Trump’s Odds Pass 60%

Oct 22, 2024

We are now only two weeks away from Election Day.  As the day draws near, polls have flipped between marginally favoring one candidate or the other over the past few months. In other words, according to polling, the election outcome is a coinflip. Meanwhile, betting markets have seen some significant moves and are projecting more of a decisive outcome.  We discussed how these have related to equities’ performance in last week’s Bespoke Report. Moving deeper on the odds themselves, below we show data from ElectionBettingOdds.com which now puts former President Trump at an over 60% chance of winning the November election. That is the highest odds for him since July 22nd following news that President Biden officially dropped out of the race and when Vice President Harris assumed the candidacy.  Trump’s gains have of course come at Harris’ losses as her odds are down to 39%. With that being said, at those levels, Harris’s odds remain stronger than the median reading for Biden during his time in the campaign. In fact, during the current election cycle up until dropping out, Biden only had stronger odds than Harris currently does from March through early June of this year.

As with any election, the past year has been eventful and in turn, there have been massive swings in betting markets’ predictions of the November winner.  Below, we show how the odds have changed since various events like the debates, Biden dropping out, and the first assassination attempt on Trump’s life.  While the event didn’t perfectly line up with the latest peaks and troughs in odds, the time after the second debate has seen a particularly big swing. President Trump has seen his odds rise close to double digits since then. That hasn’t been a full recovery from the peak in his odds when Biden dropped out, but it does make things unchanged since the first assassination attempt on July 13th.

In the chart below, we show each party’s odds at 14 days out from the election for each of the past three cycles.  As shown, 2016 and 2020 saw heavy favoritism for the Democrats at a comparable point in time. 2016 in particular was predicting a landslide with Democrats being given an 84% chance.  2020 was a closer race, but still favored Democrats with a 63% chance of winning. This time around, those odds are flipped with Republicans now favored.  Additionally, this is still the tightest race of these years albeit only by a few percentage points (relative to 2020).  As for where the odds might move to in the next couple of weeks, we would note that in 2016 and 2020, there were only a few points difference between the odds at 14 days out versus the day before Election Day.

For another comparison to those previous elections, below we show how Republican betting odds shaped up over the year before election day in 2016, 2020, and this year.  As noted in the chart above, there are examples of odds being much more elevated in each of the prior elections with Democrats being given a better than 80% chance to win at the comparable time in 2016. However, for Republican odds, outside of this past summer, the only other time where Trump was given a 60%+ probability of winning was briefly in February 2020.   Of course, like polling, betting market predictions are no sure thing.  While the outcome predicted in 2020 was correct, results in 2016 were wildly off.