Kalshi’s Michigan Senate market passes $33 million as El-Sayed holds commanding odds

Kalshi users had wagered more than $33 million on Michigan’s Senate race by Nov. 2, as the platform’s market continued to put Democrat Abdul El-Sayed well ahead of Republican Mike Rogers on the eve of the election.

By Tuesday morning, both Kalshi and Polymarket put El-Sayed’s implied probability of winning at nearly 80%. That was broadly consistent with the FiftyPlusOne polling tracker, which showed him leading Rogers by an average of five to six percentage points as of Nov. 2.

The market had strengthened modestly from the position recorded in our Oct. 31 report, when Kalshi assigned El-Sayed a 77% chance of victory, against 23% for Rogers. At 10:30 a.m. ET Tuesday, a $1 Kalshi contract backing El-Sayed would return $1.24 if he won, while a $1 contract against him would return $4.27 if Rogers prevailed.

Polymarket did not display a cumulative total for trading in the Michigan contest. Its contracts work as binary outcome shares: prices reflect the market’s estimated probability, move with supply and demand, and winning shares redeem for $1 once the result is settled.

The contest had drawn national attention in its final days. Donald Trump and members of his cabinet had strongly backed Rogers, while former Democratic primary candidate Haley Stevens withdrew her support for El-Sayed and endorsed Rogers less than 48 hours before Election Day. Stevens had lost the August primary to El-Sayed by about one percentage point.

The late split underscored the unusually close political backdrop to the market’s confident pricing. Democrats viewed Michigan’s open Senate seat as important to their effort to retake the chamber, although NPR reported that polling suggested a potentially narrow general-election result. El-Sayed would become the first Muslim American elected to the Senate if he won.

Prediction-market prices are estimates rather than guarantees. The University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public noted that conventional forecasts combine polling with economic, electoral and demographic data, whereas prediction-market odds reflect participants’ bets. A Brennan Center for Justice study found that voters were 10 to 20 percentage points more likely to believe a candidate would win when markets favored that candidate, even if polls pointed elsewhere.

The broader election-contract market had expanded sharply. Kalshi said its total midterm trading volume exceeded $1.3 billion, while combined Polymarket and Kalshi volume reached $21 billion in October, according to the Guardian. A Vanderbilt University study of 2,500 political markets found final-five-week accuracy of 67% on Polymarket and 78% on Kalshi, but recent contests also produced conspicuous misses, including primary races in Wisconsin, Los Angeles and Illinois.

The Michigan race therefore offered another high-volume test of whether an overwhelming market price could prove more informative than a close polling contest.