Sporting events, newspapers, and TV networks are regularly sponsored by gambling platforms, which studies and data are increasingly showing to be detrimental to Americans’ health and financial wellbeing. Even amateur competitions of various kinds are being bet on by strangers through online platforms that stream them. It’s only natural that some of the piles of cash being pushed around the gambling internet would end up in wagers on political outcomes.

Gone are the days when PredictIt, a pseudo “stock market” for politics, was the sole means of making some extra money on elections, polling, and political prop bets. The new political betting platform is Polymarket, which allows users to place bets far in excess of the $850 cap per contract set by PredictIt. 

All Polymarket bets are made with USDC, a cryptocurrency stablecoin whose value is pegged to the U.S. dollar. Polymarket differs from casino gambling and the traditional sports betting apps in that Polymarket bets are not placed against the house but against the bets of other users (they’re essentially the same thing).

Polymarket also differs from traditional gambling because many of the odds they offer on political outcomes are not grounded in reality even a little bit. Why do the work of assessing polling aggregates, weighing public opinion, and analyzing electoral trends to determine probabilities when you could just add up the money being put on the virtual table by a group of  very online cryptocurrency enthusiasts? Bucks County swing voters, eat your hearts out. These guys spend thousands of dollars on Bored Ape JPEGs, and we should trust them.

And GOP operatives are doing just that. Polymarket’s odds and wager totals are incorrectly being interpreted as “polls” by credulous right-wingers, who have passed this fundamental misapprehension on up to the Republican presidential nominee. During a press conference in North Carolina Monday—he was ostensibly there to survey hurricane damage—Donald Trump likened Polymarket’s presidential ticket odds to credible polling while also conveying his perplexity at the whole thing:

Look, if you believe in what’s happening with the polls, if you believe in what’s happened, they have a new phenomenon. Now, they call them the betting polls. I don’t know—people are gambling on them. I can’t imagine that’s a proper thing to do, but perhaps they are. But one of them just came out. I guess the big one, we’re 63 to 33, something like that. That’s a pretty big margin. I don’t know if they know what they’re doing. I have no idea who they are, but it’s a very big poll and they quote it all the time on television.

Right-wing personalities have also latched on to the Polymarket odds. Shock jock Steven Crowder posted on X that “No one has seen a lead like this in recent history.” Crowder is correct in one important way: Hubert Humphrey and Dick Nixon never led one another in online cryptocurrency betting markets. The internet was still 15 years away in 1968, and cryptocurrency was still more than four decades out.

Mark Mitchell, the head pollster at Rasmussen Reports, a flimsy polling operation whose staffers regularly deny the results of the 2020 election, posted that Trump has significant leads in battleground states on Polymarket.

These big Polymarket margins make sense when you realize Trump has gotten a boost from one of his loudest surrogates, who also happens to be a prominent cryptocurrency advocate: Elon Musk. 

Since October 6, when Musk declared Polymarket to be “more accurate than polls, as actual money is on the line,” Trump’s lead there has widened to almost 30 points. Meanwhile, the polling average at RealClearPolitics shows a dead heat, with Harris leading by a bit less than one percent.

The reality, as attested in actual polling, is that the presidential election is currently a tossup. Now, I don’t mean to encourage anyone to take up a bad habit. But the widening gap between Polymarket’s odds—which are based on the wagers its addled users have made—and the odds derived from polls is creating some curious possibilities for people who enjoy recreationally lighting money on fire. For instance, let’s say you think that Harris is going to pull it out. If you bet $10,000 on that outcome on Polymarket today, you would stand to make $27,293.48—a profit of $17,293.48—after she wins. 

If you bet something a bit safer—for instance, that Biden will finish his term by January 20, 2025—then you could make some quick cash on a very slim margin (the current odds on Polymarket say Biden has an 89 percent chance of running through the tape). Nothing is certain, of course, but a $10,000 bet would net you more than $1,100 from that wager. (Minus the cost of any multivitamins you end up sending him in the mail.)

Because these bets are often lopsided and at odds with reputable polls and surveys, Polymarket makes it easy to game the system. I spoke to one regular user who has made hundreds of dollars by betting on sure things during the Republican and Democratic national conventions this summer. Was Michelle Obama going to announce a presidential run before August? Of course not. A hundred-dollar bet yielded him a few bucks. But if an individual had obscene amounts of money to play with, as some particularly fortunate and/or unscrupulous members of the crypto community do, that person could easily win thousands on sure bets.

Riskier bets include the question of whether Kamala Harris and Donald Trump would shake hands at their debate last month. Moments before the candidates took the stage, the Polymarket odds of it happening were pegged at just 32 percent. (In the past two elections, the candidates have ditched good sportsmanship or adhered to COVID-19 distancing rules.) Some users—including the one I spoke to—walked away with thousands of dollars after Harris made a point of going over to Trump to initiate a handshake.

Some non-American bettors are also getting in on the action. A recent Reuters report indicated that four accounts—with possibly one single person behind them—have bet millions of dollars on Trump to win the race, potentially netting $43 million.

Betting on anything is exceptionally risky, but Polymarket’s lopsidedness might make certain gambles less of a, well, gamble. It almost seems safer than sports betting. I just hope the “Fox News Decision Desk, Sponsored by Polymarket” isn’t in our future, although I’m not sure I’d bet against it. 

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If you saw Donald Trump’s staged drive-thru shift at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania this week, you might have wondered whether the corporation authorized the visit. It turns out the company did, but it also made the case that their doors are open to everyone. Executives had agreed to let Trump in at the request of a franchisee who wanted to invite him.

The memo from McDonald’s also declared that they do not endorse political candidates and that Trump is no exception. Harris, who worked at McDonald’s in her youth, could also do a photo-op shift if she so pleased. 

But any sicko who knows the ins and outs of campaign finance knows that McDonald’s does indeed back political candidates and organizations. Through their corporate political action committee, McDonald’s cuts checks to both parties. They have maximized their support for members of leadership, allies of the beef industry, and even the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus.

Corporate PACs oversee funds that are pooled from a company’s employees, which are then directed to the campaigns of their allies in government. A small sample of McDonald’s donations this cycle includes:

In addition, McDonald’s is a major influence peddler in Washington. According to OpenSecrets, the company has spent $1,400,000 on lobbying in 2024 alone, with their biggest spending year occurring in 2023. 

Corporations have a bottom line to maintain, which is why they utilize these corporate PACs. A staged Trump visit paired with an open invitation to Harris to do the same is a PR tool. Regardless, McDonald’s customers aren’t going to start going to Burger King over a Trump fry stop, regardless of how polarizing they found it.

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As we enter the final two weeks of the election season (assuming it doesn’t bleed into January—fingers crossed), I want to say a quick thank you to the Press Pass readers who open and read this newsletter every week.

It’s a pleasure to be able to report on the chaos, the dysfunction, and the downright weirdness to help you understand the political landscape just a little bit better. I hope you’ve enjoyed it, and if you didn’t quite enjoy it, I at least hope it helped you preserve your sanity. Our Bulwark+ community is the best subscriber community of any publication in the world. If you haven’t taken the step of joining Bulwark+ already, we’d love to have you aboard.

Correction (5 p.m. Oct. 22 2024): An earlier version of this article incorrectly listed Rep. Sharice Davids’s state as Oklahoma. She represents Kansas’s 3rd district.