Deniz 
Donald Trump’s odds on distributed prediction market Polymarket surged from 44% to 47% over the weekend, putting the former President in a virtual dead heat with his competitor, Vice President Kamala Harris, whose odds also dropped from 54% to 51%. With millions more in minor markets for swing states and other relevant outcomes, Polymarket users have placed nearly $630,000,000 on the result of the national race.
Strangely, Trump’s lead on Polymarket has gotten better, even if recent surveys seem to support Harris’s prospects. Harris leads in important swing states Michigan and Pennsylvania, according to the most recent polls from Rasmussen Research, which has been criticized for having a conservative tilt. Harris is up 1.5 points on RealClear Politics’ average of national surveys; on the Economist’s polling average, Harris is up 2.7 points.
Furthermore, other prediction markets have not yet shown Polymarket’s Trump bump. Kamala is up by roughly 5 points compared to Trump; Betfair, the second-largest such market with about $67,000,000 in bets, shows. PredictIt, with $34 million on the line and one of the only sites accessible to US citizens, has an even greater discrepancy, with Harris ahead of Trump by almost 10 points.
Mathematical models equally show Harris still leading. With his odds on Polymarket rising by roughly 5%, Five Thirty Eight founder and Polymarket adviser Nate Silver’s election forecast model shows Harris with a 53.5% chance of winning the electoral college compared to Trump’s 45.9%, with the latter gaining.7% percent over the past two days. Silver argues that although Harris has the rather stronger hand, the contest is “basically 50/50.” According to the Economist’s projection, Harris would get 272 electoral votes while Trump gets 266.
In a recent interview with The New Yorker, chief political analyst and head of polling at the New York Times Nate Cohn discussed the race’s polls, saying, “In May, we had Trump ahead by five points across the battleground states. Right now, we have Harris ahead by two, so it’s a big seven-point swing. And we show outsized gains for Harris among young and nonwhite voters, and women, and we show smaller gains, but still some improvement, for Harris among men and white voters.”
Early last week, Polymarket’s open interest recovered from a sharp decline, the biggest single-day loss in its history. The website has already seen over forty thousand visits, which prevents U.S. citizens from trading on its platform this month.
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