With the election a day away, most polls have Donald Trump and Kamala Harris neck-and-neck, but some prediction markets — legal betting on elections and other current events — have Trump in the lead.
Kalshi, a new platform that was only approved to accept bets on the election last month and has already had users wager more than $100 million on the race, has Trump’s odds of victory at 54%.
“Honestly, I think that [is] about right,” vice presidential candidate JD Vance said on a recent podcast with comedian Theo Von. “You shouldn’t trust polls.”
“It’s actually people putting their money down,” Von said in agreement.
Vance is one of the latest in a string of politicians, pollsters and smart money to embrace election betting as a more accurate and up-to-date read than polling.
Even celebrated pollster and 538 founder Nate Silver has slammed pollsters, saying in a recent interview saying they are “putting [their] f—-ing fingers on the scale” and “I kind of trust pollsters less.”
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Earlier this year, Silver, who has said he plans to vote for Harris and typically votes Democrat, signed on as an advisor to Polymarket, a Kalshi rival that has only been granted a temporary license for election betting.
Silver doing so was a sign that at least some polling experts want to embrace how prediction markets are changing the game — and that the appeal of these platforms isn’t limited to conservatives.
“It’s very easy to say I think this candidate’s going to win … But when you’re actually backing it with real money, you get real time forecasts of what’s going to happen … that information can actually help us understand what’s happening,” Kalshi CEO and co-founder Tarek Mansour told The Post.
In other words, because traders are focused on making a buck, Mansour believes they will want to consider and factor in all the relevant information.
Unlike polling, which gives an outside institution the power to predict, betting markets let the everyman — or woman — put their money where their mouth is. Because people can stand to make money, it pushes them to sift through data and be less partisan.
“People will do more research,” Mansour said. “Nowadays is so polarized. But with increased research and everything, you decrease the polarization greatly.”
The rise of betting markets comes after polling underestimated Trump’s support in both 2016 and 2020, leading voters and political scientists to look for alternative data points to traditional polling.
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Kalshi, which was launched by Mansour and co-founder Luana Lopes Lara in 2018, has been live for events other than elections since 2021.
It correctly predicted major events like the TikTok ban and the decrease in the rise in inflation, but the presidential election is its biggest bet to date.
In 2022, some other betting markets wrongly predicted Dr. Mehmet Oz would beat John Fetterman in the Pennsylvania Senate race with odds that were 62 cents to 38 cents, according to the New York Times.
But unlike other platforms such as Polymarket, Kalshi is only available to US Citizens, a fact that its founders think will make it more reliable in US elections.
Kalshi had to go to court to get regulatory approval and reverse a ban on election betting that had lasted 100 years. Officials worry it could gamify elections or sway votes, and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission could still bring further legal challenges
Mansour isn’t deterred.
“With financial markets, it’s been consistently true that any new type of financial innovation brings scrutiny. It’s always been true,” he said. “That’s been the case for crypto, it’s been the case for credit default swaps, interest rate swaps and they came at the beginning of the millennium.”
He is confident that he will be vindicated.
“Polls are getting less and less accurate,” he said. “These markets … are the best mechanism to get more truth about who’s actually going to win.”
This story is part of NYNext, a new editorial series that highlights New York City innovation across industries, as well as the personalities leading the way.
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