The United States will elect its next president in November.
Opinion polls tracking the US presidential elections – Trump vs Biden – are reported almost daily in the media. Few analysts, however, track the betting odds on who will be the next POTUS.
After almost all the opinion polls went wrong in the previous US elections – by predicting a clear win for Hillary Clinton over Trump – the question being asked now is which of the two is the more reliable indicator of results.
Believers in opinion polls – who dismiss the 2016 election error as an aberration – point to clear and unequivocal evidence that Biden will be the winner (though there is always the fear that if Biden’s percentage lead narrows, Trump may walk away with the larger electoral college – a repeat of Clinton in 2016). Perhaps the finest tracker and analysis of all the different polls is Nate Silver and his organisation fivethirtyeight. Their poll tracker shows a substantial and consistent lead for Biden.
There are those of course who believe that international betting odds are the best indicators – as they are a reflection of people truly “putting their money where their mouth is”. Betting odds, indicate a slightly different forecast.
While the opinion polls have shown Biden to have a constant lead over Trump, a betting odds-tracker shows that:
a. between February and May 2020, it was Trump who had a clear lead over Biden – totally contrary to the polls which showed Biden in the lead during that period;
b. in June, July, August, the betting odds showed that Biden took a clear lead over Trump, which was also reflected in the opinion polls;
c) now, the latest betting market odds indicate Biden’s lead over Trump is narrowing and has been trending downwards since early July, while opinion polls show Biden’s lead widening marginally.
The opinion polls and the betting odds, however, both agree that Biden’s lead over Trump today is large enough to be significant. But there is still a long way to go – over 70 days left – for the elections and the differing trends between betting odds and the opinion polls could possibly become important.
International betting odds also dissect the forecast result further into the Electoral College Votes that each candidate is likely to win. Currently, Biden is clearly ahead – not just with a 66% chance of an overall victory, which is double Trump’s 34% chance of a victory. Strikingly, the chance of Biden winning by a landslide (i.e. over 360 Electoral College votes) is as high as 25%, compared to only 7% for Trump.
Some believe the stock market “always knows what nobody else does”. It’s currently booming, and they believe this is a sure sign of a Trump victory. Although they point out that it is the stock market’s movement in the last three months before an election that is key.
Finally, maybe you believe that plain old ‘gut feel’ is best. In which case, please do let us know who’s going to win.
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