It’s another election year in the United States, and political betting sites are on the rise again. How will the electoral vote be split?
It’s tough out there for a pollster. Look at what they’ve done to Nate Silver, for example. However, people still want to know: Who are you voting for in 2024?
According to the most recent poll-based projections at 270toWin, former president and presumptive Republican Party nominee, Donald Trump, is on track to win 257 seats from the Electoral College; current president and presumptive Democratic Party nominee Joe Biden trails at 216.
STUNNING POLL NUMBERS: New Polls show Trump dominating Biden. On being mentally and physically fit to be President, Trump doubles Biden by 46% to 23% pic.twitter.com/VCa2xxp1Dz
— • ᗰISᑕᕼIᗴᖴ ™ • (@4Mischief) February 6, 2024
If these numbers hold up, Under bettors are going to cash in handsomely on November 5 – or whichever day the results get finalized. The fine folks at BetOnline (find out more with our BetOnline Review) have the Republicans priced at –400 at press time to go Under 311.5 electoral votes, and the Democrats at –140 to go Under 269.5.
We’re still nine months away from voting, though.
Chances are these electoral projections are going to look somewhat different by the time we get to November. We can’t say for sure what will happen geopolitically between now and then to change people’s answers, but if history is any indication, the betting market is probably overreacting to the latest polls.
Why Is Donald Trump Ahead In The Polls?
Because so many Americans are dissatisfied with the status quo – and they either don’t believe that Trump is guilty of the multiple criminal charges he faces, or they simply don’t care.
Drilling down a bit further, a Gallup survey from December shows just 29% of Americans saying they were satisfied with the way U.S. democracy is working, down from 35% after the January 6 insurrection.
However, as you might expect, there’s a sharp divide between how Democrats and Republicans see things.
A YouGov/Yahoo News poll from September had 82% of Democrats saying Trump was unfit for the presidency, while an AP-NORC poll had the same percentage of Republicans saying a second Biden term would weaken democracy.
“It’s The Economy, Stupid”
That used to be the case.
When political consultant James Carville was working on the Bill Clinton campaign for the 1992 presidential election, he put this sign up in their office in Little Rock, Arkansas:
1. Change vs. more of the same
2. The economy, stupid
3. Don’t forget healthcare
That sign wasn’t meant to go public, but of course, that second talking point got magnified and passed around. It was true then; Clinton destroyed incumbent Republican president George H.W. Bush 370-168 in the Electoral College – although independent Ross Perot won 18.9% of the popular vote, splitting the right and paving Clinton’s path to the White House.
More than 30 years have passed since then, and not only is the economy still important, it appears to be thriving right now. Unemployment is down from 6.3% to 3.7% since Biden took office, and inflation has dropped from the 9% range to 3.4% since the height of the pandemic.
These numbers aren’t making much of an impression – even with Biden’s base.
The economic indicators may be strong, but young people and minorities aren’t reaping enough of the benefits, as their wages fail to keep up with rising prices.
The Rise of Fascism
Then you have the larger problems happening in the world right now.
There’s always been a certain amount of dis-ingenuity and performative theater in politics, but that dial has been turned up to 11 in recent years. Putting up a united front against bad actors is increasingly difficult when hard journalism is literally under attack, replaced by the algorithms and the echo chambers of social media.
Those bad actors happen to be in charge of America’s most troubling adversaries, both at home and abroad.
Still, this isn’t all that different from four years ago, when Biden beat Trump 306-232 in the Electoral College. Has the rising tide of fascism moved the needle all that much?
There’s a long-standing fear that if fascism were ever to take firm root in America, too many in our media would remain complacent or even complicit in its rise to power. Recent actions by Mark Zuckerberg & the NYT, under the guise of promoting free speech, seem to bear this out.
— Victor Pickard (@VWPickard) June 4, 2020
Maybe not. One year before the 2020 election, Silver estimated that the polls – at least the ones since Trump won in 2016 – were about 80/20 when it came to “predicting” the winner. But that’s the polls during the last three weeks of the election campaign, not nine months ahead of time.
That 80% success rate also slips to 72% when there’s a gap of 3-6 percentage points between the candidates, and 58% when the polling is even closer. A February 1 poll by CNN showed Trump ahead of Biden by four points.
still more accurate and has more hair than Nate Silver https://t.co/97PDS15ppF
— Roy Drones Jr (@chiweethedog) February 2, 2024
In short, things probably aren’t as bleak for Biden and the Democrats as they appear.
They may or may not stay in office, but from a betting perspective, you might want to avoid their Under, and pound the Republicans instead for value.
