Donald Trump started to bounce back in the betting markets after a stunning poll led to his election odds plummeting.
A Des Moines Register poll, released on Saturday, sent shockwaves through the markets after it showed Trump losing the red state of Iowa to Kamala Harris.
It triggered a flood of wagers on Harris to win the U.S. election, and Trump’s odds tanked on an array of betting and prediction markets – including Kalshi, Polymarket and Predictit.
Harris even overtook Trump as the favorite for the White House on Kalshi.
However, on Friday, markets appeared to be correcting slightly with Trump rising again.
By Friday lunchtime Trump was the favorite again on Kalshi with a 52 percent chance of victory, compared to Harris on 48 percent.
Harris was up four points on Predictit, having reached an eight point lead on the site earlier.
Polymarket showed Trump with an eight-point lead after it had gone down to six.
The Real Clear Politics betting average showed Trump with a nine-pont lead.
The former president had been soaring for weeks on a number of wager platforms but money moved to Harris earlier this week.
Then, on Saturday, the Des Monies Register poll showed Harris leading Trump 47 percent to 44 percent among likely voters in the traditionally conservative state.
Ann Selzer has built a reputation as ‘Iowa’s Polling Queen’ and the ‘best pollster in politics’ over decades of conducting Des Moines Register polls.
Iowa hasn’t voted for a Democrat in the presidential election since Barack Obama in 2012 and was written off by the Harris campaign as an easy GOP win.
Before the poll came out Trump was already falling on betting markets-.
Between October 29 and November 1 his chances on both bookmakers Bet365 and Paddy Power dropped from 66.7 percent to 63.6 percent.
On the Real Clear Politics average of betting markets earlier this week Trump had led Harris by as much as 60.6 percent to 38.1 percent.
Polls have the election on a knife-edge, and essentially tied, but for weeks the betting markets have consistently given Trump a clear advantage.
They first started to fall on October 27 after a comedian at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally in New York made a disparaging joke about Puerto Rico, which led to a widespread backlash.
Kalshi, which is America’s first legal online election prediction wagering platform, has already taken $92 million in bets on the 2024 race.
This week, Tarek Mansour, its CEO, said bettors are a more accurate indication of the result than the polls because they have ‘skin in the game.’
He told DailyMail.com: ‘We should definitely trust the [wagering] markets.
‘Prediction markets are places where people have money on the line. People don’t lie with their money.’
In 2016 the polls indicated Hillary Clinton would easily defeat Trump, but were wrong.
In the past betting markets have proved successful in predicting the outcome of elections.
However, like the polls, they were not a good indicator in 2016.
As long ago as 1924 the Wall Street Journal wrote: ‘Betting odds are generally taken as the best indicator of probable results in presidential campaigns.’
At the time, bookmakers would send people to candidates’ speeches and base odds on how the audience responded to them, according to the newspaper.
In 15 presidential elections from 1884 to 1940 there was only one upset when the bookmakers were wrong, according to a study by economists Paul Rhode and Koleman Strumpf.
However, in 1948 the betting markets, like the polls, got it spectacularly wrong when they only gave President Harry Truman a roughly one in 10 chance of winning.