I mean, I understand why 538.com is writing about them, but the truth of the matter is that if you relied on the betting markets to make your predictions in Iowa last Monday then you ended up making wrong predictions. Not that the polls did much better, there – or, to a lesser extent, the ‘polls-plus,’ which I think still ended up not taking into account that the nominal front-runner there hadn’t done even the minimum amount of campaign infrastructure that one should reasonably expect from a front-runner. Honestly? If we knew how seriously contested elections were reliably going to go ahead of time in a particular kind of race we’d probably stop having elections in that particular venue.
Also: nothing gets stale quicker than a hot new trend or metric that completely and totally explained what happened in the last election. Why? Because political campaigns hire people who can read.