If you search Google for the latest election news, you might get the impression the race is tied, or even that Kamala Harris is in the lead.
USA Today's coverage, for example, cites a (worthless) national poll which shows Harris in the lead by 1%. They portray various battleground states as "in a dead heat"… "deadlocked"… and "neck-and-neck".
Notorious misinformation outlet MSNBC just published a YouTube video titled, 'I’m certain Harris will win': Trump scrambles as James Carville sees electoral blowout for Harris (eye-roll).
Markets are telling a much different story.
Look at Trump’s social media company (DJT), which is up over 200% in the last month.
Source: Yahoo Finance, 10/29/2024
Interestingly, DJT’s market cap briefly surpassed the New York Times (NYT). Note from Adam: this is NOT an official recommendation, the stock has little revenue and is highly volatile.
Despite a sharp pullback today, DJT is still up from $15 to $40 in the last month.
On Polymarket, a site which allows users to bet real money on the election, Trump has stormed to a 67% lead vs Harris’ 33%.
Source: Polymarket
Polymarket is no small operation that could be easily manipulated. A whopping $2.5 billion has been traded in this presidential race so far.
The S&P 500 itself is also trying to tell us something. Look how closely it tracks Trump's odds on Polymarket.
Source: Bloomberg, Morgan Stanley Research
That is some serious correlation.
Big money is betting on a Trump victory. His momentum has accelerated over the past month, as the country’s honeymoon phase with Kamala came to a screeching, crashing halt.
In early September when Harris was widely considered the favorite, Jim Rickards wrote an article titled "DON'T Trust The Polls".
Here's an excerpt:
It's clear to me that recent polls of the presidential race have been rigged in favor of Kamala Harris in a way designed to maintain a narrative that she's a young, energetic new kid on the block instead of just another tired old politician with little to offer.
A recent example was The Hill, which ran a headline Harris Leading Trump by 7 Points: Poll. Wow. RealClearPolitics had Harris ahead by 1.7 points on the same day. How does that happen?
You have to consider the polling methodology to see what's going on. The Hill headline was based on a poll conducted by Fairleigh Dickinson University. The poll was conducted among "registered voters" using only 801 respondents and the sampling error was plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
Mr. Rickards has been ripping holes in polls since well before 2016 when he predicted a Trump victory in the face of "99% odds" for Hillary, on live TV no less.
Pollsters simply cannot be trusted. I place far more faith in markets.
Trump will cut red tape and waste, lower taxes, restore reasonable foreign policy, and drill baby drill. Kamala... not so much.
There are good reasons why Donald J. Trump is the market's preferred candidate.
Stay tuned for more coverage as Nov 5th draws closer.
The Daily Reckoning