Kalshi says its midterm audience was five times larger than its trader base

Kalshi said its 2026 midterm-election markets drew far more people looking for information than people placing trades, while trading itself surpassed $2.5 billion in notional volume. The company said viewers outnumbered traders by five to one, and that total visits to the markets were 50 times the number of traders.

In a Nov. 4 election recap, Kalshi said the midterm total exceeded the $1.3 billion in trading volume it recorded across the 2024 election cycle. The figures measure the cumulative notional value of contracts traded, rather than unique traders, viewers or money at risk.

CryptoSlate noted that Kalshi did not specify whether the two volume totals covered matching sets of markets or identical start and end dates. The company also said growth in election-market trading from 2025 to 2026 was six times faster than growth in football-market volume, and described the midterms as the first in which prediction markets had “truly gone mainstream.”

Kalshi’s figures suggest the exchange sees election contracts as a viewing product as well as a trading venue. It said three out of four users did not trade, instead using market prices as part of their information diet. Its Midterms Hub paired odds with VoteHub polling averages, FEC fundraising data, past presidential results and campaign news across every Senate, House and gubernatorial contest.

As covered in October, Kalshi had added Brier scores, low-volume tags and real-time activity feeds to provide more context around those election prices. The scores compare forecast probabilities with eventual outcomes, while markets with under $10,000 in volume received labels showing their liquidity and total trading volume.

The company’s recap also said traders correctly anticipated Democratic control of the House and Senate and a Democratic majority of governorships before Election Day. It said favorites won 479 of 487 races resolved by 6 a.m. Eastern on Nov. 4, a 98% hit rate, including 356 of 360 House races, 32 of 33 Senate races and 33 of 34 gubernatorial contests.

Separately, the Columbia Journalism Review reported that Kalshi and Polymarket used users’ betting odds in election-night visualizations, and that Kalshi trading volumes rose by hundreds of millions of dollars that Tuesday.