2024 US Presidential Election Betting Thread

why has in the past week her swing state polling gotten worse? seems like a pretty straight forward question

It's not really an arb when all the markets are moving in the same direction.

Polymarket always had Trump higher than other markets. The argument was always that crypto bros prefer Trump and since polymarket is a crypto market it naturally skews that way. In fact it was substantially higher for Trump than elsewhere. People didn't arb it.

Now they are all moving up.

This is more likely to be based on events, eg. Kamala nuking herself, rather than maga/cryptobros pumping all presidential betting markets.

Given that last cycle there was "actual money" being dumped all the way into December on the idea Trump had really won, then the above is not as reliable as he thinks

Personally sitting this one out now till the post election period, to see if something similar happens again.

Elon could have easily swung the betting markets by himself for a few million given it was a 20 odd cent move on Betfair and only 160 million has been matched to date in the market at Betfair and that'll easily be the market with the most volume bet on it so far compared to Polymarket or individual books or whatever.

In the last few days it's gone from 160m to 162m and change matched on Betfair. While yes, that's a couple million dollars matched it was also very sudden and could have easily been Elon himself taking a position to move the market.

If Elon took a few million on Trump (say 5 million) it'd be like 1/50,000th of his net worth or about the same as me or someone with a 1m net worth give or take betting 20 bucks on Harris or whatever to 'move the market'. Considering he overpaid for Twitter by tens of billions of dollars, presumably to try and influence elections among other things, it's not unreasonable to think that it's possible he fired a bet in if he's tweeting about it.

Obviously if he's not the source of the move, it's somewhat significant in that it's a big bet someone made or series of bets but it's still only a couple million dollars in bets, presumably because the polling is close and the market has just decided this entire cycle that Trump will overperform his polling based on previous cycles, whether or not that is true remains to be seen.

Some weird polling today with Harris ahead in GA, Trump ahead in NV against the betting odds/expectations of where the tipping point is and PA/WI tied

my mistake, i read it as why has market sentiment changed but that's not what you asked

i'm not sure the reason for the market move. assume poll movements have a lot to do with it. but the theory that crypto whales have dumped $ on trump on poly is not negated by the fact that other markets followed suit, given people will naturally arb trump no poly and yes on kalshi/predictit

very highly leveraged on trump yes and kamala no on predictit - thinking of exiting at a nice profit but unsure of when to exit

I wouldn't get greedy here. Kamala has been trending down on Poly since Sep 22 until yesterday, from 52 to 43 and change. That's not going to continue IMO and may have bottomed. Today she is 45.5.

i'd sell trump into october surprise then buy back just ahead of election

can exit now at 11k, which is a nice profit but if i hold and trump wins all those parallel markets i get a little less than 25k

isnt the predictit max like 850? you must have had to find tons of markets to get that volume down

i do think this is probably the bottom of her value in the 44-45c range on poly until right before election day/election day itself where the swings obviously get pretty wild

like this georgia one was just ******ed but i still went in way too early, could have gotten another 5 cents or so on each market if i just waited - there was a ton of kamala hysteria for a while and it had more oomph than i gave it credit for

ATH vs Kamala

Harris is +135 at bol. Was 140. Maybe you can still get that.

Seems like a steal.

+140 at Pinnacle right now

If you are closing positions on PredictIt before the event is completed, you are losing tons of your edge. The spreads are way too high to jump in and out of these markets. There's better ways to hedge your position than on PI.

I don't understand why anyone cares about poly and predictit prices at all other for arbing or if they happen to be the best price when Betfair is infinitely more liquid

Even there, there's only been 10 odd million matched to push the price from flip to where it is, Elon could easily be doing that himself with what to him is play money to spin a narrative or even get a sweat or it could be a handful of whales taking positions (or in theory it could be sharp action too but political markets aren't really moved by sharps in that game day prices rarely reflect true probability which is not so much the case with major high limits sport eg NFL)

While I agree Harris is less of a fav than she was a few weeks ago (I'd say -125 now vs -150 then) there is no way she is +140 this far from the election with the numbers being what they are, the market is just building in that there is a polling error and it will be in trumps favour on election day in that he will over perform

I fully expect Trump to get about the same amount of votes he got last time after adjusting for 4 years of population growth, if D turnout is lower he can win, if Kamala gets Biden numbers turnout wise she wins.

Too soon to call still but in no universe should Harris be +150 right now. You could maybe make a case for Trump flipping to fav despite the numbers today not justifying that based off reversal of momentum and memories of Trumps bad debate fading but he certainly isn't on the -150 range today

I guess we'll have a better idea in a few weeks

Very keen to see if Harris goes on JRE, if she's confident in her abilities she can get a mild boost among white and Hispanic millenials and gen z men that would help her a lot (or obviously if it's a disaster it could hurt her too)

I actually think with the right prep she could get Joe to agree with her on the issues on a lot of things that he and his followers probably don't realise Democrats are for and Republicans are against or vice versa, Joe is less agree with the guest I have on now than he used to be but I think the risk is worth it for the Harris camp if Joe will agree to have her on (obviously he should have both her and Trump on for the ratings if he can pre election)

Your ability to spin something to what you want to be true in the world is honestly impressive. You were completely off about Biden dropping out because it didn't align with your world view. Just from reading your posts, I can tell you are clearly a smart person. But you should work to minimize your biases.

Going off the best polls, making inferences from listening to people with actual sources to private polling on both sides like Mark Halperin, & watching Kamala's recent higher variance media strategy, I'd say it's likely Trump is > 60% to win which is even higher than Polymarket.

The PA voter registration margin is a huge red flag for Dems. Dems had a 700K voter advantage in PA in 2020 and won the state by 80,000 votes. Based on the previous five Presidential elections the Democratic Party needs between a 600K-800K voter registration advantage to win Pennsylvania. Trump won PA in 2016 when the Democrats had a 900K advantage.

They currently have a 300K voter registration advantage. And Kamala needs to win PA to have any realistic chance of winning the race.

agree 100%

anyone think trump is live for the popular vote? cant imagine that is in play but odds suggest not too far fetched

agree on the kamala higher variance strategy is obv a tell they have internals that it aint looking good

did anyone in their wildest dreams think she would entertain something like going on rogan 2 months ago? cmon

I guess this might have been posted before. I think there is a small chance I posted it. Buy just in case.

Much of it went over my head, though I feel I got the gist. However, it would be cool to hear what people who understand better take from it.

Not sure what the downside is outside of a horrible performance and given she overperformed in the debate with Trump she's obviously backing her abilities since she's clearly better at campaigning than she was during her disastrous 2020 run

Nobody who is voting for Harris right now who is a Joe Rogan fan is going to flip to Trump unless the interview is absolutely disastrous and his viewer base skews pretty heavily towards independents and Trump voters as opposed to hardcore progressives.

I'm probably the rare left-wing person who quite likes Joe Rogan (although Covid+Spotify did break his brain a bit in that it make him think i'm the expert people want to listen to me, as opposed to people want to hear me interview interesting people). There's a lot of upside going after men who hate both sides/are economically insecure/Democratic policies would actually help them more on economic issues, as long as she is smart enough to stay away from culture war stuff and give generic platitudes and move on (everyone deserves respect, i'm not going to pretend that trans swimmers is an actual issue facing this country, people want me to focus on fighting inflation/the economy/getting the immigration bill Trump and Republicans blocked passed/increasing wages etc

Joe himself can be swayed to agree Bernie Sanders or Andrew Yang when it comes to policy if it can be presented in a way that isn't off-putting to men/his audience in general, in theory Harris should be able to get Joe to agree that x y and z policies are good ideas/bad ideas, presenting her ideas as the good ones and some of Trump's Project 2025 type ones as the bad ones

Something that would actually be smart is to take a popular Dem policy where the Republican policy is unpopular, ask Joe what do you think about this issue, giving the options, then pointing out the one he agreed with is her/Dem position and Trump disagrees, making it seem like Joe's the one giving his wisdom about what policy is correct, and then pointing out hey that actually agrees with what I want to do, not with what Trump wants to do

Anyway, her team should absolutely have her go on JRE, and i'd say the same thing if she was polling 3% better or worse.

i enjoy reading taleb but the video was confusing and unclear to me. he was kind of indignant and argumentative the whole time but i didn't know what he was arguing with. he strawmanned a fake 2016 election odds chart that suggested wildly swingy win probabilities from 75% to 10% to 75% over time.

they also made the point several times that you shouldn't price a binary event at 0% if there's still uncertainty and there's a potential in the future that it will not be zero, which seems obvious?

maybe the one semi-valuable takeaway is with high levels of uncertainty a binary option should trend toward 0.5, but i think that's what we've seen this election with both markets and high-profile models like 538 & natesilver. they seemed to be suggesting that 2016 forecasts were naive in deviating significantly from 50% and should have been much closer to 50/50 throughout, but that seems like captain hindsight. i don't think many anticipated the level of correlated error in state polls. that's obviously less excusable this time around.

I obviously didn't mean she wouldn't go on before as a campaign strategy.

I meant she would think something like that is clearly unnecessary and beneath her.

Your strategy sounds OK enough but she seems way too bad at politics to execute it effectively

don't totally discount the possiblity harris would benefit from going on jre, but if i were campaign manager i would not advise.

jre audience will not be blank slate voters that will be won over by above average performance. they're more likely to adjust sentiment based on how rogan treats her... cues & vibes. given his devoted love to elon i can't imagine warm vibes. it's a longform live interview where the only clips taken and replayed after the fact will be any moments where she looks foolish.