Election prediction markets tilted heavily towards Vice President Kamala Harris overnight after a bombshell poll released Saturday showed her ahead of former President Donald Trump in Iowa.
A Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa poll found the Democratic nominee three points up on her GOP opponent, 47% to 44%, among likely voters.
The survey was conducted by the highly regarded pollster Ann Selzer, who has a long track record of producing results that uncannily mirror final election tallies.
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“It is incredibly gutsy to release this poll,” said Nate Silver, the statistician and elections data guru, in a tweet. “It won’t put Harris ahead in our forecast because there was also another Iowa poll out today that was good for Trump. But wouldn’t want to play poker against Ann Selzer.”
Selzer’s stature—coupled with the prevailing wisdom that Iowa, which he carried in 2016 and 2020, should be a safe state for Trump—was enough to send betting markets, which have largely favored Trump, into a frenzied correction.
Kalshi gave Trump a 55 percent chance of winning on Saturday, but that had fallen to 50 percent early Sunday morning in a dead heat with Harris.
Kalshi’s betting market gave Trump a sizeable 64 percent chance of winning as recently as Wednesday. Over $174 million has been traded on the platform related to the election.
Trump’s odds of victory were pegged at 63 percent at one point Saturday on Polymarket, but tumbled seven points to 56 percent as of Sunday morning, with Harris at 44 percent.
Another betting service, PredictIt, which began pricing in a narrow Harris victory on Friday, saw her gain breathing room following the Iowa poll.
Meanwhile, Election Betting Odds—a site that tracks and analyzes election prediction markets Kalshi, Polymarket, and PredictIt along with Betfair, and Smarkets—gave Trump a 52 percent chance of winning the electoral college Sunday, down 4.4 percent in the last day.
Harris, at 47.5 percent, was up almost 10 points in the site’s model in the week since Trump’s campaign held a deranged, racist rally at Madison Square Garden that even many elected Republicans condemned for its crass, boorish tone.
