With the approach of Election Day, U.S. betting sites such as Polymarket and Kalshi are buzzing. Kalshi alone has recorded well over a billion dollars’ worth of action on the upcoming elections, a number expected to rise by November 3. Unlike the slot machine, but like the stock market, election wagering rewards people for being right about the future, for vindicating their opinions and worldviews. But what a wager on the midterms resembles more than anything is the kind of gambling that has long been the lifeblood of bookmakers and dominates Kalshi’s business: sports betting.
With baseball’s World Series wrapping up just in time for America’s general elections, the affinities between spectator sports and mass democratic politics rise to the surface. Although critics lament this affinity as a sign of recent degradation of our political culture, sports championships and elections have long attracted the same desires to predict the uncertain outcome of a competition. Americans have spoken of candidates “running” for office and of elections as “races” for so long that we no longer hear the sports metaphor. For almost two centuries, ordinary Americans have been drawn to predicting results in both arenas, and the wager has provided the ideal mechanism. Betting concretizes and capitalizes upon the prediction. It also inserts the bettor into the action and turns a spectator into a contestant – someone who wins or loses.
“Americans have spoken of candidates “running” for office and of elections as “races” for so long that we no longer hear the sports metaphor.”
Modern sports are defined in part by their suitability for wagers by people who have no personal connection to the athletes but instead are connected to the sporting event through mass media. Horse racing and boxing were the first sports in America to enjoy this kind of success, beginning in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. During the same period, electoral politics became a mass activity, with national parties mobilizing historically high voter turnout among an unprecedentedly vast electorate.
Bets facilitated and tracked these developments in mass culture. When election betting began in the early 1800s, it drew on the competitive honor culture of horse racing. In both cases, men who knew each other would flaunt large wagers at the site of the race. By the 1840s, by contrast, gambling on sports and politics was mediated through the press, where wagers were reported in the aggregate and rendered far more impersonal. A recognizably modern culture of speculating on competitions of broad public interest had been born.
Election betting was big business in the mid-nineteenth century, despite being outlawed in many states. In 1844, a Pittsburgh paper advertised to “speculators in business” that “a farm in Ohio is to be put up at auction to be paid for when Henry Clay is elected, otherwise to be had for nothing.” Like many prediction market investments today, such offers were intended to instill confidence in fellow partisans and thereby influence the election. They might also be campaign finance stratagems. Democratic editor Frank Blair staked tens of thousands of dollars on the 1844 race and used his winnings to build a Washington party headquarters whose storefront rents funded future campaigns. More typically, modest wagers by ordinary Americans were not financial plans but attempts to get in on the action. Voting was open to white adult men of all economic conditions, but the vast electorate made it hard to feel like participants rather than spectators. A bet made clear that they were competing.
To many observers, the trend was disquieting because gambling was a vice that epitomized what was distasteful or dangerous about liberal suffrage and mass democracy. More specifically, it threatened to undermine electoral integrity by substituting private pecuniary interests for the common good. Multiple state laws disqualified men who had bet on an election from casting a ballot.
In spectator sports, fears about betting on games highlighted reciprocal threats to the integrity of both enterprises. The specter of an athlete in cahoots with gambling interests haunted both the game and the bet. Baseball’s infamous 1919 Black Sox scandal, in which White Sox players were accused of throwing the World Series, provided deeply destabilizing to the sport not only because it flew in the face of baseball’s longstanding self-presentation as respectable and moral entertainment, but because the possibility that the World Series had a foreknown outcome undermined the appeal of both the contest and the wager.
Election prediction markets raise similar concerns. For every complaint that wagers skew election results, another targets the opposite problem: that political decisions manipulate a betting market for private gain. Kalshi has recently suspended multiple candidates from betting on their own races – not for election integrity but for market integrity.
The discomfiting entanglements that link betting, voting, predicting, and simply rooting for an outcome are not likely to vanish. Those practices share a long history in modern America, and they share a foundation in the peculiar predicament of individuals in mass society. Come Tuesday, millions of Americans will cast a ballot and place a bet; it won’t always be clear which one makes them feel like they’re taking part.