Topline

With polls closing in mere hours, betting markets firmly favor former President Donald Trump to secure a second presidential term, though poll-based prediction models indicate the candidates are locked in a dead heat.

Key Facts

Big Number

57%. That’s the betting market’s aggregated odds for a Trump victory, according to the Election Betting Odds tool, which tracks odds across Betfair, Kalshi, PredictIt, Polymarket and Smarkets.

Contra

Polling data suggest almost Harris and Trump stand on nearly equal footing on Election Day. FiveThirtyEight’s forecasts favor Harris at a 50% to 49% clip, while Silver Bulletin, the model run by statistician and Polymarket advisor Nate Silver, leans toward Harris by a miniscule 50.02% to 49.99% margin. The difference between betting market odds and poll-based prediction models has been a major subject of debate in recent weeks, with some suggesting betting markets are a better predictor as bettors are financially incentivized to wager on the candidate more likely to win and skeptics pointing to the potentially pro-Trump demographic among bettors as an explanation for the skew.

How Does Election Betting Work?

Sites offer users contracts whose prices are tied to the real-time, market-implied odds of a certain candidate. Each contract pays out $1 if the bettor opted for the winning candidate and $0 if their wager was incorrect. So at the current odds, a contract for Trump would cost about $0.57 and one for Harris roughly $0.44 on Robinhood, with the same binary $0 or $1 return offered for each contract. Election betting sites which operate legally in the U.S. have comparative limits, with Robinhood allowing 5,000 contracts per user and PredictIt $850 per user on each election market.