Polymarket, election betting sites favor Trump over Harris

On By Littum

Upper line

With polls closing in hours, betting markets heavily favor former President Donald Trump to secure a second term, even as poll-based prediction models indicate the candidates are locked in a deadlock.

Key facts

Polymarket: Perhaps the most famous election gamer, the blockchain-based site leans most heavily toward Trump, giving him 62% implied odds of victory compared to Harris’ 38% around 8:30 AM EST.

Kalshi: The New York-based prediction platform favors Trump by a 59% to 41% margin, a big shift from Saturday, when Harris briefly led the site; unlike Polymarket, Kalshi operates legally in the US, as do competitor PredictIt and brokers Robinhood and Interactive Brokers.

Predict it: Since tilting most toward Harris, PredictIt prices in about 49% odds for Harris compared to 51% for Trump.

Robinhood: The retail giant is the newest major entrant in election betting, giving Trump a 58% chance of winning compared to 43% for his Democratic opponent.

Interactive brokers: The digital brokerage run by billionaire Thomas Peterffy offers election bets through its subsidiary ForecastEx, which prices at 60% odds for Trump and 43% for Harris.

Betfair and Smarkets: The London-based sites are not open to Americans, but both assign similar odds for a Trump win, with Betfair favoring the Republican by a 61% to 39% margin and Smarkets by a 60% to 40% tilt.

big number

58.5%. That’s the betting market’s total odds for a Trump victory, according to Odds on election betting tool which tracks odds across Betfair, Kalshi, PredictIt, Polymarket and Smarkets.

Contra

Polls suggest Harris and Trump are nearly tied on Election Day. FiveThirtyEight‘s forecasts favor Harris by a 50% to 49% clip, while Silver Bulletinthe model run by statistician and Polymarket advisor Nate Silver, leans against Harris by a slim margin of 50.02% to 49.99%. The difference between betting market odds and poll-based prediction models has been a major topic of debate in recent weeks, with some suggesting that betting markets are a better predictor as bettors are financially incentivized to bet on the candidate who is more likely to win and skeptics pointing to the potentially pro-Trump demographic among gamers as an explanation for the bias.

How does election betting work?

Sites offer users contracts whose prices are tied to real-time, market-implied odds for a particular candidate. Each contract pays $1 if the player picked the winning candidate and $0 if their bet was wrong. So at current odds, a contract for Trump would cost around $0.57 and one for Harris around $0.44 on Robinhood, with the same binary $0 or $1 return offered for each contract. Pick betting sites that operate legally in the US have comparative limits, with Robinhood allowing 5,000 contracts per day. user and PredictIt $850 per user in each electoral market.