Campaign staffers looking to profit on political races are still trying to place bets on prediction markets, despite new public scrutiny toward insider trading — and internal efforts to curb the practice.
Kalshi, the biggest prediction market company, is hoping to bar political staffers from trading on their own races with a new system that flags possible violations. The company says "dozens" of staffers have tried to bet on their own candidates since May, but that it blocked the trades.
The company's new program cross-references the names of campaign staffers listed in Federal Election Commission data against its own user logs. The FEC requires campaigns to list contribution and expenditure data, including some of the names and addresses of staffers on the campaign payroll.
Robert DeNault, Kalshi's head of enforcement and legal counsel, said his team has blocked a lot of campaign trades using FEC data.
"If we're able to identify a potential match, we have markets that are associated with each of the campaigns that are flagged, and those individuals would be prevented from placing trades on those markets," said DeNault in an interview with NPR.
Still, at least one campaign operative — who is listed in FEC records — was able to trade on a race they were involved in, despite Kalshi's new monitoring program. The campaign staffer shared records of their recent trade and spoke to NPR on the condition of anonymity for fear of consequences for their future employment.
These political trades come in the midst of an election year and growing bipartisan concerns about prediction markets and the incentives they offer for insider trading and manipulation. In a recent Brennan Center report, the nonpartisan organization said election prediction markets have the potential to "fuel misinformation and efforts to influence election outcomes" during the 2026 midterms.
Kalshi's FEC monitoring program was announced in May, days after NPR reported that some campaign staffers had made thousands of dollars using insider polling information on rival prediction markets Polymarket and PredictIt.
Polymarket, which is Kalshi's top rival, declined an interview request about its efforts to stop political insider trading. Instead, the company sent a statement saying that it has made nearly 100 referrals across all its markets to law enforcement, including one that resulted in arrest.
"Polymarket's market integrity framework includes trade monitoring, on-chain transparency, reporting channels, and escalation processes to detect, review, and respond to suspicious activity across all markets, including political markets," a Polymarket spokesperson wrote.
PredictIt, a lesser-known political prediction market, also declined an interview request for this story.
FEC data is "not a panacea"
Two former FEC commissioners told NPR that Kalshi's campaign-monitoring program is a good start in the fight against political insider trading, but cautioned that FEC data is not comprehensive.
FEC reports leave a lot of campaign staffers unnamed, such as volunteers, lawyers, pollsters and subcontractors, said Sean Cooksey, who was appointed to the FEC by President Trump in 2020 and chaired the commission during the 2024 election.
"While I think this data may be helpful in giving some picture about who is working on a particular campaign, it is by no means a complete one," Cooksey said. "It is not a complete list of every person who does any kind of work for the campaign."
Lee E. Goodman, a former FEC commissioner who served from 2013 to 2018 under Trump and President Barack Obama, agreed.
"It is a constructive step," Goodman said. "However, it's not a panacea because it still leaves many people who are involved in campaigns who will not show up on FEC reports."
Other blind spots include state and city elections, which are featured on Kalshi's election page and which use separate disclosure mechanisms from FEC filings. The names of staffers' friends and family members are also outside the bounds of federal and local campaign records.
Kalshi's DeNault acknowledged that no system is perfect and said the company is working to expand campaign monitoring to local elections.
"You have to be ready to also follow up with investigations where you've detected people who've gotten around systems," DeNault said.
He did not comment on current investigations into campaign staffers or whether Kalshi has referred any campaign staffer trades to the Department of Justice. Kalshi spokesperson Jacki McGavick said the company launched more than 150 investigations into insider trading, blocked more than 100 insider trading moves and referred at least 20 cases to law enforcement in the first quarter of 2026.
Rules are "up to us," Kalshi says
As prediction markets have exploded in popularity over the last two years, the industry's federal regulator, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), has done little to police these new financial markets, largely leaving that work to the companies themselves. Trump-appointed CFTC Chairman Michael Selig has even defended prediction markets against dozens of lawsuits from states.
The lack of regulation and the unsettled law surrounding prediction markets have raised serious concerns on Capitol Hill.
At least 21 prediction market bills have been introduced in Congress this year. None has advanced through the House or the Senate.
Until then, Kalshi's top enforcement officer said, the company will regulate itself.
"It is up to us to make rules of the road for our platform, whether Congress does or not," DeNault said. "We've done that here in an expansive way in that we police all campaign individuals, whether they have insider information or not, from placing trades."
Meanwhile, the House Oversight Committee is actively investigating both Kalshi and Polymarket for their enforcement efforts against insider trading.
Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., launched the investigation after the April federal indictment against a U.S. soldier for allegedly using classified information to trade on the U.S. operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January.
Comer had threatened to subpoena the prediction markets, but both Kalshi and Polymarket are cooperating with the investigation, according to the committee.
In June, both companies gave closed-door briefings to the committee on "the measures they have in place to prevent insider trading on their prediction market platforms," according to Oversight Committee spokeswoman Jessica Collins.
The committee's investigation remains "ongoing."
Want to share more about prediction markets and campaigns? You can reach Luke Garrett via encrypted Signal chat at lukegarrett.60
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