Election Odds Coming to TV as Poll Shows 60% of Americans Oppose Betting on Races
A new Reuters/Ipsos poll finds that 60% of U.S. adults oppose using prediction markets to wager on election results, even as CBS News, CNN, and CNBC prepare to bring real-time election odds to their midterm coverage.
Most Americans do not want to see election results turned into a betting market, but they are about to see the odds anyway. A new Reuters/Ipsos poll provided to Fortune found that 60% of U.S. adults oppose using prediction markets to wager on election outcomes, while only 13% support the practice and 24% remain unsure. The survey of 4,506 U.S. adults was conducted from Sept. 30 through Oct. 5 and carries a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 1.5 percentage points.
The opposition crosses party lines. According to the poll, 69% of Democrats and 61% of Republicans say they oppose election betting. Three-quarters of respondents consider prediction-market wagering a form of gambling, and only 7% said they had ever used a prediction market to bet money. «Most view prediction markets as a form of gambling, and it's clear that they do not see elections or government decision-making as appropriate subjects for it,» Alec Tyson, a senior vice president and lead pollster at Ipsos U.S. Public Affairs, told Fortune.
Despite that public sentiment, election odds are heading to major television networks this fall. CBS News announced on Sept. 30 that it would add real-time prices from Kalshi to its midterm coverage alongside its own polling. Kalshi has similar agreements with CNN and CNBC, and it licenses vote counts and race calls from the Associated Press. CBS News and CNN now share an owner: Skydance, which completed its purchase of CNN's parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, on Oct. 6.
The numbers behind those televised odds may rest on a surprisingly small group of traders. On Polymarket's global platform, the top 1% of wallets account for 68% of trading volume on 2026 congressional markets, and 80% of those markets have fewer than 100 wallets trading, according to an August analysis by the Anti-Corruption Data Collective, a nonprofit research and advocacy group.
Kalshi pushed back on the poll's findings, calling it biased and challenging how it described prediction markets and asked about wagering on government events. «It's not hard to bias a poll and this poll is biased,» a Kalshi spokesperson said in a statement to Fortune. «Ask leading questions about whether people support 'betting on war,' and you'll get the answers this poll arrived at. Kalshi doesn't even offer war markets.» The questionnaire did not use the word «war.» It described prediction markets as allowing people to «wager money on the outcome of real-world events» and then asked separately about elections, military actions, government policy decisions, and sports. A March Ipsos poll for the American Institute for Boys and Men found that just 21% of Americans were very or somewhat familiar with prediction markets. Ipsos did not respond to Kalshi's criticism by publication time.
Traders sued Kalshi earlier this year in March over its handling of a market on whether Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, would leave office. The dispute followed his killing in U.S.-Israeli strikes. Kalshi told Reuters at the time that the rules excluded death-related outcomes and that it had reimbursed trading fees and net losses.
Polymarket argues that its audience extends beyond bettors. More than 90% of visits are to view markets rather than trade, a spokesperson told Fortune. «Prediction markets are a way to get unbiased, accurate information about the events that impact our lives,» the spokesperson said. Dustin Gouker, a gambling industry analyst and author of the prediction market newsletter The Event Horizon, said election markets attract viewers by distilling polls and news into a probability, but turning those visitors into traders is a separate business challenge. He expects election trading to pick up as the midterms approach, though he doubts it will reach the level of sports betting.
Combined monthly trading volume on Kalshi and Polymarket more than doubled from about $26 billion in May to $53 billion in July, according to a September Pew Research Center analysis. Sports drove most of that increase, because athletic events offer frequent action and fast-changing odds that elections struggle to match. Gouker cautioned against treating high odds as a call of the race, pointing to Abdul El-Sayed's Michigan primary, where markets showed him as an overwhelming favorite around the close of voting before results suggested a closer contest. El-Sayed led by just under one percentage point when the Associated Press called the race. «You have to look at them as probabilities and not as these crystal balls,» Gouker said.
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