Forecast like a politician

I'm still reading a collection of Bertrand Russell's sceptical essays and today came across the quote below.

As I read the words "forecasting opinion" it struck me how closely an analogy might be drawn between democratic political process and the operation of financial markets. As a preference processing system, financial markets are just another voting machine and an obvious manifestation of liberal democratic ideology.

My question is, could the intuitive forecasting processes used by politicians be adapted for prediction of financial market behaviour? How might such an approach overcome the limitations inherent in "expert" approaches that tend narrowly to focus on how participants ought to behave rather than how they are actually behaving?

I was particularly attracted by the line "It is useless to urge that politicians ought to be high-minded enough to advocate what enlightened opinion considers good, because if they do they are swept aside for others." With financial markets, the clear parallel is with making a bet against the prevailing view. Even if the crowd are acting in a way that is unsupported by fundamentals, fading their move may still see you swept aside and your capital much diminished.

Here's the passage in full with emphasis added:

"There are at present two very different kinds of specialists in political questions. One the one hand there are the practical politicians of all parties; on the other hand there are the experts, mainly civil servants, but also economists, financiers, scientific medical men, etc. Each of these two classes has a special kind of skill. The skill of the politician consists in guessing what people can be brought to think advantageous to themselves; the skill of the expert consists in calculating what really is advantageous, provided people can be brought to think so. (The proviso is essential, because measures which arouse serious resentment are seldom advantageous, whatever merits they may have otherwise.) The power of the politician, in a democracy, depends upon his adopting the opinion which seem right to the average man. It is useless to urge that politicians ought to be high-minded enough to advocate what enlightened opinion considers good, because if they do they are swept aside for others. Moreover, the intuitive skill that they require in forecasting opinion does not imply any skill whatever in forming their own opinions, so that many of the ablest (from a party-political point of view) will be in a position to advocate, quite honestly, measures which the majority thing good, but which experts know to be bad. There is therefore no point in moral exhortations to politicians be disinterested, except in the crude sense of not taking bribes."