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 draws a large share of its liquidity from political predictions. In the first week of November, political prediction markets hit $396M in trading volume, a 34.2% rise from the week before.
Political predictions have nearly tripled since early October, largely fueled by the US midterm elections.
Polymarket still dominates political predictions, capturing most of the trading volume, and is not giving up market share to Kalshi.
For Kalshi, political predictions account for roughly 1.5% of total volume, even during the midterms, while the platform gets 85.2% of its volume from sports. Polymarket US is also primarily sports-focused, with sports making up 95.4% of its volume.
Politics could help prediction market platforms diversify beyond sports. The concern is that both are moving toward sports betting, which may cost them the freedom to list contracts without meeting traditional sports betting rules, especially state gambling laws in the US.
Polymarket leads in politics and election bets
Kalshi leads Polymarket in sports volume, while Polymarket remains the main venue for political and election predictions. In politics, Polymarket has outpaced Kalshi by 300 to 900%, depending on the market category.
PolitiFi, or election betting, makes up about 12% of Polymarket's volume and is its third-largest category.
US presidential elections remain the biggest driver of PolitiFi trading volume, but even smaller election events provide a steady baseline of activity and can produce short-term spikes.
Polymarket's activity and liquidity have recovered over the past few months, briefly topping $400M in total value locked at the end of October. According to DeFi Llama data, Polymarket's DEX volume has been roughly 30% higher in recent weeks than during the slower summer months.
In early November, Polymarket's open interest also reached a new high of $762.65M. The platform saw rising open interest while still offering a long tail of niche real-world event predictions alongside its main political markets.
As Cryptopolitan reported, Polymarket recently suffered a front-end exploit that drained user wallets. Even so, traders returned for the midterm results, and the platform kept most of its value locked and trading volume.
PolitiFi still reacts to election results
Crypto traders have shown they are willing to trade on political outcomes. Beyond prediction markets, PolitiFi also includes a range of tokens, some launched during the 2024 election cycle.
As of November 2026, PolitiFi tokens still carry more than $400M in market capitalization. Assets such as Official Trump (TRUMP) fell sharply after the midterm results and the possibility of crypto-related probes into Donald Trump's crypto ventures.
Other meme tokens saw brief rallies, riding the recent hype, though these mostly affected low-volume meme coins.
Source: www.cryptopolitan.com. Adapted by NBTC.
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