Everyone you know is about to start putting their money where their mouth is.
Prediction markets are booming. Think of them as like a stock market, but instead of buying shares in companies, you buy shares in the outcomes of real-world events — and you can bet on almost anything. The top platforms, Kalshi and Polymarket, allow you to stake money on everything from the outcomes of elections and wars to the weather in your city tomorrow to who will win the Grammy for Album of the Year. There’s no bookie setting the odds — instead, the prices are set based on how other people have bet.
When the bet is settled — maybe PTA gets that Oscar win — you get paid.
The sector just had its strongest period yet, pulling in nearly $10 billion combined in bets on Kalshi and Polymarket last month. But at a time where sports betting scandals are on the rise, prediction markets are facing their own ethical reckoning. Just because we can bet on anything — even politics — does it mean we should?
To help us navigate that question, Vox’s Noel King spoke with John Herrman, a tech columnist at New York Magazine. He explained why these markets feel so unsettling and how they might open up new opportunities for political corruption, especially under the Trump administration (both Kalshi and Polymarket, notably, have enlisted Donald Trump Jr. as an adviser).
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
If we’re ok with betting on horses and football games, why does betting on elections skeeve us out so much?
If we think back to the way that sports betting online took over sports media, there was a lot of squeamishness early on. That took maybe five years to break, and 10 years to be completely meaningless.
And that’s in a situation where we’re betting on games. We’re betting on things that aren’t life or death — that aren’t the types of things you can bet on now on Polymarket or Kalshi, like how many people will be deported in the next six months. And giving that to betting — it’s not the world that I think people would say they want. More obviously, you have just unbelievable opportunities for corruption here.
If we think about the ways in which betting on, say, a presidential election could go sideways, what is the worst-case scenario?
You have a vision in recent elections of a completely different type of engagement in politics. You have people who have basically removed themselves from the democratic process to engage instead in a market process — it turns everyone into a speculator rather than a voter.
A world in which people are just trying to figure out who’s going to win makes everyone into not just a speculator, but a pundit. It sort of takes them out of this decision that will have a massive effect on how the world works, and it potentially just replaces a lot of the also-problematic ways that they interact with elections and politics, through media and through social engagement, with something that is just reading the financial news or reading about options calls or something like that. It’s a completely abstract way to engage with politics and, to me, it represents kind of an exit from politics.
The dark scenario — here’s where my brain went, tell me if I’m being nuts. Someone has the opportunity to win $10 million if a candidate is assassinated. There’s an enormous incentive to do a very bad thing.
That’s actually one of the early foundational concepts of prediction markets, where people were imagining and contriving ways where a prediction market might be set up to function explicitly as an assassination market. Now, these actual platforms in the world have prohibitions on that. But I think it’s completely plausible in the world we live in that someone might manifest events in order to settle a Polymarket or a Kalshi bet in the way that they want.
We should probably prepare for a world where, much in the way that sports has become nearly impossible to follow or talk about without talking in this meta way about odds, betting outcomes, etc., politics will start to feel like that.
We just did an episode about sports betting, where fans are saying that when they learn about betting scandals again and again and again, their trust in the sport starts to erode. If people are losing trust in sports, it seems possible that, if we bet on elections, we could be looking within a couple of years at people losing faith in the outcome of elections. Is that a viable worry?
There are a couple really interesting things that you bring up there. One is that if your candidate, for example, loses an election, you might be crestfallen, you might be scared, you might be worried for the future. But none of those sensations are quite the same as losing a bunch of money on a bet. They’re not humiliating in the same way. They don’t alienate you from the thing that you’re betting on in the same way. That is a new flavor of interaction with politics.
I wouldn’t say that politics in general, and certainly American electoral politics, is a trust-rich environment. But losing even more trust in the process is — I mean, I don’t know how much lower you can go. But it seems like we’re trying to find a way, and someone is maybe making a lot of money on it.
One of the problems that we’ve seen in politics my entire lifetime is that people are not engaged. Is there a possible upside here, if we’re letting people bet on elections, that they become more engaged?
I could sort of see that, but I don’t think that gambling in general is the type of thing that is a gateway to other stuff.
But I do want to make sure that we mention here that prediction markets as an additional source of information in the world are really interesting and useful. I will make a case for prediction markets as good aggregators of information, and I think they also allow people to check out where you are, on one hand, voting, and on the other, betting. Are these things complementary? Or are they at odds with one another? And I think it’s very possible to imagine that they could be at odds.
The people who surround the president absolutely love this stuff. Donald Trump Jr. is advising both Kalshi and Polymarket. What role do you think prediction markets are going to play in this administration, and what do you think it means that they’re playing a role in this administration?
I do think that the Trump administration’s relationship to non-public information and trading and markets and corruption in general is something that a lot of people are concerned about. And so if you are in the family that has arguably more non-public important information than any other family in the world, and you are doing everything you can to make as much money as possible in a variety of ways, here is a situation where it’s basically not illegal to bet on something where you know the outcome. That’s just your advantage.
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