It has come to my attention that Kalshi is tweeting out “breaking news”.
Democracy sure does die in darkness!
To be clear: they’re not really breaking any news. Kalshi, the prediction betting website, doesn’t have reporters on staff. There is no journalism being done here. What they are doing is tweeting out predictions with the word “BREAKING” before it. Sometimes it’s obvious that they’re tweeting out a prediction, because they’ll cop to it. Sometimes it looks like any other post breaking the news on the app that breaks the news. They know it’s hard for most people to figure out what’s real and what’s not on the internet because this is a country where people don’t really know how to read. Surely this can’t be good for democracy.
A few days ago, I noticed the LinkNYC digital billboard on my block was showing ads for Kalshi, which is the biggest brand in the prediction betting space. New York State is trying to shut down Kalshi, alleging it is running an illegal betting operation. Kalshi’s argument is that it’s actually a futures trading platform regulated by the CFTC, and betting on the site is no different in the eyes of the law than buying a commodity. Who’s to say? Should people be trading on futures in the first place?
Anyway, it’s Election Day. I’m sitting here typing this at a bar in Morningside Heights, where an Irish man who’s had a green card for three decades is telling me all about why he never became a citizen. (It’s very expensive.) The polls will close in about 20 minutes, and by the time many of you will read this Zohran Mamdani may already be certified the next mayor of New York City. This is what the Polymarket and Kalshi home pages looked like at around 6:30pm EST today:
The odds seem good! Not that prediction betting companies are being honest about that. Yesterday, Kalshi tweeted that Cuomo holds “significantly more support inside NYC” than Mamdani, “per Kalshi data”. Kalshi is not a polling firm, and they don’t have any data on the NYC electorate. Their reasoning is that more Kalshi users in New York City are bullish on Cuomo than Mamdani, while users outside the city placed more bets on a Mamdani win. For context, Kalshi’s worldwide user base is around two million.
Today, Kalshi put up wheatpasted signs in New York advertising the odds they have for Mamdani and Cuomo; Mamdani is breaking 90 percent, as he should be. It is incredible to me that this could possibly be beneficial to Kalshi, but I think what they’re banking on is that people mistake prediction odds, which change in real time as people bet money, for real circumstances. It’s obvious they’re trying to make money both ways. Their back and forth on the election is nonsensical because Mamdani is obviously going to win. But if you don’t pay much attention to politics, how would you know that? I’ve been in multiple neighborhoods across the city today trying to get a sense of how people are feeling about the next four years, and a surprising number of enthusiastic Mamdani voters are nervous that he could lose. I had the privilege of telling them they didn’t have much to worry about, and I loved seeing their faces light up. I shouldn’t be the one who broke the news, though. The prediction betting markets are taking advantage of the dearth of information that most of us have. Zohran might win tonight, but our democracy has never been more fraught. Hope someone does something about that!