This week, I spent some time perusing the Polymarket Discord server to get an idea of the people most invested in the platform. There were people DMing each other about what looked like completely fabricated polls, supposedly before they were publicly released, and suggesting countless other election hypotheses to invest in. One user wrote that Polymarket was “essentially sponsoring the US elections” alongside an emoji of Joe Biden giving a thumbs up.
Rajiv Sethi, an economics professor at Columbia University’s Barnard College, says it’s not yet known whether prediction markets are more accurate than traditional polls. But even if they were completely reliable, Polymarket would not be the most accurate of all the marketplaces available.
“On PredictIt, you get relatively low volume, but no one trader can dominate the market. It is very difficult to manipulate PredictIt, and it is difficult for any trader who has 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 at Polymarket.”
Given that almost three-quarters of all traffic to Polymarket’s website comes from men, it’s clear that the platform doesn’t include all demographics either.
But maybe being right isn’t even the point. Polymarket odds are already being used as evidence that Trump is beating Harris, and Musk and other Trump acolytes are using the odds to boost their base. I’ve also seen Democrats celebrating Harris’ chances of winning the popular vote on the site. All of this has the potential to legitimize these results as viable evidence for conspiracy theorists who question the outcome of the election.
“Right before the race is called, Trump and his fans are going to say that Polymarket knew the truth and silenced her. It doesn’t matter if it’s correct. It doesn’t matter if it makes any sense in the few hours after the election is called,” says Mike Rothschild, an author who writes about conspiracy theories. “People are going to look for any type of evidence that there was a theft, that there was manipulation, that there was a dump of blue ballots at three in the morning. And if they can’t find it, they will make up for it.”
As Scott Nover mentioned in Slate this week.If right-wing operatives like Charlie Kirk share random text messages as evidence of a weak hurricane response by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, it’s not hard to imagine them using Polymarket’s results to their advantage as well.
“You can take anything that’s happening and turn it into evidence of what you believe,” Rothschild says.
The chat room
Hello! I’m Tim Marchman, director of policy, security and science at WIRED. And I wanted to take a moment to write about a new development in the world of the John F. Kennedy assassination investigation. It’s surprisingly relevant to the presidential campaign, both directly and in the sense that the underlying pattern of government opacity at issue goes some way to explaining why this election is so defined by conspiracy theories about everything from microphone earrings to investigations of the ionosphere.
When accepting 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 JFK assassination. “This is a tribute in honor of Bobby,” he said. saying.
