Not the key point, but I think this misreads the situation:
"Democrats took months to come around to the idea that their current presidential candidate might do poorly."
No, there was already readily-available data, in the form of polls, that made this pretty clear. The problem here is more around the game theory of getting somebody to resign their candidacy - nobody wants to go first and you need critical mass. People are afraid of angering an incumbent President.
I don't think prediction markets close any gaps here, other than that they could slightly shorten the timeline compared to polls - e.g., when Biden botched the debate, it took a while for fresh polling to capture the impact. But also it only took him 25 days after that to end his candidacy, AND that was probably drawn out by the fact that the Trump assassination attempt interrupted the news cycle for about a week.
Not the key point, but I think this misreads the situation:
"Democrats took months to come around to the idea that their current presidential candidate might do poorly."
No, there was already readily-available data, in the form of polls, that made this pretty clear. The problem here is more around the game theory of getting somebody to resign their candidacy - nobody wants to go first and you need critical mass. People are afraid of angering an incumbent President.
I don't think prediction markets close any gaps here, other than that they could slightly shorten the timeline compared to polls - e.g., when Biden botched the debate, it took a while for fresh polling to capture the impact. But also it only took him 25 days after that to end his candidacy, AND that was probably drawn out by the fact that the Trump assassination attempt interrupted the news cycle for about a week.