Wall Street’s Trump trade unravels after a shock poll dented his election odds

On Saturday, J. Ann Selzer, an Iowa pollster celebrated for her accuracy, released her final pre-Election Day poll, which showed Vice President Kamala Harris leading former President Donald Trump 47% to 44% in the Hawkeye State. Both campaigns had all but written off Iowa as a surefire Trump victory. No Democrat has won Iowa since Obama in 2012. In 2016 and 2020, Trump won the state decisively by nine points and eight points respectively. 

“It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming,” Selzer told the Des Moines Register, which first published the poll. “She has clearly leaped into a leading position.” 

Selzer’s poll thrust election forecasts into doubt. If Trump could lose a state so widely expected to go Republican, then perhaps it presaged electoral defeat elsewhere, such as in key Midwest battleground states. 

Prediction markets had already been trending away from Trump after his now-infamous Madison Square Garden rally on Oct. 27. Trump Media stock crashed 35% last week, also on the back of dwindling prospects in the election.

But the Selzer poll added more bearishness to the so-called Trump trade on financial markets, which had previously been pricing in a Trump victory. Because Trump plans to institute such an unorthodox economic policy centered around his signature proposal of blanket tariffs, many investors were preparing for what they assumed would be a major upheaval in global markets. Selzer’s poll upended that assumption. 

As a result, markets shifted Monday toward preparing for a Trump loss. The U.S. dollar fell 0.7% on Monday, according to Bloomberg. The Mexican peso, which was expected to be among the hardest hit currencies under Trump’s tariff regime, strengthened 1.4% against the dollar. Meanwhile the euro was up 0.6% against the dollar.  

Stocks in Europe had been trading at lower prices because they expected to be hit hard by Trump’s tariffs. They lagged the broader market through October, according to an analyst note from Barclays published last month. The jump in the euro seems to indicate that at least to some degree those concerns have eased. 

U.S. Treasury yields declined Monday as Trump’s policies were seen as inflationary, likely limiting the Federal Reserve’s ability to lower rates further. 

Crypto markets also reacted to declines in Trump’s electoral chances. The price of Bitcoin dropped 1% on Monday. Trump has repositioned himself as a supporter of cryptocurrency after his earlier skepticism. In July at the Bitcoin Conference in Nashville, Trump said he wanted the U.S. to become the “crypto capital of the planet.” 

Crypto is used as the currency of record on some of the prediction markets that have also reacted in accordance with lower electoral chances for Trump. Betting site Polymarket, which only takes bets in crypto, saw Trump’s election odds drop from a 65% chance of victory on Oct. 27 to 56% by Sunday evening. On Kalshi, another prediction market, Trump was briefly overtaken by Harris as the favorite on Saturday night, a few hours after the poll was released. Trump’s odds on both sites have rebounded slightly but remain below their peak in late October. 

However, one trade that had previously been closely tied to Trump’s electoral chances moved in the opposite direction. Trump Media stock, which had previously moved almost in tandem with the political outlook of the Trump campaign, rose on Monday. The Trump Media and Technology Group owns the conservative social media platform Truth Social and is in the process of building and developing a streaming platform. The stock rose 3% on Monday to $31 a share. Although that was down from the $53 price it had at the start of last week. 

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