An Interview with political journalist Dave Weigel

David Weigel is a veteran political journalist at Semafor who extensively covered the 2024 election campaign. Over the years, he has worked for The Washington Post, Bloomberg, Slate, and Reason among other publications.

Weigel recently spoke to Kalshi's Terry Oldreal about the political landscape for Trump’s second term, the public’s mistrust of the media, and whether prediction markets can play a role in combating misinformation.

This interview has been edited for length & clarity. Opinions presented are not financial advice.

Kalshi: I’d like to talk a bit about the public's current lack of trust in the mainstream media. Obviously, as a reporter, you've dealt with that yourself. That said, what's developing online, in terms of influencers, is arguably worse, at least in some respects. So what do you make of the current situation?

David Weigel: I feel something that is being lost in real time is an understanding of how facts in front of you are collected—facts in a legal complaint, facts in a news story.

One of my perennial frustrations is that people just don’t really have an understanding of, if you see something on the news, what went into proving it? Because their view of what the news is is so different.

They’ll see a short clip from a TV channel, or they’ll see somebody claiming something on X, and do they know how to separate that from something that has been reported and run through lawyers and a copy desk? I don’t think they do. Not because they’re stupid, but because they’re busy.

Kalshi: As a tool for separating fact from bullshit—do you think there's any room for something like a prediction market, where people have real money on the line, and when they choose to buy into something, they’re actually punished financially if they are wrong?

For example, the 2020 election. To me, it was very clear that it was not going to be overturned. But, there were a lot of people throwing their money up on the other side.*

David Weigel: When it comes to 2020, yeah, that would have been a good thing to bet on. Because if you had covered the efforts to get an election canceled, or to throw votes out, or whatever else, you had knowable facts about what the statutes were, and you had somewhat knowable facts about who the judges were that were going to be hearing these complaints.

I see your point with the media’s role in this. I feel like it can coexist with knowing which media is giving you reported information and which isn’t.

That’s very specific, but I feel like, yeah, betting on political outcomes based on actual gathering of knowledge is a pretty good BS check.

*Note: 2024 Presidential polling would have been a more recent example, but I couldn't trade on that because I work here, so I'm living in the past.

Kalshi: Has anything surprised you about Trump’s first few weeks in office?

David Weigel: Surprised me? Not really. I'd say it’s almost exactly what I expected.

Kalshi: Okay, how about Elon Musk and Doge in particular? Not necessarily what he's trying to do, but the way he's going about it. Has that caught you off guard at all?

David Weigel: It’s just what I was expecting. [2024] was a fairly substantive campaign. There are campaigns where there's not a lot of weekly back and forth about what the campaigns would do with power.

I think the 2004 election was pretty stupid, where we just had weeks wasted on Vietnam, things like that, right?

You had a campaign in 2024 with Democrats burning a lot of their clock on Biden and defending him from what became indefensible—his age and his ability to do the job.

But the Harris-Trump campaign was pretty substantive.

Maybe you've heard some Democrats say, “Oh, he didn't run on gutting U.S. aid,” or something like that. But he generally ran on a bunch of aggressive uses of executive power to undermine the way that the administrative state had been built.

And if you covered the campaign at all in a serious way, or you covered Trump in a serious way eight years earlier, you knew he was going to do that. So I actually think the political media has been pretty on top of this.

Kalshi: In terms of what they'll actually accomplish—the stated goal was initially $2 trillion in cuts for Doge. Then they walked it back and said that was the best-case scenario, changing it to $1 trillion.

But our markets right now are forecasting, for this year, $85 billion. Before 2029, we're looking at $355 billion.

Do you think the markets are more in tune with what they’ll actually accomplish? Or do you think traders are underestimating Trump and Elon’s abilities?

David Weigel: At the risk of sounding cynical, I’ll start with this.

Pollsters will tell you that people don't know how much the government spends on foreign aid. They assume it's much more than it is.

If you ask people, “How much of the budget goes to foreign aid?” they’ll guess something like a quarter, and it’s actually less than 1%.

Now, does that mean that they are conflating military spending with foreign aid? For example, if you stop somebody in Aldi and ask him about aid to Israel, does he conflate military aid with other aid to Israel? I think he might.

But I think Elon is somebody who's interacted a lot with the federal government and has made billions of dollars from defense contracts. He's not ignorant of how the government works. I think he was sophisticated about where people thought waste was coming from.

And I think that politically, he’s taking advantage of voters thinking that the budget could be balanced right now without much pain to Americans.

And if you're out there saying, “actually, everyone's wrong about foreign aid,” you're butting up against the availability heuristic. If people have heard something and then you tell them they're wrong, usually their first impulse is, No, I'm not. I'm right. If they heard on 100 podcasts that we spend a quarter of the budget on foreign aid, and you tell them it's 1%, a lot of their reactions are going to be, "Well, that’s not right. I can't have been wrong."

It's a really good information environment for Musk et al to operate in, even when you set aside Musk owning Twitter, 

So that’s the long-winded way of saying: Are they going to hit their goals without cutting anything that people care about (Social Security, health care, etc.)? I don't think so.

Kalshi: To your point, our traders think there's only a 32% chance of any reduced military spending this year.

I want to hit on a few other things. You've been following the Eric Adams situation. Do you believe he will be removed by the governor?

David Weigel: If you were betting on this, the inputs would need to include, for example, Kathy Hochul’s political bravery, which has not been dynamic.

She's not operating like a Ron DeSantis who will stretch the limits of her power.

Like, you can see what [Adams] is doing, which is a little silly. He’s arguing that it would be bad for this governor to remove the second Black mayor of New York.

She would, of course, be removing him to make room for the third Black mayor of New York. But you see how desperate he is.

Will she do it? Maybe not. But is he politically dead anyway?

Kalshi: His odds to be the Democratic nominee are 5%.

David Weigel: That’s ambitious.

Kalshi: Right now, our odds have him leaving before April at 22% (Note: they now dropped to 6%).

David Weigel: That seems fine. It really just is a matter of if something happens and she says, “Screw it.” And that would be it. She has the power to do this right now.

Kalshi: My next question is about RFK.

Right now, his odds of ending recommendations for vaccines are at about 72% for COVID, 35% for HPV, and 30% for influenza/flu shots.

Do you think that's realistic in terms of the recommendations themselves being pulled back by the feds?

David Weigel: I don't know enough about it. But I guess my back-of-the-napkin note is that it’s possible Kennedy presides over better health outcomes because a lot of people are taking GLP-1s now.

So unless they're banned, it'll keep happening.

Kalshi: We actually have a market about quarterly Ozempic prescriptions increasing. That's an interesting take. 

David Weigel: Yeah. There wasn’t, like, a new Trump anti-AIDS policy. They inherited PrEP and all these other things that had been built over the years. So they just inherit a good situation.

But I don’t know enough about it.

Kalshi: Let’s move on to the 2028 presidential race. Our current odds have:

Is there a frontrunner right now, or is it just too soon to tell?

David Weigel: No, there is no frontrunner. There is a vice presidential candidate who lost the election, but historically, Democrats do not go back to that well.

I'm glad that people are not betting on Michelle Obama, who doesn’t want to do it, or Harris, who is not inclined to do it.

There are governors who have been very good. I think Pritzker is probably underrated in this climate.

If the Democratic electorate could have chosen from scratch [in 2024], they would have been pretty happy with a Whitmer-Shapiro ticket, or a Shapiro-Moore ticket, or a Shapiro-Pritzker ticket.

But they don't have a frontrunner. They don’t have somebody who is clearly in a position to scare people out of the race.

Kalshi: Our current Republican nominee odds are:

It sounds like you're operating under the assumption that Vance will be the Republican nominee.

David Weigel: I'm assuming. I think he's been weirdly underrated by both Republicans and Democrats.

The reason Democrats are maybe not sure if he’ll be the nominee—or they're not worried about him—is he just doesn't have that Trump biographical appeal.

I mean, you can listen to a New York hip-hop track from the ’80s, and they mention Donald Trump as a stand-in for wealth.

And they don't do that for JD Vance.

Kalshi: True, but I’d like to hear that song.

That brings us to 2028. This far out, the current odds in our 2028 presidential market are about 50/50 between a Democrat and a Republican winner.

Do you think that's fair, or does one party have an advantage?

David Weigel: There is no great historical precedent for this.

Vance would be serving as the second vice president for a president who served two non-consecutive terms and then running on his own right. That has never been done. So he'd be trying to do something that has never been done.

That’s why whenever somebody says, “Historically,” it's like, “Well, there is no history here.”

And you've got to square up the weaknesses of Democrats and their current coalition, which, you know, gets you 48% of the vote but loses as much as it wins.

And for Republicans, there will be some natural voter exhaustion to deal with. But I don't know how it plays if it's non-consecutive terms. So I think 50/50 is a good place to start.

Follow David Weigel on X: @DaveWeigelFollow Terry Oldreal on X: @realOldTerryFollow Kalshi on X: @Kalshi

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