With half a month left until the U.S. presidential election on November 5, the national polls show Vice President Kamala Harris continues to lead former President Donald Trump by a slim margin. However, the political betting market has shifted in favor of Trump over Harris. A more intuitive view of the distance each presidential candidate is from the needed threshold of 270 electoral votes can be seen from the election map predictions.
The U.S. presidential election is not based on popular vote but on the Electoral College system. American voters actually elect “electors”, who then vote for the president. Each state has a number of electors equal to the total of their members of Congress. These electors form the Electoral College.
Currently, there are 538 electors in the 50 states and Washington D.C., with the candidate who receives over half of the electoral votes (270 votes) becoming the president. In 48 states and D.C. except for Maine and Nebraska, they use the “winner-takes-all” approach where the candidate who wins the popular vote in the state gets all the electors’ votes. Maine and Nebraska consider both statewide and district popular vote winners when allocating electoral votes.
Therefore, winning the national popular vote does not guarantee victory, as seen in U.S. election history, including the 2016 election. Back then, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton won nearly 2.9 million more popular votes than Trump, but Trump secured 304 electoral votes to win the presidency. The Electoral College system is designed to prevent heavily populous states from dominating the national election.
Most polling data tracking the election situation in the market reflects the win or loss of popular votes. For a more accurate observation of the election trend and the actual strength of the candidates, one needs to look at the electoral vote prediction maps.
A website named “270towin” has aggregated 17 electoral vote prediction maps for the 2024 U.S. presidential election, based on polling data, consensus predictions, and other factors. These maps provide quantitative and qualitative assessments of the electoral vote distribution between Harris and Trump. These assessments are continuously updated as the election day approaches.
From these prediction maps, it can be seen that the 93 electoral votes in 7 battleground states (swing states) are still crucial in determining the outcome – Arizona (11 votes), Michigan (15 votes), Pennsylvania (19 votes), North Carolina (16 votes), Nevada (6 votes), Wisconsin (10 votes), and Georgia (16 votes). How these votes are divided between Trump and Harris in these states will determine the ultimate winner.
Excluding these 7 states, most prediction agencies believe Harris can secure 226 out of 445 electoral votes in other states based on their clear partisan tendencies, while Trump can secure 219 votes.
As of October 19, 7 institutions including CNN, Cook Political Report, and Fox News, maintained the prediction of 226 electoral votes for Harris and 219 for Trump, indicating that the results in these 7 battleground states remain unpredictable.
US News remains uncertain whether Nebraska could allocate 1 vote to Harris, hence their temporary prediction stands at Harris 225 votes to Trump 219 votes.
Similarly, the “2024 Electoral Map Based on Polls” remains uncertain if Maine could give 1 vote to Trump, leading to a temporary prediction of Harris 226 votes to Trump 218 votes.
Among the institutions that have made some predictions about the 7 battleground states, “RacetotheWH” suggests that Harris may win Nevada, momentarily giving her a lead of 232 to 219 over Trump.
“Split Ticket” believes Trump could win Arizona, resulting in a temporary score of Harris 226 to Trump 230.
“Elections Daily” predicts Harris may win Nevada, while North Carolina could go to Trump, bringing the score temporarily to Harris 232 to Trump 235.
JHK estimates that Trump could win Arizona and Georgia, resulting in Harris having 226 votes against Trump’s 246.
If Trump secures Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina, their temporary score would be Harris 226 to Trump 262, according to the current prediction by the betting platform Kalshi.
The “2024 Electoral Map Based on Polls” predicts that Harris could win Pennsylvania, while Trump could secure Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. In the undecided situation in Michigan and Nevada, Trump could already obtain 272 votes, defeating Harris with 245 votes.
The election polling company 538 predicts Trump leads Harris with 272 votes to 266 votes. This indicates the possibility of Harris winning Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Nevada. The forecast shows Trump’s likelihood of winning in electoral votes stands at 52%, against Harris’s 48%. At the same time, 538 also predicts Harris winning the popular vote with a 51% chance, while Trump’s chances of popular vote victory are at 49%.
The political betting platform Polymarket’s forecast is bolder, suggesting that Trump is likely to win all 7 battleground states, securing 312 votes, surpassing Harris’s 226 votes. This would also make Trump’s victory exceed his 2016 performance.
Polymarket is a cryptocurrency-based prediction market, backed by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. Tech billionaire Elon Musk, another co-founder of PayPal, who later started the rocket launch company SpaceX and electric car company Tesla, and acquired the social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter), is also monitoring Polymarket’s election predictions.
According to publicized information, since April 22, Polymarket initially predicted Harris to win with 276 votes against Trump’s 262 votes. However, there have been several back-and-forths between Harris and Trump in the predictions. For instance, on July 1, Trump took a lead with 312 votes; on August 12, Harris won with 276 votes against Trump’s 262 votes; on August 26, Trump again led with 287 votes against Harris’s 251 votes; and on September 16, Harris once again won with 276 votes.
As of October 7, on the Polymarket prediction platform, Trump took the lead for the third time, winning with 281 votes against Harris’s 257 votes. Subsequently, Trump’s winning margin continued to expand.
Economics professor Rajiv Sethi noted that since October 7, there has been a surge in trading volume of contracts betting on Trump’s victory on the Polymarket platform.
On October 7, Musk also posted on the X platform saying, “Currently, Trump leads Harris by 3% in the betting market, which is more accurate than polls because real money is at stake in bets.”
According to Newsweek, as of October 16, an anonymous trader, known as Fredi9999, has purchased approximately 20 million shares of prediction stocks on the Polymarket platform, worth over $14 million, betting that Trump will win the election, including winning Pennsylvania.
Professor Sethi analyzed in a recent Substack post that the large bet by the trader has shifted the market in favor of Trump, possibly to “make Trump look better than the market’s outlook, hoping this will boost morale and attract a continuous flow of donations and volunteers.”
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission warns of potential market manipulation in the betting market. Historian and political betting expert Laura Beers from American University told Newsweek that the anonymous trader might be trying to influence the election by changing the betting odds, stating, “It remains unclear whether this will help Trump appear successful or whether it will energize Harris’s supporters, who are concerned the market sees her as a loser.”
Beers also suggested that the trader could be using political bets as a hedge to offset potential future losses, especially if their “business interests might suffer from a Trump victory.”
Renowned polling expert Nate Silver, who has been closely following the U.S. election, revealed that in the past one to two weeks, Trump has made progress in all 7 battleground states, and on October 17, Trump began leading Harris by a slim margin.
In Silver’s model updated on the afternoon of the 17th, Trump was leading Harris by 50.2% to 49.5%.
On his “Silver Bulletin” website, Silver wrote: “Regardless of what the nominal result is, this is the first time since September 19 that Trump has led in our model.”
He mentioned that some “good” polls for Trump had entered their database, including Fox News polls where Trump led the national range by 2 percentage points and had a significant lead in Georgia.
The model’s prediction a day earlier (October 16) showed Harris leading Trump by about 1 percentage point, with Harris at 50.3% to Trump’s 49.4%.
Essentially, the competition between Harris and Trump remains a neck-and-neck race. Silver stated that currently, in terms of electoral votes, both are tied at 269 votes each, with the likelihood of a tie being 0.3%.
A month ago, Harris was consistently leading in Silver’s polling aggregate model. Following the presidential debate on September 10, where Biden withdrew from the race, Harris quickly secured the Democratic Party’s nomination and officially became the Democratic presidential nominee at the party convention. Soon after, Harris surpassed Trump in national and swing state polls.
However, recent polls show that Trump has gained momentum in the final weeks leading up to the election day, increasing the likelihood of his ultimate victory.
According to RealClearPolitics’ average of major nationwide polls from October 4 to October 19, Harris leads Trump by a 0.9 percentage point advantage nationwide. But Trump is leading in all 7 battleground states, giving him an overall lead of more than 1 percentage point over Harris.
In a post last week, Silver stated, “I’ve never seen an election where the outcome in the 50-50 vicinity took this long, and I might never see it again.” He mentioned that the election might continue to be a close call until election day.