There is a cryptocurrency betting site in the US which, of late, has been giving Donald Trump supporters reason to be cheerful.
According to its modelling, the Republican candidate for the presidency has a 66.4 per cent chance of winning the upcoming election on November 5th.
It’s a number that, according to Elon Musk, should be taken seriously.
On October 6th, the Tesla billionaire posted on X that Polymarket is “more accurate than polls, as actual money is on the line.”
Even Trump himself name-checked the platform during a rally speech in Michigan, on October 18th, saying, of his percentage there, “I don’t know what the hell it means, but it means we’re doing pretty well.”
Except, there’s a rub.
According to Bloomberg reports, most of the movement has been driven by one account – Fredi9999 – who has wagered tens of millions of dollars on the former US president to reclaim his spot in the White House.
And while crypto tycoons with obscure-sounding online handles might feel very 2024, it’s hardly a reliable indicator of who will win the upcoming election.
The polls are often wrong
That’s not to say the polls are any more trustworthy.
On Election Day in 2016, a round-up of polls concluded that Hillary Clinton had a 98 per cent chance of beating Trump, while in 2012, the Gallup Organization badly understated support for Barack Obama.
The Economist now has it neck-and-neck between Harris and Trump after the vice-president’s probability of victory rose by six percentage points.
Six days out and everyone, mysteriously, seems to be shifting back towards the centre ground for fear of getting it badly wrong.
It’s all about the base
Much has been made of Harris’s inability to win over enough male voters to win the election, but not enough is being made of Trump’s inability to stretch his support beyond his base.
As The New York Times puts it, “there simply do not seem to be enough voters – even in the battleground states – who turn out at Trump’s behest anymore” when he’s simply preaching to the people he already has on side.
In an election decided by swing voters in swing states, that is one heck of a handicap.
Kamala has grasped the how
As the General Election in the UK showed in July, knowing ‘how’ to get over the finish line is more important than anything else.
Labour won a historic landslide with a lower vote share in 2024 than they received in 2017 when the party under Jeremy Corbyn narrowly lost to Theresa May.
Deborah Mattinson – a fixture of the UK polling scene – travelled to Washington D.C. in September to brief the Harris-Walz team on how to repeat that success.
War chest
Donald Trump may be a billionaire, but he represents by far the poorer half of the presidential race.
Since joining the race, Kamala Harris has raised an eye-boggling $1 billion, and last quarter one of her fund-raising committees reeled in $633 million – dwarfing what Trump raised with two committees combined.
All this cash not only effectively offsets the flow of money funnelling in for Trump from some tech billionaires, but it has also given Harris the resources she needs to persuade swing voters with ads and to organize on the ground
Arnie
And with just days to go until the election, a surprise endorsement from the man who doesn’t do endorsements could prove enough to get swing voters and even Republicans to think twice at the ballot box.
Arnold Schwarzenegger endorsed Kamala Harris by saying he will “always be an American” before he is a Republican.
The former Republican governor said that he was backing the Democrat because a Trump victory would mean “four more years of bullshit”.
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