One Week From Election Day, Trump The Betting Favorite, But There’s More To The Story

Early voting and mail-in voting are well underway, but the vote tallying in the U.S. presidential election won’t get underway until next Tuesday, Nov. 5 — one week from now. And as October nears its end, a race categorized by the betting odds at the beginning of the month as a 50-50 tossup now has a clear favorite everywhere lines are posted.

At offshore sportsbooks, at (relatively) legal prediction markets Kalshi, PredictIt, Polymarket, and even Robinhood, and at DraftKings Sportsbook in the Canadian province of Ontario — where U.S. election betting is permitted — former president Donald Trump is priced as the favorite, at odds in some cases reaching 2-to-1.

Some election models, however, continue to categorize the outcome as a coin flip, wondering whether the tail wagged the dog with a run of October polls shifting toward Trump and away from Vice President Kamala Harris — polls that in some cases came from less trusted sources with a right-ward lean. (There’s a whole theory floating around that the GOP wants to create the appearance that Trump is on his way to victory to plant the seeds for another round of election denial if Harris wins.)

Noted statistician — and poker player! — Nate Silver’s most recent crunching of numbers came up with a 53% chance of a Trump electoral college win and a 47% chance of a Harris electoral college win, which is much closer than the betting markets have it. Silver, and some others, have dubbed much of the relatively late odds movement and polling shifts to be “noise”:

So which is it? Is Trump going to win comfortably, as the odds suggest is possible? Or is it going to come down to a modest margin either way in just a state or two? (Or are the markets and polls completely off base, as was the case with the 2022 midterms, and a Harris win similar to Joe Biden’s in 2020 is coming?)

We’ll know the answers in a week.

(Or, if 2020 is a guide, a little over a week.)

(Or, if 2000 is a guide, a month or two.)

The latest prices

Here are the odds, as of press time on Tuesday:

• DraftKings in Ontario: Trump -185, Harris +150
• Pinnacle (offshore): Trump -201, Harris +178
• Kalshi: Trump 63 cents (-170 equivalent), Harris 38 cents (+163 equivalent)
• PredictIt: Trump 60 cents (-150), Harris 46 cents (+117)
• Polymarket: Trump 66% (-193), Harris 34% (+191)

As the polls have moved in Trump’s direction in October — Harris still leads nationally, but not necessarily by enough to overcome the electoral college’s impact — the betting odds have followed. And that raises the key question for everyone sweating this outcome (whether because they have money on it or because of the real-world stakes): Are the polls accurate?

In the 2022 midterms, when a “red wave” was widely predicted, “the polling averages were skewed by a disproportionate of lower quality, Republican-backed pollsters,” wrote U.K.-based election betting expert Paul Krishnamurty last week. “The same is true this cycle, although it isn’t clear to what extent it has shifted the averages to Trump. Grant Elliot Morris reckons by 0.3%. But it has impacted the narrative.”

Krishnamurty also raised the possibility of “herding” in polling, meaning that polls mimic other polls because those conducting the surveys don’t want to be seen as outliers. He observed this to be a partial factor in 2022. “I’m not in a position to judge whether herding is happening this time,” Krishnamurty wrote, “but I am not ruling out one side performing 3-4 points better than expected.”

Which side could potentially outperform expectations is an open question, but that’s part of why Silver recently stated that the two most likely scenarios are Trump sweeping almost all the swing states and Harris sweeping almost all the swing states.

Confirmation bias check-in

To some extent, the betting odds have produced a “you’ll believe what you want to believe” split on social media.

A Trump supporter may offer Polymarket’s numbers — which are dictated by how users are betting — as a sign:

And on the flip side, a Harris supporter may see value in the betting underdog because of a perceived disconnect between polls/odds and reality:

And here’s a late-breaking twist bringing the gaming industry directly into the conversation: The Harris campaign is now specifically targeting video gamers and online gamblers with its commercials.

The Democratic side began last Friday programming ads on DraftKings, Yahoo Sports, and other gaming sites, with the goal of reaching the young male demographic that, according to polling, is a key cohort in which Trump has gained ground since 2020. 

With one week to go until Election Day, it’s anyone’s guess whether the odds tell the story or are just part of the “noise.” There’s certainly money to be made by those who can parse what they should and shouldn’t be listening to.