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2028 U.S. Presidential Election Betting Odds: J.D. Vance Favored by Sportsbooks

J.D. Vance election night Florida
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The great thing about betting on politics is there’s always another election around the corner. It took about two nanoseconds after Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential race for BetOnline (visit our BetOnline Review) to post their 2028 U.S. election odds; to no one’s surprise, Vice President-elect J.D. Vance is the +275 favorite to take over for Trump as we go to press.

We know it’s a virtual lock that Vance will be the Republican Party candidate for that election. Who will represent the Democratic Party? California Gov. Gavin Newson and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro are the co-favorites at +400, and they’re also tied at +800 to claim the presidency.

Vance may be miles ahead of his Democratic rivals on the politics odds board, but at +275, it’s pretty clear the BetOnline market doesn’t think too much of the incoming veep. Let’s dig deep, peel back the layers and see if there’s any betting value for us to scoop up.

U.S. Presidential Election Betting Odds

CandidatePriceOffered by
J.D. Vance+275
Josh Shapiro+1200
Gavin Newsom+800
Gretchen Whitmer+1500
Donald Trump Sr.+2000
Pete Buttigieg+1500
Ron Desantis+2500

Publisher’s Note: The odds referenced in this article may have changed since publication. The odds table above shows real-time prices.

What Happened?

You’re probably tired of all those 2024 election think pieces already. I know I am – but that’s why I love my job. I get to write about politics from a purely factual standpoint, and there are only four facts that matter when it comes to betting on politics:

  1. What people (politicians, voters et al.) are actually doing on the ground.
  2. What bettors think people are doing.
  3. What people are going to do.
  4. What bettors think people are going to do.

Item No. 1 is the most important thing for journalists and bettors to get right. The big takeaway from the 2024 U.S. election isn’t that Trump and the Republicans improved their results somewhat among Black, Hispanic and younger voters, or that Kamala Harris and the Democrats were hamstrung because they didn’t run a full campaign. It’s the Dems drawing almost 10 million fewer voters than they did in 2020:

Historic Vote Comparison
Trump 2016: 62,984,828Clinton 2016: 65,853,514
Trump 2020: 74,223,975Biden 2020: 81,283,501
Trump 2024: 75,143,238Harris 2024: 71,881,788

Harris has actually closed the gap somewhat on Trump in the popular vote as those late ballots come trickling in, down from 3.5% last week to around 2.2%. But that trickle isn’t anything like the Blue Shift that swept Joe Biden into the White House four years ago. All those missing Dem voters appear to have cost them both chambers of Congress as well, with 270toWin now projecting the GOP to take at least 219 seats in the House of Representatives.

Are Those Voters Coming Back?

This is where we have to leave the world of hard journalism somewhat and put on our thinking caps. Looking at those numbers above, you could say that 10 million Biden voters stayed home last week, while Trump’s base held firm, but that’s not entirely true; some disaffected Dems voted for third-party candidates, especially in the Blue Wall states with larger Arab-American populations.

Maybe it’s as simple as putting a man of European ancestry at the top of the ticket. Harris had a much stronger campaign than Hillary Clinton did in 2016, but it just didn’t matter to a lot of Americans. You’ll never be able to get accurate polling of how many voters weren’t prepared to elect a woman, especially a Black woman, but those numbers you see up above tell us plenty.

It’s also why Newsom and Shapiro are your co-favorites to lead the Dem ticket in 2028, and not Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (+1200). But would any of these candidates have performed substantially better than Harris in 2024? Maybe not, given the larger trend across the free world that has seen one incumbency after another get punted out of office by an increasingly impatient and angry electorate.

Bet accordingly for 2028.

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