Kamala Harris’ chances of winning the 2024 presidential election are now higher than Donald Trump’s, according to an online prediction market.
Just three days away from what could be one of the closest elections in history, the vice president has surpassed the Republican candidate on PredictIt.
The platform allows users to share trades on the results of financial and political events and has been considered one of the most reliable in determining the outcome of this year’s race.
On Saturday morning, Harris’s stock was trading at 53 cents, while Trump’s was at 52. On October 29, his stock lead was 14 points.
Trump is still ahead of other prominent bettors like Kalshi and Polymarket.
Kamala Harris’ chances of winning the 2024 presidential election are now higher than Donald Trump’s, according to an online prediction market
But Harris has managed to close the gap, showing that her fortunes may have changed in recent days after Trump’s surge in late October.
In Real Clear Politics’ average betting odds, Trump was nearly 18 points ahead as of Saturday morning.
Meanwhile, at Polymarket, the odds of Trump winning fell from 67 percent on October 30 to 59 percent on Friday afternoon.
During the same period (October 29 to November 1), Trump’s odds at bookmakers Bet365 and Paddy Power fell from 66.7 percent to 63.6 percent.
Kalshi still had Trump most likely to win 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 at 52 percent and Harris at 48 percent as of Friday lunchtime.
The Real Clear Politics betting market average still had Trump ahead of Harris by 60.6 percent to 38.1 percent.
However, as of earlier this week, the Republican candidate had won 63.9 percent.
Polls put the election on a knife-edge and essentially tied, but for weeks betting markets have consistently given Trump a clear lead.
It was unclear what precipitated the shift in betting markets in recent days.
On October 27, a comedian at Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden in New York made a derogatory joke about Puerto Rico, sparking widespread backlash.
Kalshi, which is the first legal online election prediction betting platform in the United States, has already accepted $92 million in bets for the 2024 race.
A bettor makes his decision on the elections.
This week, Tarek Mansour, its chief executive, said bettors are a more accurate indication of the outcome than polls because they have “skin in the game.”
He told DailyMail.com: ‘We should definitely trust the (betting) markets.
‘Prediction markets are places where people have money at stake. People don’t lie with their money.
In 2016 the polls indicated that Hillary Clinton would easily defeat Trump, but they were wrong.
In the past, betting markets have proven successful in predicting the outcome of elections.
However, like the polls, they were not a good indicator in 2016.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton shake hands after the presidential debate in Hempstead, New York, on September 26, 2016.
the betting markets were wrong in 1948, when President Harry S. Truman won; Here, he gleefully displays a premature first edition of the Chicago Daily Tribune from his train in St. Louis, Missouri, after his defeat of Thomas E. Dewey.
As early as 1924, the Wall Street Journal wrote: “Betting odds are generally considered the best indicator of likely results in presidential campaigns.”
At the time, betting houses sent people to candidates’ speeches and based their odds on how the public responded, according to the newspaper.
In 15 presidential elections between 1884 and 1940, there was only one upset because the bookmakers were wrong, according to a study by economists Paul Rhode and Koleman Strumpf.
However, in 1948 the betting markets, like the polls, went spectacularly wrong when they gave President Harry Truman only about a one in ten chance of winning.