Polls, experts, and journalists all say that the 2024 presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump looks very close. The election is in just five days.
In the past few weeks, the message from overseas betting markets has not been that.
At 11 a.m. EDT on Thursday, Trump had a 63% chance of winning on Polymarket, a crypto trading website, and on Sporting Index and Betfair Exchange, two of the biggest betting sites in the UK.
As of Thursday morning, Betfair’s temperature measure showed that Trump was “likely” to win.
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What’s changed in the betting markets in October
Trump and Harris both had equal odds of 49% to win on Polymarket on October 3.
After that, Trump’s chances of beating Harris grew to their biggest since July 21, when Vice President Joe Biden dropped out of the race. They reached their biggest on Wednesday.
Trump’s chances of winning went up at first, and this month, his poll numbers went up a little in key states like Pennsylvania.
But some people aren’t sure about the sudden and big increase in his chances of winning. They have said that people with a lot of money might be messing with the betting markets. Officials at Polymarket have said that they are looking into those reports.
The difference in odds between Trump and Harris is now the same size as the difference between Biden and Trump in 2020.
But the difference in polls in battleground states isn’t the same. In 2020, Biden had three times as much of a lead in polls as Trump and Harris do now.
Polls are put together by Real Clear Politics, which also shows trends in the findings. Because polls are still too close to call, eight key states with 103 electoral votes are still seen as toss-ups.
Bettors from outside of the United States have made it more likely that Trump will win all but two of those states.
But new studies show that in five of the eight states, the difference between Harris and Trump is only one point or less.
Bettors think Trump has a better chance of winning than in previous races.
Trump’s chances of winning are now only a few percentage points lower than they were on the first day of the Republican National Convention.
On July 16, Polymarket and Betfair Exchange both gave him a better than 70% chance of beating Biden.
A 2004 study in the Journal of Economic Perspectives says that the clear favorite in the month before an election has only lost twice, in 1916 and 1948. The odds didn’t even come close to predicting Trump’s victory in 2016.
