Are Betting Odds the Best Way to Predict the 2020 Election?

The 2020 Presidential election is just a couple of weeks away. That means that your television is a source of constant negative advertising from all ends of the political spectrum. More importantly, it means that it is time to use knowledge of 2020 election betting odds to better understand who might win the election. 

As of now, legal sportsbooks are not able to offer action on 2020 election betting odds or other political props. That might change in the future, but the legal sports betting markets across the United States have not yet reached that point. However, there is still a way to make money predicting the 2020 election.

DraftKings Sportsbook is offering a free to enter pool with $100,000 in prizes up for grabs. Players can give their predictions on who will win the election and which candidate will win key battleground states. While bettors cannot wager on these items, they can still enjoy the action of waiting to see if their selections will net them some cash in this unique contest.

As it turns out, betting odds are a better indicator of election results than the polls that are done prior to elections. While there is no 2020 election betting available in the United States’ regulated markets, international bookmakers (example Unibet and Bet365) do offer odds in other parts of the world. Compared to the projections of polls, these betting odds tend to be more predictive in figuring out who the next president will be.

The reason for this is the fact that most polling is flawed to an extent. Polls are only required to get the opinions of a limited number of participants to form what is determined to be a representative sample size of a community or country. Given the extremely wide range of political views in the United States today, what was once considered a representative sample size might not be enough to capture the opinions in the country anymore.

Also aiding the argument that betting odds are better indicators of election results than polling is the fact that polling data is collected in a flawed way in most cases. Some polls are still using landline telephones to collect data, if you can believe that. With how diverse our ways of consuming information are today, polls that rely on one method of data collection might as well not exist.

Now that we have talked about what makes polling flawed at times, it is worth asking why betting odds are a good indicator of election results. The reason for this is that they are able to factor in a number of items that simple polling of voters cannot. Or, at least, those items are factored in in a more intelligent way than the average voter who does not work with data for a living the way bookmakers do.

Bookmakers are able to weigh polling results with things like historical voting trends in each state. Combined with the perception of everything going on in the current political climate today, bookmakers are able to provide a more comprehensive picture of everything that goes into winning an election. So, while your relatives might cite a poll when telling you who they think will get elected, you might want to counter with some 2020 election betting odds that point to your candidate of choice coming through at the polls.

This year, betting odds point to Joe Biden as the favorite to win the 2020 election over Donald Trump. But Trump was an underdog in 2016 as well, and there is no telling which direction this election will go in with factors like COVID-19 and the potential for contested election results being hot topics leading into November of 2020.