Former President Donald Trump’s chances of defeating Vice President Kamala Harris have improved in nearly every swing state, according to Polymarket, an online betting platform.
Polymarket, partly funded by early Trump backer Peter Thiel, gave the former president a significant edge in six out of seven battleground states that are likely to determine the outcome of next month’s presidential election.
According to the oddsmaker’s latest data, Trump is favored to prevail in Arizona (68 percent), Georgia (64 percent), Pennsylvania (54 percent), Michigan (52 percent), North Carolina (63 percent) and Wisconsin (52 percent).
The only swing state where Harris maintains a slim lead is Nevada, where she holds a 51 percent chance of victory compared to Trump’s 49 percent.
Newsweek contacted the Harris and Trump campaigns via email on Monday for comment.
While Harris still maintains a substantial lead in the popular vote prediction (68 percent to Trump’s 32 percent), the state-by-state breakdown on Polymarket suggests a race that has shifted in Trump’s favor where it matters most, the Electoral College.
It’s important to note that prediction markets, while often indicative of broader trends, do not necessarily translate directly to election outcomes.
However, betting odds have shown a strong track record in recent decades. According to aggregates by Bookmakers Review, betting odds have accurately predicted 77 percent of the expected candidates winning over the last 35 years in presidential elections.
The accuracy of betting odds extends to close elections as well. Oddsmakers correctly predicted Barack Obama’s win against Mitt Romney in 2012, where Obama was given odds of -450, and even the extremely close election of 2000, where President George W. Bush was given odds of -150.
The 2016 election stands as a notable exception, where both betting markets and conventional polling failed to predict Trump’s victory. It was the only race in the last 11 presidential elections since 1980 where the winning candidate had worse odds than the losing candidate.
For an earlier example of betting odds missing the mark, one would need to look back to 1976, when Jimmy Carter won over Gerald Ford. Even then, Carter’s odds were only slightly better than Ford’s, at +100, according to the SportsOddsHistory archive.
If Trump were to win all the swing states where he leads at the moment in the Polymarket odds, plus flip an additional state like Minnesota—where the oddsmaker gives him a 10 percent chance of winning—it could result in an Electoral College tally of 322 for Trump to 216 for Harris, surpassing the 100-vote margin often associated with landslide victories.
It’s crucial to remember that the race remains fluid, and much can change in the final stretch of the campaign.
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