“首次预测市场选举”搅乱中期选举

The ‘first prediction-market election’ scrambles the midterms

2026-09-24T09:00:30.405Z / CNN

Dan Rogalski has been obsessed with elections since middle school. He didn’t travel often as a kid, so elections were “a cool way to learn about different places,” he recalled.

He got a college degree in mathematics and now works as a software engineer in Seattle. But he said “there’s money to be made” on prediction markets, where people can bet on everything from sports to entertainment and the weather — and in Rogalski’s case, elections.

“I would see a lot of bad analysis online,” said Rogalski, 24. “So, I thought I could do better than these people.”

Since he started trading, Rogalski has profited $600,000 across platforms and ranked 20th on Kalshi’s leaderboard for election traders as of Thursday. He’s part of the more than $750 million in combined trading volume on 2026 election markets on Kalshi and its top rival, Polymarket, according to a CNN analysis of public data.

All this wagering is scrambling nearly every aspect of the midterms — from campaigns to election officials, voters, donors and traders — according to interviews with 20 people involved in elections and prediction sites. Many have dubbed it the “first prediction-market election.”

Multiple election officials told CNN prediction platforms are fostering a new wave of disinformation and creating risks for possible insider trading within their own offices.

Dean Logan, the top election official for Los Angeles County, said even though election markets are legal, he wishes they would go away. He said his election office, the largest in the nation, dealt with a surge of “destructive” prediction-fueled disinformation after the city’s mayoral primary in June.

His message to prediction companies? “Don’t do this,” he said. “Stay out of this particular field. There are plenty of other areas for you to do what you do. But you don’t really belong here.”

Campaigns say the markets are a new form of “background noise” they need to deal with, giving them a real-time barometer of public sentiment, even if the markets don’t always accurately predict outcomes.

Still, some political operatives acknowledged that they’re closely tracking their odds. One source told CNN they met a candidate who checks the market for their race “nearly every hour.”

CNN has a partnership with Kalshi and uses its data to cover major events. Editorial employees at CNN aren’t allowed to trade on prediction markets.

The prediction companies say their platforms offer a public service by harnessing the “wisdom of the crowd” to surface unbiased insights about election outcomes — which they claim are better than the polls.

“Election prediction markets are well-calibrated,” Kalshi’s head of politics growth Benjamin Freeman told CNN in an interview. “Polls are backwards-looking. They’re expensive to run. They can be biased. Markets are always live. They’re 24/7. They can price-in new information quicker than polls.”

A Polymarket spokesperson said in a statement, “We provide transparent, accurate, real-time information about the events that matter — an antidote to the disinformation poisoning public dialogue. The public has a right to this information, just as it has a right to polling, only ours is more accurate.”

To maximize engagement, and their own profits, Kalshi and Polymarket have created markets for essentially every inch of the 2026 midterms.

The hundreds of available markets range from every House and Senate race to more obscure questions such as whether major endorsements will be announced and even whether the midterms will “happen on time.”

The “who will control Congress” markets on Kalshi and Polymarket have seen a combined $32 million in trading volume, as of this week. But plenty of the closely watched House battlegrounds have less than $100,000 in trading volume.

Niche election markets have been around for decades, and a federal appeals court in 2024 paved the way for Kalshi to offer more widespread trading on the presidential race that year. But prediction markets have never been as ubiquitous as they are today across US culture, and trading volume has soared in the past year.

More than 80% of the prediction business still comes from sports, though the election markets have grown. Trading activity comes from retail traders having fun, newfound day traders and large commercial institutions.

“We don’t do sports. We don’t want to spend our time in that mess,” said Earl Nemser, vice chairman of the Interactive Brokers Group, a brokerage that facilitates prediction trades. “But elections outcomes have major global consequences. It’s important for insurance companies and individuals to hedge exposure.”

Some election officials say the prediction wave is creating fresh headaches at a time when they’re already grappling with new threats from the Trump administration, burnout among poll workers and years of disinformation.

Others like Derek Bowens, the elections director in Durham County, North Carolina, said it’s “something we have to live with,” despite his concerns that prediction sites create “challenges to the confidence of our election system.”

Prediction sites were on the agenda at a professional conference in July, where election officials from across the country swapped strategies for November. At the conference, and in later interviews, officials told CNN they’re nervous that prediction markets could even depress turnout, because voters might not go to the polls if their preferred candidate has horrific odds to win.

“People are looking to betting market as indicators for who will win, and that’s dangerous,” said Barb Byrum, the election clerk for Ingham County, Michigan, which includes Lansing. “This is just people who are trying to make a buck. It’s simply conjecture. The true results come from the voters.”

Kalshi rejects many of these concerns. Freeman said prediction sites could boost turnout by attracting new voters, especially younger voters who like trading. He also said prediction platforms give people and businesses a way to financially “hedge political outcomes” in a fair and open market.

What comes up the most with election officials is their fear that prediction sites will create new avenues for disinformation about mass voter fraud and elections being rigged. And there’s already a poster child for this: The Los Angeles mayoral primary.

For most of the campaign, prediction markets suggested Democratic Mayor Karen Bass would advance to the general election along with Republican Spencer Pratt, the former reality TV star who built a fervent online following.

Bass’ campaign was pulling for Pratt, too, viewing him as a weaker opponent for November, and betting markets may have contributed to an overconfidence, a Bass campaign ally told CNN. (Bass spokesman Alex Stack said prediction markets were “background noise” that didn’t influence campaign strategy.)

In the week after the June 2 primary, election workers slowly tallied more than 850,000 votes, and Pratt fell from second place to third, knocking him out of the general election.

Frustrated Pratt supporters cited prediction markets to claim the race was rigged. Making matters even worse, paid social media influencers for Kalshi and Polymarket were caught peddling false conspiracies about shady “late” ballots and “literally impossible” vote totals.

“It had some real negative effects,” said Logan, the Los Angeles County election official. “We spent a lot of time on our end trying to combat that misinformation about the security and accuracy of our process.”

Prediction markets have also become a new consideration for pollsters — and not always in a positive light. Markets shifted after Bass promoted an August poll that she said showed her “momentum,” but it later turned out the survey was fake, with the group behind it calling it a “social experiment.”

Adding to the potential confusion for voters, Kalshi “projects” winners on election nights with sleek social media graphics. Polymarket also uses the “projection” phrase to describe the odds on its markets, adopting the same terminology that news organizations like CNN use — but with very different methodologies.

News outlets hire statisticians who use mathematical models to project winners from real results. Freeman said Kalshi “projects” winners after polls close when a candidate reaches 99% odds to win and stays there for a while.

“These aren’t formal calls, like the media does it,” Freeman told CNN. “In small print on these graphics, we clarify that these aren’t official calls.”

Another high-profile miss by prediction markets this year came in August’s Democratic primary for Wisconsin governor. State Rep. Francesca Hong was trading at around 95% to win, heading into Election Day but lost to Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley in a major upset that also defied polling.

A former spokeswoman for Hong’s campaign, Allison Geyer, said the markets “never factored into our strategic thinking” and that, “even with traditional polling consistently showing us in first place, we took nothing for granted.”

Other candidates heavily favored on prediction platforms also lost in Hawaii and Texas. Kalshi traders gave Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed a 97% chance to win his primary – he did win, but by a tiny margin of less than 1%.

“This is the first prediction-market election,” said Nicholas Jager, 26, a trader with profits of $1.3 million this year. “The markets have been pretty good … Wisconsin was a miss. For the public, it can be pretty jarring, seeing a high-probability thing not actually occurring.”

Kalshi says that in a fair market, huge underdogs occasionally do win. After Wisconsin, co-founder Luana Lopes Lara posted, “5% is not 0%.”

The betting markets have seeped into campaign culture.

One Democratic operative said some staffers are watching the markets so closely that they’re scouring for bumps from strong debate performances or drops from bad stories in the press.

But they also noted that prediction sites can’t offer insights for which TV ads should be deployed in which media markets. Another operative said they found more value from polling, and the “feel” from door-knocking and phone-banking.

“I’d be lying if I said I didn’t look at Kalshi, but it’s not driving our decisions,” one of the operatives said.

Kelly Gibson, vice president of the American Association of Political Consultants, said she worried that favorable odds on prediction markets can lure campaigns into a “false sense of security” that they are winning a race. “It’s like a quicksand,” she said.

Some candidates have openly drawn optimism from prediction markets.

That happened earlier this month in the race for Texas railroad commissioner after GOP nominee Bo French drew bipartisan backlash for a xenophobic post about South Asian college football fans. His Democratic opponent, Jon Rosenthal, wrote on X, “I’m now the favorite,” sharing his 52% Kalshi odds.

The betting markets are rattling the donor world, too.

Another Democratic operative — one who worked in a competitive Senate primary — said they felt they had to track prediction markets because some donors followed the markets.

“It’s just another thing for them to stress out about,” the operative said.

So, the campaign would assuage donors’ concerns by downplaying the markets, sharing internal polls or previewing upcoming positive news, like a big endorsement.

Gibson, a Democratic media consultant, said she has heard of advisers having to talk donors, especially those from the technology industry, out of making investment decisions based on what prediction markets say about a race.

The expansion of prediction sites means it’s never been easier for campaign staff or election workers to corruptly cash in on insider knowledge — like a scandal that’s about to blow up, or a vote-drop in the middle of the night.

The first political insider trading cases became public in April, when Kalshi fined and suspended three minor candidates who bet on their own races. Speculation swirled about more cases, and some campaign staffers even anonymously bragged in the press about making money.

Kalshi disclosed a few more new cases last month, notably including Laurie Buckhout, the GOP nominee in a battleground House race in North Carolina. Buckhout apologized for her “dumb mistake,” and like the other traders, she only bet a small amount and paid a modest fine — about $2,600.

Legal experts have said the penalties in these and other cases, like the White House teleprompter operator, aren’t creating enough deterrence. Kalshi’s leaders say the fines typically follow longstanding formulas that are spelled out in federal law for how to punish securities and commodities fraud.

“If I had my druthers, we would bring a sledgehammer to every single case, to stop anybody from ever committing bad conduct,” Kalshi’s head of enforcement, Bobby DeNault, told CNN. “But that’s not really the way we traditionally think of pursuing enforcement when there are violations.”

The company scrubs public records for names of campaign staffers and blocks them from trading on relevant markets, DeNault said, as part of its internal safeguards to prevent and catch insider activity.

A Polymarket spokesperson said in a statement, “We protect our markets with continuous surveillance, clear rules against manipulation and misuse, and an experienced investigations team.”

The election officials who spoke to CNN said they’ve started including warnings against insider trading while preparing staff and poll workers for November. Some counties have adopted formal bans against election-trading.

“Referees don’t get to bet on sports, and election officials and election workers don’t get to bet on elections,” said Byrum, the Lansing election official. “That’s the message we’re conveying in our trainings to clerks.”

During primary season, the vast majority of markets were settled without a hitch and without any indications of manipulation or insider activity.

But a dispute in Alaska’s marquee Senate race raised questions about how things could go in November, when Kalshi and Polymarket will be settling thousands of markets during the chaotic post-election period, as races are called by press outlets and election officials certify final results.

Some traders complained that Kalshi improperly settled the market for the Alaska’s top-four primary after a flurry of action in the days afterward, where some candidates withdrew and were replaced by others.

Kalshi has defended settling the market based on who was announced to be on the final list of candidates advancing to the general election. But some traders argued that the officials market rules indicated that Kalshi should have paid out based on the original certified results of the race, before anyone dropped out.

“We resolved in accordance with our rules and common sense: ‘Yes’ for the four candidates on the ballot and ‘No’ for the two who are not,” Kalshi spokeswoman Elisabeth Diana said in an email.

One trader, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, said he bet $5,000 on the primary and thought he won $13,000. Another trader, Caleb Davies, said he believed the official rules didn’t align with the title of the market.

“When I call out stuff like this, it’s not because I’m looking for a payout,” said Davies, a top-1% trader on Kalshi who bet on the Alaska race. “In this case, I don’t even care. It’s more for the long-term health of the platform. I trade a ton, and you need to trust that platforms will pay out correctly.”

This article has been updated with additional information.

https://www.cnn.com/videos/title-2599145?episode=2599169&source=subwall:vod:episode-2599169&iid=related-embed_streaming-now