We’re just five days away from Election Day, and polls, pundits and pundits continue to tell us that the 2024 presidential race is very close between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.
That’s not the message offshore betting markets have been sending in recent weeks.
The gap between Harris and Trump continues to widen on Polymarket, a crypto trading platform, and two of Britain’s biggest betting platforms, Sporting Index and Betfair Exchange. As of Wednesday evening, Betfair’s temperature gauge pointed to a “possible” win for Trump.
How the betting markets have changed in October
The odds on the poll market on October 3 tied Trump and Harris at 49%. Since then, Trump’s chances of defeating Harris on Tuesday reached their largest margin since July 21, the day President Joe Biden dropped out of the race.
The initial boost to Trump’s chances of winning was matched by a slight increase in his polling this month in battleground states like Pennsylvania. But some have questioned the sharp, significant jump in his odds of winning. He has suggested that players with deep pockets may be manipulating the betting markets. Polymarket officials have said they are investigating the claims.
The gap between the chances of Trump and Harris winning is now as wide as the Biden-Trump gap in the 2020 election. But the differences in battleground state polling are not comparable. Biden’s lead in 2020 polls was more than three times that between Trump and Harris.
How the polling and gambling odds compare in the 2020 and 2024 elections.
Election forecaster Kamala stands by Harris’ win prediction.
Renowned election prognosticator Alan Lichtman has predicted nine of the past 10 presidential elections.
States where polling shows the race is still a toss-up.
Real Clean Politics collects polls and shows trends in their results. That still considers eight battleground states with 103 electoral vote tossups because polling results are within the margin of error. Offshore bettors have increased the odds of Trump winning all but two of those states. In eight states, though, recent polls put the gap between Harris and Trump at 1 point or less.
Bettors pushed Trump’s chances of winning higher than in previous elections.
Trump’s odds of winning are now just a few percentage points lower than they were on the first day of the campaign at the Republican National Convention. On July 16, the Polymarket and Betfair Exchange had a more than 70 percent chance of defeating Biden.
According to a 2004 paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, the clear betting favorite has lost only twice in the month before an election, in 1916 and 1948. Betting markets also failed to predict a Trump victory in 2016.