LOGAN – Despite a less than stellar performance at the only face-to-face debate in the 2nd Congressional District race on Oct. 13, odds-makers are still predicting that incumbent U.S. Rep. Blake Moore (R-UT) will retain his seat in Congress during election balloting on Nov. 3.
One predictive lab has even put the odds of a Moore win over Democratic challenger Peter Crosby at a seemingly improbable 94.8 percent, even while acknowledging that the incumbent’s margin of victory might be much slimmer than expected in what is believed to be a heavily Republican district.
Those odds were predicted by Nijinn’s TruthIndex, a trademarked single probability online forecast derived with odds data from Polymarket and Kalshi, a pair of federally regulated financial exchange and prediction markets that let people trade on the outcomes of real-world events.
The long odds in Moore’s favor look less solid when the results of local polling are considered.
Surveys of more than 500 voters from each of the Utah’s new congressional districts were conducted by the Lighthouse Research group for the Hinckley Institute of Politics at the University of Utah and the Utah Debate Commission between Aug. 31 and Sept. 24.
That polling found Moore favored by 39 percent of voters in the recently redrawn 2nd Congressional District, compared to 34 percent who favored Crosby.
But political analysts at Ellis Insight observe that five-point margin of victory has the potential to shrink, however, given that the survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.32 percent.
Small wonder that the Utah Democratic Party was crowing in early October that Crosby was within “striking distance” of a win in the 2nd Congressional District.
The 2nd District polling is also complicated by third-party candidates and undecided voters, according to the Utah News Dispatch. With no realistic hope of winning, Libertarian candidate Daniel Cottam, Carlton Bowen of the Independent Party and unaffiliated candidate Robert Moesinger each soaked up slightly less than 5 percent of the vote in the Lighthouse Research polling.
Undecided voters also made up about 11 percent of survey respondents.
Following the UDC face-off on Oct. 13, Moore told reporters that he was confident with his current standing in the race and looking forward to another two-year term to “… continue a lot of things that I’ve been working on.”
The morning after the debate found Crosby back on the campaign trail, leading a press conference on the steps of Utah Capitol where he shared the speaker’s podium with Brian King, the chair of the Utah Democratic Party.
Both speakers continued to portray Moore as out of touch and tone deaf about the needs of residents of northern Utah.
The Ellis Insight is a right-leaning daily website identifying and analyzing emerging trends in political campaigns and elections.
The TruthIndex has all Utah races are on one page at midterms.nijinn.io/state/utah/.
That site has a page for every senate, house and governor race, as well as ballot measures, mayoral contests and control of Congress, with the day’s largest moves and rating changes on its homepage.
Nijinn is an independent analytics product of Predictive Labs Ltd., based in Singapore. It’s a nonpartisan entity, with no affiliation to any candidate, party or campaign.
Nijinn figures are probabilities implied by traders’ prices, calculated with the same published methodology for every race rather than polls or election results.