Gambling platforms turn up in wild election conspiracy posts — as paid partners

With California continuing to count the results in major races, Republicans continue to cling to second place in the gubernatorial primary and the mayor of Los Angeles, but the gap is narrowing as disproportionately Democratic late mail ballots continue to be processed, raising the possibility that Republicans could eventually slip to third and be locked out of one or both races.

The development has led to an explosion of conspiracy theories from MAGA activists on social media — but more strangely, reported Semafor's Max Tani, the prominent gambling platforms Kalshi and Polymarket appear to be sponsoring some of those conspiracy theory posts.

For instance, she noted, right-wing influencer account "Gunther Eagleman" posted "They're stealing it, aren't they?" in response to a Kalshi post flagging current third-place progressive Democrat Nithya Raman trading at 60 percent odds to overtake right-wing reality TV star Spencer Pratt in the Los Angeles mayoral race — and it was flagged as a "paid partnership" post with Kalshi.

In another instance, right-wing streamer Kangmin Lee quote-posted Polymarket odds trading for Raman at 71 percent, saying, "Notice how the mail-in ballots that come in last second always end up voting Democrat; Totally a coincidence, nothing to see here." This, too, was flagged on X as a "paid partnership" post.

According to Semafor, Polymarket did not respond to questions about the story; Kalshi's spokesperson said that “we’ve asked these to be taken down, as they violate our affiliate marketing policies.”

Kalshi and Polymarket style themselves as "prediction markets," where users can trade on the probability of real-world events as futures investments. Critics argue that this is essentially just a gambling market that bypasses the rules imposed by states that regulate online betting. The Trump administration sides with the market platforms and advocates for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to preempt all state gambling laws on these companies.

DISCLAIMER: The author of this article works for a gaming company.