A Bet Is Not a Poll
Polymarket and Kalshi offer to predict the future. Journalists should be wary, especially during elections.
G. Elliott Morris has worked on political forecasting—the process of predicting election winners through polls and other information—for much of the past decade. Most recently, he led the now-defunct FiveThirtyEight. Now he runs his own polling and analysis site, Strength in Numbers. As news organizations strike partnerships with betting markets and use their odds to forecast events, Morris knows as well as anyone that it’s dangerous to claim to predict the future—especially during election season, when readers and journalists are especially susceptible to misinterpreting data. “When you give people probabilities for electoral outcomes, you’re giving them something to play with,” Morris told me. “We do degrade part of the political process when we do that.” Betting markets such as Polymarket and Kalshi, he said, increase that degradation. “I think it is incredibly irresponsible,” he said. “I find this uncritical wholesale acceptance of their numbers as the true probabilities for the world very bad.”
Related Knowledge Center: Prediction markets
Platforms are offering a way for users trade positions — place bets — on a wide range of possible events, and newsrooms are starting to incorporate the data.
As the business rapidly grows, critics and opponents are pushing back. Numerous states have argued that the markets are gambling, and sports gambling in particular is regulated by the state. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, now led by a Trump appointee, disagrees — as did a federal district court judge in a suit involving New Jersey.
Critics see some of the markets as, particularly in the case of military actions, indefensible, and note as well that some large, well-timed bets — “event contracts” — suggest an abuse of insider knowledge of federal actions.
Related Knowledge Center: Polls and polling
Polls are considered essential to the businesses of politics and journalism. What they contribute to the quality of political journalism is subject to debate.