Betting markets aren’t sure Trump and Biden will survive to Inauguration Day
Tiana Lowe Doescher
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Despite a slew of eleventh-hour endorsements and appeals from Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, betting markets still believe that Donald Trump has a 3-in-4 shot of scoring the Republican presidential nomination for a third time in a row. And, despite fury from the Democrats’ left-hand flank and dismal approval numbers, investors have granted Joe Biden similar odds of winning his party’s nomination. But despite the betting markets’ disinterest in either Iowa or wishcasting by Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) and Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN), markets have priced in a nearly 1-in-3 chance that neither the current president nor the former actually win the presidency in 2024.
After the GOP’s disastrous showing in the 2022 midterm elections, Trump’s general election odds tanked as Gov. DeSantis, who won the once purple state of Florida by nearly 20 points, ascended. Alas, the 15-point margin in GOP primary polling between Trump and DeSantis doubled to 30 points after Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg launched his idiotic indictments against the former, and then the latter began his terminally online campaign with a cringeworthy launch with two Democratic billionaires on Twitter. Ever since, nobody has filled the void, or really the chasm, between Trump and Biden versus the rest.
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Yes, there were two notable near-exceptions. Newsom briefly popped up to 10% when the California governor debated DeSantis on Fox News and reminded the world he isn’t actually running for president, and now Haley, the former South Carolina governor and U.N. ambassador who is ascendant in primary polling for the crucial early state of New Hampshire, has a 10% shot of winning the presidency.
After her comes Newsom at 6.5%, crackpot Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at 3%, Michelle Obama (who will never run, as much as Democrats correctly wish she would) at 2%, and Vivek Ramaswamy at 1.8%. DeSantis, who has the endorsement of Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds and one of the best ground games ever built in the Hawkeye State, has a 1.7% shot, and the woman ostensibly a heartbeat away from the presidency, Vice President Kamala Harris, has only a 1.6% shot.
Consider that math. The betting markets believe the sitting and former presidents likely to run as their parties’ nominees only have a 68% chance of winning the 2024 election, and the vice president and DeSantis, who spent more than a year as the runner-up to Trump, can barely rub 3 percentage points together. The only slightly normal sign in these odds is the exceedingly small chance that Haley carries a strong second place in Iowa and two first-place finishes in New Hampshire and her home state of South Carolina to stop Trump. And again, the betting markets say Haley only has a 13.3% chance of making that happen in the primary.
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So what’s the black swan event the betting markets are pricing in? Perhaps that the progressive legal movement succeeds in locking up Trump before Election Day, but more realistically that the 81-year-old Joe Biden doesn’t make it. After all, Biden entered office older than Ronald Reagan, our previous oldest president, was on his last day in office, and Biden would be 86 years old by the end of a second term, more than a decade older than the average life expectancy for a white American man.
If only for the sake of the republic, we ought to pray that neither outcome manifests itself in reality.