(CNN) — Two successive weeks of primaries brought two successive shocks for progressive candidates in purple states and carry an important lesson for people watching politics:
It’s noisy out there!
With little high-quality polling in either Michigan or Wisconsin, polling averages showing big leads for progressive candidates were driven largely by partisan polling. And prediction market bettors followed suit, going all-in for those candidates. The two combined to create the mirage of a sure thing ahead of primary day.
But actual voters served up tight margins.
Francesca Hong, the democratic socialist and state assembly member in the Democratic primary for Wisconsin governor, had a 95% chance of victory up until Tuesday, primary day, according to the prediction site Kalshi. (CNN has a partnership with Kalshi and uses its data to cover major events. But CNN editorial employees are not allowed to use prediction markets.) There are other prediction platforms, including Polymarket, that similarly favored Hong.
Hong ended up losing the race by the tightest of margins to David Crowley, the establishment candidate and Milwaukee County executive who, incredibly, dropped out of the race before rejoining it. As of Wednesday morning, fewer than 5,000 votes separate the two. And neither reached 40% in the race. Two other prominent candidates — Mandela Barnes and Sara Rodriguez — dropped out ahead of Election Day, but not soon enough to remove their names from the ballot, and together won about 8% of the total votes cast.
By around 9 p.m. ET, it was clear the vote was going to be close, and traders on Kalshi were predicting a Crowley victory. The odds see-sawed through the night. CNN did not project a Crowley victory until the 3 a.m. ET hour.
In Michigan a week earlier, another proud progressive, Abdul El-Sayed, seemed like a lock with a lead in recent polls, none of which met CNN’s standards for reporting, but which may have affected bettors on prediction sites. It all led up to a more than 97% chance of victory on primary eve, according to the market on Kalshi. His odds never dropped below 94% as votes were being counted.
El-Sayed ended up winning, but with less than 49% of the vote, just one percentage point ahead of his moderate rival.
In both cases, the near–certainty of bettors on Kalshi was likely fueled by polls that suggested leads for Hong and El-Sayed. But in both cases, the most recent polling had been conducted largely by partisan outfits. In the absence of more high-quality polling, vibes took over and fed the social media echo chamber and a sense of momentum for progressive candidates in particular.
What happened in Wisconsin?
In Wisconsin, the most recent independent poll that met CNN’s standards had been conducted in late July by Marquette University. In that poll, Hong was indeed ahead by double digits, holding 46% support among registered voters who said they would vote in the state’s Democratic primary.
Importantly, the race was still in flux. The Democratic establishment had not yet rung alarm bells about Hong and coalesced around Crowley.
About a third of voters were uncertain about their choice when that Marquette poll was conducted. Barnes held second place in the poll, and dropped out just a day after the poll was released. It’s also hard to accurately poll a race where the candidates keep changing.
The ultimate winner, Crowley, had only recently reentered the race. And public scrutiny of some of Hong’s more controversial previous positions was just getting underway.
“Sometimes what polling tells you is that there’s a lot of uncertainty and room for shifts in a race,” said CNN’s polling editor, Ariel Edwards-Levy.
In other words, the campaign was still very much underway when the last high quality polling was done.
The fact that Hong had a 95% chance of winning on prediction markets never meant that she was going to get 95% of the vote or anywhere near it. It meant that most bettors thought she would win based on what they were seeing — polling, trends in other recent elections, their reads on the mojo of the candidates and whatever else fed the wisdom of the crowd.
In addition to those limits, it might not help when Polymarket and Kalshi executives tout their products as “truth machines,” when the reality is far more nuanced.
The crowd was wrong
Kalshi’s founders say favored candidates occasionally losing is actually a feature of the platform.
“Before the ‘prediction markets got it wrong’ headlines roll in: a 5% probability doesn’t mean it won’t happen. It means it should happen 1 in 20 times. If 5% candidates never won, the markets would be broken,” Kalshi co-founder Tarek Mansour wrote on X.
In fact, Kalshi argues this is a teachable moment.
“Teaching people to think probabilistically in a world that is quickly losing nuance is one of Kalshi’s most important impacts,” Kalshi spokesman Jack Such told CNN on Wednesday. Polymarket declined to comment.
Polling quality matters
Michigan and Wisconsin are home to some of the highest-profile recent election polling misses, and pollsters agree they are notably places that are hard to poll well. Voters in both states have proved reliably swingy, and neither state has partisan voter registration, which makes difficult the type of modeling on voter file data that improves modern polling.
It all means that the quantity of quality polling is important in knowing how confident to be about the state of any race, particularly as fewer news organizations conduct polls. CNN does not rely on any single poll, but does compute a poll of polls — essentially an average of polls that meet its standards — where possible to assess presidential approval ratings and, as elections approach, for major contests.
Looking ahead to November, polling should be viewed for what it does say rather than what it does not. A recent CNN Poll conducted by SSRS showed that voters preferred Democrats by an 8-point margin heading into the November midterm election. That number is only so helpful, however, since people aren’t voting generally for Republicans or Democrats; they’re voting in a specific race for a specific candidate. House seats in many states have also been gerrymandered to benefit one party or the other, stuffing like-minded voters into certain districts.
What we’ve learned over the past two weeks is that November is still an eternity away and momentum can shift.
There are going to be a lot of polls out there that may point in different directions, a lot of them conducted by groups with a partisan agenda.
On the Kalshi prediction market, the odds of Democrats taking control of the House has been growing all summer and currently sits at more than 85%, which is a high degree of confidence, but also leaves a lot of room for Republicans. They actually have a better chance of holding the House majority than Crowley had of winning the Democratic primary for governor in Wisconsin, under Kalshi’s odds. It’s important to remember what these numbers mean: People who are placing monetary bets think the safer bet is on Democrats winning. In the Senate, the odds of one party or the other winning control are about even.
Those markets are an interesting tool, but they’re only as good as the conventional wisdom.
The-CNN-Wire
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