Polymarket Betting Shifts Towards Trump Amid RFK Jr.’s Potential Withdrawal
The U.S. presidency race has shifted course dramatically, as Polymarket, a decentralized prediction market, has shown the betting odds on former President Donald Trump improving. It comes as rumors resurface that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may pull out of the race and possibly support Trump.
Trump Gains Ground on Polymarket
Tuesday was a day for obvious Trump movement, indicated by the data from Polymarket, when bettors awarded him 52% chance of grabbing the presidency. Just a day before that, Vice President Kamala Harris was leading, albeit marginally, with both candidates close in their respective scores of 47% and 52%.
Kennedy Withdrawal Impacts Trump’s Winning Odds
RFK Jr.’s potential departure seems to be a determining difference point in this shift. Such an impact is more pronounced in swing states such as Pennsylvania, where the odds have shifted from favoring Harris to being almost equally weighted between her and Trump.
In spite of this uptrend on Polymarket, other platforms still predict otherwise. In fact, PredictIt, an online betting site based in New Zealand, indicates that Harris has a 56% probability of winning as opposed to Trump’s 47%.
Data from the Election Betting Odds, which gathers info from many sources, shows that the race is tightening. Trump currently holds a 49.3% chance of winning in November compared to Harris who is at 49.1%. This situation is quite different as at the start of the week Harris had a more comfortable margin of over five percentage points.
Polymarket Under Scrutiny as Trading Volume Surges
Polymarket is becoming a major actor on the political scene: it is one of the foreign presidential campaign platforms for the 2024 elections. Congress rushed to action at the beginning of last month being a bipartisan group and taking a big box body ban for betting the upcoming elections.
Lawmakers like Senators Jeff Merkley, Richard Blumenthal, Elizabeth Warren, and Representatives Jamie Raskin and John Sarbanes posed their thoughts to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in a letter. They argued against the possibility of the election cycle being defined by rich individuals who can use large bets for their own benefit, thereby ruining the public’s fragile trust in the institutions of democracy.
The representatives of the government are against using elections as an opportunity for money-making, as this threatens the integrity of the elections significantly. “Political bets alter the meaning of votes in a way that financial calculations rather than political convictions motivate people to cast them,” they claimed.
Polymarket’s Record-Breaking Trading Volumes
Polymarket, a burgeoning decentralized prediction market launched in 2020, enables you to purchase and sell on real-world events using cryptocurrencies. The platform is using the USDC stablecoin that allows the users to get and provide their opinion about future events.
Because of the election of the new U.S. president, the latest trading volumes at Polymarket have rocketed. As of late, the firm completed its $1 billion milestone in just one month of trading, with July itself grossing $343 million.
