Polymarket and Kalshi miss South Carolina Senate and Texas governor calls
Prediction markets Polymarket and Kalshi incorrectly forecast that Darline Graham would win the South Carolina Senate race and that Greg Abbott would win the Texas governor race, according to published November 10, 2026. The misses came from two CFTC-regulated platforms that had promoted their midterm accuracy. Separately, the two venues drew more than $50 million in combined bets on Mississippi's U.S. Senate race ahead of that contest, though odds favored one candidate without resolution.
The South Carolina and Texas misses give state attorneys general in Ohio and Tennessee concrete evidence against the platforms' core defense. They argue event contracts amplify sentiment rather than predict outcomes; two wrong calls on high-profile races weaken the forecasting-utility claim ahead of likely 2027 proceedings. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Kevin Curtis have already demanded internal trading data under bipartisan deadline, so accuracy gaps enter the congressional record directly.
Record midterm volume means millions of retail users entered through Bloomberg and CBS News embeds, exposing more capital than any prior cycle. Those users lack tools to distinguish signal from positioning. A rigorous third-party audit now gives both litigators and lawmakers a common dataset to test whether markets predict or merely gamble.
The misses join a running post-midterm accuracy debate that already includes The Times' audit of 428 races, a $917,000 trader gain on Democratic sweep positioning, and a WWLP22 House test, as platforms face parallel state lawsuits.