The above is the Sportsbook for the 2020 presidential election at Betfair, an online betting exchange. A lot of people take this data more seriously than polls, on the theory that what people say with their money means more than what they say on the phone. The figures must refer to the amount of money you'd get returned if you bet a dollar on someone and then he (or she) won. Most bettors currently think Biden will win, which is why putting a dollar on him will return only 1.73. Someone who bet on Trump today would, were he to be reelected, get 2.25. Or you could go with, say, Andrew Cuomo. I guess the theory would be that Biden croaks before the election and Cuomo, after being drafted, defeats Trump in November. If you want to invest in that scenario, the return upon Cuomo's election would be just over a hundredfold. Pence comes in at just 51. That makes sense, since if Trump croaked, Pence would become president and, presumably, the Republican standard bearer. It's perhaps a bit of an insult to Pence that a bet on Nikki Haley returns only twice as much as one on him.
Up until a few weeks ago, bettors preferred Trump, even though polls showed him consistently trailing Biden. Over the past month or two, however, Trump futures in the betting market have resembled that ramp he doddered down the other day—a steep drop, no handrails, and an allegedly slippery floor. I say that some people think the betting markets have more predictive power than the polls, but I'm not sure that's very rational, since it appears the polls are mainly what drive the markets. When Trump trailed modestly in national polls, bettors thought he'd pull through in the electoral college, and they put their money on him. Now, though, Biden's lead has swelled, and the bettors are backing him. With regard to state polls, I wonder whether the bad news for Trump is less that he's behind in most of the "battlegrounds" and more that he's struggling in states he won easily four years ago. Polls show him behind Biden in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Worse (I mean better), they show him in virtual ties with Biden in Iowa, Ohio, Georgia, and Texas. You can also bet on the number of electoral votes Trump wins. Right now, the range with the lowest return is 251-269—in other words, a narrow Trump loss in the electoral college is regarded by bettors as the likeliest outcome. The second most likely outcome, according to the betting market, is that Trump wins only in the range of 201-250 electoral votes. The fourth most likely outcome is that he wins only 151-200 electoral votes.
As election scholars and historians have often observed, it doesn't generally help incumbents when "everything sucks."
In other bad news for Trump, back in 2017, when Melania hadn't yet moved into the White House (for the ostensible reason that she was staying behind in New York while Barron finished school), she was actually renegotiating the terms of the first couple's prenup. Back in the day, the poor immigrant wasn't holding the best cards, but the deck has been shuffled.
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