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“Bingo,” Michael Durham said. “It’s here.” Durham, a seventy-two-year-old former salesman of, among other things, cable TV, who lives in Albuquerque, told me, “I can sit in my underwear and bet on whatever games I want till the cows come home.” We were speaking of online sports betting. “I’ve always had an interest in gambling, from the first time I went to a horse track when I was fourteen,” he said. “I just thought the whole deal was pretty cool and exciting. All my life I have been a bettor.” Durham connected this to a larger interest in predictions: “Who’s going to win this election? Is the temperature going to exceed a hundred degrees anywhere in the month of May in Los Angeles? There are a million propositions. I’m instinctively interested in those things, as I think a lot of people are.”
Durham first heard about the prediction markets Kalshi and Polymarket from following the news. But when we spoke, he didn’t yet know that Kalshi, which wants to “financialize everything,” now partners with CNN and CNBC, and has a “sponsored integration” with Fox News. Durham liked the idea of “making a wager of some sort on the outcome of a future event, whether it’s a ball game on TV tonight or a political election scheduled sixty days from now.” Even so, he worried about “war profiteering and death and destruction. That’s not cool.” He’d heard about Emanuel Fabian, the Israeli journalist who said he was being threatened by Polymarket bettors urging him to “update the lie” he published, a piece of news that had delivered them a loss. And he’d read about alleged signs of insider trading at Polymarket.
Research suggests that people over the age of sixty-five represent a large and growing fraction of gamblers in the United States. They also constitute a major demographic for cable news: as I wrote in 2023, older people consume TV news disproportionally. Nevertheless, as Jonathan C. Baker, the chair of the psychology department at Western Michigan University, put it in a paper for Analysis of Gambling Behavior, older adult gamblers are apparently “the Jackalope of behavior analysis”: even though there are so many older people gambling (including those playing bingo in nursing homes), it is hard to find much present-day research on them. Notably, though, some researchers in France have looked at older adult gamblers through the lens of the “Silver Economy,” observing that the “occupational, emotional, financial, and health-related changes experienced by this population mean that they have a lot of free time available and a different relationship with money, leisure, and the future.”
This is also a reason that older adults consume the televised news—and therefore, at this point, the Kalshi-bolstered coverage at CNN, CNBC, and Fox. “Prediction markets offer just one source of data that journalists can use in telling a story,” a CNN spokesperson told me. “It is best used as a complement to other reporting and data sources, such as polling. It is not a replacement for other sources and has no impact on editorial judgment.” CNN gave me no indication that it was tracking the impact of exposing older viewers to prediction markets. CNBC declined to comment. Fox pointed me toward a press release noting that Kalshi data has been adopted by other newsrooms as well as the Federal Reserve.
Lia Nower—a distinguished professor, associate dean for research, and director of the Center for Gambling Studies at Rutgers University, who studies older adults, among others—told me that she was “not at all” surprised by prediction markets’ ventures into cable news. Some electronic sports betting falls into a category known as “event contracts,” which is highly unregulated (though certain states, such as Arizona, are attempting to change that). The market for sports betting “skews much younger than the market for, say, online casino gaming,” Nower said. “Before, the problem that the industry had was they were not capturing the younger market with brick-and-mortar and online casinos. That has been more or less rectified with sports betting. Now we see that the goal is to start to capture this middle- to older-adult market in the online gambling space, because that demographic has typically been more prone to brick-and-mortar. But that’s not half as lucrative as the online space.” She noted that people in their fifties are the highest income and spending group when it comes to online gambling. Perhaps the oldest-old, at this moment, are not glued to their phones; but the young-old, and the slightly younger than them, are.
Watching CNN recently, I saw Harry Enten, the chief data analyst, run through polling numbers while a gecko-green Kalshi Prediction Tracker tickered underneath, in all-caps: THE ODDS: 36% CHANCE THE U.S. TAKES CONTROL OF ANY PART OF GREENLAND BEFORE JANUARY 21, 2029. THE ODDS: 51% CHANCE ARIANA GRANDE HAS A #1 HIT SONG THIS YEAR. THE ODDS: 58% CHANCE GAS PRICES IN THE U.S. WILL BE ABOVE $4.00/GALLON THIS MONTH. Enten pivoted from Reuters/Ipsos research into Trump’s approval rating to a Kalshi segment about the midterm elections: “If we look at the Kalshi prediction markets, what do we see?” he asked. “A 42 percent chance that the GOP gets absolutely blown out, and it will be in large part because Donald Trump is just so freaking unpopular.” Kalshi was credited for the information, but its relationship with CNN was not disclosed. Elsewhere, in an article about the Trump family’s relationships to Kalshi and Polymarket—Donald Trump Jr. is advising both, and is an investor at the latter—CNN included a disclaimer about its use of Kalshi, while noting “potential conflicts of interest” in the Trump administration’s relationships to prediction market regulation, of which there is little. CNBC, for its part, has a minority investment in Kalshi.
Recently, Adam Johnson at the Real News Network wondered about the stakes of this arrangement. “In February 2025,” he wrote, “New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani was given a 8% chance to win the election by Kalshi. If, at the time, CNN made this fact central in its coverage, how much would it have influenced voters’ perceptions of the race? How would it have impacted momentum?” Its older viewership would hold significant sway: as AARP reported during the New York City mayoral race, nearly eight in ten older voters were undecided—“in a position,” potentially, “to decide this election.”
When Durham was younger, and living in St. Louis, he would go across the river to Illinois to bet on horses. “There’s a psychic connection between old people and gambling,” Durham told me, and reflected on Baba Vanga—the blind Bulgarian mystic whose many political predictions, interpreted by her followers, the state, and, more lately, the internet, brought her fame. Later, I looked her up, and read in an article by Mary Neuberger and Adam Hanzel, in Comparative Studies in Society and History, how Baba Vanga represents a concept of “post”-truth that “recognizes that truth is not just in unprecedented excess today but is built through a complex and participatory bricolage that uses science and religion to build shared realities.” I heard Durham’s catchphrase in my head: Bingo!
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