Intrade investors are now increasingly confident that Mitt Romney will win the nomination. Aside from a brief period of post-South Carolina panic, Romney has been trading at 70% or more for a long time; Santorum's decline has brought Romney back up to 79.7%.
Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul are still well behind, trading at 3.2% and 3.1%, respectively. Those four men are the only candidates in the race, but there are now two more individuals getting a small piece of the Intrade action. Chris Christie and Jeb Bush are each trading in the single-digits. Christie is at 1%, and Bush is actually managing to pull in 2.7 percent--almost as high as Paul and Gingrich. Are Christie and Bush planning to get in the race? No. But their numbers reflect the possibility of a contested or brokered convention, a scenario in which none of the current candidates gets a majority of the delegates and a total meltdown ensues.
Meanwhile, the Intrade markets for state contests are much more favorable for Romney than they were two weeks ago. Romney is given a 95% chance of winning Arizona and a 76.7% chance of winning Michigan. Intrade investors were always skeptical of the earlier polls showing Santorum way up in Michigan, but he had gotten as high as 60% to win when the Santorum surge was cresting.
