Best Bets in the 2024 American Political Markets
by Dan Angell | by Tyler Doty
Best Bets in the 2024 American Political Markets
Before we get too far into this piece, it’s important to note that political bets are not allowed at U.S. sportsbooks. It doesn’t matter if you go to DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM, Caesars or a local sportsbook; you cannot bet on American election outcomes at any of them.
However, offshore sportsbooks do offer odds on American elections. That’s because in other countries, betting on politics is as common as betting on basketball. In the United Kingdom, for example, there’s a famous story about a cab driver making a bet in 1983 that Tony Blair would one day become Prime Minister and cashing his bet for 5,000 pounds in 1997. And because the United States is the world’s largest democratic nation, American elections are big business for offshore betting markets.
If you’re going to make a bet on the American election markets, though, you’d better know what you’re betting. There are no vanity bets to fade in political betting. In sports betting, you can fade certain teams with huge fan bases, because fans love to place $5 to $10 on their favorite team to win a title, even when it has no chance to win. That doesn’t happen with political wagers. If someone’s making a bet on politics, they’re doing it because they genuinely think that outcome is going to become reality.
That makes it tougher to find value, but not impossible. Here are a few bets worth looking at for the 2024 American political markets.
Kamala Harris to Win the Presidency
There’s a sense that Vice President Kamala Harris might be on the verge of pulling away from Republican candidate Donald Trump. One sign of the state of the race is where each party is investing its time and resources, and the Trump campaign has gone dark in Minnesota and New Hampshire. Both states have voted against Trump twice, and it seems likely they’ll make it three for three. If every state that voted for both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden also votes for Harris, she’ll start with a floor of 225 electoral votes.
From there, it’s a matter of the seven swing states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin), plus one electoral vote out of Omaha, Nebraska. Nebraska is one of two states to divide its electoral votes by district, and the Democrats have pushed for it hard since Barack Obama’s election in 2008. Over the past four elections, Nebraska’s Second District (Omaha and its suburbs) has given its one electoral vote to the Democratic nominee three times.
If Harris wins there and in Nevada (which has voted Democratic in four straight elections), she would need Pennsylvania and any two of the remaining five states to swing her way. The good news for the Harris campaign is that four of the five remaining states have either a Senate or governor’s race where the Republicans have chosen an unpopular candidate. If that candidate becomes a drag on Trump, she’d be likely to benefit and thus win the election.
Democratic President, Republican Senate, Democratic House
This bet offers the best value on the board, because the Senate map is just awful for Democrats this year. Remember, while the House has all 435 members up for re-election every two years, only one-third of the Senate is up for election at a time. This year has the Class I senators on the ballot. Of that group of 33, 18 are currently held by Democrats, and four others are held by independents who caucus with the Democrats. For the purposes of this bet, that makes them Democrats.
With Dianne Feinstein of California vacating her seat, causing a special election, that means Democrats are defending 23 of 35 Senate seats. And of the 12 seats Republicans are defending, most are in places where Democrats have no realistic hope of victory. Of the 12 seats Republicans are defending, only Florida and Texas are less than 10 points more Republican than the national average.
It gets worse from there for Democrats. One of the 23 seats they’re defending is in West Virginia, where the consensus is that only Joe Manchin could hold the seat. As Manchin has retired, that seat is almost certain to flip to Republicans. So to win control of the Senate, Democrats would have to either protect all of their vulnerable seats, or they’d have to flip Florida, Texas or a surprise race.
Odds are that Democrats will lose at least one of their tossup seats. While Elissa Slotkin looks good in Michigan and Ruben Gallego seems to be pulling away from Kari Lake in Arizona, Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Jon Tester of Montana face a tough task to maintain their seats.
Tester, in particular, is vulnerable, having never had to share a ballot with Donald Trump before. In 2018, Tester won in part because Trump wasn’t on the ballot, giving his voters little reason to show up. But Montana has voted for Trump by margins of 20 points in 2016 and 16 points in 2020. Tester has to convince some Trump voters to vote for him too, and if he loses, there’s almost no scenario where Democrats hold the Senate. A loss for Tester would mean either Colin Allred would have to beat Ted Cruz in Texas, or Debbie Mucarsel-Powell would have to beat Rick Scott in Florida. Neither is a particularly likely outcome.
Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to All Elect Democratic Senators
The value here is not terrific. But all three Senate races are must-wins for the Democratic Party, and the Harris campaign isn’t going to stop investing here no matter how well each candidate runs. All three candidates — Elissa Slotkin in Michigan, Bob Casey in Pennsylvania and Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin — are consistently running ahead of Harris. Casey and Baldwin are two-time incumbents and well-known across the state, and Slotkin has built a reputation as a popular moderate during her time in Congress.
Because Harris wins the presidency if she wins all three states, she’s going to keep advertising and canvassing here no matter what. And that makes it very unlikely for any of their challengers to make inroads toward an upset. Only Slotkin’s race is currently in the toss-up category, and that more because she’s not an incumbent than anything else.
New Hampshire to Elect a Republican Governor
If you’re looking for a realistic value play, this could be the one. Essentially, this bet boils down to one question: can Kelly Ayotte win the Republican primary? If she can, then the Republicans’ chances of winning the seat drastically increase. The New England states are Democratic territory at the federal level, but at the state level, they like having Republican governors because they tend to be more moderate so they can actually work with Democratic legislatures. Vermont and Massachusetts, for example, haven’t voted Democrat at the presidential level in any of the past eight elections, but both commonly elect Republican governors.
And New Hampshire is the most conservative of the six New England states. It went Republican for president as recently as 2004, and Ayotte served as senator from 2010 to 2016. Of course, 2016 was when Donald Trump showed up on the ballot, which adds risk to this bet. As much as Trump has claimed he can win New Hampshire, he’s proven to be electoral poison in the Granite State. Ayotte lost her Senate race by just over 1,000 votes in 2016, and things only got worse for Republicans from there.
Ironically, Trump going dark in New Hampshire actually helps Ayotte’s chances. New Hampshire voters are not MAGA voters; they tend to be fiscally conservative and socially liberal. Ayotte has the record to appeal to that type of voter, and it’s much easier to do that if the former president isn’t on the air forcing her into positions she doesn’t want to take.
Kamala Harris -29.5 in California
Yes, you can bet point spreads on the presidential election. And here’s one where it makes sense to do so, because the spread is likely underselling a couple of factors.
First, California really hates Donald Trump. It’s a safe blue state that hasn’t gone red since 1988, but Democrats have really run up the score against Trump. As recently as 2004, George W. Bush managed to keep his margin of defeat in the Golden State to under 10 points. John McCain got blown out here by Barack Obama in 2008, but his margin was 24 points. Nobody had lost California by 30 until Trump managed it against Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Second, Kamala Harris is from California. The favored son or daughter of a state usually gets a boost when they’re in favorable territory. Delaware, for example, delivered for Joe Biden by 21 points. When Walter Mondale got blown out in 1984, he managed to carry his home state of Minnesota to avoid losing all 50 states. Arkansas has voted Democrat exactly twice in the past 40 years: 1992 and 1996, when former governor Bill Clinton was the nominee.
All Harris has to do to beat this projection is increase Biden’s margin of victory in 2020 by half a point. The combination of her popularity in California and Trump’s unpopularity there should make that happen.
