While gamblers outside of the United States have long been able to place bets on who will win the White House, in a historic shift this election cycle, Americans can make political wagers of their own.
More than $100 million in election bets have been traded on Kalshi, a federally regulated prediction market that was given the green light to offer election betting after a federal appeals court in Washington, DC, this month upheld a lower court’s order that made way for legal political gambling. Other platforms in the US have begun to offer election-related bets in the wake of the ruling.
The election markets have not gone unnoticed by the Republican Party’s presidential nominee, Donald Trump, who has touted his odds on social media and at campaign events.
“You see we’re up in the polls pretty substantially. They have a new thing, a new phenomena, and that’s gambling polls,” the former president said at a stop in Michigan on October 18. “I don’t know what the hell it means, but it means that we’re doing pretty well.”
The final nationwide CNN poll before votes are counted showed Trump and his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, in a deadlocked race for the White House.
While the platforms have marketed their odds as election forecasts and claim that they allow their users to hedge their bets on different outcomes, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which sought to block Kalshi’s political contracts, has warned that they could degrade public perception of the democratic process.
With more than 50 million ballots already cast ahead of Tuesday’s election, here’s what you need to know about election betting in the US.
Where is legal betting taking place in the US?
Kalshi launched its offerings – which range from which party will control the House and the Senate in 2025 to who will sit in the Oval Office – earlier this month after a three-judge panel for the DC Circuit Court of Appeals found that the agency had failed to demonstrate how it or the public “will be irreparably harmed” while the appeal plays out.
The CFTC had appealed a lower court ruling that found Kalshi’s contracts did not involve “unlawful activity or gaming.” While the appellate court ruling allows Kalshi to offer election bets, it also gives the agency another chance to pause the ruling should more concrete evidence of irreparable harm develop.
Meanwhile, the court granted the CFTC’s request to fast-track the case and could hear oral arguments on the matter in the coming months.
Robinhood, a popular stock-trading app, launched presidential election betting on Monday. PredictIt, another prediction market embroiled in a legal fight with the CFTC, also offers election contracts while its case is ongoing.
Not all prediction markets are available in the US. Polymarket, an offshore, unregulated crypto-based prediction market, bars US users due to a 2022 settlement with the CFTC.
Political betting isn’t new
David G. Schwartz, a gaming historian at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, told CNN that for much of the country’s history, Americans gambled on their elections in markets largely centered in New York City. Political betting, he said, traces its roots to informal, “player-to-player” betting. “Betting on elections was an outgrowth of that. It was never sanctioned by the state,” Schwartz said.
According to economic historians Paul Rhode and Koleman Strumpf, who have studied the history of political betting markets, Americans placed election bets on Wall Street as far back as the 1880s, with formal political betting markets appearing to “have largely disappeared by 1944.” Those odds were published in newspapers, Rhode and Strumpf note.
Since the first half of the 20th century, political gambling has been considered illegal in the US due to various state laws and state court rulings. Some states, such as Nevada, Texas, Michigan, explicitly prohibit the practice.
Researchers, however, have long studied political prediction markets.
The University of Iowa has operated the Iowa Electronic Markets, which offers contracts on the outcomes of political events, since the late 1980s for research purposes. PredictIt was launched in partnership with Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand.
Regulation in flux
Because Kalshi is a federally regulated market, its political bets are protected under state laws that have carve-outs for business transactions and commodities trading.
Not everyone is allowed to make a political bet on the platform. Kalshi is available only to US residents and prohibits candidates, campaign staff, poll workers and employees of decision desks at major media organizations, among others, from making political bets.
Some states have additional measures regulating election betting.
In Wisconsin, anyone who has “made or become interested, directly or indirectly, in any bet or wager depending upon the result of the election” isn’t allowed to cast a ballot. If they do, their vote could be challenged, a spokesperson for the state Elections Commission told CNN.
An uncertain future
While its legal dispute with Kalshi plays out, the CFTC has embarked on a broader clampdown on events-based betting: It proposed a rule earlier this year that would explicitly ban contracts on the outcomes of elections, awards shows, sports and other events. If the agency were to finalize that rulemaking, it’s likely that the prediction markets would have to file a lawsuit against the agency again in order to offer political bets.
Meanwhile, in the weeks since it launched its congressional contracts, Kalshi has added more markets, allowing its users to wager on the margin of victory in battleground states such as Wisconsin or Pennsylvania, or on whether tech billionaire Elon Musk will be nominated to a Cabinet seat.
For Cantrell Dumas, the director of derivatives policy at Better Markets, a non-profit organization that advocates for financial reform, it’s not possible to hedge business interests on those contracts. He says it underscores what his organization has argued: that Kalshi’s markets weren’t for hedging in the first place, but for gambling.
“The longer we wait, the more truth is revealed, right? No business can hedge whether or not Kamala Harris loses by three points, or whether Donald Trump wins by two points,” Dumas said.
