personally I take more notice of things like this than the moron mob on here
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By Brett Arends
Bookies and gamblers are sharply raising their bets on a Kamala Harris win in November after the vice-president's first full day as the presumptive Democratic nominee.
Harris is now being given a 47% chance of beating Donald Trump in November at the betting market Predictit.org, a big jump from around 38% on Sunday evening, shortly after president Biden dropped out of the race.
Trump's chances of winning have meanwhile been slashed to 55%, compared to a peak of 69% just after the assassination attempt on July 13.
Traders at Polymarket, a rival site, are more skeptical of Harris' chances but have still upgraded her probability of winning from 29% to 36% since Sunday night.
And professional bookmaking giant Ladbrokes, which uses old-fashioned odds, has raised her effective probability of winning from 33% to 38%.
Meanwhile stock in Trump Media & Technology (DJT), which is partly a stock market bet on President Trump's chances of reclaiming the White House, continues to slide. It hit $46 on the Monday morning following the assassination attempt. Latest price: $32.
What does this mean for the race?
It is, naturally, way too early to reach any firm conclusions. As Casey Stengel famously said, you should never make predictions, especially about the future. The Republican-Trump attack machine hasn't even begun to turn their guns on Harris. Right now an army of Trumpers are going through every single thing she's ever said or done, looking for dirt.
But the betting numbers aren't meaningless, either.
Harris is far more of an unknown than either the Washington pundits or the opinion polls would have you believe. Like almost every vice president in history, she's been basically invisible. There's very little to go on. Vice-president is about the worst job from which to campaign for president, because you are effectively constitutionally prohibited from expressing an independent opinion.
A fresh Reuters opinion poll has suddenly put Harris 2 points ahead of Trump, 44% to 42%, nationally.
It doesn't help Trump that Republicans have lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections. He actually lost to Hillary Clinton in 2016 by a significant margin.
And anyone who watched Harris' first campaign speech, in Milwaukee on Monday night, can see that she's no Hillary.
Nearly eight years ago, here, I bucked the almost-universal conventional opinion which was that Hillary Clinton was heading for a landslide victory. If that were true, I argued, she should have been way ahead of Trump in the polls. Instead, even after Trump had had a disastrous few weeks, she was only narrowly ahead. Trump could definitely still win, I wrote.
Today we face a mirror image. It's almost impossible to imagine a worse month in presidential campaign history than the Democrats have just had. The debate, the infighting, Biden's reluctant decision to drop out were bad enough. Add in an assassination attempt on Trump, and a simply stunning photographic image, and it's been all tailwinds for the Republican nominee.
But for all that, even when Biden was still in the race and clinging on. Trump was still only a few points ahead. That's not good news for Trump's campaign, it's bad news.
The biggest unknown is going to be the tsunami of negative campaigning and attack ads that Harris is going to face. But for now, I'm betting the current Kamalaphoria in the betting markets has more room to run.
-Brett Arends
This content was created by MarketWatch, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. MarketWatch is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.
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