60% of Americans Oppose Election Betting as TV Networks Add Odds

Sixty percent of U.S. adults oppose using prediction markets to bet on election results, a Reuters/Ipsos poll provided to Fortune found — and they'll see election odds on their TV screens anyway this fall.

CBS News said Sept. 30 it will add real-time prices from Kalshi to its midterm coverage, alongside its own polling. Kalshi already has similar deals with CNN and CNBC, and it licenses vote counts and race calls from the Associated Press. CBS News and CNN now share an owner: Skydance completed its purchase of CNN's parent, Warner Bros. Discovery, on Oct. 6.

Yet the odds that anchor those broadcasts can rest on a thin base of traders. An August analysis by the Anti-Corruption Data Collective, a nonprofit research and advocacy group, found that on Polymarket's global platform the top 1% of wallets account for 68% of trading volume on 2026 congressional markets. Eighty percent of those markets have fewer than 100 wallets trading.

In short: the on-screen numbers Americans will watch this fall often move on a handful of accounts.

What does the poll actually say?

Ipsos surveyed 4,506 U.S. adults from Sept. 30 through Oct. 5. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 1.5 percentage points.

The numbers break down like this:

• 60% oppose using prediction markets to wager on election results
• 13% support it
• 24% are unsure
• 69% of Democrats and 61% of Republicans oppose election betting
• Three-quarters of Americans consider prediction-market wagering a form of gambling
• Only 7% said they had used a prediction market to bet money

"Most view prediction markets as a form of gambling, and it's clear that they do not see elections or government decision-making as appropriate subjects for it," Alec Tyson, a senior vice president and lead pollster at Ipsos U.S. Public Affairs, told Fortune.

Opposition crosses party lines. It doesn't, however, cross into experience — barely one in fourteen respondents has actually placed a bet.

Why is trading volume booming anyway?

Public approval and trading volume measure different things. Combined monthly global volume on Kalshi and Polymarket more than doubled, from about $26 billion in May to $53 billion in July, according to a September Pew Research Center analysis. Sports drove most of that increase.

Users buy and sell contracts on whether an event will happen; winning contracts pay $1, losing ones pay nothing. Those totals cover all trading and count contracts at their potential $1 payout rather than their purchase price — they don't represent company revenue or cash traders spent.

Sports offer what elections struggle to match: frequent events and fast-changing odds, said Dustin Gouker, a gambling industry analyst and author of the prediction market newsletter The Event Horizon. A game can move odds within minutes as teams score. A poll or campaign development moves an election market once.

"I don't think it's necessarily that election trading isn't popular," Gouker told Fortune. "It's more that it doesn't feature some of the things that we see in these markets that are seeing more volume."

How did Kalshi respond?

Kalshi called the poll biased. "It's not hard to bias a poll and this poll is biased," a Kalshi spokesperson said in a statement to Fortune. "Ask leading questions about whether people support 'betting on war,' and you'll get the answers this poll arrived at. Kalshi doesn't even offer war markets."

The questionnaire didn't use the word "war." It described prediction markets as allowing people to "wager money on the outcome of real-world events," then asked separately about elections, military actions, government policy decisions, and sports. It did not measure familiarity — and a March Ipsos poll for the American Institute for Boys and Men found just 21% of Americans were very or somewhat familiar with prediction markets.

"We welcome research on our industry, but a clearer picture would come from research that measures familiarity, uses neutral wording, and reports all responses," Kalshi said.

Ipsos did not respond to Kalshi's criticism by publication time.

Kalshi has faced trader disputes before. Users sued the exchange in March over its handling of a market on whether Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, would leave office, a dispute that followed his killing in U.S.-Israeli strikes. Kalshi told Reuters the rules excluded death-related outcomes and that it had reimbursed trading fees and net losses.

Are election odds the same as election forecasts?

Polymarket argues its audience extends well beyond bettors. More than 90% of visits are to view markets rather than trade, a spokesperson told Fortune. "Prediction markets are a way to get unbiased, accurate information about the events that impact our lives," the spokesperson said.

Gouker expects election trading to pick up as the midterms approach, though he doubts it will reach sports-betting levels. He expects the 2028 presidential election to draw more trading than this year's midterms.

He also cautioned against reading high odds as a call of the race. Markets showed Abdul El-Sayed as an overwhelming favorite in his Michigan primary around the close of voting, before incoming results suggested a closer contest. El-Sayed led by just under one percentage point when the Associated Press called the race.

A candidate with a 70% chance of winning still has a 30% chance of losing. "You have to look at them as probabilities and not as these crystal balls," Gouker said. That's the frame viewers will need when the odds hit their screens this fall.

By Grace Kim