Republican Nominee Odds After Midterm Elections: Prediction Markets for Politics

In the Republican Party’s worst-case scenario, the outcome of the midterm elections could not have been a bigger disaster than it was in reality. The GOP will look to pick up the pieces now as many speculate on Republican Presidential Nominee odds after the midterm elections have concluded.

Losing control of the House of Representatives was expected, even with the rampant gerrymandering to try and prevent the predictable.

Losing the Senate was viewed as possible and even likely as Election Day grew closer, but the GOP was certainly not expecting to lose red Texas, or the glowing red Kansas and South Carolina. Two other Senate seats in states that are invariably viewed as safely in the GOP column, Alaska and Mississippi, are in jeopardy of falling into Democrat hands.

Republicans also lost governorships in Ohio and South Carolina.

In short, it was a dystopian nightmare come to life. But that’s where they are, and Republicans have no one to blame but themselves.

Still, since politics is often a short-term endeavor, there is every chance that two years of the Democrats battling a cornered President Trump could lend itself to familiar Democrat overreach. It’s certainly plausible the Democrats take a full-bore dive into Democratic Socialism, or other dramatic reversals of Trump policies that go so far that it reminds the electorate why they preferred Trump to Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris in the first place.

Prediction markets are already offering options on the 2028 Republican nominee for president. There’s no shortage of candidates, and making the right pick, especially this early in the process, can yield a substantial return on investment.

Republican Presidential Nominee Odds After Midterms

Even with the 2028 presidential election two years away, trading volume for this market is beyond $78 million.

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The three names with the highest market probability as the dust clears from the blue tsunami in the midterms are: Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and outgoing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Vance is at 30%; Rubio at 23%; and DeSantis at 18% in the prediction markets.

Below them in the 2-4% range are Nikki Haley, Joe Kent, Tucker Carlson, Brian Kemp, Glenn Youngkin, Thomas Massie, Trump himself, and Ted Cruz.

Read on for a further breakdown of the Republican presidential nominee odds for 2028.

JD Vance

At the moment, it’s probably better for Vance not to advertise that he’s Trump’s VP. While he has calculatedly sought to distance himself from unpopular policies—particularly the war in Iran—he is attached to Trump no matter what he says and does.

His thin credentials, having been a Senator for only two years before leaving to be Trump’s VP, will be highlighted by his intraparty rivals who want the nomination themselves or sidelined Republicans who want to be done with the MAGA movement once and for all.

Still, there are many attributes that would make Vance an appealing candidate. He’s 42, a stark departure from the last two presidents, Trump and Joe Biden, who were a combined 156 years old when they were sworn in.

To appeal to Trump and get the VP nod, he needed to backtrack on his criticisms of Trump and apologize (grovel); he backed off his fealty to corporate economics and global forays in favor of “America first”; and he dove into hardline immigration reform. These are problems for him.

The big appendage he’ll need to excise is his support of Trump’s tariffs, which increased prices for staples like fuel, severely damaged the agriculture business, and led to the stunning losses in Kansas, his home state of Ohio, and Iowa.

Worse for him is that the Trump union was one of convenience to shore up Trump’s standing in the then-battleground state of Ohio and to try and win its neighboring states, Pennsylvania and Michigan, which, in 2024, he did. The general perception is that Trump seems to prefer Marco Rubio as his successor.

Vance wants the gig, but the midterm washout and his proximity to Trump will be BIG obstacles to overcome to reach his aspirations.

Marco Rubio

Rubio has taken on the dual role of Secretary of State and National Security Advisor in Trump’s second term. The former Florida senator is well-liked by the rank and file partially due to his competence and because he was unafraid to take on Trump when he ran for president against Trump and his former mentor Jeb Bush in 2016.

The question for Rubio is whether he has been sufficiently distant from the daily turmoil in the White House so he can eschew blame for the more controversial policies. He has executed Trump’s orders and deftly handled the crises overseas as best he could and done so with a calm and well-spoken demeanor. Rubio simply sounds like he knows what he’s talking about.

He’ll be 57 for the 2028 General Election and could have Trump’s imprimatur over Vance, with whom Trump has a transactional relationship. The president seems to like and respect Rubio for his intelligence and political skill. While Trump’s approval could be as much a negative as it would be a positive, it does not hurt that Rubio is a Latino and a Roman Catholic, demographics in which Trump hemorrhaged support, leading to the midterm wipeout.

His problem in that vein is whether the GOP will ignore (at their own risk) the preferences of the lame duck president whom they see as the architect of this electoral catastrophe.

He has not yet stated his clear intention to run again in 2028 and might sit it out until 2032 when the environment will likely be friendlier for the GOP.

Ron DeSantis

DeSantis is probably in the best position of all the top contenders to rise from the GOP wreckage.

He is not in Trump’s orbit, having had the audacity to challenge Trump for the 2024 nomination before he was engulfed and returned to Florida, receding from the national landscape. Smartly, he ducked his head and focused on running Florida.

Trump does not seem to be a big fan of DeSantis, dubbing him “Ron DeSanctimonious,” an unusually complex and clever pejorative nickname for Trump. But in a strange twist, that has turned out to be a boost to DeSantis’s political hopes. He’s been able to serve as the Sunshine State’s governor free of the Trump sludge sticking to him. The two do not seem to have a relationship, even with Trump spending much of his time at his Mar-a-Lago resort.

DeSantis has not been a vocal critic of the president and, since he’s term-limited and is leaving office in January, he can sit out and wait, courting donors, bolstering his candidacy for president, and honing his pitch. He’ll be 50 on Election Day 2028, already has supporters who got behind him in 2024 before Trump won the nomination, has a young, attractive family, and can work on his flaws, such as not being viewed as a people person in the run-up to the primaries. He’s almost assuredly running for president and has a great chance at the nomination.

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