2024 US Presidential Election Betting Thread

My post-election autopsy. Full disclosure, I had zero bets on the election myself so it's probably good to discount my opinion somewhat. However, if I were betting I would have bet some mixture of K-Dawg to win the electoral college and popular vote. So I wanted to share my thoughts on why I would have gotten it so wrong.

You may remember, in the last few cycles, "but muh polls" became a meme around here as a way to poke fun at the cope people had after losing money betting on some type of poll-based methodology. "But muh polls" never showed up in this thread (yet) which I found interesting. I fell for the polls yet again, and I really should have known better. Although I don't think polls are a psy-op, they really are at best a blunt instrument and at worst guilty of all kinds of biases from herding effects to poor incentives. I'll admit most of the reasons for liking Harris this around were based on polls. The fundamentals for her were awful. She's a historically unpopular VP tied to a historically unpopular president. America just experienced the worst inflation in 40 years. Illegal immigration is at record highs. And economics and immigration just happen to be Trump's strongest issues.

After an election, people are quick to attribute their own pet causes to the reason for why so-and-so won or lost the election. In general, the simplest explanation is usually the correct one (Occam's Razor) and the scars from the worst inflation in 40 years run deep.

I do think in some sense, Trump supporters got "lucky" this election in that the mistrust of polls and institutions is baked into right-wing populism, and that just happened to be the winning mindset this election. But that's not being fair. Trump backers deserve credit for seeing through the day-to-day nonsense and realizing that fundamentals rule the day. When Trump first ran in 2016, illegal immigration was an issue but it was nowhere near the catastrophe that is was in 2020-2024. Trump's big issue just happened to become the dominant issue. Also, in a way Trump was fortunate to have lost in 2020 as the COVID lockdown and spending spree that fueled inflation was coming regardless of who was in office. But it worked out that Biden took all the blame and Trump can coast back into office without being saddled with any responsibility for it.

So if it really was the one-two punch of 1) Inflation and 2) Illegal Immigration, talk about playing right into Trump's wheelhouse. Everything is obvious in hindsight of course.

Going forward, it will be very interesting to see if this new more racially diverse GOP coalition is just a blip and an incidental reaction to inflation/immigration or if it will continue going forward.

Congrats once again to those in the winner's circle.

Good post Tom. I and others mentioned the polls being adjusted. But at least in my case, I only read vague allusions to this. I never read an article breaking down how it was done. Maybe it wasn't so much.

We also need to remember a political poll is asking a person what they intend to do in the future. A poll asking "did you see the last Star Wars movie" will have results that correlate more strongly to actually seeing the movie than "will you see the next Star Wars movie?" But that doesn’t mean the second poll is inaccurate.

One thing we've learned is that Trump got about the same number of votes as usual. Harris got far fewer votes than Biden. I speculated as to why above. I thought Roe, in particular, might drive turn out for her but it didn't. People who saw the last Star Wars movie saw the ads for this one and decided to skip it.

Edit: and of course, congrats to those who got it right.

Yeah. The misinformation thing is indeed very funny. It sucks that some people think Bill Gates puts microchips in vaccines to turn you gay. But if the "trusted sources" made up all those ludicrous lies about Iraq today, they'd be debunked instantly. It's well worth it. They are pissed about people getting accurate information. They were able to make sure stuff like that Vance interview didn't exist for decades and want to go back.

I have a question, what did the markets on Kalshi look like compared to Polymarket?

Seemed like Kalshi generally leaned Harris more than Poly right? When the day started and Harris was about 71-72c for PV on poly, what was she on Kalshi?

Also final opinions on poly? pretty sharp considering was above market on trump than anywhere else and he smashed right? sample size of 1 but still noteworthy

yes kalshi was shaded (vs. polymkt) a couple cents toward harris on national election, most states, and PV. she was 74-75c PV morning of iirc

political betting is US-legal on kalshi, at least for the time being. no fees on politics markets. they won an appeal against the CFTC somehow. kinda feels like genie's out of the bottle and it's here to stay, especially with the anything-goes trump admin taking over and probably installing barron trump as CFTC chair

the CFTC legal case is funny. kalshi argues all their markets are purely for legitimate economic hedging purposes, CFTC argues it's pure gambling and points to the many kalshi markets that offer zero economic/hedging benefits.

case in point: volume died down after tuesday night when everything became an orange certainty. but punters gonna punt, so the "what will be the margin of the popular vote?" market blew up last couple days, taking tens of millions in volume. it was so popular that they decided to offer a second identical market today in increments of 0.25% margins rather than 1%. what any of this has to do with hedging economic risks i'll never know, but it's fun.

PV margin was 3.2% earlier today and now at 3.0%. markets have sharpened to make "trump by 1-2%" the clear fave. this new 0.25% increment market is interesting in that support is very heavy in 1.75-2% and 2-2.25% currently.

decided to model it based on 10 states with significant votes outstanding, CA being the behemoth. assuming outstanding votes go for same proportions as have already come in for each state, i get a margin of 1.8% trump. however, the new mail-in votes reported today have skewed much more toward harris than previous state averages. if i use the new rate we saw come in today for remaining ballots, i get 0.85% Trump. i'm probably wrong because the market seems pretty certain it will be between 1.5-2.25%, but decided to go long 0.5-1.5% (currently trading at a few pennies), neutral 1.5-2%, short the rest

AFAIK Kalshi does not offer any sporting event contracts.

Similar to online poker, there is not a strong enough lobbying effort in the US to make sports market betting legal. And there is probably enough resistance at the moment to keep it out.

With France outlawing it as "gambling", I see a similar path in other countries. Time will tell. Thiel is smart, maybe he has a few cards to play.

What I've noticed is bias played a huge part. Poly was more international than Kalshi. Americans have so many biases with Trump, even sharp bettors. The best polling company was AtlasIntel, from Brazil.

The non-Americans saw this election much more clearly than Americans. It was funny hearing people discount Poly's probability and calling it biased from Trump crypto bros. IRONY

I still think some of the polling was a psyop. You can't tell me the golden girl of Iowa missed this election by 16 points. That is more than just a terrible poll. I keep hearing about the shy Trump voter effect, but maybe it's just biased polling to get a specific result? Trump's internals looked great throughout. As evidenced by him not giving Kamala a rematch. They must have had it as a huge Trump lead at that point for him to be so dismissive of a second debate.

There's a strong chance the Democrats new this election would be a punt and they just wanted to get as big of a turnout to not get crushed down ballot.

Trump may have run good on the inflation timing but he ran awful on the covid timing and would've won that election if not for covid.

Also, Biden admin painted themselves into a massive corner with inflation when they had those economists come out and say there wouldn't be any. About a month later there was and it never stopped. Once that happened, they lost all credibility on the issue and tried to blame it on all sorts of things that had nothing to do with excessive money printing like price gouging which the public wasn't buying.

Is poly that much non American? from what I know it is majority VPN bros....I don't think the international component really has much to do with it.

I'm not sure why PM liked Trump more than the others, although market did get in line with PM on most things by election day.

Yeah, as a crypto bros narrative guy, I still wouldn't discount that entirely. If there was some market dominated by woman who majored in the humanities, I'd expect some Dem bias.

What we know about the election now is that Trump held his ground, while nobody showed up for Harris. You might say that Harris underperformed her polls, more than Trump overperformed his.

It's an open market. If the bias is big enough people will take the other side. There's money to be made.

I'm more inclined to believe people didn't take the other side of the crypto bros Trump bias because they didn't think they had an edge with Harris, rather than there simply wasn't enough money out there to bet the other side.

If there's an edge, there's money.

aped back in at arizona at higher prices than i initially paid 2 months ago

gap is 36k votes now with an estimated 759k uncounted

lake only needs 53% of remaining votes to win

she's gotten 55% of the votes made on election day

i think she's got this

i know nothing but i'll ape with you for fun

if only the other thread knew how much we supported women politicians house 😀

and btw, reason for aping wasn't that she needed 53% but has been getting 55%

it's that she only needs 53% if gallego gets 47%

but there's a green party candidate getting a decent chunk of the vote so as you can see it's not 55/45 but 55/42/3

i think the rest of the market is seeing what i saw too, which is comforting

polymarket hasn't really moved but that's ok. i trust your instincts. apes ape together.

Lake voters commenting, but I like the vibes

It should be obvious to anyone that the last 3 POTUS elections had a built in 4-6 % bias across the board. It is far too easy to put the thumb on the scale with polls: biased D/R ratios being the easiest. Even the "pros" here were fooled by essentially meaningless polls and the cognitive dissonance with real money projections had to be explained with nutjob whales.

The sad truth is Kamala ran a worse campaign than Hillary, if that is possible.

Damn coulda used this alpha when she was like 8%

Lake dropped a bunch. Perhaps alpha wasn't alpha

about 100k additional votes in and she hasn't narrowed the gap

if it goes 53/47 then she'll lose by less than 200 votes but we know if she gets 53 it'll be more like 53/45/2 or 53/46/1 and then she'll win by a larger margin

if we include a 3rd party getting 1% of rest of vote here's how it breaks down

if 2% then she wins at 52% but loses 51%

i'm holding steady