House of Representatives MPs are placing bets on the election with Sportingbet, or so we are told in recent reporting. Specifically, they’re backing themselves to win their own seats.

Sportingbet doesn’t offer odds in all the seats, just 25 marginal ones, and according to a spokesman, a couple of members sitting in these are betting on themselves — to win.

Ok, it’s an almost non-story. But it leads us to an interesting point: the value local members put on themselves. They like to think they make a large difference to the vote in their seats, but in the grand scheme, they don’t matter much. National and state-wide swings are much more important.

Richard Farmer noted in Crikey recently that Portlandbet, the only betting outfit which offers odds on all seats, has the Coalition favoured in slightly over half of them, while the overall outcome price favours Labor. This implies either that Labor should not be the overall favourite, or the seats are on average overstating the Coalition’s chances.

Blind Freddy aside, no-one could believe the first proposition, so the second one is true: Coalition MPs are overvalued at the moment. Especially by themselves.

The thing about sitting members as a species is this: they overstate their own electoral worth. If they get, at an election, a swing towards them, they believe it was due to their own popularity, hard work and no-nonsense approach to serving their electorate. A swing against is always the fault of the party and leader.

In reality the effect of individual Members is puny compared with the overall electoral tide.

Some MPs like to boast they’ve consistently increased their margin while those around them are shrinking theirs. They probably believe it too, but examination generally doesn’t bear this out.

Local MPs are never as hot as they think they are. They have only marginal effect on their own seat outcomes. See, for example, the possible fates of John Howard in Bennelong and Malcolm Turnbull in Wentworth.

The way things look, those two MPs will lose their dough along with their seats come the next election. And who do you think they’ll be blaming – themselves or the Prime Minister?