This week, I spent some time reading through the Polymarket Discord server to get a sense of the folks most invested in the platform. There were people DMing each other what looked like entirely fabricated polls supposedly before they dropped publicly and suggesting countless other election hypotheticals to place their money on. One user wrote that Polymarket was “essentially sponsoring the US election” next to an emoji of Joe Biden giving a thumbs up.
Rajiv Sethi, an economics professor at Barnard College at Columbia University, says the jury is still out on whether prediction markets are more accurate than traditional polls. But even if they were totally reliable, Polymarket wouldn’t be the most accurate of all the markets available.
“In PredictIt, you get a relatively low volume, but no trader can dominate the market. It’s very hard to manipulate PredictIt, and it’s hard for any trader who may have beliefs that are out of step with the average to have a disproportionate impact on the price,” says Sethi. “That’s not what you see on Polymarket.”
With nearly three-quarters of all the traffic going to Polymarket’s website coming from men, the platform’s clearly not inclusive of all demographics either.
But maybe being correct isn’t even the point. Already, Polymarket odds are being used as evidence that Trump is beating Harris, and Musk and other Trump acolytes are using the odds to pump up their base. I’ve seen Democrats celebrating Harris’ odds of winning the popular vote on the site too. All of this has the potential to legitimize these results as viable evidence for conspiracy theorists questioning the outcome of the election.
“Right before the race gets called, Trump and his fans are going to say Polymarket knew the truth and they silenced it. It doesn’t matter if it’s right. It doesn’t matter if it makes any sense in those few hours after the election is called,” says Mike Rothschild, an author who writes about conspiracy theories. “People are going to be looking for any sort of evidence that there was a steal, that there was rigging, that there was the blue ballot dump at three in the morning. And if they can’t find it, they’re going to make it up.”
Like Scott Nover mentioned in Slate this week, if right-wing agents like Charlie Kirk will share random text messages as proof of a weak hurricane response from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, it’s not hard to imagine them leveraging Polymarket results in their favor as well.
“You can take anything that’s going on and turn it into evidence of the thing that you believe,” says Rothschild.
The Chatroom
Hello! I’m Tim Marchman, WIRED’s director of politics, security, and science. And I wanted to take a moment to write about a new development in the world of John F. Kennedy assassination research. It’s surprisingly relevant to the presidential campaign—both directly and in the sense that the underlying pattern of government opacity at issue here does something to explain why this election is so defined by conspiracy theories about everything from microphone earrings to research of the ionosphere.
When he accepted Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s endorsement in August at a rally in Arizona, former president Donald Trump announced that if elected, he would appoint a presidential commission to release all government documents related to the assassination of JFK. “This is a tribute in honor of Bobby,” he said.