PredictIt

We'd be using the AP.

Would you use a very election-specific site like the Decision Desk or the Cook Political Report? Or, like many of you, will you be using X? Or will you just be scrolling through Instagram? Will you be watching a Substack creator or a YouTube creator or a Twitch creator? Would you just watch it on a prediction market? CalSheet, PolyMarket, PredictIt? Or will you tune it out entirely? There are so many ways to experience an election night.

More than ever, obviously.

And yet, as a sort of student of the media industry, I marvel at how much this sort of remains the Super Bowl for the legacy news networks and how its minted stars in the likes of Steve Kornacki at NBC News his replacement at MSNOW, Ali Velshi, likes of John King over at CNN, the list goes on and on and on.

But I mean, this has been happening for a long time.

Back in 2017, the dominant player in the prediction market universe was PredictIt.

And there was a fake survey that was done by people that were betting in those markets in the Michigan Senate race that showed then incumbent Debbie Stabenow losing her general election campaign to none other than Kid Rock, which is quite silly, but it was shared pretty widely.

I mean, Kid Rock retweeted this.

But when you take a look at that ad yesterday, or I talked about it yesterday, but you take a look at the Amy Acton mom ad, which, by the way...

if you take a look at the prediction markets, has helped Amy Acton, if you believe in these markets like PredictIt, Kalshi, and PolyMarket.

You've got to understand, when you take a look at the research, and the research says that these negative ads work, you think about who do they work on? Who do they work on? They're probably not going to work on you.

no matter what side you stand on, because I'm assuming you're educated, I'm assuming you do your research, and I'm assuming you know the backgrounds of the candidates.

We are a mere two weeks away from the 2026 midterm elections.

John and I have both sunk thousands of dollars into Polymarket, Kalshi, PredictIt, DraftKings, and every other available online betting source in order to maximize the potential payoffs of our political, uh, political wisdom and, uh, our investment positions.

And, uh, it's only two weeks, and we'll find out if we make money or lose money, but I'm feeling very good about my investments.

I have $30,000-

And so, you know, that obviously has some national security implications.

But what's bumming me out a little bit is that these prediction markets, you're familiar with these things, right? Kalshi and Polymarket and Predictit.

So these used to be a pretty... good way to make some extra money in election years because the the markets these prediction markets were so skewed in in one direction or the other that you could bet on like pretty much sure things and still do better than the fees and everything and and make out pretty well but i think that now that prediction markets have gone mainstream and everybody's betting on all these sports on these prediction markets, the election side of the house has also gotten more mainstream and this arbitrage opportunity no longer exists.

So now the prediction markets seem to pretty closely mirror the election models that are out there.

Perfect.

You say you're doing everything but sports, and, like, the prediction market model, at least here in America, going back to, you know, PredictIt and when Kalshi first, you know, started knocking on doors and opening business and PolyMarket to follow, it was pitched, you know, really as for exactly what you're doing.

Sports was never really talked about as, like, something that they were gonna get into.

Obviously, they have.

I mean, it's a good question.

It's what everyone in the business wants to know the answer to, you know, from investors to content guys like me.

Like, if you just look at the recent history of the business, so I'm so excited that you brought up PredictIt.

By the way, are you like an OG PredictIt degen, or are you-

They're giving Amy Acton a roughly 70% chance of winning the governor's race right now, and Sherrod Brown about 60% chance of returning to the US Senate.

So these are the things like Polymarket, PredictIt.

These, PredictIt apparently was very accurate at forecasting the 2024 election results, where we know the polls that we had looked at, even though we didn't report horse race polls at the time, were wildly off.

So these markets let people put money on the candidate they believe will win a race.

Each contract costs roughly the same number of cents as the candidate's odds of victory.