Latest Trump Odds: Tariffs, Stormy Daniels, 2020 Election & more!

• The odds on Trump’s re-election in 2020 are upside-down.
• Democrats are favored to win the White House.
• Get the latest odds on this week’s biggest political news.

We haven’t updated the Presidential Odds Tracker 45 for a while, so it’s time to take part in that time-honored SportsBettingDime tradition, going all the way back to 1789.

Odds Trump Wins the 2020 Presidential Election

Reminder that 70% of Presidents win reelection, and not by accident. The incumbent has a whole host of advantages at his or her disposal during the campaign, and the GOP is very good at using all the tools at its disposal to maintain power.

Of course, Donald Trump’s popularity isn’t tracking well, he’s currently the least popular president since we started keeping track of these things during the Truman administration. We haven’t seen a one-term president since Bush Sr, and his campaign coincided with a deep recession.

Odds on the GOP’s 2020 Nominee

Donald Trump is still very much the guy, despite what some congressional Republicans will try and tell you, so the only prospect here for Mike Pence is death or resignation, either of which should fetch far more than a measly +500. At -150, there’s value in Donald Trump, but it means tying up your bankroll for a long time for two and a half years. The sportsbook is figuring that they can get a better return in that time than they’ll have to pay out, and that some of that will be subsidised by rubes taking Ben Shapiro at +1000 and Steve Bannon at +3300. Finding a 60% return in three years is a tall order, but evidently they’ve got a great financial manager.

We’ve covered this in detail before, but suffice it to say that Donald Trump should be the overwhelming favorite.

Betting Tip: If you’re okay tying up your bankroll for this long, and you really shouldn’t be, Donald Trump is the value name on this list.

Odds on the Winning Party of the 2020 Presidential Election

Right away, you can throw out the Libertarian and Green parties. If there was any year that a third party would contend, it was 2016, the year with the two least popular presidential candidates in history.

Don’t know why the Democrats are the favorites, they threw everything they had at the 2016 election and lost, and haven’t showed significant signs of changing. The party  is still sticking with the strategy of donor-friendly policy, appeals to Donald Trump’s personal failings, and TV dominated ad spending that got them nowhere in 2016. Meanwhile, Donald Trump has named his 2016 digital director Brad Parscale as his 2020 campaign manager, indicating a redoubled focus on micro-targeted digital advertising that’s both more engaging and affordable than TV. He’s also balancing his commitment to his base with donor-friendly policies, the tax bill being chief among them, that appeal to the affluent base of voters that buoyed him to victory in 2016.

It is more difficult to unseat a sitting president than it is to install a new one at the end of an eight year cycle. The latter is a challenge the Democrats failed to measure up to in 2016, and the former is the reality of 2020.

Betting Tip: Perhaps somewhat counter intuitively, the Republicans should be the favorite. Controlling the White House is a huge advantage during a campaign.

Steel/Aluminum Tariff Odds

Donald Trump ran on a campaign of economic protectionism, and he’s decided that now is the time to start a trade war. He’s threatened to place a 25% tariff on steel and aluminum, both of which are mostly manufactured in China, in an attempt to balance the trade deficit the US has run since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system.

It’s not worth talking about whether tariffs will help the US recover a booming steel industry, in the same way that it’s not really worth talking about if a wall will keep people out, but it is worth wondering if he’ll actually do it or not. Unlike some of the ideas he’s floated recently, like arming teachers or standing up to the NRA, this one actually coherently engages with his campaign promises and the broadest strokes of what you could call his ideology.

What are the obstacles? Well, Trump is facing rare opposition from congressional Republicans, Paul Ryan took a pretty hard line there for a minute, and general fallout from the corporate wing/lifting body of the GOP. National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn, who was so instrumental to the tax bill served as the top White House economic policy advisor, resigned after the tariff decision. That could either indicate a falling-out between Trump and Wall Street, Gary Cohn being a Goldman Sachs alum and reassuring presence for Republicans scared of Trump’s more populist and erratic rhetoric.

There’s hints that this whole shebang could be a bargaining chip for the NAFTA negotiations, and by “hints” I mean Trump has offered to lift the tariffs if a “fair deal” is signed. This would perhaps indicate that it’s more a threat than a policy commitment, and not likely to either become law or last long if it does.

A quick refresher: a woman named Stormy Daniels has filed suit against Donald Trump over a non-disclosure agreement that you may have heard about. In that suit, Daniels states that she was wired $130,000 and expected to remain silent about a relationship she had with then-candidate Trump. The suit itself is actually pretty tepid, Daniels is only seeking judgement declaring that she isn’t bound to the duties of the agreement Trump didn’t sign. Having that would allow her to tell her story in full and as she sees fit, and she could even release a book about it all! Fun read.

A great detail from this whole saga: Donald Trump’s attorney, one Michael Cohen, paid the $130,000 out of his own pocket, and has not yet been reimbursed by his client. Stormy Daniels first broke the NDA (which hadn’t been signed) when she heard that Cohen was complaining at bars that the President still owed him money and he was likely never going to see it.

But the plot thickens! Last week, Trump’s lawyers obtained a restraining order to restrict Daniel’s from disclosing the information that was covered by the NDA. That would explain Daniels’ suit, as it is primarily focused on exempting her from the arbitration process.