I don't know about you. But as the election season starts to heat up I become sort of a junkie for the several political futures markets that exist on the web. If you're not familiar with them, they are (depending on how they're described) either betting sites or 'futures markets' in which you put down real money based on what you believe is the most likely outcome of this or that political race or outcome. Who's going to be the Democratic nominee? Which party will win the presidency in November 2008? Will this or that fading candidate bail out before the end of the year.

The key is that people are putting real money on the line. So as long as there are enough participants in the markets, they should give a decent read of conventional and/or informed opinion on the likely outcomes of the races.

In practice, they tend to function a lot like real world markets -- pretty decent predictors of outcomes, broadly speaking, but with a real tendency toward group-think and exaggerations of conventional wisdom.

One thing my extremely unsystematic observation of the markets over the last few years is that they seem to skew slightly Republican. And I've wondered whether this may be an example of some skew in the participants in the market toward GOP-leaning speculative investors -- or as Grover Norquist would put it, the 'investor class'.

One of the best known of these sites is the Iowa Electronic Markets, which is run by the faculty at the University of Iowa Tippie College of Business, as a research and teaching tool to learn about the function of markets and stuff like that. Other sites, like Intrade or Tradesports.com, are basically betting sites. But it's basically the same difference.

So tonight, I took a look at the futures on the nominations. And here's the one for the Dems ...

(You can click on the graph to go through to a larger and more legible image of the graph on Iowa Markets site.)

As you can see the big story is the chasm that has opened up between Hillary and Obama starting a bit more than six weeks ago. Hillary was the favorite through most of the Spring and Summer. But then it became something like a blow-out -- 70/20. I must say I don't quite get that spread. Maybe it's just wishful thinking that I don't want the race to be over before it starts. But I think those numbers are a bit out of whack.

Your thoughts?

Then there's the Republican spread.

As you can see it's pretty all over the place. Which seems basically accurate. The one thing that catches my eye is that the increasingly ridiculous Fred Thompson has managed to sneak barely ahead of Mitt Romney.

And finally, who wins in November 2008? The Dems or the GOP candidate?

Again, no big surprises here. I'd say that's a reasonably accurate take on what the next cycle portends.

Thoughts?