Super Tuesday: Newt’s My Moneymaker

I was really looking forward to Super Tuesday this year, more so than I ever have, because I thought I’d have $100 to play with on the Intrade markets.  Well, things don’t always go as planned, and sometimes Rick Santorum shows up in Colorado ready to rape you.  Instead of skipping class to watch every moment of Super Tuesday, the polls, the news updates, the Twitter feeds, my friend, Dave, and I decided to have all our money locked up in bets to see if we could get around Intrade’s $4.99 monthly fee.  It didn’t work, but we did end up making some pretty good money.

We had decided long ago that Newt Gingrich would be our horse on Super Tuesday, and we picked a hell of a thoroughbred.  In fact, as early as February 1st we decided to buy shares of Newt to win a second primary, and kept buying at an average of about $6.67 per share.  We knew Georgia was a sure-fire winner for Newt and took it to the bank.  We bought 2 shares of Newt to win Georgia at $7.50 per share on February 29th.  We made nearly $20 riding Newt Gingrich, our thoroughbred, to the finish line on Super Tuesday, and we’re now starting to see the deficit created by Rick Santorum’s Colorado raping disappear.

We did make our mistakes, however, and Ron Paul had everything to do with them…as usual.  I put down $4 for Paul to finish third in Vermont, instead of going with my gut and buying shares for him to finish second, even though polls had him trailing Santorum by 7-9 points.  He finished second by 1.8 points, and we lost $4.  Paul screwed us again when we bet against Romney winning Virginia by 45 points when we should have been betting against Romney to win by 30 points as well.  Romney was leading by 43 points in the polls, and Ron Paul was the only other candidate on the ballot, so I figured betting against a 45 point spread was a safe bet.  It was, and we made $2, but we could have made more had we bet against the 30 point spread.  The spread ended up being just 19.5 percentage points.

Overall we took home around $18 on Super Tuesday, and I didn’t have to miss class or even pay attention to the results.  It was a very comfortable Super Tuesday, and I’m glad we didn’t have a bunch of money to throw around, because that’s how you lose it.

There are two things you can always depend on from Newt: 1) he’ll perform well in the South, and 2) he’ll screw it all up.  We can’t ride Newt to the finish line, of course, which may be fast approaching for him.  If he doesn’t win both Alabama and Mississippi, his campaign director has stated they will be forced to drop out of the race, and I don’t see them winning both states, so I’d like to say to Newt, “It was fun while it lasted, and thanks for being so predictable.”