We’re just five days from Election Day, and polls, experts and pundits continue to tell us the 2024 presidential race appears exceedingly 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.
As of Thursday at 11 a.m. EDT, Trump’s probability of winning was 63% or higher on Polymarket, a crypto trading platform, and two major U.K. betting platforms, Sporting Index and Betfair Exchange. As of Thursday morning, Betfair’s temperature gauge pointed to a “likely” win for Trump.
How betting markets have shifted in October
The odds on Polymarket had Trump’s and Harris’ win probabilities tied at 49% on Oct. 3. Since then, Trump’s odds of defeating Harris jumped to their widest margin on Wednesday since July 21, the day President Joe Biden dropped out of the race.
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The initial rise in Trump’s odds of winning corresponded this month to a slight increase in his polling in battleground states such as Pennsylvania. But some have questioned the quick, significant jump in his probability of winning. They have suggested deep-pocketed players could be tampering with the betting markets. Polymarket officials have said they are investigating those claims.
The gap between Trump’s and Harris’ odds of winning is now as wide as the Biden-Trump gap in the 2020 election. But the gap in battleground state polling isn’t comparable. Biden’s lead in polling in 2020 was three times as large as it is between Trump and Harris.
How polling and gambling odds compare in 2020 and 2024 elections
Election forecaster stays by Kamala Harris winning prediction
Allan Lichtman, renowned election forecaster, has successfully predicted nine out of the last 10 presidential elections.
States where polling shows the race is still a toss-up
Real Clear Politics aggregates polls and show trends in their results. It still considers eight battleground states with 103 electoral votes toss-ups because polling results remain within the margin of error. Offshore bettors have pushed up the probability of Trump winning all but two of those states. Of the eight states, though, recent polls put the gap in five of them between Harris and Trump at 1 point or less.
Bettors push Trump’s probability of winning higher than in previous elections
Trump’s probability of winning is now just a few percentage points below the high the campaign hit on the opening day of the Republican National Convention. On July 16, his probability of defeating Biden was more than 70% on Polymarket and Betfair Exchange.
According to a 2004 paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, the clear betting favorite in the month before the election has lost only twice, in 1916 and 1948. The betting markets also failed to predict Trump’s win in 2016.