by Fred Fuld III
If you have been wondering what the percentage chance of a particular candidate winning an election, there is a website you can check out.
It shows the betting odds for the U.S. presidential election and the odds for the Senate control and the House control, based on the oddsmakers.
The site is called Election Betting Odds. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately?) for Americans, there are laws prohibiting betting on political elections in the United State (with one exception which will be described later in this article).
The Election Betting Odds site is based primarily on Betfair.com, the major betting site based in the UK, along with other sources. Americans are not allowed to bet on this site.
However, if you are a U.S. citizen and you really want to speculate on the outcome of the upcoming elections, you can use a site called PredictIt.org. Why is there this loophole?
Well first, Predictit.org is an experimental project operated for academic purposes at New Zealand’s Victoria University under permission from the CFTC, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission.
Second, the maximum you can “invest” is only $850, so there is not a huge risk to traders if they lose. Bid amounts range from one penny to 99 cents.
The interesting feature about PredictIt is that there are numerous politically related possibilities that you can speculate on, not just the presidential election.
Here are just a few of the things you can bet on:
- Which party will win Florida in 2020?
- Will Nancy Pelosi become Acting U.S. President on January 20?
- Who will win the 2020 New Hampshire Democratic gubernatorial primary?
- Will Trump resign during his first term?
- Who will be the next justice to leave the Supreme Court?
- Will a federal charge against Rudy Giuliani be confirmed by Dec. 31, 2020?
- Will Kim Jong-Un be Supreme Leader of North Korea on Dec. 31?
- Will Benjamin Netanyahu be prime minister of Israel on Dec. 31, 2020?
- Will Scottish Parliament call for an independence referendum in 2020?
- Will NASA find 2020’s global average temperature highest on record?
I found it fascinating just to browse through to see all the different things that people are speculating on.