With a Trump victory in the US presidential elections pretty much assured, bookies again were a better gauge of the result than most conventional polls issued before the election.
A total of $1.8 billion has been bet worldwide on the US election, Polymarket reported, with most bookies having favored Donald Trump’s odds to regain his seat at the White House.
Unlike polls, which survey voters directly, betting markets reflect the sentiments and behaviors of those willing to put money into an outcome.
According to the Conversation, a nonprofit news organization, the betting favorite has only lost twice since 1866: in 2016, when then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was favored over Trump throughout the campaign, only to lose, and in 1948, when Democrat Harry Truman beat 8-to-1 odds to defeat Republican Thomas Dewey.
As recently as midweek, the betting at Polymarket gave Trump a 67 percent chance of winning, odds that still went down to 58 percent shortly before the election, with Harris’ chances having risen from 33 to 42.
Presidential election betting can’t be done legally in the US, and much of the information came from UK bookmakers, which mostly gave Trump a clear edge.
Betfair Exchange, for example, the biggest UK peer-to-peer betting platform, predicted last week that Trump would likely win, giving him 1.63 odds to win the election, over Harris with 2.56
Ladbrokes offered bets on Trump winning at 8/13, equivalent to a 62 percent chance, and Harris 11/8, equivalent to 42 percent. Gamblers at PredictIt seemed to have been the only cautious ones, with odds exactly level at 52 percent shortly before the election.
Meanwhile, the final six public polls right before the election basically told the same story as each other and the previous polls in October, a razor-thin margin. Three of those last six polls were actual ties; one has Kamala Harris ahead by three points; the others have Donald Trump up by one point and two points.
For example, a national poll of likely voters from Emerson College found that Trump and Harris had 49 percent support each among US voters. At the same time, a poll released Sunday by ABC News/Ipsos found that Harris had 49 percent support among likely voters, and Trump trailed behind at 46 percent.
In the FiveThirtyEight’s National Polls tracker, Harris held a narrow lead of 1 percentage point over Trump, while a poll released Sunday by The New York Times and Siena College claimed that Harris has pulled ahead of Trump in North Carolina and Wisconsin, crucial swing states that ended up leaning towards the Republican candidate.
All this, despite a majority of pollsters having changed their methods since the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, where Trump’s performance was significantly underestimated.
“We don’t always see the misses in the same direction,” Chris Jackson, the senior vice president of public affairs for Ipsos stated recently. “I can tell you that the polling industry has made substantial changes to how we do our surveys to try to account for what we think was driving those errors in 2020″.
