Donald Trump has opened up a lead over Kamala Harris in the betting markets after the vice president had been gaining momentum on her Republican rival.
Trump now has a 49.7% chance of winning, leading Harris by 0.9 percentage points, according to Real Clear Polling, which aggregates half a dozen gambling sources on the election. It is Trump’s first lead in the betting odds since August 22 – and comes despite polling that largely backs Harris to take the White House.
The pair were tied as recently as August 31, after Harris had come from just a 29% chance on July 21, the day Joe Biden dropped out of the race.
Harris later surged to an 8.8 percentage point lead over Trump in the betting average on August 15 before the pair slipped back to neck and neck. Harris’ last clear lead over Trump was following the Democratic convention in Chicago when she opened up a 2.3 percentage point gap.
That momentum has since been stifled, with gamblers apparently unmoved by Harris’ performance during her CNN interview last week, which did little to impress her naysayers and even earned criticism from Democrat voters.
Donald Trump has opened up a lead over Kamala Harris in the betting markets after the vice president had been gaining momentum all the way into a tie with the former president
The pair were tied as recently as August 31, after Harris had come from just a 29% chance on July 21, the day Joe Biden dropped out of the race and Harris announced her own run
The betting markets are seen by some election forecasters as a useful indicator – as gamblers are driven by profit, while pollsters are more vulnerable to political and media influence.
Of the six bookmakers in RCP’s aggregate, only PredictIt (53%) shows Harris with a lead.
Trump and Harris are tied in the Bwin betting markets but Trump holds a lead over the ex-California Senator in the other four, with Bovada giving him a 52% chance of victory.
Polling still shows Harris with a slight advantage, as the vice president has a 1.8% lead over Trump in RCP’s polling averages.
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However, Trump leads the polling average in Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina and is tied with Harris in Nevada.
The vice president leads the averages in the other three swing states: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
If all other results held from the 2020 election and those states went the way of the averages, Harris would have exactly 270 electoral votes pending Nevada’s result – enough to take the White House.
However, the latest swing state polling suggests that Harris has received little to no convention boost, showing Trump ahead of the vice president in several crucial swing states.
A Trafalgar Group survey of seven of the toughest contests – considered by experts to be Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina and Nevada – show Trump either in the lead or even with Harris.
Trump leads Harris 47% to 45% in Pennsylvania and 47% to 46% in Wisconsin, two states that flipped to red in 2016 when Trump won before flipping back to Democrats in 2020 when he lost to Joe Biden.
The Trafalgar survey, which is considered by polling aggregators to lean Republican, also shows Harris almost even with Trump in Michigan, with the former president eking out a 47% to 46.6% lead.
Trump leads the polling average in Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina and is tied with Harris in Nevada
Polling still shows Harris with a slight advantage, as the vice president has a 1.8% lead over Trump in RCP’s polling averages
Michigan was another state that Trump took from Hillary Clinton in 2016 before ceding to Biden four years later.
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A separate survey by Insider Advantage shows Trump up by one point in Arizona (49%-48%), Nevada (48%-47%) and North Carolina (49%-48%) with Harris and Trump level at 48% in Georgia.
Both campaigns are targeting independent and undecided voters in the seven key swing states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Harris and vice presidential nominee Tim Walz spent Labor Day in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, including one event with Biden, while Trump did not make a public appearance.
Similarly to Harris, Trump also did not experience the usual post-Convention bounce after the RNC in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in July.
The stagnant nature of the standing between Trump and Harris is indicative of the locked-in nature of the highly polarized 2024 race as the campaigns enter the final two months before Election Day.
Trump leads in top concerns that voters care about heading into the election, including an 8 percent advance in trust to address the economy and soaring inflation and a 9 point lead in handling immigration at the southern border.
The candidates’ running mates are head-to-head with only one percentage point division of those who think they are prepared to be president if needed. Walz has 50 percent confidence compared to the 49 percent earned by Vance.
But a quarter of survey respondents were not ready to express their opinion of either Walz or Vance.
Much of this week’s narrative appears set to preview the September 10 debate in Philadelphia between Trump and Harris, televised by ABC News.
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