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Kamala Harris‘ chances of winning the 2024 presidential election are now greater than Donald Trump’s, according to one online prediction market.
With just three days until what could be one of the closest elections in history, the vice president has leapfrogged the Republican nominee on PredictIt.
The platform lets users share trades on the outcomes of financial and political events and has been deemed one of the most reliable when determining the outcome of this year’s race.
As of Saturday morning, shares in Harris were trading at 53 cents while Trump was at 52. On October 29 his lead had been 14 points on the site.
Trump is still ahead on other prominent oddsmakers such as Kalshi and Polymarket.
Kamala Harris’ chances of winning the 2024 presidential election are now greater than Donald Trump’s, according to one online prediction market
But Harris has managed to close the gap, showing her fortunes may have changed in recent days after a Trump surge in momentum at the end of October.
In Real Clear Politics’ average of betting odds, Trump was almost 18 points ahead as of Saturday morning.
Meanwhile, on Polymarket, Trump’s odds of winning fell from 67 percent on October 30 to 59 percent on Friday afternoon.
Over the same period – October 29 to November 1 – Trump’s chances on both bookmakers Bet365 and Paddy Power dropped from 66.7 percent to 63.6 percent.
Kalshi still had Trump with a better chance of winning five of the seven key battleground states – Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
But it gives Harris a better chance in Michigan and Wisconsin.
Pennsylvania is very close with Trump on 52 percent and Harris 48 percent as of Friday lunchtime.
The Real Clear Politics average of betting markets still had Trump leading Harris by 60.6 percent to 38.1 percent.
However, earlier this week, the Republican candidate had been at 63.9 percent.
Polls have the election on a knife-edge, and essentially tied, but for weeks the betting markets have consistently given Trump a clear advantage.
It was unclear what precipitated the shift in the betting markets in recent days.
On October 27 a comedian at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally in New York made a disparaging joke about Puerto Rico, which led to a widespread backlash.
Kalshi, which is America’s first legal online election prediction wagering platform, has already taken $92 million in bets on the 2024 race.
A bettor makes their decisoin on the election
This week, Tarek Mansour, its CEO, said bettors are a more accurate indication of the result than the polls because they have ‘skin in the game.’
He told DailyMail.com: ‘We should definitely trust the [wagering] markets.
‘Prediction markets are places where people have money on the line. People don’t lie with their money.’
In 2016 the polls indicated Hillary Clinton would easily defeat Trump, but were wrong.
In the past betting markets have proved successful in predicting the outcome of elections.
However, like the polls, they were not a good indicator in 2016.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton shake hands after the presidential debate in Hempstead, N.Y., Sept. 26, 2016
the betting markets were wrong in 1948 when President Harry S. Truman won; Here, he gleefully displays a premature early edition of the Chicago Daily Tribune from his train in St. Louis, Missouri, after his defeat of Thomas E. Dewey
As long ago as 1924 the Wall Street Journal wrote: ‘Betting odds are generally taken as the best indicator of probable results in presidential campaigns.’
At the time, bookmakers would send people to candidates’ speeches and base odds on how the audience responded to them, according to the newspaper.
In 15 presidential elections from 1884 to 1940 there was only one upset when the bookmakers were wrong, according to a study by economists Paul Rhode and Koleman Strumpf.
However, in 1948 the betting markets, like the polls, got it spectacularly wrong when they only gave President Harry Truman a roughly one in 10 chance of winning.
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