News Slate: How Offshore Oddsmakers Made a Killing off Gullible Trump Supporters

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“It’s the most irrational market I ever saw,” says Collin Sherwin, a Tampa, Florida–based gambling writer who covers the industry for Vox Media’s DraftKings Nation.
The pandemic hit the U.S. In election betting terms, COVID-19 meant three things:

1) Most of the world saw Trump’s catastrophic handling of the virus for what it was, and his betting odds got longer as his approval rating sank.

2) People were cooped up inside, with fewer places to spend their money. And just as the gamified investment app Robinhood saw massive user growth during the pandemic’s early months, so did election betting markets.

3) The pandemic left people devoid of bettable events. “One of the few things that still seemed to be happening in the world, while very little was happening, were the primaries were still under way,” Morrow says.

Throughout the year at Bovada, Morrow says, the money coming in was around 2-to-1 for Trump. At BetOnline, around 60 percent of bettors were on Trump, though the total money was closer to 50-50, meaning Biden backers placed some large bets.

For most of the year, Trump’s short odds to win (requiring bettors to risk more money for smaller winnings) were not a reflection of inside political knowledge, or of the oddsmakers being MAGA guys. Bookmakers were taking on so many Trump bets that they consistently tried to discourage people from betting on him.

“The Trump guys were just out in full force,” Mason says. “According to the true odds, they probably could’ve got a better price, but us and probably every other book kept it lower than it should, just because we were all so exposed on it.”

Time and again, the effort to get Trump bettors to chill out failed.

For Trump fans, it seems possible that the betting odds acted as “proof” that the polls were wrong, the smart people knew it, and their man would win.

 

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