The polling gets even better for Biden but Betfair punters remain cautious
One of the features of the current White House race is how the polling has got better and better for Joe Biden as time has gone on but the impact on the UK betting markets particularly Betfair, has not reflected this. Ladbrokes reported yesterday that two-thirds of all bets that taken on the election had been the Trump – my guess being that the smaller ones are going for the Republican but the bigger bets are for the Democrat. This…
The WH2020 early voting trends suggest that we could see a record turnout
Is this good for Trump or Biden? Thanks to Michael McDonald who is collating all the published data on early voting and producing regular updates on his website which has enabled me to produce the chart above. Each state operates this differently so what’s available on the public record is not constant but we do have have from many states figures on the number of votes that have actually been cast by mail and at polling stations. We also have…
The battle for the White House – Trump’s fight to retain the female vote
It is that gap with women that’s so tough for the incumbent One of the great things that happened in the early days of PB (before GE2005) was the creation of the British Polling Council which placed requirements on pollsters to make available certain key data within a fixed time period after the publication of a poll. This is voluntary but political pollsters know that they will struggle to make an impact unless they are BPC compliant. We now take…
The other big US election three weeks today – the fight to control the Senate
If you are betting remember to check the bookies’ rules The above Economist video gives a good analysis for those punters who plan to have a bet on on the race to control the US senate – which is being voted on at the same time as the President three weeks today. This is almost as critical as the Presidency because the Republicans have been blocking so much of what has been agreed by the House. At the moment the…
The states that will decide WH2020 – polling averages from the key battlegrounds
With the election just three weeks away way I thought it might be useful to have the above chart so we can monitor the latest polls in the states that will decide the election. The chart shows simply the average Biden polling lead as recorded in Fivethirtyeight.com. These are the states where almost all of the effort is being put in and where, of course, there are the most active betting markets. The number of state polls is unprecedented and…
For all the talk in the past week of Biden landslide the spread betting markets have barely moved
But some movement on the exchanges Over the past week the message from both the national and the state level polls is that Joe Biden is doing very well indeed and if they’re right he will be the next President of the United States. Yet there still appears to be a lot of nervousness amongst punters on both the spread betting markets and exchanges suggest. The Sporting Index spread on Biden of 315-321 has barely moved and the exchanges are…
If Trumps wins next month, it’s the economy, stupid
Looking at those key states, worth 55 electoral college votes that Trump won in 2016 it is understandable why people are talking now about a Biden victory but the size of it, but from those same polls there’s a sliver of optimism for Trump because the same polls that gives Biden hefty leads they also show this Now we’ve seen plenty of occasions across the world when the party leading the voting intention loses the election because they’ve trailed on…