What will happen in Kansas? Prediction markets offer seductive, damaging answers through wagers

Columnist Eric Thomas warns of a future where every moment can be a wager and nobody has anything to show for it. (Photo by Eric Thomas for Kansas Reflector)

I will tell my son to run the other direction.

Under no circumstances.

Don’t even think about it.

Just stay away.

If you have read my worryings before, you might think, “Not another column, Eric, about teens and social media or phone addiction or artificial intelligence.”

Unfortunately, I’m adding a new one to the list — not just for my son, but for our culture: prediction markets.

Recent coverage of these websites, which allow you to gamble on essentially any political, sports, entertainment or world news question, has ballooned recently.

Some sample questions:

• Another U.S. government shutdown by Feb. 14? Yes or no.
• Will the U.S. acquire part of Greenland in 2026? Yes or no.
• Who will be the best picture winner at the Oscars?
• Will President Donald Trump say “Biden” more than 10 times during the State of the Union address?

In late 2024, technology journalists noticed how these websites presaged the outcome of the presidential election before the cable TV pundits. Recently, other mainstream publications have covered them because of weakening federal enforcement, bursts into pop culture and a $400,000 payout for a user who predicted the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

These prediction markets, such as Kalshi and Polymarket, have a dark side though. That is why I will warn my boy.

Before we get to that, let’s use the politics of Kansas to show how they work. Each market relies on a question that will eventually resolve. For instance, one Polymarket page states, “This market will resolve according to the winner of the 2026 Kansas gubernatorial election.”

For this market, Polymarket offers two options for the winner: a Republican or a Democrat. (Sorry, independents.) For each of those options, users can predict yes (as in, “Yes, a Republican will win.”) Or, no.

The odds here are not based on Vegas or CNN pundits. Instead, the probabilities hinge on the wisdom of the masses — or, more specifically, the masses who have wagered on Polymarket on that particular outcome. The current state of the Kansas governor’s race, according to Polymarket, is this: 66% chance of a Republican and 26% chance of a Democrat.

Each market provides a historical graph charting the ups and downs of the particular question. (In the case of this governor’s race question, the graph on Wednesday coincidentally looked like an absurdly stretched version of the Kansas state map.)

Aside from that gubernatorial market, Polymarket offered four other Kansas political wagers, all of them aimed at the U.S. Senate and governor’s races in the state. (There are also many opportunities to test your ability to predict sports.) I could catalog them all here, but I am wary of propping up their legitimacy, especially after respected journalism sites agreed to partner with both markets recently.

If there is a dip or surge in the predicted success of an outcome, that is because someone bet money for or against it. Famously, a French man commissioned polling for the Trump-Harris presidential election and his wager reoriented the market to reflect his accurate faith in Trump’s win.

Therefore, wild swings signify a person’s belief in an outcome.

With that in mind, consider this. Christy Davis, a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate primary in Kansas, saw her chances on Polymarket crater from 42% to 16% seemingly all at once on Tuesday.

Why? Did someone plunk down their cryptocurrency in a bet against her because they have insider knowledge from her campaign?

More likely, someone noticed that during the past week fellow Democrat Sharice Davids toured Kansas areas outside of her U.S. House district, a move interpreted as her testing a bid to run for the U.S. Senate.

Whatever the reasoning of the Polymarket wager, the rationale wasn’t a headline directly about Davis, but instead a nuanced real-time reading of the headlines.

Some people working in prediction markets would celebrate such sensitivity and subtlety.

Some people working in prediction markets would celebrate such a scoop, if that’s what it is. They might say, “This is how prediction markets are intended to work: to factor in the wagers of folks with confidence. Why not use the expertise of people who are most knowledgeable to signal what’s coming next?”

For anyone who has played a fixed game, the answer is obvious. If the game seems rigged by people on the inside, players will walk away from the table. An even more nefarious possibility, insiders can often tilt those tables, influencing the events we are wagering on.

Even so, many people still believe they can win — especially young men. The success stories from prediction markets hold out newly affluent young men as the example.

“Last month, I made $100,000,” one told NPR.

It’s a marketing pitch that would make us roll our eyes if we saw it on a flyer in our mailbox. But I worry that it’s seductive to a generation of men who are conditioned by sports gambling and TikTok to spend 100 hours a week in front of a screen. Win the bet and digital confetti bursts on your screen. A pixelated dopamine hooray.

Unregulated wagering sadly will lead to addiction.

Here’s the compassion a Kalshi representative offered last year at an industry event: “People are adults, and they’re allowed to spend their money however they want it, and if they lose their shirt, that’s on them.”

In a future world where every event produces a chance to bet, every moment can be a wager: length of the middle school band concert, the weight of a newborn baby, the time an Amazon delivery arrives.

As a creative person, I worry about the psychology of spending thousands of hours over a year with nothing — and no thing — to show for it. No emerging product. No new restaurant. No business plan. Hundreds of reflexive wagers heaved into the ether. Endless speculation on the minutia of world politics as work. It’s such a depressing way to employ a generation’s most analytical minds.

Then there is the matter of what we are predicting. Imagine that prairie fires break out again in Kansas. Do we want a world in which Kansans can bet on when the fire will be contained? That scenario played out during the Los Angeles fires, encouraging people to wager on whether homes and people were destroyed. Wagering on such suffering is a perverse braiding together of money and misery.

If the industry seems beyond regulation, that seems to be the pose of our passive federal government. The Trump administration walked away from an investigation of the founder of Polymarket. Right on cue, the president’s son joined the board of Polymarket and is a strategic adviser to Kalshi.

The prediction markets appear to be operating in a sinister, unregulated space. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission seems ill-equipped — not to mention defanged by the current administration. Even the gaming industry (the gaming industry!) urged Kansas state legislators to enact reforms.

Yet, users can still wager on prediction markets on hundreds of trivial questions on a minute-by-minute basis, tempting the ruin of family and personal savings. This prediction market stew, so new and novel, has already soured to toxic.

For my son, I repeat my warning to stay away. But I would say the same for us all.

Eric Thomas teaches visual journalism and photojournalism at the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.