Okay, so this wasn’t supposed to come out for another two days – but I anticipate being incredibly busy over the next few days, so I thought I’d get this out there while I could!

Below the fold is the end of the month update from my tracking of Intrade numbers. Intrade is a site you can place money on certain events by buying and selling contracts with other people. The value of a contract indicates the percentage chance investors believe that particular contract has of occurring. So a contract at 54.0, for example, means that event has a 54% of happening in the eyes of those who pay money for these things.

I use this to keep track of the 2008 race, since I am a visual learner. The graphics, and some notes, below the fold.

The numbers in the first column are the changes from 1/15 until now, and the numbers to the right of them are the combined movement for all of January.

First, notice how the race is almost completely set now: almost all the cells are colored in one way or the other. The only person left to announce on the Dem side in Wes Clark. Indications are he’ll make an announcement one way or the other in the next week or so. On the GOP side, the race is a little more open, with just four potential candidates remaining to announce. So currently, we have 4 running, 8 exploring, and 4 unannounced on the right side and 7 running, 2 exploring, and 1 unannounced on the left side. The potential to have 16 GOP candidates is not an unreal one – sadly enough.

This was not John McCain’s month, to be sure. He lost a ton of support, most likely over the troop surge issue. However, even with that he still retains the top spot on Intrade. Giuliani had some solid gains, now that it looks like he’s actually in the race, which propelled him past Romney into second place.

The big news on the GOP side, though, has to be the emergence of Chuck Hagel, who burst onto the scene and into 4th place, knocking out Gingrich and the recently announced Huckabee. His anti-war message seems to be picking up the investors who dumped McCain’s contract earlier.

And, as you can see, Intrade saw fit to respond to my e-mails and add Ron Paul and Mike Gravel to the GOP and Dem sides, respectively. Why they didn’t see fit to also include my other requests, John Cox and Michael Smith, is unknown.

On the Dem side, the public already seems to be tiring of Clinton and Obama. But who’s picking up the slack? None other than Al Gore, who announced he wasn’t going to run, then said he might, then said he wouldn’t, then said he might, and most recently said he wouldn’t again.

Because of the low number of unannounced candidates, as mentioned earlier, I have also begun tracking a spreadsheet with just the candidates who have not ruled out running:

Eventually we will use just this graphic instead of the other one. Discuss away!