Dem
53
Ties
1
GOP
46
Well, we're kind of up against it, both in terms of time, and in terms of the "reasonable" word count we aspire to (5,000-6,000 words). So we'll wrap up today with a bit of dessert.
The futures market Kalshi has all kinds of political bets. Some of them are, as far as we can see, reasonably harmless. Some of them, on the other hand, are open to manipulation by bad actors. Kalshi wants to avoid regulation as much as is possible, and certainly does not want to be shut down. So, it has to at least pretend to care about removing problematic bets, and about punishing (at least) some of those bad actors. And so, yesterday, the site announced its first ever lifetime ban. Readers can probably guess who it was, if we give the hint that he's a blast from the (somewhat recent) past.
The scammer in question is everyone's favorite Congressional cosplayer, former representative "George Santos." He's almost as grifty as Donald Trump, just on a much smaller scale. How there isn't a Santos cryptocoin, we don't know. Anyhow, one of the bets on Kalshi was "Will George Santos attend Donald Trump's State of the Union address?" "Santos" posted a bunch of messages to eX-Twitter about the suit he was planning to wear, and how excited he was to hear Trump in person, and once that drove up the market for "Yes, Santos will attend," the former congressman placed a bunch of bets that he wouldn't attend. He thought he'd be laughing all the way to the bank, but he ultimately had to pay a fine greater than his winnings (which were about $20,000), and now he's banned forever. So, who's laughing now?
There was also one other political figure sanctioned yesterday. Laurie Buckhout (R) is trying to unseat Rep. Don Davis (D-NC) in NC-01, which is now R+5 after redistricting. She bet $1,000 on herself to win, which may or may not be helpful to her, politically (it shows confidence, but it also trivializes the election). It definitely did not work for her financially, as she had to surrender the futures she bought, and pay an additional $2,500 in fines. She's also banned from the site for 3 years.
If an athlete bets on themselves and/or their team (ahem, Pete Rose) to win, then that's obviously a problem because they could manipulate things to increase win chances in the games they bet on at the expense of the games they did not bet on. For example, Rose—who was a player-manager when he started betting on baseball—would overuse his best pitchers in games he'd bet on, and would keep them out of games he did not bet on. This undermines the legitimacy of the competition in a very serious way.
We're not so sure that a politician betting on themselves to win works the same way. If they're trying to win, a bet on themselves to win isn't going to change their approach to their campaign. They're not only going to use the "good" campaign manager for this campaign, and not the next one. That said, there are most certainly bets that could be abused. For example, the site is selling futures on when Iran and the U.S. will reach a permanent agreement on nuclear weapons. Someone, say a grifty president, could bet heavily on "no" futures for "Before Mar 1, 2027," and then could prevent a deal until then. So, Kalshi is going to have to seriously limit its political future options at some point soon, or else it's going to get regulated six ways to Sunday. (Z)