I heard it on the drive: an interview with a staff writer at The Atlantic. His magazine handed him $10,000 to bet on a season of football, as reporting. He lost $9,891 of it, and by his own account the assignment "veered into obsession."
His was football. The next thing you can bet on is the election, and people already are.
I grew up in Pleasantville, about five miles from Atlantic City, and I knew the town before the casinos. My uncle, my mother's youngest brother and only five years older than me, ran a restaurant inside Resorts, the first of them. We grew up together. I have family in Las Vegas. I am not against gambling. I am against making suckers of citizens. I watched what it promised, that it would save the town, and I know what it means when a town's budget and the house's winnings become the same number.
I have been writing about the wager. So let me say plainly why this is not that.
A wager, the way I mean it, is a bet with nothing to win. Pascal's bet costs you something real and pays you nothing you can spend. You stake yourself on a person, or a belief, before there is proof, and the only return is that you were right to have cared. It is the most civic thing a person does. It is how a community gets built: someone decides, with no evidence, that someone else is worth it.
A market is the opposite bet. The stake is money and the payout is money. And the moment the outcome has a price, the outcome has a reason to be moved.
That is the corrosion, and it is structural, not moral. Nobody has to be a bad person. Put a price on an election and the people who stand to profit from its result now have an incentive to shape the information the result depends on: the poll, the rumor, the turnout story, the leak. The poll stops being a measurement and becomes an instrument. A number that used to tell you what people think becomes a number someone bought in order to change what people think.
It does not take much. A Bloomberg reporter who covers these markets says that in a thinly traded race you could drive a candidate's odds up or down with "a few thousand or possibly even just a few hundred bucks." Then the odds become a story, and the story moves the race. The price does not predict the outcome. It helps make it.
Democracy runs on a fragile assumption: that the thing you are looking at is an honest attempt to describe the world. Every market on a public outcome puts a price on dishonesty, and prices work. This is not only a worry of critics. In 2024 the federal commodities regulator tried to stop election betting on one exchange, and a federal judge ruled against it.
There is a second corrosion, quieter. A citizen is someone with a stake in the outcome that is not a payout. A bettor is someone with a stake that is. Turn enough citizens into bettors and you have not added participation, you have replaced it. People watch the race the way they watch a game, hoping to be proven right, with no interest in whether the country is. Spectators with money down are still spectators. The same reporter says the consensus used to be plain: we should not have people betting on elections, because this is a sacred civic activity.
Look at what a year did to the man on the radio. A trained, skeptical professional, with an editor watching and his employer's money rather than his own, lost his footing inside one season. Now scale it. Legal sports betting in this country went from about $4.9 billion in 2017 to about $160 billion in 2025, and roughly half of men between 18 and 49 now hold an active sportsbook account, by the figures reported alongside his story. He had an editor. A country does not.
And a third, and this is the one Warren Buffett put his finger on. Asked about sports betting on CNBC this spring, he called it "a tax on stupidity," and then made the argument that matters here: "I don't think the function of the government is to play its people for suckers." States collected roughly $2.89 billion in tax on betting in 2025, by the account of his remarks, and he pointed out what that does. The bettors lose, the books profit, and the treasury takes its cut, so the burden the state would otherwise put on the people best able to carry it lands on the people least able.
A state's job is care: the schools, the roads, the safety of people who cannot protect themselves. Betting changes the job from care to extraction. The state stops asking what its citizens need and starts counting what they lose.
We fund schools with lottery dollars. Why not fund them directly? A lottery lets the people who do not play keep their taxes low on the losses of the people who do. I pay property tax for the public schools and tuition for a private one, and I would rather pay more, for better schools and fewer potholes, than have either paid for by somebody else's losing streak.
That is the democratic problem in one line. When the public treasury takes a cut of the wager, the public is no longer a neutral party on whether the wagering should be allowed. You cannot regulate what you are paid by. A government that profits from its citizens' losses has a reason to keep them losing.
The screen sorts what is already proven. The wager is for what is not yet. A market that prices the outcome before the vote is neither. It is a bet that the proof can be arranged.
I am not against betting. The only game I play is roulette, pure chance, no skill. That is why I can sit at it. Nobody at the table knows what the rest of us don't, nobody can lean on the wheel, and the house's edge is known before I put a chip down. An election is the opposite table. Someone there knows something. Someone there can move the ball.
And the roulette player knows what he is paying. That is the line between a player and a sucker: the sucker does not know the price, or can no longer walk away. A business that runs on the second of those, addiction, is corrosive at its core, and a government that takes a share of the take has joined it.
When the convention closed, a woman asked Franklin what kind of government they had given us. A republic, he said, if you can keep it. Keeping it is the work of citizens. Every bet on the outcome asks the citizen to stop keeping it and start watching.
I have done a little of that work. I printed materials and paid for the T-shirts for my line brother, a man who was a police officer, then a councilman, and at one point the council's president, in a place I no longer live in and cannot vote in. I could not decide that election. I could only put something behind a person and let the people who can vote decide. That is the wager as I mean it: money put behind a person before there is proof, with nothing to win. It is the opposite of a market on the outcome, and it is what keeping a republic looks like.
I am against betting on the one thing that is supposed to be settled by everyone, and only by everyone.