Prediction markets are fueling a new era of political graft

In the days leading up to the 2026 State of the Union, George Santos was acting—at least in public—like a man preparing to take a victory lap. In October 2025, President Donald Trump had commuted the former Republican congressman’s 87-month federal prison sentence, which he’d received in April 2025 after pleading guilty to various forms of campaign funds-adjacent fraud. Four short months later, on X, Santos began teasing his triumphant return to the chamber from which he’d been expelled two years earlier. “I’m going to be there for the State of the Union, in the gallery, guys,” Santos said in a video posted the night before the main event. “Just chill, trolls. Chill.” In other tweets, he floated the idea of wearing a “bedazzled” suit to the event, before eventually telling his followers that he’d opted for a “basic” blue or gray number instead. On Kalshi, a prediction market where users were betting on (among many other things) whether Santos (among many other people) would attend the State of the Union, his announcement caused the price of YES shares to spike. Then came the plot twist: At about 6 PM on Tuesday, Santos tweeted, “Watching SOTU from an airport tv was not part of the plan!” He added two red-faced emojis, and a rueful three-letter acronym expressing frustration that even the most aggressively online millennials stopped using a decade ago. Almost immediately, the price of YES bets on Santo’s attendance tumbled into single-digit territory. Sure enough, when Trump began speaking, Santos was nowhere in sight. A major snowstorm earlier in the week had snarled air travel up and down the East Coast, and on Wednesday, when a Kalshi user complained on X that they’d lost money because of him, Santos blamed a problem with a flight. “Trust me I wanted to be there too,” he wrote. As it turns out, Santos may have found a way to make the best of a bad situation. According to NPR, before he sent that market-flipping tweet, Santos hopped on Kalshi to bet that he would n