In Reply to: Re: Kalshi makes a jump towards GOP winning senate posted by russsmith on May 11, 2026 at 09:37:49
> THe people who are predicting the Dems take the Senate IMO are counting on the fact that Dems are outperforming the polls in virtually every race now.
I’m mostly just following the polls and Kalshi.
When I ran a binomial distribution based on the polling, it suggested roughly a 33% chance that Democrats would win the Senate. But despite that, Kalshi odds kept moving toward Democrats until the market eventually treated Senate control as essentially a 50/50 proposition. Doing similar calculations on Kalshi odds I would get Dems winning at 45% to 47%.
This week is the first real bounce back toward Republicans on Kalshi, with the GOP now slightly favored around 55/45.
What’s interesting is that the betting markets are giving Democrats strong odds in states like Georgia and Maine. In Alaska, for example, markets have Democrats as roughly 60/40 favorites, while the polling, from memory, has it tied or Republican-leaning.
The bigger question is whether the MAGA base is simply too large and stable, somewhere around 38% to 40%, for Republicans to realistically lose Senate control.
As I mentioned before, this currently feels somewhat similar to the end stage of Kamala Harris’ campaign, where her numbers seemed to hit a floor and stop declining.
The difference now is that Trump is the incumbent and still has a lot of time left. The key question is whether incumbency changes the dynamic enough to matter.