It’s been a little over two weeks since U.S. House Leader Nancy Pelosi started an impeachment inquiry against the President of the United States, Donald Trump. While news seemed bad enough for Trump at that time, a whole lot more has happened since, and it seems like as good a time as any to take another look at his odds, care of PredictIt.
For a quick reminder on how PredictIt works, it’s a little different than other gambling sites. The political focused odds site allows punters to buy shares of a line, priced anywhere between $0.01 and $1.00, and continue to buy or sell shares of that line until the event happens. In the case of a Trump Impeachment, should Trump be impeached today, anyone holding the “Yes” line would get paid out at its current price. If Trump’s first term should end without an impeachment, “No” gets paid out.
When news of the impeachment inquiry was fresh, after lots of moment on September 24 and 25, the odds of an impeachment vote passing settled at $0.49. If you bought a yes vote at the time, you could possibly cash out now and make a lot of money, as the release of the official whistleblower complaint and Kurt Volker’s resignation drove the price up to $0.72 on September 28. It has since settled into a range between $0.68 and $0.73, currently sitting at $0.71.
Following roughly the same timeline, the odds that Trump would complete this first term have plummeted. Going back to the halcyon days of September 17, his odds of making it all the way to January 20, 2021 were at $0.85. They hit their all-time low on September 27, hitting $0.66. They bounced back a bit and recovered to $0.74, but on the latest news, that Rudy Guiliani’s Ukrainian associates had been arrested, those odds are back down to $0.68.
A Trump conviction by the Senate seems almost impossible to think of, but the best bet might be by making Guiliani face the bright lights at an Impeachment inquiry. So if you want to bet on charges being brought against Guiliani, you’re about a day too late. When the line was first offered, you could bet on charges at $0.36 a share. That price has now rocketed up to $0.46, just two cents below its all-time high when the associates’ arrests were first announced.
If you’re looking for PredictIt betting advice on Impeachment, the takeaways are pretty simple. It would take unimaginably bad news for the Senate to agree to convict Trump or pressure him to resign, so betting on him finishing the term seems smart. But just as you think the news couldn’t possibly get worse, something new happens to make Trump’s term even crazier, so keep betting hard on whatever the worst case scenario is.
