Election betting has well and truly broken through in the 2024 campaign. Mainstream publications now cite odds alongside polls and other election models, while millions of people are watching them directly — hoping, wondering, or fearing that the power of the market has discovered something close to the real probabilities of the election.
This is still new. In 2020, election betting was a fringe but growing phenomenon. On Polymarket, the total bet volume on the outcome of that election was just over $10 million, with Joe Biden favored to win. This year, total bet volume is about to pass $2.5 billion, with Donald Trump currently sitting at a 66 percent chance of winning. That is markedly higher than the probabilities assigned by popular poll-centric election models, but only slightly higher than other, smaller markets, which have followed its swing, and the old-fashioned betting lines set by casinos.
The confidence of these markets and their (shrinking) gap with models from established election forecasters has invited a mixture of reasonable and motivated skepticism. Do the sort of people who would, or could, place bets in a crypto-centric betting platform that’s not legal to use in the United States have a strange, particular, or biased sense of U.S. politics? Maybe. Could the market be distorted by massive bets from anonymous individual “whales” with unknown motivations? Sure! Could betting markets be prone to unpredictable manias or poisoned by incorporating misleading data such as polls or press coverage? Yeah.
Prediction markets have an answer to all these critiques, which happens to be the premise on which they’re founded: that people with skin in the game will be motivated to synthesize a broad range of information, including these possibilities, setting aside personal biases and acting rationally, motivated by the prospect of winning or losing real money. According to Polymarket:
Studies show prediction markets are often more accurate than pundits because they combine news, polls, and expert opinions into a single value that represents the market’s view of an event’s odds. Our markets reflect accurate, unbiased, and real-time probabilities for the events that matter most to you. Markets seek truth.
“If you’re an expert on a certain topic, Polymarket is your opportunity to profit from trading based on your knowledge, while improving the market’s accuracy,” the company says. Because its users are “financially incentivized to be correct,” the theory goes, Polymarket “creates more thoughtful, data-driven predictions.”
Kalshi, a Polymarket competitor that recently won regulatory approval in the U.S., makes its case in a similar way. By putting “a concrete number” on predictions or rumors, betting markets take the “messy world of opinions” and force participants to “refine our beliefs, consider all sides of the issue, and ultimately, gain a sharper understanding of the world around us.” This portrait of a rational market participant is core to the work of Robin Hanson, an economist whose ideas are cited by Polymarket as inspiring the platform. In a short manifesto posted on his website outlining the concept of “Futarchy” — roughly, a government in which elected officials institute policies decided by speculative-market bets on whether or not they’ll work. Hanson condenses the underlying theory: “To have a say in a speculative market, you have to ‘put your money where your mouth is.’ Those who know they are not relevant experts shut up, and those who do not know this eventually lose their money, and then shut up.”
This makes a lot of sense, and there’s mounting evidence that prediction markets can be pretty effective on a wide range of speculative questions. It also paints a certain portrait of prediction-market participants as rational people with the simple goal of making money and strong incentives to step outside of their own experience and eliminate bias while identifying bias in others. They’re traders sitting at their terminals, analyzing information, assessing polls and sentiment and fundamentals rather than bullshitting or posturing or getting worked up trying to win arguments or persuade people. It’s a compelling story and a strong pitch for a product.
There’s just one minor wrinkle: the comment section.
Polymarket allows users to comment after placing their bets and displays the size of posters’ bets by default. The comment sections for bets related to the 2024 election are extremely active and offer a keyhole glimpse into the thought processes of users with thousands of dollars on the line. Users like KamalaTheJailer, who has bet more than $16,000 on Harris winning, and who today posted, “McDonald’s is having an E. Coli outbreak. Happens if you let pieces of shit close to your food.” Or user JulianP, with more than $700,000 bet on Trump, who shared some recent thoughts: “Even with Kamala’s earring headphones she still can’t figure out how to answer anything.” TrumpoDumpo — bio “EAT MY saggy hate BALLS,” with about $2,500 on Harris, urges other users to think about AI, writing that as “we enter the Intelligence Age, careful, informed leadership is essential. For a safe, stable future, choose wisely.” To that, PaulDenino, who is either a fan of the controversial streamer and alleged crypto scammer or the man himself, replies, “Dude who gives a fuck, I just want money and think Trump is toast,” and warns that “if you delude yourself into thinking you’re betting with your head, you’re in dangerous territory,” with a little more than a thousand dollars bet on Harris’s victory. (In another comment, he says he’s been “looking for AI porn of her.”)
Graphic: X
If you’ve spent any time reading the comments at, say, the New York Post or the Huffington Post — not to mention X or Instagram — you’ll find a lot of familiar material here and on Kalshi. “Another amazing day for Trump! MAGA! We are going strong! meanwhile liberals are crying 😀 amazing!,” writes one user with a few hundred dollars in the mix. TrumpsCrackDealer, with a few thousand on Harris, quotes an article about Allan Lichtman, the controversial Harris-guessing election forecaster. “Trump’s already angling for a post-loss pardon lmao,” writes user Rechanting, referring to reports that the candidate suggested he might pardon Hunter Biden, before calling another commenter an “asstard.” Walli8573, with more than $100,000 on a collection of bets that Harris will win the Electoral College and the popular vote, brings up QAnon: “Dump Trump supporters literally believe that there is a deepstate that is trafficking children and that Trump was selected by the good guys in the military,” adding in another comment, “Only faggots are voting for the rapist.” Poopoopeepee, with about $1,800 on Trump, disagrees: “dark MAGA is taking over.”
@cleofaee Uber driver was betting on his Tesla screen at stop lights and my friend JOKINGLY said he’s gonna lose if he bets on Trump. No joke he pulls the car over and said we can find another ride and he’s canceling. We thought he was kidding but he literally ended the ride and my boyfriend had to call another one in the middle of this random neighborhood. We already reported to Uber but they have said anything yet #fyp
There are flamewars, like the one between a relentless pro-Harris poster with about $15,000 on the line and an account named after him that has mirrored his bet out of spite. There are obvious bots in the mix on both sides, but a low-betting Harris account speaking in obvious LLMese recently rendered the comment section unusable for days. Some of the comments would be inscrutable to most readers, with lots of gambling and trading jargon, but they do suggest an approximate (if obvious) user profile: fairly young, mostly male, into crypto, seem to spend a lot of time in Discord channels and on X. After a while, though, the thing you can’t help but notice about these comments is how unremarkable they are in their nastiness, imprecision, and emotional level of engagement — how very much of, rather than separate from, the “messy world of opinions” they are, written by people who seem to be driven by everything but “data-driven” analytical thinking. They feel an awful lot like how everything else feels in comment sections where the election comes up. Everyone is either miserable or happy because someone else is miserable. These don’t sound like people who will “shut up” after their theories don’t pan out. These are people who can’t stop posting.
This isn’t necessarily an argument that Polymarket’s odds should be seen as less credible. For one, the number of people who comment relative to the total number of people betting is small and probably overrepresents trolls and people who just want to argue or who see their bets as ways to publicly support a candidate. Also, one could argue that this is all part of the plan: This sort of betting is still fairly new and niche, but with more than $2 billion dollars in the mix and a loosening regulatory regime, one can assume that, if larger and more sophisticated investors aren’t already seeing all of this “messiness” and deciding whether it represents an opportunity, they’ll be on their way soon. It may also simply turn out that a small, socially maladjusted, trollish population of foreigners with crypto holdings are nonetheless — or especially! — capable of figuring out the odds of an upcoming election together. Crazier things have happened.
It does suggest, however, that the favored stories around prediction markets — much like popular narratives about actual voting — are perhaps a bit wishful and misleading about what’s really going on, motivated by marketing imperatives or a deep ideological commitment to markets in general. Polymarket posters are people who seem to be engaging with the 2024 election as investors, gamblers, supporters, forum posters, trolls, or some combination thereof. They’re in this for all sorts of reasons, some of which don’t align perfectly with the market’s function as an aggregator of useful information or suggest its participants are primarily clear-minded or temporarily underinformed truth-seekers. They’re a motley crew — and, again, on Polymarket, they’re at least supposed to be located outside the United States — but they also live in the same world as everyone else, where things feel, in multiple different dimensions related to the election, disorienting, hopeless, feverishly exciting, or simply disassociated from the real. So they’re looking at polls. They’re holding their intercontinental divining rods over Nate Silver’s gut. They’re watching Republicans perform lockstep hyperconfidence while Democrats message test gloomy postmortems. They’re watching Americans crack the hell up. Some of them are just getting amped.
Put another way, people bet on vibes, just like some people vote on vibes, which means participating in prediction markets is, to some degree, a necessarily vibe-centric activity even for the most hard-nosed user. Maybe the result is that prediction markets end up missing less than polls and other election models. Or maybe the result is that, as they fill with thousands of users who are betting for the first time for a wide and strange set of reasons — perhaps just because of an attractive signup bonus! — they just end up collectively missing something slightly different, informing users’ mental models and vibe calibrations for the next time around in 2028. This openness to vibes is both a competitive advantage for prediction markets and accounts for their limitations on a given question, the scale of which is only revealed, of course, after the fact. If this sounds like a long way to state the obvious fact that prediction markets can’t perfectly see the future, that’s because it is. It’s also a response to their creators’ occasional implications — and emerging vibes-based belief among some users — that they can.
Mainly, though, on-platform-betting discourse tells a story about a potentially underrated factor that seems to draw people to these places in the first place. In an election, a voter’s reward is getting the president she wants to win. In contrast, a bet promises money but also something even rarer in the slippery, unaccountable world of politics: a chance to force your opponents to admit that you were right — and, more importantly, that they were wrong.
