Donald Trump’s chances of winning the 2024 presidential election appear to be improving this week, as betting markets tracked by RealClearPolitics put them just ahead of President Joe Biden’s for the first time this year — at 32%, compared with 30%.
That’s illustrated in the below chart, which also shows Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom of California with an 8% chance of getting elected president, even though he has ruled out a White House run repeatedly. Newsom’s chances are ahead of those for Trump’s rivals for the Republican nomination, such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley.
To be sure, betting markets got last year’s midterm elections wrong and can be poor predictors for several reasons. The clientele for political gambling tends to be right-leaning and male, and betting markets can get caught up in narratives as well as skewed by unreliable polls, one expert in political gambling and prediction markets told MarketWatch last year.
Trump’s chances of winning the 2024 presidential election have hit a new high for the year, as Biden seems to fade a bit, DeSantis has seen a big drop, and some bettors like Michelle Obama.
RealClearPolitics
Trump’s improved chances come as he skipped a GOP primary debate for a second time, instead giving a speech Wednesday night directed at Michigan auto workers in which he suggested that none of the debaters deserved to become his vice president.
The former president has 56.6% support in national primary polls, according to a RealClearPolitics moving average of surveys. He has been indicted this year in two separate election-interference cases, a hush-money case and a classified-documents case, but many Republican voters have rallied around him.
DeSantis is a distant second in those polls with 14.4% support, followed by Haley at 5.8%, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy at 5.1% and former Trump VP Mike Pence at 4.2%. In aggregate, the non-Trump GOP candidates get 35.9% support in RCP’s average of national polls, compared with Trump’s 56.6%. In RCP’s average of surveys for Iowa, which holds the first major contest in the GOP primary, they get 46.4% support vs. his 49.2%.
Now read: DeSantis says at debate that Trump’s spending ‘set the stage for the inflation that we have now’
See also: Gas tax a target at Republican debate. Here’s what you’re paying now.
Plus: Instagram, other social media should be banned for anyone 16 and under, Ramaswamy says at GOP debate
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