Former President Donald Trump is the Election Day betting odds favorite to win the 2024 presidential election. His odds to win plummeted earlier in the week, making him a narrow favorite, but have since bounced back to give him a more comfortable margin.
Trump had a 28.9-point lead among bettors on Oct. 29, and that dropped to 9.9 points by Sunday. As his odds fell, DJT Media stock tanked about 47% from $54.64 to $28.81. His lead is now back up to 20.8 points, and DJT Media has shot up over 41% to over $39 per share. It jumped 17% on Election Day alone at one point, resulting in trading of the stock being halted twice due to volatility.
Despite the volatility, Trump finished the 2024 election cycle by leading in the betting odds for 30 consecutive days. Before he surged ahead, Vice President Kamala Harris led for 26 consecutive days.
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Why the drastic shift?
Founder of ElectionBettingOdds.com, Maxim Lott, shared his analysis of why the odds shifted so drastically days before the election with the Washington Examiner.
“I don’t think it’s early voting data,” he said. “Which, if anything, has been favorable to Trump, and which I think is partly responsible for his betting leads in Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, and Nevada, where more than half of voters have already voted.”
He explained that bettors seem to be pulling back in the northern swing states where there is less early voting and where “there have been a flood of polls” that “hint at very slight momentum towards Harris.”
Two weeks ago, Trump was favored to win all seven swing states in the polls and the betting odds: Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin. As of election morning, Harris is now favored to win the latter two battlegrounds and has significantly tightened the odds in Nevada.
“It’s hard to detect the exact cause of that, but one possibility is that the narrative around the Madison Square Garden comments” where a comedian joked that Puerto Rico is a “floating pile of garbage,” as well as when President Joe Biden called Trump supporters “garbage” are distractions “from the issues Trump does best on, like the economy and migration.”
One other explanation for the odds shift, as Lott explained on MaximumTruth.org, is the Selzer poll released this week, which showed Trump down by 3 percentage points in solid-red Iowa.
While Harris’s betting odds momentum was short-lived, Democrats took and kept the betting odds lead to win majority control of the House. On Halloween, Republicans were given a 56.1% chance to win the House and Democrats had a 43.9% chance. By Monday, Democrats flipped that around, with a 55.9% chance to win. On Election Day, Democrats are given a 52% chance.
Despite the volatile betting odds shifts in the presidential and House races, there has not been a major change in the Senate odds. Republicans remain favored to win a 52-48 majority, however four GOP underdogs who were mounting last-minute comebacks have seen their momentum cool off.
According to Polymarket, Republican Senate underdogs in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada have all seen their odds decrease over the last week. Pennsylvania’s Dave McCormick went from a 31% chance to 23.7%, Michigan’s Mike Rogers went from 33% to 21.3%, Wisconsin’s Eric Hovde went from 35% to 26.6%, and Nevada’s Sam Brown went from 26% to 13.7%.
Arizona’s Kari Lake, on the other hand, went from a 26% chance last week to 27.7% on Election Day after an Atlas Intel poll put her ahead by a point earlier in the week.
How predictive are election betting odds?
Historical data shows that betting odds are extremely efficient at predicting a candidate’s chance of winning an election. Candidates given a 75% chance to win will win approximately 75% of the time, data show.
Between 2016 and 2022, ElectionBettingOdds tracked 807 different candidates’ chances across a number of elections. They found that if bettors gave a candidate between a 90% and 100% chance to win, that candidate won 99.4% of the time. Candidates given between an 80% and 90% chance won 93.8% of the time.
Between 70% and 80%, that falls to 74.4%. Between 60% and 70%, it’s 68.8%. Between 50% and 60%, it’s 56%. Between 40% and 50%, it’s 44%. Between 30% and 40%, it’s 34.9%. Between 20% and 30%, it’s 23.8%. Between 10% and 20%, it’s 4.5%, and between 0% and 10%, it’s 1%.
There is, however, an “underdog bias” present in races where one candidate is heavily favored over the other. This bias produces a higher predicted chance of upset in races where the outcome is essentially a forgone conclusion. This would not apply to the 2024 presidential race since it is predicted to be very tight.
Lott’s research has also found that election betting odds have a slight lean toward Democratic candidates but less so than FiveThirtyEight’s model does. Both tend to be more “surprised” when a Republican wins.
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In total, 88.9% of candidates favored in the election betting odds won their election out of the 807 tracked. Only three betting underdogs have won the presidential election since the 1940s, and two were only slight underdogs. John F. Kennedy won at +110, Jimmy Carter won at +100, but Trump won in 2016 despite +375 odds.
Even in 2016, bettors gave Trump greater than a 20% chance to win, while many of the top predictive models had him in single-digit territory. Lott told the Washington Examiner that bettors may have discounted the chance “outsiders, nonpoliticians, and populists” could win major elections in 2016, but “this time around, they are certainly not discounting [Trump’s] chances.”