For many people, the prevailing feeling upon learning that Donald Trump has once again won the presidency may be shock. For weeks, the polls have predicted a tight race, but in the end it was the betting markets that called the race correctly.
On Tuesday, a suite of gambling platforms predicted a Trump landslide. Polymarket, a crypto exchange and (by its own account) the world’s largest prediction market, projected that the 78-year-old led Kamala Harris by 38 points. Similarly, the sites Kalshi, Robinhood, PredictIt, and Interactive Brokers favored Trump by 50 to 60 percent.
The final tally isn‘t in yet, but the Associated Press called the race with Trump at 277 electoral votes to Harris’s 224.
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Ahead of election night, experts expressed skepticism about the betting markets’ confidence. It has occasionally seem misplaced: In late October, for example, it emerged that a wealthy Frenchman had tipped the scales toward Trump with a $28 million wager that substantially moved the market.
That was the fear among economists and researchers: Massive wagers from wealthy individuals overseas muddied the waters too much to read the markets as a reliable metric.
They also weren’t necessarily consistent in their predictions. On Saturday, for example, several betting platforms swung abruptly toward Harris, after the typically prescient pollster Ann Selzer released data putting the vice president ahead in Iowa, a state she ultimately lost. The odds swung violently back toward Trump as the returns came in, placing his odds of winning at an average of 98 percent at 1:30 a.m. EST.
In the run-up to the election, most polls locked Harris and Trump in a dead heat—the third time in three elections that they‘ve read the national mood incorrectly. Meanwhile, Trump’s team has been touting the betting markets as the best possible predictors, with Elon Musk writing on X that they were “more accurate than polls, as actual money is on the line.” Hate to see him be right.
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