DO BETTING MARKETS REALLY BELIEVE TRUMP WILL WIN?

Axios reported this yesterday:

Even after the White House's delayed response to the coronavirus outbreak, unprecedented job losses and a bruising recession, ... betting markets are still putting their money on President Trump to win re-election.

...The world's most popular betting destinations show Trump as the clear favorite.

The RealClearPolitics average of betting websites gives the advantage to Trump with an average spread of 8.2 as of Sunday night.

Casino sportsbooks are paying around $83 for winning bets on Trump versus $135 for winning bets on Biden, making Biden the unequivocal underdog, Bovada shows.

The last link in that excerpt is from Oddsshark. If you click on other links there, you see what's going on: Trump is given about even odds to win reelection, while bets on challengers are split because bettors aren't quite sure Biden will be the nominee.

Could a rematch of the 2016 presidential election be on the horizon for 2020? Former vice-president Joe Biden is the clear front-runner to oppose President Donald Trump on the ballot in November, but swirling controversies may derail him and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton may enter the conversation.

Biden is the -600 favorite in the odds to win the Democratic nomination but the former first lady is now second on the oddsboard at +700 followed by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo at +1800. Neither Clinton nor Cuomo has officially entered the race.

So here's the odds chart at Axios's Bovada/Oddsshark link:



Mike Pence and Nikki Haley are seen as possible nominees on the GOP side, but they're much further back. (If I were betting, I'd place a small wager on Pence to be the 2020 candidate, because Trump's refusal to take proper precautions puts him at high risk of being sickened by the coronavirus.)

One of the sites in the Real Clear Politics betting market average is Betsson, which has Trump up by 11 -- but again, there's doubt (and not particularly well-informed doubt) about who the Democratic nominee will be.



Sorry, bettors -- even if the Tara Reade story or some other problem drives Biden from the ticket, Michelle Obama won't be the Democratic nominee. She's made it clear that she doesn't want to run. (And Democrats won't run Hillary Clinton again, either.)

Betsson also has state betting markets -- and Democrats are expected to win all the obvious blue states. However, they're also leading in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona. Apparently it hasn't occurred to the bettors that if those bets pay off, Trump loses.

We also see this discrepancy at PredictIt, a site not listed in the RCP average or mentioned in the Axios post:



Trump is leading, yet Democrats are favored to win 290 electoral votes -- again, because they're the favorites to win Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona.

At PredictIt, Trump has better odds of winning the election than Biden even though the Democratic Party is favored to win. Again, it's because there's a belief that someone else might be the Democratic nominee -- in this case, Clinton and Bernie Sanders are seen as contenders.

So, yes, the betting markets like Trump. But the betting markets don't make much sense.