DENVER — With less than a week left until Election Day, betting platforms describing themselves as election forecasters are gaining traction on social media.
“The courts have just recently allowed for betting on politics and presidential races, literally within the last month, so we see a little bit more coverage of it," explained Dr. Robert Preuhs, MSU Denver political science department chair. "But these things have been filtered through, you know, other countries and kind of like any sports betting, online sports betting, it's the same kind of process."
Polymarket is one betting website that claims to be unbiased and gave former President Donald Trump a 66% percent chance of winning. The platform has received major funding from Republican mega donors.
According to CNBC, Trump’s supporters have touted Polymarket as evidence that Trump’s support is growing despite polls showing a tight race.
“These are predictive markets — that is, people can put money down on who they think is going to win, and then they aggregate all those bets. Kind of like creating the odds for a horse race, and then that's the odds that we see reported on X,” Preuhs said. “These sites take everyone's money who was willing to put some money down on the presidential race... One of the things to kind of keep in mind is that any one of these measures, or any one of these predictive markets, is just one. So you want to take a look at a number of them. And if they all align, which you know, for now, they seem to, you can probably trust that, at least in terms of folks that are willing to bet on the election. They are more likely to think that Trump is going to win than Harris."
Outside of betting when considering a poll or election forecast, Preuhs said look at polls with representative samples and look at aggregate polls, or polls of polls.
