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By Theo Burman
Live News Reporter
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Betting odds for the 2024 election currently show the race to be one of the closest in recent history, with Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump neck and neck in both odds and polling.
However, betting odds and polling models sometimes offer different predictions due to the different methodologies they use. Current polling has Harris at a very slight lead, with 538's forecast model saying Harris has a 55 percent chance of winning the election.
Meanwhile, the betting odds at RealClearPolitics are calling the race a draw, with Trump and Harris dead even on 49.3 percent each.
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Are Betting Odds Good at Predicting Elections?
According to aggregates by Bookmakers Review, betting odds have accurately predicted several of the most recent elections, with 77 percent of the expected candidates winning over the last 35 years.
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In the 11 presidential elections since 1980, the only race where the winning candidate had worse odds than the losing candidate was in 2016, where both the betting markets and conventional polling failed to predict a Trump win.
Betting odds have also correctly predicted close elections, including Barack Obama's win against Mitt Romney in 2012, where Obama was given odds of -450, and even the extremely close election of 2000, where President George W. Bush was given odds of -150.
According to the SportsOddsHistory archive, you have to go back to 1976, when President Jimmy Carter won over Gerald Ford, for the last time betting odds called the election the wrong way—and even then, Carter's odds were only slightly better than Ford's at +100.
Shortly after the vice presidential debate between Tim Walz and JD Vance, Trump overtook Harris as the bookmakers' favorite in the race, with Betfair spokesperson Sam Rosbottom telling Newsweek: "This really is a rollercoaster of a betting market."
Professor Laura Beers, a political-betting expert and professor of history at the American University in Washington, D.C., told Newsweek that betting odds were only as accurate as the groups making the bets.
Beers said, "Because political betting markets effectively harness the 'wisdom of crowds' — with odds initially set by polling data and then continuously readjusted depending on gamblers' willingness to take a bet — they are only more effective than polls when the crowd of gamblers is actually bringing real collective wisdom to the table.
"If the group of bettors is sufficiently large and heterogeneous, this is likely to be the case. However, there have been examples of betting markets getting it wildly wrong because their participants all shared a similar set of biases.
"In terms of the 2024 election odds, they, like the polls, are effectively predicting a toss up, which only underscores that we are in for a close election."
How Are Betting Odds Decided?
Betting odds change depending on the methodologies used by each site. In contrast to polling, which uses quantitative data from representative samples, bookmakers are free to add additional factors into the odds they offer.
For betting sites like Betfair, which currently gives Harris a 48 percent chance of winning the election (with Trump on 47), bettors are gambling against each other rather than bookmakers' odds, meaning the odds are dictated by public interaction and people's beliefs or predictions.
Other sites, like Polymarket, which currently gives Trump a two-point lead over Harris, use a "blockchain-based prediction market" to allow users to buy the equivalent of shares in a certain outcome, increasing the odds of that outcome happening according to "collective wisdom."
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