Election Promises, Manifesto and Giant Rosettes: A Guide to Political Betting

Politics is always an interesting area to place bets, and while most people tend to cast hypothetical outcomes for political candidates, others like to place their money where their mouth is, which is good news for certain sportsbooks.

It’s literally possible to bet on anything, and back in 2013 many were casting their wagers on the name of the Royal baby, and you can get some crazy left-field bets, like which member of One Direction will leave first.

Political betting is no different, and some analysts even believe that people’s bets can predict the outcome of political events.

With a wide range of sportbooks getting ready to take your political bets, let’s take a look at the best way to wager on the elections.

Political betting: How to bet

In order to make a bet, it’s important to find a site that allows for political wagering. Fortunately, there are plenty of online sportsbooks in the UK and abroad that tend to offer real money politics bets.

Wagering on a political candidate or party functions in the same manner as a betting on a football match or any other sports event.

In the time running up to the election result, there will be a list of political figures and the corresponding odds listed alongside them that represent the possible outcome of that candidate winning.

Closer to the final line though, there will be less and less options due to the decrease in the contenders.

This may also mean that your sportsbook might change the wager into a moneyline bet, where you can either bet on a favorite with a lesser payout, or a bet on the less popular character.

If you want to find an alternative to a sportsbook, then check out some of the betting exchanges. Here you’ll be betting against other gamblers and not the bookmaker.

The prices and odds at a betting exchange will depend on the current betting market.

What you need for a political wager

Best sportsbooks for political betting:

• Bet365 is one of the biggest online sportsbooks in the UK, and while it offers a number of sporting events, you also have the chance to bet on politics.

• BetVictor covers most sports, and also offers you the chance to undertake some political betting too.

• Betfair is a betting exchange that is highly popular with gamblers that prefer to play against others rather than the bookmaker. You can also undertake political betting here.

Pretty much everyone discusses politics and has some kind of opinion, but once money is involved, a lot more certainty comes into the mix.

Betting functions very differently to debating and proving yourself right, since numbers and outcomes are what speak the loudest.

To be able to win at political betting comes from study and observation. You need to be able to read the public, know what the big names of today are, and accurately predict how the candidates will react to major decisions.

Whether you prefer one candidate over another is not the point in political betting, since you need to take a cold and distant approach in determining who will actually win.

It’s also better to cast aside your opinions on major decisions, like health care and immigration bills. You need to predict how people will vote and which party will win.

So the key to political betting is distance, evidence and watching how the public responds to said candidate. Also, there may also be some fluke cases, like a candidate withdraws and such.

How you can win at politics

Unlike a match, where a lot can happen, you can analyze the political outcome of an election to a certain degree, although there is always the chance for the unexpected to happen.

But in order to stand a chance of winning a political bet, it’s important to cast your personal opinions aside. You might be rooting for one guy, but he may have little chance of winning and betting on him because you have a bias won’t help you win.

You also need to sift through the bias for a candidate by other people as well. Some might be noisy about their political bias, but that might not mean that candidate or party will win.

It’s hard to avoid any bias, even in the media, so you need to approach it pragmatically and observe which candidate is more likely, based on the evidence.

However, you can use the mainstream media to your advantage. The news is a fully functioning propaganda machine that’s watched by everyone, so you’ll get a better idea what the average voter is seeing and how they’re likely to vote.

Another good source for information and the workings of the politics of your country are political blogs. You can learn a lot from posts and comments.

It’s also worth scouring out the polls and public opinion trends. The data from the polling information will not only give a hint into the possible winner, but you can also get a feel on how the political candidates will react to events.

In fact, many political candidates tend to base their campaigning decisions on the outcome of the polls, but again, do watch out for bias.

To make sense of the polls, read up on the statistics and how the polling data and studies can be used to and manipulated to show certain results. Take care with news recaps, since those can also be engineered to show an altered result.

The important piece of advice to take home is that when it comes to politics – bias exists everywhere and you need to question every piece of news, each opinion and every statistic.

Be doubly sure to be skeptical of information that supports your personal opinion. Sometimes the outcome we get in life is not what we want to happen, so if you’re serious about winning, then take a step back, analyze and then place your bets!