Polymarket Traders Predict That Kamala Harris Will “Win” Her First Debate Against President Trump

A second presidential debate, the first of which will feature Kamala Harris, the current Democratic nominee, will be held on September 10 on ABC.

In the days preceding the debate, wagerers bet around $850 million on the Polymarket election contract. Despite this, they still favor former President Donald Trump over Harris, with odds of 52-46. Bettors can participate in Polymarket, a blockchain-based platform, by depositing the stablecoin USDC, a token pegged to the dollar, onto the Polygon network.

Prediction markets about polls (which prediction markets are meant to replace) and even prediction markets about other prediction markets are where it gets a little weird.

Polymarket traders are wagering that Harris will be given the opportunity to debate by traditional pollsters, with a 75% likelihood that the Ipsos/538 survey would conclude that Harris “wins” it.

They estimate Harris's chances of regaining the lead in the primary Polymarket election contract the day following the debate to be as low as 22%.

With an anticipated viewership of well over 70 million, the debate could challenge the record-breaking first Clinton-Trump debate, which had an audience of 84 million, and the second Carter-Reagan debate, which drew an audience of 80.6 million.

In the meantime, the market appears to have corrected itself following an extremely costly manipulation attempt over the weekend.

According to on-chain data, the manipulation appears to have involved several whale accounts under the direction of DJTHolder. These accounts reportedly attempted to manipulate Harris' odds in the market for the winner of the US presidential election in order to profit from a derivative market that settled on September 6.

This organization spent $9 million USDC purchasing significant quantities of Trump NO and Kamala YES shares. As a result, the price of Harris shares was momentarily driven up by anywhere from 2 to 27 cents. (Harris' current 47-cent pricing suggests a 47% chance of winning; each share pays out $1 if the prediction is correct and zero if it is not). Then, the price dropped back down to normal.

They lost millions of dollars trying to keep Kamala's odds higher than Trump's, which resulted in losses of over $60,000 in USDC in the derivative market and six figures in the regular election market.