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Former President Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, has opened up a huge advantage in the election betting odds in recent weeks, giving Americans a new way to try to understand what might happen on Election Day..
“More than $2 billion has been bet on the election already,” Maxime Lott, who runs the election website BettingOdds.com, told Fox News Digital.
The comments come as website Lotte, which uses data from five different betting sites to display the average bet, shows Trump has a 58.5% chance of winning the presidential election as of Monday.
The Lott website isn’t the only site tracking betting odds, as popular sites like RealClearPolitics have joined the fray, which has become known over the years for tracking polling averages.
Trump opens up the biggest betting lead in days after Biden withdraws
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump appears at a campaign rally at Findlay Toyota Arena on October 13, 2024, in Prescott Valley, Arizona (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
As with SectionBettingOdds.com, the RealClearPolitics betting average shows Trump as the favorite with a 59% chance of winning the election as of Monday.
Trump’s chances of winning the election have risen dramatically over the past few weeks, with his Democratic opponent, Vice President Harris, being the RealClearPolitics betting favorite through October 4. But Trump took the initiative the next day and showed no interest. Again, it eventually rose to the nearly 20 percentage points the former president enjoyed on Monday.
For Lott, looking at betting averages gives people a much clearer picture of the most likely outcome of the election than trying to put together exit polls.
“It’s really accurate, it’s more accurate than just trying to look at polls or particularly more accurate than listening to inflated pundits,” Lott said.
“[The bettors] “They look at all kinds of historical data, they look at trends. I find percentages to be more useful than polls,” he added.
Check out the latest FOX NEWS power rankings in the 2024 election
Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Harris speaks to the media at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on October 17, 2024. (SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)
Lott, who previously served as an executive producer of Fox Business Network shows, noted that people risk their own money to bet on an outcome, creating a market that has the ability to “discipline people” who make mistakes.
“If you’re not very smart, or very biased, you’ll lose your money very quickly, and then you’ll probably never bet again in the next election,” Lott said.
While betting on elections is newer than well-known gambling pastimes like sports betting and casino games, Lott said the market has become robust enough to provide election followers with a glimpse of the most likely outcome.
“Last session, over $1 billion was traded. This is still the case [not] That’s a lot if you compare it to… the stock market or something like that, but it’s enough that we have a reliable indicator, and that’s what [is] “This is important for us as users who just want to know what will happen,” Lott said.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally, October 19, 2024, at Arnold Palmer Regional Airport in Latrobe, Pennsylvania (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
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As for Trump’s lead, Lott said it likely reflects the end of the “honeymoon period” that Harris enjoyed after her promotion as the Democratic Party’s nominee, noting that Trump’s probability of winning the election rose to about 70% before President Biden abandoned his re-election bid. – Elections and he returned to the forefront again.
“Things have kind of come back to the middle where — it’s a tough cycle for Democrats with things like inflation and immigration, and so for a few months people were probably saying, ‘Oh, Harris, this is interesting, this is new, this is interesting, this is new.’ “That’s refreshing,” Lott said, and then it kind of sinks in: “This is the same administration we didn’t like with Biden.”
Get the latest updates from the 2024 campaign trail, exclusive interviews and more in the Fox News Digital Election Center.
