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.”