There is nothing these markets can tell us that the polls did not already say.
There is nothing these markets can tell us that the polls did not already say.
T his year was the first time in a long while that I managed to catch the World Series.
It had been nearly a decade, by my back-of-the-napkin estimate.
You can imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered just how thoroughly gambling — pardon me, “predicting” — had wormed its way into the sport that refused to forgive Charlie Hustle until after his death in 2024. (And even then, the posthumous lifting of his lifetime Hall of Fame ban hardly screams reconciliation.)
From stadium billboards to official partnerships between ballplayers and gambling apps, the audacity and shamelessness of it all is breathtaking — and I haven’t even mentioned the hundreds of gambling TV spots flooding the airwaves. We outlawed the Marlboro Man and Joe Camel, yet we’re comfortable somehow with a half-naked Sydney Sweeney coolly enticing audiences to blow the kids’ college fund on a sporting event. (The real lesson here is that the tobacco lobby needs to take a peek at Big Gambling’s homework.)
You might also imagine my surprise during the 2026 midterm elections, when I learned that corporate news outlets, too, had given themselves over to lucrative partnerships with organized gambling.
Talk about a new professional low. Also, talk about bad timing.
At a moment when the national press face an existential credibility crisis — when major media are distrusted more than Wall Street and Big Pharma, according to Gallup — the powers that be decided that now was the moment to roll out the newsroom casino.
Because nothing says “trust” quite like a pit boss.
Fox Corp integrated Kalshi across its properties earlier this year, connecting the platform to Fox News Channel, Fox Business Network, Fox Weather, and Fox One. To keep up appearances, the Fox News division made clear that the agreement excluded political coverage. Thank goodness for small mercies.
Fox is not alone in the Murdoch world: The Wall Street Journal partnered with Polymarket in January. The paper’s homepage now hosts a regular “Featured Prediction Market” column highlighting various gambling odds, including who will be the next James Bond.
CBS News announced Kalshi as an official “prediction market” sponsor this year and featured its gambling odds alongside the network’s usual battleground tracking.
CNN also partnered with Kalshi, careful to emphasize that the deal involved no equity stake and no revenue from user trades.
CNBC co-hosted a “Trading the Midterms” event with — yes — Kalshi.
Even Substack, which launched in 2017 as a platform for exciting original investigative journalism and cutting commentary but has since devolved into something of a retirement community for washed-up “resistance” performers and unemployed C-list cable-news personalities, jumped into bed with Polymarket for its midterm content.
Come for the essays on how President Trump is worse than Hitler! Stay for the latest betting odds on the Michigan Senate race!
The news business struggles enough to convince audiences it’s credible and trustworthy, and this is without shackling itself to a notoriously seedy corner of the vice economy.
Give it a few more years, and we will be seeing sponsored content tagged, “This Election Coverage Powered by Pornhub.”
You may laugh, but why wouldn’t this be the logical end of this phenomenon? At least the adult-entertainment industry can tell us something about the state of the economy. The “stripper index” — the tongue-in-cheek model that tracks economic downturns by spending at strip clubs — unfortunately contains a grain of truth.
By contrast, the degenerate gambler industry offers news consumers nothing of value. This is the central point, apart from the moral question of normalizing gambling. (For the record: I believe the normalization is a net negative. I do not think it particularly healthy that every young man should carry in his back not only the world’s collected wealth of pornography, but also now an assortment of casinos. It does not make for a happy, well-adjusted population that respects its own dignity as well as the dignity of others.)
The gambling markets are all hopes and speculation. There’s nothing in it for the “public interest.”
What’s worse is that what little the “prediction markets” tell us is just cribbed from polling data — that is, information already provided and covered by major media. Anyone who paid even modest attention to the midterms saw the betting odds largely copy the polling models. The markets were reactive, not predictive, euphemistic branding notwithstanding.
Election polling is imperfect, but it at least rests on real-life data collection and discernible methodologies. It does the original work of recording voter sentiment and perception. It uses first-hand research to measure the electorate, its mood, and how campaigns are perceived. It is more than a coin flip. By contrast, the gambling markets are about guessing while copying someone else’s homework, and not with an eye toward documented electoral trends and data, but with both eyes fixed firmly on the purse.
As polling guru Nate Silver remarked last week, “The polls and models provided the direction in contrast to vibes and dumb insiders. And yes it’s good that traders were smart enough to trust them. But the better election models were more confident about the outcome than the markets and got there more quickly.”
The betting markets behave the way they do because of the hard work of the polling firms, firms whose labors the news sites already feature. In other words, there is truly nothing — zero, zilch, zip, nada — of journalistic benefit to these gambling partnerships. There is nothing the gamblers can tell us that the pollsters did not already say.
The “prediction” partnerships are, therefore, entirely for the benefit of the hosting outlet, not the readers.
But perhaps the news outlets already know this.
Perhaps this is why they continue to insist, with more than just a hint of sheepishness, on calling these gambling platforms “prediction markets” rather than what they clearly are.