The betting markets were not good predictors, but they weren’t trying to be. The online bookmakers that fielded bets on the election saw their largest single-event windfall ever. To understand why, you need to understand election betting and Donald Trump supporters.....

Here, the computers and the betting odds kept a wide gap. Oddsmakers don’t set odds based on what they think will happen. They aim to limit their risk and to create the best chance of “the house”—the bookmaker—making a profit. Too much money bet on one side is a liability. And in this case, there was so much money on one side: Trump’s.

“We needed Biden big,” Mason of BetOnline says. “We needed him huge.”

Throughout the year at Bovada, Morrow says, the money coming in was around 2-to-1 for Trump. At BetOnline, around 60 percent of bettors were on Trump, though the total money was closer to 50-50, meaning Biden backers placed some large bets.

For most of the year, Trump’s short odds to win (requiring bettors to risk more money for smaller winnings) were not a reflection of inside political knowledge, or of the oddsmakers being MAGA guys. Bookmakers were taking on so many Trump bets that they consistently tried to discourage people from betting on him.

“The Trump guys were just out in full force,” Mason says. “According to the true odds, they probably could’ve got a better price, but us and probably every other book kept it lower than it should, just because we were all so exposed on it.”

Only after the election did bookmakers reach the “taking candy from a baby” portion of the proceedings. Mason tweeted the day after the election, when Trump’s odds at BetOnline were +525 and 80 percent of the bets were still coming in on Trump, “Our massive liability continues to grow.”

That, to me, reads like baiting the gullible. But even then: Trump supporters were doing it to themselves. It’s not the sportsbooks’ fault if someone doesn’t realize that businesspeople aspire to separate customers from their money.

The sportsbooks won untold millions off a political movement’s refusal to accept reality. It wasn’t the oddsmakers’ plan to win by such large margins, and doing so despite making Trump a relative favorite was largely good fortune.

he Lincoln Project, of course, pumped out a lot of ads—with such finesse and success, under Wilson’s creative direction, that Ad Age has named the PAC one of 2020’s Marketers of the Year. In this in-depth conversation, Wilson (speaking by phone from his home in Tallahassee, Fla.) reveals some of the art and science behind TLP’s barrage of remarkable, agenda-setting, viral political ads.....

Do you have a specific sense of how much you moved the needle?
We have very specific metrics in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, that we played a decisive role.

And what does that data show? Who did you shift?
We moved former Republicans, independents and current Republicans over what we call the Bannon Line. Steve Bannon, who is no fan of us, said, early in the process, if these guys can move 2% or 3% of the Republican vote, Trump is gonna lose. Well, from the metrics we’re showing, in the swing states, where we spent I would say 80% to 85% of our resources, we moved the Bannon Line, and crossover Republican votes, between 9% and 13%.

That is a huge accomplishment. We are enormously proud of the work we did. We played, as we said from the very beginning, a game of small numbers. I was not out there trying to convert Trump voters. I was not, for the most part, trying to fire up Democratic voters. We were building a campaign from the very start that was meant to do certain things. The No. 1 thing was blocking. We saw already that a lot of Republicans had drifted away from the party in 2018. And they were primarily female, they were primarily better educated.

For years, politicos and policy wonks have kicked around ideas for how to increase election turnout in Texas, where voters usually show up in pitifully low numbers. And Texas officials knew that if turnout did rise during 2020’s closely contested presidential election, the pandemic would pose tremendous challenges to our electoral infrastructure.

Enter 29-year-old Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo and 34-year-old county clerk Chris Hollins. Under Hidalgo’s leadership, the Harris County Commissioners’ Court appropriated $29 million for the election, seven times more than in 2016. But just as important as the funding was choosing the right election administrator. When the sitting county clerk resigned in May, following a disastrous March primary election marred by six-hour lines and computer glitches, the commissioners selected Hollins, a management consultant at McKinsey and Company and the Texas Democratic Party’s vice chair of finance, to serve as interim clerk.

It was an unconventional pick: Hollins, a fifth-generation Texan, had never held public office or overseen an election. But he hit the ground running, embracing an array of innovative ideas, including 24-hour voting, drive-through voting, and ballot drop boxes. Hollins recruited 11,000 poll workers to staff a record number of early voting locations as well as Election Day polling places. And he spent heavily on personal protective equipment for both election workers and voters.

“It’s important that voters are able to cast their votes safely,” Hollins told Texas Monthly before the election, “but also to do so conveniently and with the peace of mind of knowing that their votes are going to be counted.”

Tax cuts for rich people breed inequality without providing much of a boon to anyone else, according to a study of the advanced world that could add to the case for the wealthy to bear more of the cost of the coronavirus pandemic.

The paper, by David Hope of the London School of Economics and Julian Limberg of King’s College London, found that such measures over the last 50 years only really benefited the individuals who were directly affected, and did little to promote jobs or growth.

“Policy makers shouldn’t worry that raising taxes on the rich to fund the financial costs of the pandemic will harm their economies,” Hope said in an interview....

The authors applied an analysis amalgamating a range of levies on income, capital and assets in 18 OECD countries, including the U.S. and U.K., over the past half century.

Their findings published Wednesday counter arguments, often made in the U.S., that policies which appear to disproportionately aid richer individuals eventually feed through to the rest of the economy. The timespan of the paper ends in 2015, but Hope says such an analysis would also apply to President Donald Trump’s tax cut enacted in 2017.

“Our research suggests such policies don’t deliver the sort of trickle-down effects that proponents have claimed,” Hope said.

In the days after George Floyd's killing in police custody in Minneapolis last month, as massive protests against police brutality spread across Texas and other states, conservative power broker Steve Hotze of Houston called Gov. Greg Abbott's chief of staff to pass along a message.

"I want you to give a message to the governor," Hotze told Abbott's chief of staff, Luis Saenz, in a voicemail. "I want to make sure that he has National Guard down here and they have the order to shoot to kill if any of these son-of-a-bitch people start rioting like they have in Dallas, start tearing down businesses — shoot to kill the son of a bitches. That’s the only way you restore order. Kill 'em. Thank you."

The voicemail, which The Texas Tribune obtained Friday via a public information request, came on the weekend of June 6, several days after Abbott activated the Texas National Guard as some of the protests became violent. It is unclear whether Saenz responded, and Abbott's office declined to comment on the voicemail.