Here is a civics-class question that should make every voter a little uncomfortable: if a candidate can legally raise money, buy ads, hire staff, and shape the message, why should it feel different when that same candidate puts cash on the outcome of their own election?
Because it is different. Not always in the way people assume, but in the way a constitutional system survives. The Constitution is not just a set of permissions. It is a trust machine. And when public trust breaks, everything else becomes harder: elections, legitimacy, and peaceful transfers of power.
Join the Discussion
What happened
Kalshi, a prediction market platform, took action against three candidates who traded on contracts tied to elections they were personally running in. Kalshi imposed fines and five-year suspensions, framing the punishments as a response to “unfair or improper trading.”
- Minnesota State Sen. Matt Klein, running for the Democratic nomination for Minnesota’s 2nd congressional district, agreed to pay a $539.85 fine and accepted a five-year suspension. He later said he placed a $50 bet because he was “curious about how it worked,” and he apologized.
- Ezekiel Enriquez, a former candidate in a Republican congressional primary in Texas, was fined $784.20 and suspended for five years. According to Kalshi’s filings, he purchased less than $100 worth of contracts tied to his own race. He lost the primary in March.
- Mark Moran, a Virginia Senate candidate who ran in a Democratic primary and is now running as an independent, received a $6,229.30 fine and a five-year suspension. Kalshi said the higher penalty reflected that Moran “did not accept responsibility.” Moran wrote on X that he bet on himself to “get caught” and draw attention to the issue. He also said he disputed an initial fine because he believed being required to make a public statement would violate his First Amendment rights.
Kalshi pointed to these cases as examples of internal monitoring while scrutiny of prediction markets increases over suspicious bets on major events, including war, foreign policy, and political races. Kalshi has also issued a $20,000 fine to a video editor for popular YouTuber MrBeast after the editor placed thousands of dollars in bets about YouTube videos. The company also fined and suspended a 24-year-old California gubernatorial candidate who placed about $200 in bets on himself.
The constitutional issue is not gambling
You can search the Constitution cover to cover and you will not find the word “betting.” That is not where the real fight lives.
The constitutional problem is the same one that keeps showing up in different outfits across American history: conflicted power. When someone with official influence can personally profit from outcomes they can shape, the system starts to smell like something the Framers recognized and feared, even if the technology is new.
At the federal level, the Constitution tries to protect legitimacy in a few blunt ways. It is heavy on structure and light on ethics language, but the logic is there.
- The Elections Clause places primary responsibility for election rules with states, while giving Congress a backstop to alter those regulations for federal elections. The point is not micromanagement. The point is preventing a single interested actor from writing the rules alone.
- The anti-corruption architecture shows up in things like the Emoluments Clauses and the Ineligibility Clause. Different contexts, same theme: public office should not become a personal profit engine.
Prediction markets add a modern twist. The wager is private. The incentives are public. And the public cannot easily tell the difference between “I made a symbolic bet” and “I found a way to profit from the chaos I helped create.”
Three policy questions
1) Can the candidate influence the price or the outcome?
If a candidate’s actions can move the market, then the candidate is not a normal trader. A campaign announcement, a strategic withdrawal, even a decision to amplify claims of fraud can affect perceived odds. When the trader is also the candidate, the market becomes a mirror that the candidate can tilt.
This is why “but it was only $50” does not end the conversation. Small sums can still create perverse incentives, especially if the goal is not profit but signaling, publicity, or sabotage.
2) Is it effectively insider trading on your own conduct?
When a candidate knows what they are about to do, they possess information the public does not have yet. In a normal election, that is just politics. In a prediction market, that can become something like trading on nonpublic information about your own future decisions. That is a category of conflict we already treat as toxic in other areas of law and ethics.
3) What does it do to public trust?
Even if a candidate never rigs a thing, the optics are ugly because the public is being asked to accept a basic premise of elections: that candidates want to win for political reasons, not because they have a side bet on the outcome.
In an era where suspicion travels faster than evidence, adding personal wagers is like pouring lighter fluid on a campfire and then acting surprised at the flare.
The First Amendment argument falls short
Moran’s explanation is worth taking seriously because it raises a real constitutional instinct: political speech deserves breathing room, and compelled speech is suspect.
But Kalshi is not a public park. It is a private platform with rules designed to prevent manipulation. Candidates are not being punished by the state for expressing opinions. They are being removed from a marketplace because their participation creates a built-in conflict.
Could government regulation raise First Amendment questions? Possibly, depending on how it is written. But the cleanest solution is also the oldest: treat candidacy like fiduciary responsibility. You do not get to take personal positions on a market that you can directly affect.
Should candidates bet on themselves?
In my view, no. Not because every candidate who bets is corrupt, but because the constitutional system depends on credibility more than it depends on cleverness.
If you are on the ballot, you should be barred from trading contracts tied to your own contest, full stop. That is not moral panic. That is conflict-of-interest hygiene.
There is a narrow exception some people will propose: allow a candidate to buy “yes” shares of themselves as a confidence signal, capped at a small amount. But that exception misunderstands what elections require. Elections require losers who accept the loss. A candidate with money riding on the outcome has a new incentive to dispute results, claim sabotage, or inflame doubt. The cap does not fix that incentive. It just makes it cheaper.
What a sensible rule looks like
If prediction markets are going to touch politics, then the rules need to be as blunt as the problem:
- Candidate blackout: if your name is on the ballot, or you have filed to be, you cannot trade that contest.
- Campaign and staff restrictions: extend the blackout to campaign committees, staff, consultants, immediate family, and any entity materially controlled by the candidate.
- Clear enforcement: automatic suspensions and transparent fines, with an appeal process focused on facts, not theatrics.
- Disclosure triggers: if an elected official trades election-related contracts at all, require a public disclosure similar in spirit to financial disclosures, even if the dollar amounts are small.
None of this requires rewriting the Constitution. It requires remembering what the Constitution assumes: that power will look for angles, and that a republic survives by closing the most obvious ones.
The deeper lesson
When the public starts treating elections like a sporting event, we get politics that looks like sports: team loyalty, trash talk, and a refusal to accept the final score. Prediction markets are not the cause of that shift, but they fit the mood.
The question is whether we want candidates to participate in that mood financially.
The Constitution does not promise us pure motives. It promises us a structure that can withstand mixed motives. Letting candidates wager on their own races is an invitation to mix motives in the one place we cannot afford it: the legitimacy of the vote.