In 2023, the CFTC blocked Kalshi from listing contracts on the outcomes of elections. We sued in response and won. At the time, Kalshi was a small company with limited resources. All of our investors advised us against suing. We made the choice to risk everything we had built for a simple reason: election markets were too important to give up on.
Markets are the best way to aggregate information. Millions of people compete on an open exchange that incentivizes participants to think rationally, conduct research, and put conviction behind well-informed opinions. As open-source data shows, the result is trustworthy, accurate information. The Federal Reserve published a paper showing how Kalshi performed just as well, if not better, than traditional forecasting methods at predicting certain economic outcomes.
There is no topic more important for this to occur on than elections.
Just two years after launching the first election markets, Kalshi has quickly become one of the most widely-used information sources in politics. And while prediction markets have been used in past elections, 2026 marks the first midterms where they've truly gone mainstream. Kalshi data shows that election trading volume is higher in 2026 than 2024–a presidential election year–and election trading has grown six times faster than football volume in 2026, compared to 2025.
People are turning to prediction markets because they offer something traditional forecasts can't: a bottom-up signal built from the collective judgment of everyone participating. With prediction markets, there's a real incentive to be accurate because traders have money on the line. This also eliminates bias from the markets' forecasts, as Dartmouth economists have shown. Whereas polls are about what people want to have happen, prediction markets are about what people think will happen when there's actual skin in the game. This dynamic can challenge a mistaken consensus and update odds in real-time as soon as new information comes in.
Three out of every four users on Kalshi don’t trade, using the markets as an addition to their information diet. That gap is even wider on the midterms markets, where viewers outnumber traders five to one, and total visits are 50 times the number of traders. Between our app and website, Kalshi is expected to be one of the most visited platforms this election season.
Because of this, we're launching additional features to ensure that all visitors who come to Kalshi understand what the market prices represent. While prediction markets and polls can complement each other, odds on Kalshi are not the same as polling percentages. We want to make this very clear to our visitors.
Starting today, Kalshi's midterm election markets include three new features:
Brier scores: Each election market will show a Brier score, a measure of forecast accuracy that compares the market's predicted probabilities with actual outcomes. Lower scores mean more accurate forecasts.
Low volume tags: Labels will show each market's liquidity and total trading volume, making lower-volume markets easy to spot.
Activity feeds: Each market will show individual trades in real time as they happen.
Brier Scores
Prices on Kalshi are probabilities. If the markets are perfect, candidates priced at 80% should win 4 in 5 times, and lose 1 in 5 times.
To measure how close to perfect the markets are, we use a Brier score, which is a quantitative metric used in fields like meteorology to track how closely forecasts match reality (lower scores are better).
In the product, you will now see the Brier scores of each midterm market. These are calculated from millions of historical data points on Kalshi, weighted by how much volume the market has and how far away from resolution it is.
Overall, the markets have proven to be well-calibrated, trustworthy forecasts of election outcomes, especially when compared to other forecasting methods. We’re adding Brier scores so every site visitor has a transparent view into the overall confidence level they should put in each individual forecast.
Research into Kalshi's accuracy shows that even markets with low volume (below $10,000) display Brier scores on par with the world's top forecasters (who typically score around 0.1 in competitions).
Nonetheless, it’s true that forecasting success increases with additional trading volume. To make this clear to casual site observers, we are adding special tags that denote when markets are low volume.
Activity Feed
Finally, we are adding activity feeds to the main chart section of all midterm market pages.
Activity feeds show each individual trade on a particular market as it comes in – for example, a buy order for $20 on Gavin Newsom to win the 2028 Democratic nomination at a price of 14 cents.
These feeds are already displayed on Kalshi, but they are positioned at the bottom of market pages, below other features. As of today, we’ve put them higher on the page to be more prominently displayed to casual site visitors.
We are doing this to help remove confusion about how probabilities on Kalshi are created. Some people visiting our site and app say they’re unsure of what the probabilities represent, confusing Kalshi with polls or odds set by a house.
Kalshi is not a poll, nor is it an oddsmaker. The probabilities you see are the emergent result of millions of individual people trading against each other, putting money behind their opinion.
Harnessing the wisdom of the crowd is how prediction markets like Kalshi are able to produce such accurate forecasts. Raising the prominence of the activity feed in the product is an attempt to better display to casual site visitors how markets work on the back end.
