Looking Back at the US Presidential Election Betting...And Celebrating some winners!

Wow. Well that was quite an election!

Over £500m gambled on the outcome just on Betfair, some wild swings on election night and a few anxious days waiting for the final results to be tallied.

Earlier this evening though Joe Biden was finally declared the winner and elected the next President of the United States.

It was a relief for me and very welcome, but a bit more of a roller-coaster ride than I was expecting! Before I get into my thoughts on the election betting, here is just a quick summary of the advised bets:

– Joe Biden to be the Next President: 10 points MAX bet @ 1.58 and 5 point additional bet @ 1.64 (also advised at 1.5 if not already backed)
– Kamala Harris to be Joe Biden’s Vice Presidential pick @ 1.92
– North Carolina Senate – Democrats to win @ 4/7
– Montana Senate – Democrats to win @ 8/11
– Democrats to win Maine @ 1.33 – 5 point bet
– Democrats to win Iowa @ 1.73 – 2 point bet
– Back Biden with Electoral College handicap of -48.5 at 1.74 – 3 points
– Hedge Biden Electoral College Votes of 330-359 at 5.8 & 360-389 at 8.0 – 1 point each
– Back Biden to win Arizona at 1.7 – 1.5 points (result not final but Biden down to 1.18)
– Back Biden to win Florida at 1.85 – 1.5 points
– Back Biden to win Michigan at 1.4 – 5 points
– Democrats to win the Senate – traded out for 1 point profit
– Trump to get 70 million or more votes at around 3.0-3.2 in the popular vote tally
– Dutch Biden’s vote percentage at between 49-51.99 and 52-54.99 @ 4.4 and 2.94.
– Joe Biden to win Georgia @ 2.36 (result not final but Biden down to 1.06)
– Lay the Republicans to win Texas @ 1.38
– Biden to win Wisconsin @ 1.42

So overall it was a great night with the big bets on Biden winning in the next president market and in Michigan and Wisconsin, plus a couple of nice plays on Trump winning over 70m votes at 3.1 and a Dutch of Biden’s vote percentage coming in.

Where I didn’t do so well was in the Senate betting, where Democrats fell badly short. But I will cover that further below when sumarising my thoughts on the election.

Overall though I was very pleased and hope you managed to grab a bit of the value on Biden and some of the other bets above.

Thoughts on the Election

Once again the polls were way off and this time it was actually worse than 2016, which itself was famed as an epic polling miss.

When all the votes are counted it looks like the national polls will be 3-4 points off the final result, which is pretty poor. But that pales into comparison with how bad some of the state polls were:

Polling avg. vs actual results:

Florida: Biden +2.5, Trump +3
Wisconsin: Biden +8.4, Biden +0.8
Ohio: Trump +0.8, Trump +8
Texas: Trump +1.1, Trump +6
Michigan: Biden +7.9, Biden +3
Iowa: Trump +1.1, Trump +8

So some massive misses there, by nearly eight points in some cases! Whether people were lying to pollsters about how they were going to vote or pollsters just aren’t able to sample a representative group of people who knows, but either way it looks like the polls are broken in the US.

Although most of my bets still landed and the main market still correctly predicted a Biden win, it looks like polls may not be the best way to predict elections (in the US at least, other countries still have accurate polls). Interestingly, the predictions right at the start of the campaign based on fundamentals like demographics and past votes actually proved quite a lot more accurate. So in future it might be better to look at them, plus a bit of “gut instinct” in calling the result rather than relying on polls.

Polarisation

Another element to be aware of is that you are seeing increasing polarisation in America. This is reflected in the red states staying red – Texas, North Carolina, Ohio, Florida and Iowa, amongst others, all stayed in Trump’s column pretty comfortably. The blue states in the North-East and West all remained blue and the former democrat “rust-belt” states went back to Biden after flipping to Trump in 2016.

The only exceptions to this were Arizona and Georgia which have undergone significant demographic change in recent years.

And once again the states that voted Trump for President also voted for the Republican Senate candidate and vice versa, with the one exception of Maine which stuck with Susan Collins as Senator whilst voting for Biden for President.

This really demonstrates how the red states are staying red and blue states are staying blue – or in other words that there is extreme polarisation. It’s a very strong trend and in future elections it could pay dividends to follow this rule of President-Senate going the same way in a state, even when the polls and odds suggest otherwise.

In-Play Opportunities

I remarked in one of my earlier updates that there could be in-play opportunities, with the early vote favouring Trump before the mail-in votes which would favour Biden were tallied. I tweeted on the day of the election that I expected Biden would hit over 2.0 in-running.

Well that’s just how it turned out but I was amazed by how wild the swings were. Biden actually hit over 4.5 in-running at one point as the early vote favoured Trump. A shrewd trader (with strong nerves) could have profited very well from this as there was always a high chance things would swing back in Biden’s favour later. Certainly Nate Silver was never persuaded the early results were that good for Trump, even after he won Florida and North Carolina. If you ignore all the noise and follow those in the know it can really pay off in these events.

Final Thoughts

Other than that it is too soon to unpick the election without more data – and all the votes being counted of course. Why did Trump outperform the polls so much again? Why did Biden outperform downballot Democrats? Why were the polls quite accurate in some places but way, way off in others? It gives serious food for thought as this election did not go the way most pundits were expecting and there is much to be learned going forward once we have more info and the dust has settled.

Until then though, hopefully like me you had some winners and can enjoy those successes for a little while.

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US Presidential Election Betting – 10 Days to Go

2nd November 2020

Here we are folks…just one day until the US Presidential Election. Finally all the talk, punditry and speculation will be over and we’ll have some results at last. And I can stop obsessing about the polls for the first time in months…

I’ve covered the betting quite extensively below in previous updates so this is just a final check-in with any notable trends or changes with one day to go.

Nevada – Good News for the Dems

I remarked last time that if we were in for a shock we might see signs of it in Nevada. Trump has been polling better with Latinos this time and Nevada has quite a large Latino population.

Well the signs aren’t good for Trump. Elections expert Jon Ralston has an excellent record of following the early vote in Nevada and I’ve seen him call a number of previous elections there pretty much spot on. Here is what he says about the early vote in Nevada:

“It already was very difficult for Trump. Now he has less of a chance to win than he does of getting a gaming license in Nevada.”

Early voting blog is updated.

With Clark Dem firewall approaching unprecedented 90K voters after overnight update, Trump's path in NV leads off a mail ballot cliff.

The dice are cast, and they look like snake eyes for the GOP.

Brief post, more later:https://t.co/QaEyq6FUeb pic.twitter.com/XyEaQnGr2g

— Jon Ralston (@RalstonReports) November 1, 2020

His blog is quite technical for the non-expert but essentially he looks at the early vote by party registration and extrapolates from there based on various scenarios. He believes whichever way you crunch the numbers Trump’s chances of winning Nevada are extremely low.

So I would recommend cashing out of the Nevada bet on Trump recommended last time (a lay of the Democrats at 1.28). Fortunately the odds have only moved down from 1.28 to 1.23 so it would only be a very small loss there.

Bigger Picture

The bigger picture is that if you plug a Democratic win in Nevada into the models, Biden goes from a 90% chance of winning the election in Fivethirtyeight’s model to a 95% chance and from a 95% to a 98% chance in the Economist’s model.

Even without that bump the odds are still completely out of whack with the polls and models. Biden is remarkably still available at 1.52 whilst the models suggest he should be around 1.10 right now. Bear in mind Barack Obama, who had a smaller polling lead going into election day in 2008 than Biden does now, was a 1.10 shot at this stage twelve years ago.

Over 90 million Americans have already voted and over 100 million are likely to have voted before Election Day tomorrow. That is likely to be around 66% of the total vote, pretty much around what I expected – i.e. more than 60% of people voting early. It also means pollsters are able to count people who have already voted, making their polls more accurate.

Biden’s national polling lead is currently 8.5 points, which is well ahead of where Hillary Clinton was at this point in 2016 (just 3.2 points).

The bottom line is that the only way Trump can win is if the polls are all completely and utterly wrong in a way they never have been before. The votes actually cast in Nevada give me additional confidence this will not be the case. So I would still recommend Biden as fantastic value at 1.52.

Additionally the trends look strong for Joe Biden in Georgia, where he now leads by a point in the polling averages and has been campaigning recently, yet is available at 2.36.

I am also following Texas closely, where something quite remarkable is happening. More people have already voted in the Lone Star State than voted in the entire 2016 election, meaning turnout there is through the roof and like nothing that has been seen before in Texas. Trump does lead the polling averages there by a point so is rightly favourite, but with sky-high turnout leading to added uncertainty, there is a chance of an upset in Texas so I am happy to lay the Republicans at 1.38 and at least give myself a good potential trading position if it looks close on Election night and the odds move towards evens.

That’s all for now but will be back with any additional value I see over the next day and into Election Night.

US Presidential Election Betting – 10 Days to Go

24th October 2020

It’s now just 10 days until the US Presidential Election…and things are hotting up…but to be honest not much has actually changed.

In our last update a week ago we remarked on what great value we thought Biden was in the main Next President market at 1.58 – only for his odds to then drift out all the way to 1.7 over the next couple of days!

We couldn’t really see any substantive reason for the drift, but it did seem to coincide with the “news” of Hunter Biden’s dealings in Ukraine. The chances this will actually influence the election seem slim – if people were going to place importance on this then they would also question all of Trump and his family’s dodgy business dealings over the last few years. In reality people don’t care about these so-called “scandals” and are much more interested in the coronavirus, the economy and healthcare. It did seem enough for Trump supporters to pile into the market at that point though.

It was another good opportunity to back Biden in my opinion and that’s what I did. His odds have now fallen back down to 1.5 so that seems like a good choice.

Since last weekend we have had the final Presidential debate, which was seemingly Trump’s last chance to really change the direction of the race and land some punches on Biden. However, that didn’t really seem to happen, with independent polls concluding Biden had won the final debate. The margins of those polls were roughly the same as his overall lead over Trump though so perhaps they just reflected people’s general preferences.

In any event, with nothing dramatic happening either in the debate or over the last week it favours Biden given his lead in the polls. As we said before, Trump badly needs something to shake up the race and just isn’t getting it, yet anyway.