Six days out from the first major U.S. election for which election wagering is widely available across the country via numerous prediction markets, the weekly tribal gaming webcast The New Normal welcomed a pair of guests with personal experience in both politics and risking their money on prediction markets.
Hosts Victor Rocha and Jason Giles broke in their new studio with an episode titled “Who Profits When Americans Bet on Democracy?” and the guests were head-turners: George Santos, the expelled former U.S. congressman from New York who this August was banned and fined by Kalshi for trading on contracts regarding his own attendance at the State of the Union; and Mark Moran, a former candidate for U.S. Senate from Virginia who was fined and banned from Kalshi for betting on his own election.
Indian Gaming Association Conference Chairman Rocha and Executive Director Giles very much leaned into the sensational and the controversial with these bookings. As Santos himself said at one point during the conversation, “I am the best clickbait you can find.”
But the bookings were also plainly strategic. Indian Country has largely opposed the spread of prediction market sports betting, and Santos and Moran arealigned with that position.
“Kalshi is gambling, and it’s [unregulated] gambling, and it needs to be banned,” Santos said.
“When you think about the number of lives that this is gonna destroy — that not only is it democracy up for sale, it’s the future of young men,” Moran opined. “In reality, the sides are slanted. You know that the house is always gonna win. But in this, they’re telling you this is just peer-to-peer, that you’re not trading against some sophisticated quants on the other side … when in reality you are.”
Santos racks up points
In December 2023, Santos was expelled from Congress after less than a year in office for fabricating much of his personal story, establishing himself as an unreliable narrator. So mileage will certainly vary on how much stock people put into anything he says on any topic, including prediction markets and election betting.
That said, Santos displayed a dynamic personality on The New Normal and is more than capable of delivering a sound bite. His “clickbait” comment got perhaps the biggest laugh from the hosts — until he chimed in after Giles said that Kalshi, Polymarket, and Novig are everywhere with: “Novig is not everywhere. Sydney Sweeney’s rack is everywhere.”
Santos also began the conversation by deftly buttering up the outspoken Rocha, saying, “I’m always interested to meet the next sassier person than I am, and then I met you and I said, ‘Yes, finally.’”
Santos proceeded to tell his side of the story of his State of the Union betting and the subsequent Department of Justice investigation, along the way denigrating Kalshi’s head of enforcement and legal counsel Robert Denault, asking, “Did this man buy his legal degree? Did he actually pass the bar?” He proceeded to call Kalshi “bad actors” and said he and Moran reached out to other outlets about appearing on their shows or podcasts to discuss this issue but said, “Nobody wants to touch it. You know why? Either they’re on the Kalshi take or they want to be on the Kalshi take.”
Moran was more diplomatic in recounting his Kalshi experience — in which he bet $100 on himself, purportedly just as an experiment — but no less forceful in his feelings about the current wave of prediction markets.
“The beauty of [long-running political prediction market] PredictIt, that was limited to $200 max. I used to run it up on PredictIt, I love that, but there were controls, there were limitations,” Moran said. “Now you have Kalshi allowing for leverage to be used to trade. You can literally destroy yourself, become addicted before you can even have a legal drink in America. They’re hiring people to work as lobbyists with the hopes that … they’re going to go public. And then all of the venture investors for these companies, all of the executives, they’re going to cash out. The retail shareholder is going to be the one who eats it on this.”
The legal age for making a trade on a prediction market is 18, while the legal drinking age is 21.
Rocha, who has frequently used his assorted platforms to state the case against Kalshi and other prediction markets, piled on: “The big issue here — we’re talking around it — is the fact that there is enforcement and it’s very arbitrary. That’s what we’re talking about with George and with Mark. … They’re going to go after George, but they’re not going to go after this multi-billion dollar trade.”
The trouble with election betting
Santos, a Republican, lobbed bombs at assorted politicians on the other side of the aisle, though he did point out that he co-sponsored a bill with Democrat Abigail Spanberger of Virginia to ban stock trading for those in political office. Santos also owned (and then some) his alignment with certain politicians on his side of the aisle: “I love the president, everybody knows that. I’m a big ass-kisser of the president, and people hate me for it, love me, I don’t care.”
On the topic of election betting, Santos stated strong opposition.
“What’s stopping Russian oligarchs or people all across the world who are adversaries, Chinese oligarchs, from going in and influencing elections in a direction that they want?” he asked. Santos noted an unverified claim of a $700,000 position on James Talarico to win the Senate race in Texas over Ken Paxton. “That creates desperation. On the right side, people look at this and say, ‘oh, I’m not going to go vote. It’s in the bag. Talarico’s won it.’ It creates apathy. It creates a disincentivization for people to show up to vote.
“And what’s to say that money is even American? … This is literally putting foreign money into influencing the outcome of American elections.”
Santos was no less defiant in sharing his definition of what prediction markets are.
“I’m so bored with the wordsmithing that Kalshi is trying to do to justify everything they do. Contract betting, swaps, combos — it’s gambling! It’s gambling, god damn it!” Santos said. “I love going to the Mount Airy Casino Resort in the Poconos, or, whenever I’m in D.C., I go to MGM National Harbor. This is gambling. I walk into that building knowing what I’m going to do. I log into DraftKings knowing exactly what I’m going to do. I’m making a wager, right?
“We have a massive, disproportionate amount of under-21-year-olds gambling on their website that they should not be doing. We have created an addiction economy for young men in America, and largely thanks to Kalshi.”
Moran, a former Democrat who now identifies as an independent, was no slouch himself at producing sound bites on the topic of Americans aged 18-20 being able to risk money on prediction markets. He declared, “I think you’d see Thomas Jefferson rolling in his grave if he saw what was going on today.”
Regarding election betting, Moran doesn’t mind markets on major elections with high liquidity that are “much harder to sway,” but he does want a ban on smaller election markets and any sort of market — such as the State of the Union market that Santos was found to have manipulated and got banned over — that is “controlled by individuals.”
And Moran is apparently unconvinced that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission can properly regulate this activity or that the prediction markets will police themselves.
“We’re saying that they’re self-regulating?” Moran said. “Well, if they are, why didn’t they prevent me and George Santos from placing bets on ourselves with our own accounts that we had to sign up for using forms of state or federal ID? It’s wild.”
