Polymarket retains lead over Kalshi in political and election trading volume

Polymarket is still the main venue for political predictions, surpassing even Kalshi in this niche. In the past week, the US midterm elections expanded Polymarket’s trading volumes on political bets. 

Polymarket still benefits from political predictions as one of its significant sources of liquidity. In the first week of November, political prediction markets reached $396M in trading volumes, up by 34.2% from the previous week. 

Political predictions almost tripled since early October, mostly driven by the US midterm elections. 

Polymarket still dominates political predictions, accounting for most of the trading volumes, and is not ceding market share to Kalshi. 

For Kalshi, political predictions make up around 1.5% of all volumes, even during the midterm elections. The platform relies on sports for 85.2% of its volumes. Polymarket US is also mostly focused on sports, making up 95.4% of its volumes. 

Politics can give prediction market platforms a way to diversify away from sports. The main reason is that they are converging on sports betting, and may lose the freedom to offer contracts without complying with traditional sports betting regulations and especially state gambling laws in the USA. 

Polymarket leads in politics and elections bets

Kalshi volumes lead Polymarket in sports, while Polymarket is still the main venue for politics and elections predictions. In politics, Polymarket has surpassed Kalshi by 300 to 900% depending on the specific market category. 

PolitiFi or elections betting makes up around 12% of Polymarket volumes and is the third-largest category. 

While US Presidential elections are still the main event for PolitiFi trading volumes, even smaller election events offer a baseline of activity and can show spikes of activity on a shorter time frame. 

Polymarket activity and liquidity recovered in the past few months, briefly breaking above $400M in total value locked at the end of October. Based on DeFi Llama data, Polymarket DEX volumes are around 30% higher in the past few weeks compared to the slower months in the summer. 

In early November, Polymarket open interest also reached a new peak of $762.65M. The platform showed increased open interest while still offering a long tail of niche real-world event predictions, in addition to its main political markets. 

As Cryptopolitan reported, Polymarket recently encountered a front-end exploit, which ended up draining user wallets. Despite this, traders returned for the mid-term results, and the platform retained most of its value locked and trading volume levels. 

PolitiFi still reacts to election results

Crypto traders have shown they are ready to trade based on political outcomes. In addition to prediction markets, PolitiFi still spans a selection of tokens, some created during the 2024 election cycle. 

As of November 2026, PolitiFi tokens still carry over $400M in market capitalization. Assets like Official Trump (TRUMP) crashed in response to the midterm election results and the potential for crypto probes against Donald Trump’s crypto enterprises. 

Other meme tokens had short-term rallies, making use of the recent hype, though mostly affecting low-volume meme tokens.

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