Ohio Senator Bill DeMora Introduces Two Bills Targeting Prediction Markets

Ohio senator Bill DeMora targets prediction markets with two new state bills

Ohio Democratic state Senator Bill DeMora introduced two bills last week targeting the prediction markets sector, one that would bring sports event contracts under state gambling regulation and another that would ban election-related betting outright. The timing is deliberate: a federal appeals court recently backed Ohio's authority to enforce its gambling laws against prediction market platforms, and DeMora is moving while that legal footing holds.

The preemption argument that Kalshi and Robinhood have been pressing in Missouri and elsewhere — that CFTC designation shields their contracts from state gambling law — did not survive in Ohio's circuit. That ruling is the structural fact underneath DeMora's bills. Without it, he would be introducing legislation into a vacuum. With it, he has a court-endorsed hook.

The two-bill structure is worth attending to. Separating sports contracts from election contracts is a choice, and I think it reflects a reading of where the political resistance actually lives. Election betting is the easier target — it carries its own freight of public unease, and banning it allows a legislator to draw a clear moral line without necessarily engaging the harder commercial question of whether prediction markets are gambling at all. Sports contracts are the revenue. That's the bill that matters to the platforms, and that's the one that will face the more organised opposition.

Senate Bill 430 — the sports classification bill — is the one I'd watch. If it passes and survives challenge, it establishes Ohio as a state that has successfully applied its gambling framework to CFTC-designated contracts. That matters enormously to every other state legislature that has watched the Missouri and New York proceedings with interest. The preemption map is not settled. Each jurisdiction that holds its ground makes the next one easier to defend.

My disagreement with the consensus read here is on pace. The prediction markets industry tends to frame state-level bills as delay tactics — things that get filed, make noise, and then stall in committee while the federal argument resolves. That framing made sense in 2024. It made some sense in 2025. It makes less sense now that the Ninth Circuit has upheld Nevada's position and an Ohio federal appeals court has done the same. The platforms are losing ground in the courts faster than they are winning it, and state legislators are noticing.

DeMora has been here before on this issue, which means he has also been here before when these bills went nowhere. What's different now is the appeals court decision sitting behind him. Whether that's enough to move Ohio's legislature is a genuinely open question — the chamber dynamics are not straightforward — but the legal environment has shifted enough that dismissing this as performative would be a mistake.