This mirrors the path of Rand Paul’s price in the last debate, as he eventually emerged as the dominant anti-establishment candidate before competing with the group of insiders. This likely means that while we might not expect Fiorina to be the winner of every debate, we can expect one outsider to rise to the top and maintain a large market share until the end of the night.

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Noah Lieberman is the founder of election forecasting website PollingLab. Click here to see more of his analysis of the 2016 election.