If you have made the grave mistake of being a living human being in 2026, you have no doubt been swarmed with ads for gambling services. DraftKings and Fanduel are so heavily marketed and integrated into all manners of sports media that they have become synonymous with the sports themselves. In 2018, the supreme court overruled PAPSA, which made sports betting legal on a state-by-state basis and has been gradually spreading across the nation (https://www.proskauer.com/alert/us-supreme-court-strikes-down-paspa-opening-the-door-to-state-authorized-sports-gambling ). In lockstep with the march of sports betting, a new flavor of gambling has been flooding the public consciousness: prediction markets.
Don’t be mistaken, prediction markets themselves are old as dirt. For as long as people have had currency or goods to trade, there has been betting on events. Will the American Revolution Succeed? Will King Henry VIII have a son? Will Jesus come back this year?
If you had a cow you were willing to gamble with, somebody out there would take you up on the wager. Those olden forms of betting weren’t quite as organized as current titans like Kalshi and Polymarket are today, but the underlying principle of betting on what will happen has been a strong throughline throughout gambling history. Kalshi and Polymarket, much like their sports betting peers, have become absurdly widely advertised, with massive infrastructure backing them. Proponents of these various gambling enterprises are doing their best to normalize and legalize their particular flavor of poison, adapting to modern tastes.
The subjects of the wagers themselves have modernized.
Will Trump win the 2024 presidential election? Will Elon Musk reveal another secret child? Will Jesus come back this year?
Riveting stuff! But along with major predictions on who will rule the world next, you have smaller wagers, pettier bets. Will Caroline Leavitt mention Afghanistan in today’s speech exactly 10 times? Will Steph Curry score over 30? Will this blog post have exactly 9 hypothetical wagers in it?
If you bet on that last one on Polymarket, you just scored yourself fifty bucks.
Everything can be bet on. Amazing! Every single aspect of the human experience can be boiled down to whether or not it has value for the speculative finance industry! What a fantastic development, with absolutely no possible negative repercussions.
Wait, you can bet on elections?
I think we glossed over that a bit.
Run that by me one more time? I can spend hundreds, if not thousands of dollars, wagering on the outcome of an election? That’s legal? I can do that? Not just do that, but do that at any time on my phone? That’s legal? Not just legal, but normalized?
Did I wake up in the Berenstein universe or something?
How the hell is this normal! Why are we okay with this? Am I taking crazy pills! What’s happening, in what world is it normal to have entire organized markets with vested financial interests in the outcome of elections? It’s cronyism, clientelism, not even obscured, not obfuscated, but literally the entire point of the process?
Sure, for major national elections with millions of voters, it’s a lot harder to rig that outcome. But what about local elections? They’re not on Kalshi and Polymarket yet, but how long until they are? Why should I even have the option to bet a thousand dollars on who will be the next education minister of my school district, why should anyone? All it takes is a few bad actors working together to push an unlikely candidate, and all of a sudden they’ve made gangbusters and screwed the system in the same breath. It turns the participants of elections into speculators, and not voters. (https://theweek.com/business/markets/prediction-markets-politics-gambling ) Not who has the best policy, or who can get the most done, but instead every election is defined by who will make me, personally, the most money if they win. Clientelism personified. It’s a horrifically cynical and bleak glimpse into the future.
It’s an attempt to rewire the public consciousness away from actually thinking about the effects of their vote, but rather viewing it through the lens of finance. They’ve already corrupted sports thusly, and it took just a few decades to do so. An industry overwhelmed, overtaken by gambling, and the normalization of viewing everything through the lens of finance. If the wealthy builders of our future are left to their own devices, and the current streak of deregulation is maintained, it’s only a matter of time before democracy itself is compromised.
With stories coming out of professional basketball players and coaches being arrested for rigging games for the sake of sportsbooks, how can anyone look at the attempts to build the same system but for politics as anything but a blatant scheme to benefit the corrupt and greedy? (https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/46695228/sources-terry-rozier-arrested-part-gambling-inquiry )
When the inevitable story of a candidate rigging their own campaign to implode to win a massive wager on Kalshi breaks, does the soul of American democracy die at that exact moment, or does it wait until the check clears?
First off, this is perhaps the strongest opener I have read this year; the tone of it is both humorous and very honest to the situation we unfortunate living humans are currently in, and immediately draws the reader in. I also highly appreciated your tone throughout the entire piece! It did a fantastic job of not only keeping the reader engaged, but also looking forward to what you would say next while describing this distributing practice. Prior to reading this piece, I had never seen any work explicitly connecting prediction markets with the decline of democracy, and I believe you made this argument incredibly effectively. This unprecedented phenomenon truly is the most dangerous and modern version of unencumbered clientism, especially when the risk of tech CEOs colluding with those in executive power or with classified knowledge is factored in. Given the recent news of a U.S. Special Forces service member being arrested for placing a $400,000 bet on the capture of Venezuela’s President using his classified, insider information, I’d say your point has been proven quite well. Despite the accessibility and levity you have brought to such a serious topic, I was also saddened by the unspoken implication that haunts this scenario. Though many of the most dangerous betters may be seeking to grow their already vast fortune, there are also likely individuals who have been hit hard by rising inflation and the challenging job market and are seeking to make money in any way possible, including via prediction markets. Many scholars of democratic erosion, including Lipset, Przeworski, and Schedler, have explored the impact a strong and stable economy has on strong and stable democracies, which makes the citizens’ desperation for any form of income worrisome. If it comes down to it, will these people resist regulations on these markets, and further down the line, resist even more overt threats to democracy? Overall, this was a very thought provoking and enjoyable work!