Could Trump become President before 2025?

Matthew Shaddick

4 February 2022

In the world of political betting markets, you occasionally come across markets where the prices seem hard to explain. Here is a good example.

Smarkets prices 4 February 2022

 

Will Donald J Trump become US President again before 2025? First off, this has nothing to do with whether he wins the 2024 election, for which he is currently the favourite with around a 23% chance. As our rules make clear this wouldn't count because, even if he won, he wouldn't be inaugurated until January 2025 assuming the standard timetable doesn't change in the meantime.

So how come the current prices give him above a 10% chance of returning to the White House before that? In fact, how come some people have bet him at odds of up to 20% to do so? I can only come up with one scenario that the constitution would allow:

  • Trump runs for a congressional seats in the Midterms and wins. There's nothing to stop this happening, and it has been mooted as a possibility. He would presumably find it very easy to get elected to the House if he wanted to by entering a primary in a safe Republican seat, maybe in Florida somewhere. Still, there is no particular indication that he is actually preparing to do this.
  • Next, he gets himself elected as Speaker of the House. The GOP are currently strong favourites to win a majority at around an 85% probability. It's hard to say how easy this part would be, but I dare say it's quite plausible if he got as far as becoming a Congressman.
  • Once he becomes Speaker, he is now officially second in the line of succession to the presidency behind the Vice President, based on the Presidential Succession Act of 1947. Now, all that needs to happen is that Biden and Harris both step down or become unavailable at more or less the same time. Or maybe Biden appoints him as VP and then steps aside. To put it mildly, this part of the plan is quite implausible, albeit not impossible.

I don't suppose the people betting YES in this market are relying on the constitutional route above. Perhaps they are expecting some kind of QAnon-themed military coup which would install Trump in the White House? Either way, odds of around 1/10 for NO seem like incredible value if it weren't for the fact that it won't be paying out for around three years. 

 


Matthew Shaddick

4 February 2022

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