You might think that Donald J. Trump would be a heavy underdog for online betting in the 2020 Presidential election. After all, many national polls in the United States show his challenger, Joe Biden, with a lead in the projected popular vote, and a pandemic is running largely unchecked in the United States. However, the popular vote doesn’t determine the winner. In the United States, presidential elections are based on the outcome in each state; each state has a number of votes. Because some states (such as California and New York) are so much larger than others (such as Wyoming and North Dakota) in terms of population, a candidate can win some states by a huge number but still not win enough states to win the election. This has not happened often, but it happened in 2016, when Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the election despite losing the popular vote by more than three million votes, and it could happen again.
Take a look at the latest Politcal odds and developments in the U.S. political scene.
USA Political Betting News:
The Latest on the 2020 US Election: What to Expect for these Elections
Odds to Win
- Joe Biden -120
- Donald Trump +100
So why isn’t Trump more of an underdog?
As of September 23, according to FiveThirtyEight.com, Biden leads by 6.9 percent nationally in the polling, if you average all of the accepted polls. However, the “battleground” states — of the 50 states, only a handful are seen as competitive because of the conservative or liberal majorities in those states — are few in number. Biden leads some, such as in Michigan, where he leads by an average of 7.4 percent across the polls. Biden’s lead is narrower in Pennsylvania (4.4 percent) and Florida (1.7 percent), and Trump leads in Ohio (1.6 percent).
The two-party system leaves a lot of voters out of the mix
In the United States, the two major political parties are the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. There are other parties, such as the Green Party and the Libertarian Party, but their candidates’ poll so low that they do not qualify for federal election assistance. This requirement keeps the two parties dominant. Just about half of the voters in the United States do not identify with either party, and often many of these political independents do not bother to vote in presidential elections.
Trump’s opponent has a lot of negative baggage of his own
Joe Biden and Donald Trump both have allegations of sexual misbehavior, and even assault, that have been leveled against them without resolution. Biden opposed the use of busing to integrate public schools in the 1970s. He wrote the crime bill passed during the Clinton Administration that has led to the disproportionate incarceration of people of color. He has supported turning such public entitlement programs as Social Security into privately run entities. In other words, many of the platform positions that the Democrats supposedly embrace are more progressive than Biden’s own positions.
Incumbents have a large advantage
There are laws in the United States against using government property for political purposes. However, Trump has not worried about that law, instead turning the White House into a backdrop for his acceptance speech for his nomination for re-election. Even in years when incumbents have more respect for the laws of the nation, they come in with an advantage. It generally takes a major economic downturn for an incumbent to lose; the last two incumbent Presidents to lose their bids for re-election were George H.W. Bush, in 1992, and Jimmy Carter, in 1980; in both cases, the nation was suffering economically. There has been a considerable amount of economic uncertainty in 2020 thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, and that could play a role if Trump does not win, but unemployment was down prior to the pandemic, so Trump could point to those successes.
Don’t forget the pandemic
Trump has spent the months since COVID-19 came to the United States referring to it as some sort of public relations problem sent to him by the Chinese government, instead of allowing the science to dictate policy. This might seem like a recipe for losing the election, but many Trump supporters have echoed his sentiments. On social media, it is common to see posts where Trump supporters declare that the pandemic is some sort of political tool that will vanish after the election. So while mismanagement of the pandemic has caused outrage among some, suspicions about the true nature of the pandemic have caused outrage among others.
So which way should you wager?
Biden’s lead in the polls has remained largely consistent since the end of the Democratic National Convention. The fight over filling Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s vacant seat on the Supreme Court is another polarizing battle that will galvanize voters on both sides of the political aisle. I expect voter turnout to be higher than usual in 2020 — and higher turnout tends to favor the Democratic candidate, historically. So I would go with Biden for now — and the early voting has already started to begin.
