In the latest plot twist of the 2024 presidential election season, it looks like former President Donald Trump has pulled ahead of Vice President Kamala Harris in betting market-based predictions.
It wasn’t even a month ago when Audacy reported that The Virtual Tout, a forecasting model developed by Northwestern University professor Thomas Miller, was expecting Harris to win the race by a landslide in the Electoral College not seen since the 1980s. Through early October, The Virtual Tout – a model based on forecasting from real money trading site PredictIt – showed Harris in a lead over Trump.
According to The Virtual Tout site, the vice-presidential debate between Republican Ohio Sen. JD Vance and Democratic Minnestoa Gov. Tim Walz on Oct. 1 did have an impact on forecasting. Throughout the month, forecasting for Harris got progressively worse. While she was predicted to have 302 electoral votes compared to Trump’s 236, that story was totally flipped as of Friday, when she was predicted to have just 234 to Trump’s 304.
“The market has been active and volatile, suggesting either that current investors are moving their money from one party to the other or that new investors are entering the market,” said The Virtual Tout. It also noted that: “For the first time in US history, we have seen a presidential election go from toss-up to Republican landslide, to toss-up, to a possible Democratic landslide, to toss-up, and to a Republican leaning election.”
In June, when President Joe Biden was still the Democratic candidate, polls showed Trump leading in key swing states. Just before their presidential debate, a poll indicated Biden and Trump were in a dead heat. After Biden’s poor debate performance, he left the race and passed the reigns to Harris, who was leading Trump at the polls even before she became the official candidate in August.
The Virtual Tout wasn’t the only betting-market based forecast that showed Trump in the lead as of this weekend. This Saturday, Kalshi – a U.S. betting site that went live with presidential election betting earlier this month – showed Trump in the lead compared to Harris at 52% to 48%. Polymarket showed Trump in an even greater lead at 54.9% to Harris’ 44.8% Saturday.
“Since the vice presidential debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz, offshore betting markets have trended toward Trump, according to Polymarket, a crypto trading platform,” USA Today said in an article this week. “The primary driver: an influx of bets that raised the probability of Trump winning Pennsylvania.”
That’s where Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt this summer during a Butler, Pa., rally – escaping with a bloodied ear.
Before Harris picked Walz as her running mate, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro was rumored to be a top contender for the role.
According to USA Today, bettors also gave Trump a narrow chance of winning Wisconsin and Michigan as of Thursday morning. Compared to the 2016 and 2020 races, Trump appears to have better odds of winning this time, the outlet added. He eventually lost the popular vote in both races, but Trump won the 2016 election via the Electoral College.
“He had just a 17% probability of defeating Hillary Clinton as voters went to the polls in 2016, according to Betfair Exchange, the biggest U.K. peer-to-peer betting platform,” said USA Today. In October 2020, bettors gave Biden a 68% chance of winning.
USA Today noted that bettors don’t always get it right. In 2016, Betfair odds gave Hillary Clinton with an 81% likelihood of winning. Still, they are usually spot on – the only other time bettors failed to predict the winner was in 1948, when Democrat Harry Truman beat Republican Thomas Dewey.
Back in 2016, polls also indicated Clinton was expected to win, at 71.8% compared to Trump’s 28.6%, according to FiveThirtyEight. While betting market-based forecast look at wagers people make on candidates, polls survey people about what they think and who they plan to vote for. One disadvantage polls have is that they are in the rearview mirror. On the other hand, betting markets convey real-time expectations.
New York Times/Siena College Poll results indicated that Harris still has a lead and that more people believe she represents change and cares about people. A new pair of New York Times/Philadelphia Inquirer/Siena College polls also showed Trump in the lead in Arizona and Harris in the lead in Pennsylvania.
FiveThirtyEight’s aggregate of poll results showed Harris in the lead nationwide as of Saturday, at 48.5% to Trump’s 46%. Even those results show a close race with not even a month to go until the 2024 election. Although The Hill’s Decision Desk HQ forecast also showed Harris in a slight lead, it dropped from 52% earlier in the week to 51% as of Saturday.