The betting odds of former President Donald Trump winning next month’s election rose to their highest level since President Joe Biden ceded way to Vice President Kamala Harris in July, though the increasingly popular election betting platform Polymarket reportedly is investigating the source of the massive wagers driving the odds shift amid scrutiny into the eight-figure bets on Trump.
Donald Trump dances during a rally in Florida in July.
The crypto-based Polymarket gives Trump a 66% chance of prevailing over Harris, the first time his odds have risen over 65% since July 21, the day Biden dropped his reelection bid.
Competitor sites which also take wagers on the election outcome are heavily in Trump’s corner, albeit less starkly than Polymarket, as Kalshi and PredictIt price in roughly 60% and 57% market-implied odds for Trump, respectively.
It’s the latest trend in betting markets toward Trump, as Kalshi favored Harris as recently as Oct. 9, PredictIt as recently as Oct. 8 and Polymarket as recently as Oct. 4.
The trend toward Trump comes as Polymarket looks into the source of recent bets which contributed to the tilt and whether they came from U.S. entities, Bloomberg reported Tuesday, citing unnamed sources. Polymarket operates as an offshore betting operation, unlike Kalshi and PredictIt, making it illegal for individuals in the U.S. to wager on election outcomes on the blockchain-based site. Bloomberg noted the $43 million placed on Trump and other victorious Republican election scenarios across four Polymarket accounts are not based domestically, according to an anonymous source, corroborating a Friday report in Reuters. Blockchain analyst Miguel Morel told the Wall Street Journal last week there’s “strong reason to believe” the four prolific accounts are the “same entity.”
$2.25 billion. That’s how much trading volume Polymarket has handled on its presidential election outcome market.
Polymarket and election betting markets as a whole have become a major talking point this election season, with the likes of Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest man and a major Trump donor, touting the site as “more accurate than polls as actual money is on the line.” Yet popular polling-based prediction models like Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin and FiveThirtyEight both give Harris and Trump 50% respective odds to win the election.. It’s also important to note the Polymarket odds still imply Harris wins about one in three simulated elections, so it’s more accurate to think of the odds, for example, as the winning probability of a football team with a stronger record than their opponent — and underdogs often prevail in sports. Also noteworthy: Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016 despite facing roughly 17% betting market-implied winning probability.