Last evening, when most traditional polls showed the 2024 US presidential election as a toss-up between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump, prediction markets including Kalshi, Robinhood, and Polymarket broadcast a very different outcome, correctly anticipating a decisive Trump win in the electoral college.
Now, the people running these markets are taking their own victory laps. For weeks now, as bettors have placed huge sums of money on the outcome of the election, the markets have faced scrutiny about whether they were accurately capturing voter sentiment or merely overhyped fads distorted by MAGA-leaning bettors. They see this as a moment of vindication. “It’s such a better alternative to polls,” says Kalshi cofounder and CEO Tarek Mansour. “One thing we can all agree on is people like making money and dislike losing money.” The company touted the accuracy of its predictions on social media.
Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan has made similarly confident statements on social media about the superiority of his product, calling it a “global truth machine.” He also claimed on X that the Trump campaign “literally found out they were winning from Polymarket.”
While Polymarket is the global leader, Kalshi holds the distinction as the first modern market in which US citizens are legally allowed to place wagers. (Prior to the 1940s, gambling on elections was commonplace, but it fell out of favor following the Great Depression.) With online gambling broadly on the rise, a new contemporary wave of prediction markets has emerged to build upon renewed interest in wagering; in a blog post on Kalshi’s entry into politics, Mansour called it a “forgotten American tradition.” After a prolonged (and still, technically, ongoing) battle with the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Manhattan-based startup jumped into the market earlier this fall—and found an enthusiastic user base eager to gamble on the outcome. The company is still tabulating exactly how many people bet on the election, but Mansour estimates that it is in the millions. “We’ve blown up unbelievably,” he says. Kalshi is also still accounting for how much money bettors made but says it is at least $900 million and likely more than $1 billion.
This week, Kalshi reached the top of the app store, and Mansour says the staff was ecstatic as it followed the startup’s climb up Google Trends. “We overtook everything,” he says. “We even overtook Pornhub.”
“Markets work because, one, there’s skin in the game. People are putting real money where their mouth is. And two, there’s the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ aspect to it,” Mansour says. “Those two together are a very, very powerful force.” He thinks that questions about whether it’s good or bad to put money into politics in this way are obtuse in a world in which the wealthy have long financialized elections. “If you are rich enough, you can go to an investment bank, and they will give you a Trump basket or a Harris basket. You can take that position already,” he says. From his vantage point, Kalshi and its ilk are simply leveling the playing field for normal people. The rhetoric is reminiscent of how online stock-trading firm Robinhood—which itself jumped into the election prediction market just a few weeks ago—marketed itself as a great equalizer.
While there’s a wide variety of events that people can bet on in addition to politics—there’s keen interest, for example, in whether Gladiator 2 will get good critical reception—the company does have some guardrails. “We don’t do wars, terrorism, assassinations, or violence,” says Mansour. “One of our core responsibilities is to make sure that our markets are not susceptible to manipulation.” He says the company employs a team dedicated to spotting suspicious trading patterns and that Kalshi is beholden to the same monitoring as more traditional financial institutions like the New York Stock Exchange.
The company has already opened up betting on the 2028 primaries, and it’s still taking bets about the outcomes of the 2024 race. Mansour anticipates a high volume of wagers about the second Trump administration’s personnel decisions. “I think cabinet positions are going to be huge,” he says. Right now, Kalshi shows Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s odds of securing a position hovering around 76 percent.