Political Betting–Presidential Election Betting Odds After The First Debate

There may be nothing treated with a higher degree of significance that is in reality completely insignificant than Presidential Debates. Monday’s first US Presidential Debate between Democratic Party nominee Hillary Clinton and Republican Party nominee Donald Trump was no different. You can make a compelling case that there’s never been an important Presidential Debate. Political science types like to gush over the 1960 debate between Richard Nixon and John Kennedy. Their take is that it ‘ushered in the television era of politics’ (true) and ‘swayed the outcome of the election’ (not true). The narrative is that John Kennedy looked so handsome on TV while Richard Nixon looked, well, downright Nixonian. The problem is that there’s nothing to validate the assertion that the debate had any significance. The election was one of the closest in US history as Nixon won more states, Kennedy won the popular vote by a razor thin margin (0.17%) and won the electoral college to become the 35th President of the United States.

The problem now is that people are ‘catching wise’ to the scam that is the Presidential election. One of the more hopeful signs of recent years is that voter participation is highest among older people and plummets with each younger demographic group. Millennials get a bad rap from the media but their voter participation is less than 50% which suggests that they have a lot more sense than ‘Generation X’ and ‘Baby Boomers’. We live in an increasingly digital and decentralized world yet the two major party candidates don’t have a clue about technology. Assuming you’re not on the business end of a drone strike the US government is becoming less and less relevant with every passing year. No matter who wins the election that trend will thankfully continue.

THE WINNER IS…TAKE YOUR PICK

The satirical news website ‘The Onion’ published a story with this headline last night: ‘Open Minded Voter Waits Almost 5 Minutes To Decide Who Won Debate‘. It would be a lot more funny if it wasn’t true. The ideological slant of the person or media source reporting on the debate completely determines who they think won. In fact, most aren’t as ‘open minded’ as ‘The Onion’s’ voter and had decided who won before the debate began. This is true in most years and definitely true in this extremely polarized election. All Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton did last night was yell ‘talking points’ at each other and threw in a few ‘gotchas’ that they hoped would ‘go viral’.

They didn’t ‘change any minds’ among the voting public but then again that wasn’t their goal. The candidates just have to show up and not pass out during the debate. After that, their supplicants in the mainstream media and partisan political hacks go to work chortling about how their candidate ‘looked Presidential’ while the other candidate ‘flopped’. As this election cycle has shown, a thoughtful and witty bon mot won’t change even a single voter’s mind. At this point, nothing Donald Trump can say or do would get his supporters to vote for Hillary Clinton and vice versa.

My plan was to come up with some political prop bet odds on who various news outlets would declare the winner. But what’s the point? Even ‘public opinion polls’ are unreliable. Pollsters get paid to find a way to quantify what candidates want them to. And there are so many ways to ‘work’ an online poll that it’s not even worth talking about. At this moment 80% of Drudge Report readers say Trump won. You can be sure that a left leaning website will say the diametric opposite.

There is one ‘prop bet’ that is worth posting a line on. The USA TODAY is as close as we have to an objective news source. They love their polls and you can be sure that they’ll have one in their front page story about the debate:

PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE POLL RESULTS

Who will be declared the winner in the USA TODAY poll accompanying their front page story about the first Presidential debate on 9/27/16?
Donald Trump: -110
Hillary Clinton: -110
(No poll or a 50/50 tie in the poll = No Action)

USA TODAY doesn’t have a pronounced ideological position so the results of their poll are entirely contingent on the methodology they use.

THE DEBATE’S IMPACT ON PRESIDENTIAL BETTING ODDS

One thing I did want to see is if the debate would have any impact on 2016 Presidential Election betting odds. I monitored a number of US facing sportsbooks as well as UK bookmakers and the Betfair betting exchange. The majority of the US facing books took the Presidential election bet off the board before the debate. That didn’t have any significance–it’s just smart bookmaking. Interestingly, sportsbooks with a primarily European clientele never took their ‘US Presidential Election’ wagers down. Neither did BetFair. The big surprise was that the debate didn’t move the needle at all. The prices during and after the debate were essentially the same as before the debate. The prices vary from shop to shop but you’ll find Hillary Clinton as a -210 to -250 favorite just about everywhere. Takeback on Donald Trump is +210 to +225 or so depending on the pricing format of the individual sportsbook.

But that won’t stop us from having some fun. To the extent that there is an impact of the debate it won’t be felt until the aforementioned media outlets and political hacks go to work. For that reason, we’ll base our prop bets on the poll data released on Monday, October 3.

POST PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE POLL RESULTS

We’ll start with the ‘poll average’ at RealClearPolitics.com and post some totals based on each candidate’s current standing based on that metric:

Hillary Clinton’s Poll Average at RealClearPolitics at 11:59 PM EDT on 10/3/16 will be:
OVER 43.1 -110
UNDER 43.1 -110

Donald Trump’s Poll Average at RealClearPolitics at 11:59 PM EDT on 10/3/16 will be:
OVER 41.5 -110
UNDER 41.5 -110

The RealClearPolitics site gets their average from ten major Presidential polls. At this point, Hillary Clinton is shown as leading 7 of these polls with Donald Trump leading 3. We can do a prop bet based on this as well:

The 10 polls in the RealClearPolitics average at 11:59 PM EDT on 10/3/16 will show the candidate leads as follows:
CLINTON 7 TRUMP 3: -225
NOT CLINTON 7 TRUMP 3: +185

These numbers were based on the ideological disposition of the poll sources as well as the lead held by each candidate in the relative polling data.

Finally, we’ll do a prop on the poll conducted by the Bloomberg financial media network. It’s like the biggest poll showing Trump in the lead (by 2 percentage points). This prop will ask if he’ll still be leading next Monday?

Will Donald Trump be shown as the leader in the Bloomberg Presidential Poll at 11:59 PM EDT on 10/3/16
YES -175
NO +150

The second Presidential Debate will be held on Monday, October 9th and the third debate on Wednesday, October 18th. We’ll have prop bets and analysis in advance of both debates.

About the Author: Jim Murphy

For more than 25 years, Jim Murphy has written extensively on sports betting as well as handicapping theory and practice. Jim Murphy has been quoted in media from the Wall Street Journal to REASON Magazine. Murphy worked as a radio and podcasting host broadcasting to an international audience that depended on his expertise and advice. Murphy is an odds making consultant for sports and 'non-sport novelty bets' focused on the entertainment business, politics, technology, financial markets and more.