A while back we wrote about the people getting rich betting on war — the anonymous accounts on prediction markets that kept calling U.S. military strikes with a precision luck can't explain. If that one made your skin crawl because it was about bombs, here's the companion piece that should bother you for a different reason. It's about ballots. And it's about the people you'd least want doing it: the staffers running the campaigns themselves.
The story comes from NPR's Luke Garrett, who got two campaign operatives to talk, and it works like a confession.
Picture a tight statewide race somewhere in the South. A staffer gets a look at a poll that hasn't been released yet — one showing their candidate suddenly way out front. They don't even fully believe the number; it doesn't square with the campaign's own internal data. But belief isn't the point. The point is that when that poll goes public, it's going to move the betting markets, where their candidate is currently sitting at double-digit underdog odds. So the staffer, and others on the campaign, quietly buy in before the poll drops. The poll comes out. The price jumps. Everybody cashes. And the staffer's read on the whole thing? With knowledge in hand that the public doesn't have yet, "it's almost foolish not to bet on it before it's made public." NPR confirmed the trade against market data. It wasn't a one-off, either — the staffer said this kind of thing was just normal, on that campaign and the ones after it.
Sit with the mechanics for a second, because they're almost insultingly simple. On these markets you're buying contracts that pay out if a thing happens, and the price is basically the odds — a contract going for 20 cents means the crowd thinks there's a 20% chance. Now imagine you already know something the crowd doesn't. You know the good poll is coming Thursday. So on Wednesday you buy your candidate's contracts cheap, and Thursday the rest of the world catches up and the price climbs, and you sell into the people who are only now learning what you knew yesterday. That's it. That's the trick. It isn't clever. It's just being early on purpose, using information that was never yours to trade on — the exact same move as the war bets, only here the secret is a polling memo instead of a strike package.
And it isn't one guy in one Southern statehouse race. The second staffer NPR found, who worked statewide races on the East Coast, described watching colleagues do the same thing — eyeing the wobbly market odds against the polling they were sitting on and treating it like a quick five grand on the table. This person said they personally don't touch it, but that plenty of people they knew did, especially back in the early 2020s when these markets were newer, thinner, and easier to beat. Until somebody writes real rules, they told NPR, it stays the Wild West. That phrase keeps coming up, and it's worth noticing who's using it: not critics on the outside, but the people on the inside doing the betting.
So is it legal? Here's where it gets genuinely murky, which is the whole problem. Jeff Le Riche spent twenty years at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission as a trial lawyer working insider trading and market manipulation, and his read is that what these staffers are describing could well be a violation. The federal law is clear enough in spirit: if you've got material, nonpublic information and a duty not to use it, trading on it is illegal. A campaign staffer betting on a secret poll arguably checks every box — they had a duty to keep it confidential, the poll was the very definition of nonpublic material information, and they understood exactly what they had. The evidence, Le Riche figures, would live in two documents: the staffer's employment agreement and the fine print they clicked through to open the betting account.
But knowing it's probably illegal and watching anyone get punished for it are two different things, and that gap is where the rot grows. Le Riche put his finger on the dangerous part: in any new, barely-regulated market, the fact that nobody's been hauled in yet curdles into a feeling that nobody ever will. An illusion of safety. Everyone keeps doing it because everyone keeps getting away with it, and getting away with it starts to look like permission.
It doesn't help that the referee may not even be capable of blowing the whistle. A former CFTC commissioner, Kristin Johnson, told NPR flatly that the agency hasn't built the muscle to police election betting — it hasn't developed the expertise, hasn't run the test cases, and the courts have never clearly said that insider-trading law even reaches this kind of political wager. She questioned whether the commission is staffed well enough to do the job at all, and said Congress is going to have to step in and tell it, in plain terms, what the rules are. So we've got conduct that's probably illegal, a law nobody's sure applies, and a cop who isn't sure it's allowed to make the arrest. Wild West about covers it.
Washington has noticed, sort of, in the half-hearted way Washington notices things in an election year. The White House warned its own staff off prediction markets. The Senate voted unanimously to bar senators and their aides from trading on them. One Republican, Indiana's Todd Young, called that a decent start and said it should go much further, to every elected official and government employee. A Massachusetts congressman, Seth Moulton, banned the markets outright in his office and campaign and wrote it into the employee handbook. Good. And yet — read the fine print on all of it, and you'll find the loophole big enough to drive the entire story through: none of these rules touch campaign staffers. The exact people in this report, doing the exact thing this report describes, are covered by precisely nothing.
The markets themselves have started swatting at the most flagrant cases. Kalshi — the for-profit, U.S.-regulated platform now hosting billions in legal election bets — has suspended and fined candidates caught betting on their own races, including a California gubernatorial hopeful who turned it into a publicity stunt and an editor for the YouTube star MrBeast. But candidates are the easy target, the obvious insiders. The staffers are the ones with their hands on the polling, the schedule, the strategy — the actual nonpublic information — and they're the ones nobody's watching.
Which brings the two stories together into one uncomfortable picture. More than a billion dollars rode on military outcomes this year; billions more now ride on elections. The same machine that lets a soldier cash in on a raid he helped plan lets a staffer cash in on a poll she helped commission. War and democracy, the two things this country tells itself are sacred, both quietly repriced into tradeable assets — and in both cases the people with the best seats are the people who are supposed to be serving the thing, not shorting it. The poll wasn't just a number on a screen. It was a campaign's promise to voters about what was true. And somebody on that campaign looked at it and saw a buy signal.
