Topline

With polls closing in hours, betting markets are clearly favoring former President Donald Trump to secure a second presidential term, even though poll-based prediction models indicate the candidates are in a dead heat.

Key facts

Big number

58%. Those are the betting market’s aggregate odds for a Trump win, according to the Election Betting Odds tool, which tracks odds from Betfair, Kalshi, PredictIt, Polymarket and Smarkets.

In return for

Polling data shows Harris and Trump are on nearly equal footing on Election Day. FiveThirtyEight’s predictions favor Harris by a 50% to 49% clip, while Silver Bulletin, the model of statistician and Polymarket advisor Nate Silver, favors Harris by a minuscule margin of 50.02% to 49.99% in the leaning towards Harris. The difference between betting market odds and poll-based prediction models has been a major topic of discussion in recent weeks, with some suggesting that betting markets are a better predictor because bettors are financially incentivized to bet on the candidate who is more likely to win, and skeptics point to the potentially pro-Trump demographics among gamblers as an explanation for the skew.

How do election bets work?

Sites offer users contracts whose prices are tied to a given candidate’s real-time, market-implied probabilities. Each contract pays out $1 if the bettor chose the winning candidate and $0 if his bet was incorrect. So at current expectations, a contract for Trump would cost about $0.57 and a contract for Harris would cost about $0.44 for Robinhood, with the same binary return of $0 or $1 for each contract. Election betting sites operating legally in the US have comparative limits, with Robinhood allowing 5,000 contracts per user and PredictIt allowing $850 per user on each election market.

When are election bets settled?

It varies per platform. Polymarket’s main market will pay out when the Associated Press, Fox News and NBC News bureaus all call the election in favor of one candidate (so possibly as early as this week). Robinhood will pay winning bettors on January 7, the day after Congress certifies the results, Kalshi on Inauguration Day on January 20, and PredictIt says it will pay out if “any ambiguity or uncertainty occurs before the market is resolved.”