CASEY AT THE BAT
While Tallahassee was frozen again this session, the first lady was getting hot.
Everyone knew the Casey DeSantis pop was not organic momentum. A thin line moved, and in this business that only ever means one thing. Someone knows something. Or at least that is what everyone tells themselves.
So in a town where information is power, the hunt was on. Lobbyists started sniffing around like bloodhounds. Consultants compared notes. Staffers poked around to see whether Casey allies suddenly sounded confident.
Here is the part that stings.
Everyone probably got punked. Not by inside information, but by a new school tactic. A little money, placed early, bent the line just enough to trigger the reflexes of an industry trained to chase signals. It is the modern version of slipping your name into a “who should run for governor” poll.
The poll is not the point. The reaction is.
The chart did its job. Tallahassee went looking for who knew what, while someone who probably reads HelloFLA’s reporting on prediction markets sat back, knowing exactly how predictable the reaction would be.
The move was really fueled by only a couple of small buys, scooping up contracts at pennies and then walking the curve upward as liquidity disappeared.
If this had been an insider acting on real information, you would have seen something else entirely: sustained buying, paced accumulation, and a willingness to absorb selling pressure. Instead, the tape shows brief pushes into thin air. As liquidity dried up, it took almost no money to print higher numbers.
That is how the graph made it look like more.
For a brief moment, the line even printed north of 30 cents. That was likely the whole point.
The dollars that actually crossed at those levels were negligible, single digits, before the price snapped back. The buyer pushed until they hit a visible sell wall, paused, then nudged it again. That is how it touched 32.
At the very top, only a handful of contracts traded.
When you actually do the math, it appears they spent about $2,000 total to light the fuse. Then, once the line was already up, someone chased it with a few hundred dollars more. That is an order of magnitude cheaper than slipping your name into a poll or buying an advertisement on FloridaPolitics.com.
Nobody wanted to believe the oldest truth in Florida politics. Sometimes the signal is fake, and the reaction is the product. And I hope Peter Schorsch at least heard about it first from an advertiser, because the prediction market sure delivered a return.