READING THE TEA LEAVES: Amazon and Bezos Appear to Predict Who Will Win Presidency

October 28th, 2024 3:35 PM

Amazon founder and owner Jeff Bezos may have tipped his hand on who he believes will be the next president of the United States.

After searching for “election party decorations” on Amazon and looking through the first fifty entries, MRC researchers uncovered on Oct. 25 that of the partisan election party decorations, 62 percent were Trump or Republican-themed. On the same day, The Washington Post, Bezos’s leftist publication, became the second major outlet historically supportive of the Democratic Party to not endorse Vice President Kamala Harris.

MRC researchers found thirteen Trump or Republican-themed election decorations for sale compared to only 8 Harris or Democrat-themed election decorations for sale. Sponsored election decorations were not included.

The Post has endorsed every Democratic Party presidential nominee from former President Bill Clinton in 1992 to President Joe Biden in 2020. But Bezos apparently wasn’t content with just nixing The Post’s decades-longobjectivity-wrecking tradition of endorsing presidential candidates. 

Reporting from The New York Times revealed Bezos's signal to his newspaper “that he is interested in expanding The Post’s audience among conservatives.” Bezos reportedly informed Post CEO Will Smith “that he wants more conservative writers on the opinion section,” The Times wrote. This would be a dramatic overhaul of a media outlet that has spewed predominantly unhinged leftist and anti-Israel agitprop for years.

MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider suggested that Bezos likely noticed how the Biden-Harris administration discriminated against and punished Bezos’s competitor, X owner Elon Musk. Schneider pointed out that Bezos may now be scrambling to signal Trump that The Post can function like a news outlet once again.

"Suddenly, Elon Musk is being fined, investigated, probed for what he has potentially done, the entire power of the Harris-Biden police state has come down on his head and the second wealthiest man on the planet [Bezos] is thinking, ‘Well could Trump do that to me, too?’” Schneider said during the Oct. 26 edition of the 77WABC’s James Golden Show.

Bezos’s decisions aren’t boding too well for the uber-leftist apparatchiks at The Post, who are reportedly up in arms that their seemingly impenetrable echo chamber has just been breached. The Washington Post Guild even tried to put its publisher on blast: “‘The message from our chief executive, Will Lewis — not from the Editorial Board itself — makes us concerned that management interfered with the work of our members in Editorial.’” 

Schneider wasn’t the only one to allude to Bezos possibly genuflecting to Trump.

Former Post editor-at-large Robert Kagan—who resigned in protest of Bezos’s decision to halt his newspaper’s endorsement of Harris like a petulant child—surmised that “[i]t’s a sort of preemptive bending of the knee to who they may think is the probable winner.” 

Kagan added, “‘Anybody who is as much a part of the American economy as Bezos is … they obviously want to have a good relationship with whoever is in power. [It’s] an attempt to try not to be on the wrong side of Donald Trump.’”. 

Whether the reason for Bezos unplugging himself from the leftist matrix is a genuine red-pilling or just that he got the heebie-jeebies that Trump could be in the White House again is unimportant. The Post is long overdue for a shakeup of its left-wing orthodoxy.

Other informal signs of a potential Trump victory include the betting markets PredictIt and Polymarket. On Oct. 28, Polymarket showed a 66 percent chance that Trump will become the nation’s 47th president but gave Harris only a 34 percent chance of that honor (unless Biden leaves office before Inauguration Day).

PredictIt also heavily favored Trump on Oct. 28, requiring users to put down 60 cents on the former president if they wished to bet on his return to office. Investing in Vice President Kamala Harris is apparently a riskier proposition as PredictIt offers users a deal of only 43 cents to pick her. 

Trump has also thrived in casual local competitions such as a cookie-buying contest in the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania and another cookie contest in Cincinnati that has predicted every presidential election since 1984 (except 2020). 

Methodology 

For this report, MRC Free Speech America researchers analyzed the first 50 non-sponsored or promoted items for the Oct. 25 Amazon results for “election party decorations.” MRC Free Speech America used a private window utilizing the Brave privacy browser to analyze Google search results to limit the influence of prior search history and tracking cookies. 

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