In an election cycle full of the outrageous, absurd, and ridiculous, the newfound excitement among conservatives over a betting site is pretty much top-10 territory.
Polymarket is a political betting site. Traders use crypto to place bets on the outcome of races and events. It is funded by venture capitalist Peter Thiel and happens to be statistician Nate Silver’s current employer, if you ever wonder about the ethics of running a (bullshit) predictive model while working at a gambling site. The crypto requirement means it’s heavily used by tech bros, so not exactly a representative sample of anything.
For weeks, Vice President Kamala Harris was the bet to win the election, a fact that no one outside of the site’s users cared about.
Yet over the last few days, that trend reversed, and on Monday, Trump’s chances rose dramatically. Conservatives are delirious with excitement.
Check out Russian-funded propagandists like Benny Johnson, claiming a “collapse” that has zero bearing with reality.
The conservative push seems almost coordinated, see here, here, and here. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and Donald Trump hype man, has been pushing the narrative heavily.
Note the hilarious notion that betting markets are “more accurate than polls,” which is beyond absurd. But given the lack of any real good news in recent polling for Team Trump, Polymarket has become the conservative moment’s heaviest dose of coping.
The reality, of course, is that nothing has changed in a race that has remained remarkably static despite the hundreds of millions of dollars spent and so many dramatic twists and turns. If an attempted Trump assassination doesn’t move numbers, pretty much nothing will. The electorate is locked in, vote intentions decided. The only question mark is who will vote, and how many of them. It’s a turnout game.
But sure, Polymarket, “Kamala is collapsing” makes tons of sense.
On the other side, there’s been plenty of chortling, noting that it is a well-known fact that gamblers never lose. Except when they do:
And really, political betting is as predictive as sports betting. Otherwise, the city of Chicago would collectively bet their way to a Super Bowl championship, with me happily chipping in! Just because people wager on an outcome, it has zero bearing on that actual outcome. So what exactly is happening?
A couple of rich MAGA gamblers went all in on Trump.
More speculation and analysis here, here, here, and here.
Think of what happens when buyers go all in on a stock—the price skyrockets. A bunch of kids on Reddit single-handedly rescued AMC Theaters by aggressively purchasing the stock. They recreated that success with GameStop. The problem, of course, is that the tactic was a sugar high—the stock prices eventually crashed back down to earth, as those companies’ fundamentals are challenging at best.
Whether that happens in this worthless Polymarket gambling site remains to be seen. It depends on how committed these cope-mongering Republicans are to feeding money into the wood chipper, much like they did for so long with Truth Social.
Trump’s supporters love to be scammed out of money, given how freely they let themselves be used and abused by MAGA grifters, including Trump himself. It’s not unreasonable for either crowdsourced MAGA deplorables or Musk or other wealthy Trump backers to drop a few hundred thousands on Polymarket. It gives them a fresh injection of hopium, even if the rest of the world looks at them with raised eyebrows, wondering how they could possibly be this stupid.
