What is the most popular betting event in the world?
It’s not the Fifa World Cup or American Football’s Superbowl. It is the US elections where former president Donald Trump squares up with US deputy president Kamala Harris on Tuesday in the race for the Oval Office.
Now Sun International is allowing South African punters to get in on the action through its betting platform SunBet. The company has already taken thousands of bets on who will win the US elections, just a day after it opened wagers on who comes out tops.
SunBet COO Gideon Mann told TimesLIVE Premium that since they put the banners on their site on Thursday informing people of the betting options, the number of bets on the US elections has surged to thousands.
Top opinion poll aggregators and analysts are calling the race a virtual coin toss, with Trump projected to attain 51% compared with Harris’ 49%. The US election is decided through an electoral college system, where a candidate’s win depends on victories in individual states rather than a straightforward popular vote.
The outcome rests on seven critical “swing” states where both candidates have a chance of winning, and with Trump and Harris polling within razor-thin margins in these states, a single percent could tip each of the seven states in one candidate’s favour. SunBet is allowing bets on everything, from the overall winner to state and congressional races.
Traditionally our female customers preferred playing slots-styled games to betting — but the US election is creating non-typical interest with this audience.
— Gideon Mann, SunBet COO
“In the election betting, SunBet is seeing the typical betting patterns — over 80% of bets are on who is going to win. SunBet is offering 65 different types of bets, from the winner of swing states to the senate to popular vote winner and more, with a total of 309 individual bet choices,” Mann said.
Bets on Trump have increased greatly, bringing him near level and on a trajectory to surpass bets on Harris. Mann said this was a markedly different pattern to earlier trends when Harris had more bets.
He said SunBet punters are normally more than 90% male, but when it comes to betting on US elections, so far 57% of the wagers are female customers.
“Traditionally our female customers preferred playing slots-styled games to betting — but the US election is creating non-typical interest with this audience.”
Mann said that given the uptake, SunBet would consider giving South Africans the chance to place bets on events closer to the home front such as municipal elections in 2026, but events where setting and managing odds is harder are less likely to be covered by the platform.
The tight US election will attract sizeable attention from the global community as its outcome will have implications for the country’s foreign policy and whether it will be underpinned by outgoing President Joe Biden’s attempts at restoring US influence on the global stage or Trump’s inward-looking “America first” philosophy.
Speaking to Centre for Development and Enterprise, former US ambassador to South Africa Patrick Gaspard, now CEO of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, a public policy think-tank, said Trump’s first presidency, which started with a “declaration of a Muslim ban” and ended with a riot in and around the Capitol, held clues of what his return to the White House would mean for the US and the world.
“We’re in a moment where it’s abundantly clear, based on his own rhetoric, that Donald Trump not only intends to not surround himself with senior members of the Republican Party who would put some stops, some brakes and some guardrails around his worst abuses.
“He has actually said that he would weaponise the department of justice, the FBI, the National Guard to go after people who he has deemed enemies of the state.” These include his political opponents, according to his own rhetoric.
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