Political betting contracts lag behind sports on trading platform

Midterm trading volume nears $1 billion as political contracts lag sports

The Anti-Corruption Data Collective put a number on it last week: more than 21,000 individual midterm contracts live across the major platforms, with total notional volume already past $750 million as of October 15th and a projection that pushes past $1.6 billion once the races close. That is an eight-fold increase from what moved on Congressional and state contests in 2024. The scale is real. What is less clear is whether it means what the platforms think it means.

There is a version of this story that writes itself — prediction markets vindicated by 2024, now scaling into the institutional fixture they always claimed to be. Shayne Coplan told that version on a Netflix documentary, and a Fox Business commentator confirmed it the night the presidential result came in. The story is not wrong, exactly. But it is missing something the S&P Global survey published this quarter made hard to ignore.

Seventy percent of prediction market users have traded sports contracts. Thirty-three percent have traded political ones. The platforms reaching for credibility as electoral forecasting tools are being carried, financially, by people who want to bet on games. That is not a scandal — sports volume funds the infrastructure that makes political markets possible. But the two use cases are not the same thing, and the regulatory pressure building across more than a dozen states is aimed squarely at the sports side, not the election side.

Google's advertising block, which now covers Kalshi and other operators in five states where legal proceedings are active, hits sports-contract acquisition harder than political-contract acquisition. Users seeking election markets tend to seek them out; users trading sports props respond to the kind of advertising that no longer runs in Connecticut, Michigan, Nevada, New York, or Ohio. The $1.6 billion projection assumes continued user growth. It does not account for what happens to that growth when the acquisition channel closes.

The consensus read on midterm volume is that it confirms the industry's maturation. The survey data suggests something more complicated: that political trading is a minority practice inside a product whose majority use case is legally contested in the jurisdictions that matter most. The industry has spent two years citing election accuracy to establish legitimacy. The users have been doing something else.