How to Bet on Politics

Sports may dominate the betting markets, but as elections can’t be wholly determined by voters or bettors, politics betting is quite popular. Of course, as you’d be more accustomed to betting on handicaps, forecasts, or goalscorers rather than election winners, knowing how to bet on politics isn’t always as straightforward.

Luckily, understanding the markets, odds, and different ‘competitions’ is easy thanks to the sports betting formula, which enables you to back handicaps, brackets, and winners with political bets. To help you get to grips with this, we’ve created this politics betting guide.

Politics Betting Overview

Political bets have been around for a long time. They started, as you’d guess, as outright odds on major elections, such as those for prime ministers and presidents. As the markets gained interest, oddsmakers expanded their offerings.

Nowadays you can bet on more minor and local political elections, back over/under markets for the number of votes or percentage of total votes gained, and even place forecast bets, like in horse racing. Props have also become commonplace in political betting.

In the UK for example, while Boris Johnson was being hit by a scandal almost weekly in 2022, people around the world would bet on who would replace him before the end of the year. In this case, Liz Truss landed the win to upset the earlier odds, but it obviously proved to be the wrong choice and only lasted 50 days.

It’s storylines like this that have generated so much interest in political betting. People are better informed about political news than ever because the internet and social media have made it so accessible. Equally, due to how the algorithms on key platforms work, news outlets thrive on inflammatory headlines, while social media groups help to fan the flames and place people into echo chambers.

Politics Betting Markets

There are many ways to bet on politics, and those who are familiar with a few different forms of sports betting definitely have an edge. So, if you’re looking into how to bet on elections, having also bet on sports at home, this should be fairly easy to grasp.

Ante-Post Bets

Ante-post bets are popular in horse racing and involve taking odds long before the bookies at the track open their betting stalls, which then move the odds reflective of where the money’s being placed. The aim is to get odds that you perceive to be better than they’ll be once those with on-the-day information can adjust accordingly.

In political betting, you can place an ante-post bet before election day. As more votes come in and get confirmed, the odds on each political candidate will swing according to the new information, so ante-post bets can provide better odds.

Candidates Per Party

Even before the major public elections start to take centre stage, you can bet on which candidates will get to run in each party. This is of course, where US politics betting draws plenty of attention from bettors around the world.

As the nation is essentially divided into Democrats and Conservatives, the winners of each party vote will then enter into a showdown for the country. It makes these prelims popular in the final rounds. Long before the final few though, you can sometimes find odds on who will be among the final candidates for each party.

Over/Under Votes Percentage

This aspect of political betting can discourage some who want to know how to bet on elections. The idea here isn’t to back an outright winner of the election in question, but rather bet on the party or person to get over or under a set percentage of the overall vote.

As an example, in the 2020 Irish General Election, the over/under odds for Sinn Féin could have teetered at around 25 percent. So, you’d get 10/11 odds on the party getting over 25 percent of the votes and 10/11 odds on them getting under 25 per cent of the votes. Sinn Féin did get the most votes, but the percentage was 24.5, so the under betting odds would have won in this example.

Party Majority

To make this part of the political betting guide as clear-cut as possible, party majority betting is the equivalent of outright betting in any sports competition. The aim is to bet on the party that will win the upcoming election. We’re often more accustomed to having a figurehead to back, like Joe Biden in US presidential markets, but in the end, it’s the party that wins the government rather than the leader of said party.

Popular Elections to Bet on

You can bet on elections taking place all around the world, but here at LeoVegas, we’d assume that if you’re looking into how to bet on politics, you want to bet on the biggest ones. These would be elections in NATO, the EU, the UK, US, and, of course, Ireland. In this part of the political betting guide, you can find out what you can bet on in each type of election.

US Elections

US elections regularly make headlines in just about any English-speaking nation and beyond. As politics has become increasingly heated in America, it draws in big crowds from all over the world, particularly due to the contrast between globalist Barack Obama and eccentric billionaire Donald Trump.

There’s a whole host of political bets to place when it comes to US elections. You can back who will become the next president, who’ll be put forward as the candidate for each party, which parties will dominate Congress and the Senate, who’ll be nominated as the vice president, and which party will get the most votes overall.

The next big vote is the 2024 US Presidential Election, which is set to take place on 5 November 2024. In the meantime, you can bet on who will become the Democratic and Republican candidates for the big election.

UK Elections

British politics betting has become as inflamed as US betting since the infamous Brexit vote. Still, for anyone who knows how to bet on politics, the increased popularity has created more betting markets. The next general election is scheduled for the 28th of January 2025, but the election betting markets are already open.

You can bet on which party will get the most seats in the general election, the winning government – which ranges from party majorities to potential coalitions – the name of the next prime minister, and even the year of the next general election.

Irish Elections

In Ireland, there’s plenty of interest in election betting, especially because the parties were neck to neck in the last general election. When it comes to Irish political betting, you can start with the local elections before building up to the all-important general election results, the eventual president.

Next up in betting on Irish politics are the local elections, which should take place in June 2024. This will be the precursor to the general elections that are scheduled for March 2025. In the meantime, you can also bet on the next leader of major parties, the parties that’ll land the most seats, and if there’ll be an Irish unification referendum.

NATO Elections

After having played a role in the background for years, NATO has been brought into sharp focus and is regularly hitting the headlines. As a result, we’ve seen plenty of punters looking into how to bet on elections within NATO. Being a multinational effort, there can be many elements in play for the role of secretary-general.

Following his appointment in 2014, the mandate of secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg was extended three times. On the day of writing, it just so happens that Stoltenberg was asked to extend his tenure for another year. So, if the situation in Ukraine gets resolved within the next year or so, the next NATO election could be at the start of October 2024.

European Union Elections

Bets on the European Union elections include a wide range of elections. There’s both the votes within and around the collective continental group, as well as the individual elections that take place within the nations of the EU. After Brexit, there are even markets on the next country to leave the EU – with none to leave in the next two years standing as the regular heavy favourite for obvious reasons.

The next European Parliament elections are scheduled for the 6th of June 2024, but prior to that, a few EU nations have their general elections booked in. The Spanish general election occurred on the 23rd of July 2023, for example. Other major nations like Germany, France, and Italy have their elections set for a year or two after 2024.

How to Prepare Your Political Bets

As with all forms of betting, anyone working out how to bet on politics should always start with research. If you don’t know all of the angles and official sentiments in play, you’re at a disadvantage in any form of political betting. To help with this, here are the angles that you should approach the political landscape from in order to make informed political bets.

Research the Local Environment

Whether it’s local, general or national elections, everything comes down to each locality’s sentiments towards the candidates. For local elections, it’s a bit easier to read the room. People will generally feel like the current local member of parliament has either done a bad job or a middling-to-good job. If people in the area quite loudly discuss issues such as housing, crime, poor services, and the like, then change may be around the corner.

However, there can be exceptions to this rule, particularly in famously hardened localities. As often in general elections, certain places are a stronghold for particular parties. In the UK, constituencies in Northern England and the Midlands have historically sided with Labour, creating the so-called ‘Red Wall.’ In the US, the likes of Mississippi and Wyoming present themselves as hardened conservatives.

As noted above however, if the locals feel that the area has fallen into disrepair or gone downhill during the mandate of a national party or locally elected representative, a change can be on the cards. When these tensions begin to bubble up, if they can be spotted early, you can get seemingly favourable odds when you bet on politics. Odds are generally created through quantitative data, which can sometimes miss important qualitative information.

If you don’t live in the local area that you want to bet on or draw information from, you can turn to social media and local press outlets. Now, in the current era of online information and opinion sharing, it’s important not to get overly enthusiastic by a few loud and inflammatory commentators. It makes more sense to measure up the issues brought up with evidence against the number of people acknowledging them and the reactions they triggered.

Research the Candidates

Politics has become a much more personalised forum nowadays, thanks to social media and increased news reporting. You don’t just vote for a party anymore, and more often than not, reports on the people involved affect voting decisions. In spectacular contrast to other US presidents, Donald Trump is demonised constantly with regard to his character, personal history, and finances, but millions of voters connect to his personality and unique speaking style.

How candidates are presented in the news, both locally and nationally, can affect the votes considerably. In the 2020 presidential election for instance, Biden benefitted massively from the overwhelming support from most mainstream media outlets. In the UK, a photo of narrow poll leader Ed Miliband eating a bacon sandwich was published across tabloids to crush his election chances and the hopes of the Labour Party in 2014.

This is the angle of public perception, which can be tricky to gauge, especially if you don’t analyse all of the various groups on social media platforms to attempt to assess the sentiment on a larger scale. Polls on the other hand, can be a bit more revealing. There is a certain subgroup of people who are more inclined to partake in polls and political questionnaires, which may not represent the locality or country properly.

More often than not though, such websites tend to obtain a substantial sample size to offer a fairly good reflection of the perception of, for example, political leaders or parties in general. Outlets to avoid would be the think tanks. Organisations labelled as think tanks tend to be politically funded and politically driven, regularly holding back key information, while focussing on releasing reports that serve their political alignments.

Finally, especially for more local elections, looking into the political background, ascension, and social media presence of candidates can be key. Others will investigate this to determine if they’re locals, if they come from a background that’s the opposite of the general population of the local area, and if they’re approachable. Social media have essentially made anyone on it approachable, so check out some of their posts, responses, and how others have reacted to their posts.

Follow the News

It’s recommended to consult neutral news outlets that will report the straight facts on political matters without the intervention of opinion or commentators. This provides a solid basis to start checking the more popular news outlets to analyse how they’re delivering the information to their viewers. This approach allows you to determine how large audiences will be getting pulled in either direction regardless of the news.

News outlets are very powerful, but perhaps more powerful are popular people with lots of followers on social media who can condense the news and provoke emotional responses. If you want to know how to bet on politics well, it’s a good idea to find out how these modern news services are swaying their audiences. You only have to look as far as the CNN-Biden symbiosis that spurred his victory.

How to Bet on Politics at LeoVegas

Political betting at LeoVegas couldn’t be easier as it’s only a matter of finding your markets from the Sports page. Follow these simple steps:

1. Sign up to LeoVegas or deposit the amount that you want to place on political bets;
2. Select the Sports page from the top toolbar;
3. Open the Search function using the little magnifying glass;
4. Type in ‘Politics’ or the specific political bets that you want to place;
5. Click on your odds, add your stake to the bet slip, and then press the button to bet on politics.

Now that you know how to bet on elections and politics in general, you can start analysing public sentiment and try to back the candidates and parties that you think will win the upcoming votes.