Recent polls show Harris ahead, but Trump’s odds of winning surge in the polls

adminAugust 19, 2024

Over the weekend, decentralized prediction market platform Polymarket saw Donald Trump’s odds soar from 44% to 49%, putting the former president in a virtual tie with his rival Kamala Harris. Harris’s odds also plummeted from 54% to 49%, but she still holds a slight lead. Polymarket users wagered more than $630 million on the national race results, with millions more on smaller markets for swing states and other related outcomes.

Oddly enough, Trump’s lead in Polymarket has grown even as recent polls have shown Harris in his favor. A recent poll by Rasmussen Research, which has been accused of a conservative bias, shows Harris ahead in the key swing states of Michigan and Pennsylvania. The RealClearPolitics national polling average has Harris up 1.5 points, while the Economist polling average has Harris up 2.7 points.

Moreover, other prediction markets have yet to reflect Polymarket’s Trump surge. Betfair, the second-largest market with about $67 million in bets, had Kamala ahead of Trump by about five points. PredictIt, one of the only sites that has $34 million on the line and is available to U.S. residents, had Harris ahead of Trump by about 10 points, a wider lead.

Mathematical models also show Harris continuing to lead. Nate Silver, founder of FiveThirtyEight and an adviser to Polymarket, has Harris at 53.5% chance of winning the Electoral College, compared to Trump’s 45.9%, with the latter up 0.7 percentage points in the past two days and his Polymarket odds up about 5 percentage points. According to Silver, the race is “… basically 50/50, but Harris is a little stronger.” The Economist’s forecast predicts Harris will get 272 electoral votes to Trump’s 266.

Nate Cohn, senior political analyst and pollster for The New York Times, recently told The New Yorker about the polling, saying, “In May, we said Trump was up by 5 points in key states. Now Harris is up by 2 points, so that’s a big seven-point lead. And we’re seeing huge gains for Harris among young, nonwhite voters and women, and smaller gains for Harris among men and white voters, but still some improvement.”

According to data from The Block, Polymarket’s outstanding transactions have recently recovered from a steep drop early last week, the largest single-day drop in history. More than 40,000 users have already joined the site, which this month blocked U.S. residents from trading on the platform.

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adminAugust 19, 2024