Kalshi takes another shot at pollsters and pundits with its midterm elections hub

Welcome to Wednesday's edition of Washington Secrets, where we have been eating pastries with the future of election forecasting as Kalshi launches its midterm elections hub. Plus, we remind you that Secrets subscribers were the first to read about Laura Loomer's about-face on Ukraine and Russia.

The prediction market Kalshi took another step today from niche economic hedging tool to its ultimate goal of putting a price on everything as it launched its midterm elections hub.

On one level, it is offering what it calls a "one-stop shop for state and federal election forecasting," with real-time market prices on Senate, House, and gubernatorial races, alongside polling and fundraising data.

On another, it is the latest challenge to conventional pollsters and news organizations as the firm's dataheads offer prediction tickers direct to consumers, undercutting the traditional election authority long enjoyed by the likes of NBC or CNN.

Kalshi's ultimate goal could even be to run decision desks, calling election day results for the networks, one adviser suggested to Secrets. The platform's selling point is that it combines the wisdom of crowds with users who have skin in the game.

“Prediction markets don’t care about spin or partisanship,” Kalshi co-founder Tarek Mansour said. “They cut through polarization and show you what the wisdom of the crowds actually believes, backed by real money, not rhetoric.”

The concept is simple. Users trade shares of a future event, such as James Talarico winning the Texas Senate race. The shares are worth $1 if the event happens, but $0 if it does not. Right now, you can buy a Talarico share for 44 cents, which means that Kalshi users believe the Democratic candidate has a 44% chance of winning.

The new hub pulls in polling averages from ​VoteHub, Federal Election Commission fundraising numbers, campaign news, and historical results. (You can see it here.)

It is a massive business. Kalshi is coming off a lucrative World Cup. It added 3 million new users during the tournament, and more than $1.2 billion was wagered on picking the overall winner, setting a record for a single market.

On Wednesday morning, Riva Sciuto, Kalshi's head of external affairs, said more money has already been wagered on the 2026 midterm elections than in the entire 2024 election cycle.

"Volume numbers are already record-breaking, and that's very exciting," she said at a breakfast launch event at a Washington hotel for campaign strategists and journalists.

INSIDE KALSHI'S WASHINGTON POWER PLAY

The new hub is designed for a different kind of user: the 75% of visitors who come to Kalshi for information instead of gambling.

And Sciuto said the platform was already working with campaigns and members of Congress to provide insights.

At present, it gives Democrats a 83% chance of flipping the House, but only a 40% chance of taking control of the Senate in November. (For the record, it currently has North Carolina, Maine, Alaska, and Ohio — barely — in the Senate flip column.)

None of this means the death of polling, said Kristen Soltis Anderson, founding partner at Echelon Insights. She said prediction markets served a different, complementary role.

"99.9% of it is not trying to predict, it's not trying to tell you what the future will be," Andersaon said. "It is trying to tell my clients how to change that future.

"And so my goal as a pollster is to help people understand what are people thinking, what are they feeling... with a goal of advising a client to say and do things that will make their outcome more favorable," she added.

Last year, Kalshi partnered with CNN, providing probability data to give viewers a live, data-driven look at public expectations for political, cultural, and economic events.

"This is just the start," said a Secrets source, who said that the ultimate ambition was to be able to call elections on the night, although Sciuto denied the idea.

"There are no plans for anything like that," she said as the launch event wound down on Wednesday morning.

Absent from the proceedings was Kalshi's chief executive. Mansour was due to fly down from New York to unveil the election hub, but was waylaid by travel problems.

Who would have forecast that?

President Donald Trump spoke to reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday about the deaths of three American service personnel in Jordan during an Iranian attack. And he appeared to throw his ally under the bus.

“We, because we have the best equipment in the world, you know, we've stopped almost everything,” he said. “But when you let other people do your job … sometimes it doesn't work out so well.”

This is more than a throwaway line. It outlines Trump's worldview, his rejection of alliances and multilateralism, and his constant refrain of allies: What have they ever done for us?

“I feel like such an a**hole for minimizing the struggle of Ukrainians for the last 5 years," Laura Loomer said on X Tuesday. "I often said I don’t care. Looking back, that wasn’t very nice of me to say.”

She is in Ukraine right now.

If you are a reader of Secrets, you knew this was coming. Last week, we reported on the campaign to persuade MAGA influencers such as Loomer to rethink their views on Russia and Ukraine. People such as Steven Moore, founder of the Ukraine Freedom Project, realized that winning over skeptics on the Right was the key to keeping up support for Kyiv in its war against Russia.

You can read how it works here.

How Markwayne Mullin went from Indian Country to Trump’s immigration enforcer: “He wasn’t brought in because of his command of CBP and ICE issues,” one DHS official said. “He was brought in to restore normalcy.” But normalcy is not what MAGA hard-liners want to see.

The kids are right about AI: "My students came to college because they want to become stronger readers, better writers, and more careful thinkers. Many have experimented with AI, but they have little interest in outsourcing the very work they believe a liberal arts education is meant to cultivate."

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