California gubernatorial candidate Eric Swalwell delivers remarks during the California Democratic Party convention at Moscone Center in San Francisco on Saturday, February 21, 2026.
Yalonda M. James/S.F. Chronicle
People have poured more than $2.7 million into the markets on Polymarket to predict the next California governor.
SOPA Images/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Gett
SACRAMENTO – With so many California Democrats running for governor that the party faces the possibility of being locked out of the general election, one candidate is making an unusual pitch: People are literally betting on him to win.
Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Castro Valley, has hovered between 13% and 17% support in recent independent polls, putting him neck and neck with the other four leading candidates in the race. But on prediction markets like Kalshi, where people can put money on the outcome of everything from elections to football games, he’s the frontrunner. He’s posted about his odds on the markets on social media and brought them up at live events as a way of distinguishing himself from the other candidates in the close race.
“We have built the biggest coalition. We sit on top of every poll, every predictive market,” he said at a forum hosted by LGBTQ+ advocacy group Equality California earlier this month. “I need all of you on the team.”
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It’s not the first time prediction markets have become a campaign talking point – allies of Donald Trump touted his success in the markets during the 2024 election. But Kim Nalder, a political science professor at Sacramento State, said the current state of play in California’s governor primary means the markets could have a unique influence on the race.
In California’s June primary, the top two vote-getters, regardless of party, advance to the general election in November. This year, so many Democratic candidates are running for governor that they could divide the liberal vote into such small pieces that the two leading Republican candidates finish first and second. That would be a nightmare scenario for Democrats, because it would guarantee that liberal California will have a Republican governor.
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“Voters will be looking for some indication as to who the front-runners are so that they don’t waste their votes on someone who’s less likely to win,” Nalder said. “It makes sense that somebody like Swalwell would bring it up. … Voters are really eager for some cue.”
Online prediction market platforms like Kalshi allow people to place bets on wide-ranging subjects such as sports, finance, politics and currents events.
Scott Olson/Getty Images
Most trades on prediction markets focus on sports, but platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket also allow people to bet on election outcomes, putting the multibillion-dollar industry in the spotlight as the election ramps up. People have poured more than $4.3 million into the markets on Kalshi to predict the next California governor. On Polymarket, that number is over $2.7 million.
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“Are voters more likely to support a candidate because they’re doing well with investors? We don’t know the answer to that yet,” said Dan Schnur, a politics professor at UC Berkeley. “But anything that creates a sense of momentum is good for a campaign.”
Former Controller Betty Yee, one of Swalwell’s Democratic rivals in the race, said she would like to see more regulation of these markets and that she’s concerned they introduce a financial incentive tied to the outcome of an election.
“It feels like a bit of an undermining of the integrity of our democracy,” she said.
People trading on the markets could have a financial incentive to manipulate them or spread disinformation about the candidates.
“That’s my worry,” she said. “Is the information on there subject to be manipulated because the ultimate objective here is financial gain?”
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There are multiple ongoing court cases challenging the legality of the markets. On Tuesday, Arizona filed criminal charges against Kalshi, alleging the platform allows illegal gambling on election and sporting outcomes. Other states have sued the platform, making similar claims.
“Kalshi may brand itself as a ‘prediction market,’ but what it’s actually doing is running an illegal gambling operation and taking bets on Arizona elections, both of which violate Arizona law,” Attorney General Kris Mayes wrote in a statement.
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes alleged in a lawsuit this week that Kalshi allows illegal gambling on election and sporting outcomes.
Darryl Webb/Associated Press
Kalshi argues it is not a gambling company – instead it bills itself as operating financial markets where people trade on their predictions. The company has vowed to fight the charges, which a spokesperson called “meritless.” In some lawsuits, the Trump administration has sided with the company in its arguments that it is not a gambling operation and instead should be regulated by the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
California lawmakers have introduced bills this year to regulate prediction markets, including to ban platforms from allowing minors to make trades and to limit when public officials and lobbyists can do so. Gov. Gavin Newsom, raising the potential for bad actors to manipulate the markets, has also called for regulation.
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Swalwell’s campaign did not respond to questions for this story, including about whether he would support regulating the markets.
Jack Such, a spokesperson for Kalshi, said the platform is already barred at the federal level from allowing children to make trades and that the platform has internal policies forbidding people with insider knowledge from trading. The platform blocked former candidate Steve Cloobeck from trading in the governor’s race markets after he dropped out and began donating to Swalwell.
Online prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket have risen in prominence in recent years, but markets have existed in the United States to bet on elections since the 19th century, and actually predate modern polls, said Koleman Strumpf, an economics professor at Wake Forest University who studies prediction markets.
Strumpf is optimistic about the markets’ ability to predict the future, and notes they often out-perform polls. There are notable examples where that’s not true – in 2016, for example, prediction markets did not accurately forecast Trump’s win. But in 2024, they did.
“It’s real-time information,” Strumpf said. “The people in the market are generally quite smart because if they’re not smart, they’re going to lose money.”
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Unlike polls, however, prediction markets do not contain representative samples of the population. Traders on the markets are overwhelmingly young men, Strumpf said.
“In some ways, taking cues from it is kind of like thinking Twitter represents the real world or Reddit represents the real world,” Nalder said. “We’ve seen people make that mistake on many occasions where it feels like everyone around you is favoring a particular candidate so you can’t believe that they lost. I think it could be highly misleading because of the demographics.”
Strumpf said he’s studying how much of an influence the personal preferences of people trading on the markets influence their decisions. He’s skeptical they do – people participating ostensibly want to make money by predicting the winner correctly, regardless of who they like. But he said he doesn’t yet have a definitive answer.
Perhaps as a coincidence, the markets on Kalshi and Polymarket predicting the outcome of California’s upcoming election on Thursday afternoon listed five men in the lead: Swalwell, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, billionaire investor Tom Steyer, Riverside Sheriff Chad Bianco and former Fox News host Steve Hilton.
Polling, however, consistently shows former Rep. Katie Porter in that top tier, with Mahan polling significantly below her. The most recent independent poll, from UC Berkeley, found Hilton and Bianco in the lead with 17% and 16%, followed by Porter and Swalwell tied for 13%, followed by Steyer at 10%, former Attorney General Xavier Becerra at 5% and Mahan at 4%.