How Donald Trump Odds Shifted After Assassination Attempt & JD Vance VP Pick

2024 election odds have taken another wild swing over the past week following the assassination attempt on Donald Trump and his pick of Ohio Senator JD Vance for Vice President. Trump is now an even bigger favorite across legal betting exchanges in the United States and Canadian sportsbooks.

As the Republican National Convention continues in Milwaukee, the race for the Presidency has seen multiple twists and turns. From the shooting to the seemingly paused Democratic attempts to get Joe Biden off the ticket, things have changed dramatically in only days.

Joe Biden and Donald Trump Odds

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Donald Trump Assassination Attempt

At a Saturday rally in Butler, PA, Donald Trump was shot by a bullet that grazed his ear. He’s going to give a convention speech on Thursday, one of the big setpiece events of the campaign, in the backdrop of the shooting.

There’s been no post-shooting polling yet, so the impact on 2024 Presidential election odds is mostly speculative. That said, Trump has claimed he has re-written his convention speech in an effort to unify the country. If that holds, Trump could see a bigger political benefit.

There are also some lessons we can take from past shootings. 

Historical Shooting Impacts

The Reagan shooting is the closest thing to a comparable event in the modern era, but even that has some striking differences. Reagan got an 8-point boost in approval rating from 60% to 68% at its peak. That bump disappeared within 3 months, returning his approval rating back to 59% before long.

The other differences are key to explaining why it’s unlikely Trump even gets close to that level of bump.

Reagan was shot less than three months into his first term, at a time when he hadn’t done anything. Reagan was still in his honeymoon period and hadn’t angered any meaningful number of people by that point. It was also a time of much lower polarization. Now, Trump is an established brand, a much-hated politician by Democrats who tried to overturn the 2020 election, and opinions are hardened.

Being glad he’s still alive doesn’t mean a pro-choice woman denied rights by the Trump-appointed Supreme Court will end up voting for him.

Will The Shooting Help Trump?

The notion that the shooting won Trump the election is as much copium as when Democrats said the Access Hollywood tape won them the 2016 election. The history of the Trump era is that singular events that should have ended campaigns don’t anymore. If the normal, historical rules about what matters in a campaign held true, Donald Trump wouldn’t have gotten past attacking John McCain for getting captured as a prisoner of war. The rules don’t apply, and that’s a key point to remember for Joe Biden and Donald Trump odds.

It’s also not the first time we’ve seen Trump survive a near-death experience in his political career. We’ve all forgotten it, but he was nearly put on a ventilator in 2020 when COVID tanked his blood-oxygen levels, and there was no meaningful evidence of a polling bump then either.

He did beat his polls in the end, but there’s no evidence his COVID fight had anything to do with it.

Joe Biden

The biggest impact of the Trump shooting has been to take the wind out of the sails of the anti-Biden palace coup. A senior House Democrat told Axios that they were “resigned to a second Trump presidency,” a quote instructive of both the level of patheticness and the view of reality.

Unless the reaction to Biden’s Monday Night primetime Lester Holt interview is particularly bad, Democrats are seemingly willing to let Joe stay. And if that’s the case, then Trump’s odds to win go up.

Joe Biden doesn’t seem able to run a campaign good enough to win.

That’s not a guarantee he’ll lose – polarization is at modern highs, and Donald Trump is enough of a reason for Democrats to rally behind the nominee. There were plenty of overwrought takes about how Trump had lost in 2016 at various moments before he won unexpectedly.

Things don’t look great for Biden, though Trump threw him a bone with his VP selection.

JD Vance For Vice President

With the selection of JD Vance as his running mate, Donald Trump has made the single most useless pick he could have.

Vance is a strident, unrepentant choice from a safe red state that doesn’t reassure any group of voters who don’t already vote for Trump. For months, Trump and his allies leaked that his VP selection would help with voters Trump lost in 2020 — namely suburban, educated whites.

Let’s put aside the fact that Vance once said that Trump could be “America’s Hitler.” Let’s also ignore that Vance is an election denier who said, had he been in the Senate on January 6th, he’d have delayed Biden’s certification by making Congress debate more than one set of electors. And let’s even ignore that he once called the need for rape and incest exemptions to abortion law “inconvenient.” Vance brings absolutely nothing to this ticket. Trump very obviously believes he has already won this election and that he doesn’t need to use this pick as a way of helping bring more support in. This is a retrenchment pick.

It’s a stark contrast to his 2016 strategy of picking an evangelical to reassure those voters. It’s much more like Hillary Clinton’s decision to pick Tim Kaine in that the upside is low. There have been comparisons to Sarah Palin, because of their youth and relative inexperience, but Palin at least could have helped McCain pick up disaffected female Hillary voters who didn’t like Obama.

2024 Election Outlook

The price of Donald Trump odds in the exchanges is a reasonable one. Biden has a strong economy on his side and little else, but he remains a normal polling error away from (narrow) victory in the electoral college. That said, it’s likely Trump’s price will only climb higher. As we get post-shooting and post-convention polling, Trump’s lead will likely grow.

If his price gets closer to 80 cents (-400), that’s when I’ll consider betting on Democrats.

I don’t think a Democrat will win the White House this fall, but 2016 proves that even bad campaigns can win when both sides are hated.

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