MESSAGE TO THE REPUBLICANS: Great convention, kid. Don’t get cocky. If you want something to puncture the buzz, look at the Iowa Electronic Market — which has actually taken a sudden anti-Bush turn. Reader P.J. Hinton emails: “What is going on out there among the traders, I wonder. Were they so distressed by the Twins’ performance? I dunno.”

Maybe it was the word that Joe Lockhart is riding to the rescue of the Kerry campaign.

UPDATE: Hmm. Tradesports isn’t showing the same phenomenon. Maybe Soros is manipulating the Iowa market!

ANOTHER UPDATE: If he is, it only took one trade, due to the rather odd way these things are graphed:

According to their website, what the graph shows is the final trade for that day, the ONE that occurs closest to midnight.

So, all someone has to do is put in ONE goofy trade right before midnight to screw the graph for the next 24 hours.

This market does not have enough volume & trade frequency to do it that way. They need to be graphing the final 25 trades or some such.

Odd.