On Election Night, millions of Americans will watch anxiously as the ballot counts stream in. Most will be worried about the political future of their country. Some will also have money on the line.

Over the past several months, election betting has gone mainstream. On Polymarket, perhaps the most popular political-betting site, people have wagered more than $200 million on the outcome of the U.S. presidential election. The election forecaster Nate Silver recently joined the company as an adviser, and its election odds have been cited by media outlets including CNN, Bloomberg, and The New York Times. Polymarket is officially off-limits to U.S. users, but the website is still accessible using technical work-arounds. Americans can directly place bets on other platforms such as PredictIt and Kalshi, the latter of which was recently approved to offer legal election betting. Just this week, the investing app Robinhood launched its own presidential-election market.

In a sense, election betting is like sports betting: Think Donald Trump will win next week? Put money down on it, and profit if you’re right. But these sites present themselves as more than just a way to make a quick buck. They assert that how people bet, whether on the benign (who will be the next James Bond?) or the consequential (will Israel and Hamas reach a cease-fire before the end of the year?), can help forecast the future. Because there’s money involved, the thinking goes, these prediction markets leverage the collective wisdom of what people actually think will occur, not what they hope will. For example, this summer, prediction markets accurately forecast President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race. If they are right about the election, Donald Trump has the edge: On Polymarket, for instance, Trump currently has roughly a 65 percent chance of winning the election.

But what will happen if the outcome is contested? Many Trump loyalists are already preparing for the next “Stop the Steal” campaign rooted in unfounded claims of a rigged election. A disputed election could plunge these betting sites into chaos. Prediction markets sometimes describe themselves as “truth machines.” But that’s a challenging role to assume when Americans can’t agree on what the basic truth even is.

Prediction markets have become popular among Trump supporters—no doubt because they show that Trump is favored to win even as the polls remain deadlocked. If Trump loses, election denialists may look to the betting markets as part of their evidence that the race was stolen. The groundwork is already being laid. “More accurate than polls,” Elon Musk recently tweeted to his more than 200 million followers on X, alongside an image displaying Trump’s favorable Polymarket odds. “You shouldn’t believe the polls,” J. D. Vance has agreed. “I think that chart’s about right,” he said in reference to Kalshi’s presidential odds. Even Trump himself has talked up his betting odds, both online and in real life. “I don’t know what the hell it means, but it means that we’re doing pretty well,” he recently said of Polymarket, during a speech in Michigan. Indeed, if you follow only betting markets, a Trump loss might even be surprising, potentially fueling claims of foul play.

Prediction markets have already received significant attention in the lead-up to the election, but this might be only the start. Strange activity could occur on these betting sites after the polls close. That’s because most of these markets will remain open for bets for weeks and months after the election, in some cases as late as Inauguration Day. A significant amount of money will likely be wagered after votes have been cast, and the market odds could diverge from election results.

That’s what happened during the previous presidential election. In 2020, even after an audit had confirmed Biden’s win in Georgia and his victory was certified, PredictIt still gave Trump a nontrivial chance of winning the state, at one point reaching as high as 17 percent. Putting money on a Trump win after he officially lost wouldn’t make much sense—unless, that is, you genuinely believed that the election was stolen or that Trump would be successful in an extralegal attempt to overturn results. This time around, with more money on the line and election denialism already in the air, a contested election could result in even more anomalous election odds after the polls close. In other words, betting markets can’t be disentangled from a reality in which a segment of the country does not believe the election results.

Especially on Polymarket, such a scenario could get weird fast. Polymarket runs on the blockchain—bets are made with cryptocurrency, and official decisions about who wins are made by the holders of a crypto token called UMA. If there is a disagreement over what occurred, UMA token-holders can vote to determine the official outcome. These are not lawyers scrupulously analyzing predefined rules, but people considering evidence posted to a Discord server. Although token-holders have strong incentives to vote honestly, the system is still vulnerable to manipulation. And in a highly contentious election, things could get messy.

Consider how the Venezuelan presidential election this summer played out on Polymarket. According to Polymarket’s rules, the winner was to be determined based primarily on “official information from Venezuela.” Given that the authoritarian incumbent Nicolás Maduro controlled the election, bettors initially favored him by a sizable margin—in part, because it seemed likely that he would stay in power, regardless of how Venezuelans voted. That’s what happened. Although the opposition candidate, Edmundo González, got more votes, Maduro stole the election. But the UMA arbiters declared González the winner, overriding Polymarket’s original rules. Some bettors defended the decision: Rubber-stamping Maduro’s fraudulent win, they argued, would be “very bad, even dystopian.” Others felt they had been scammed. “What happens next, if Trump doesnt recognize the election results,” wrote one user in the Polymarket comments section.

Venezuela is a unique case. Trump cannot steal the election like Maduro did—he’s not even currently in office. Still, UMA decision makers could go against official sources if the results are disputed. Even in the case of a contested election, such an outcome would be unlikely because it would be a massive blow to Polymarket’s credibility, Frank Muci, a policy fellow at the London School of Economics, told me. However, he added, “if there are Supreme Court rulings and dissenting opinions and Trump is saying that the election was really stolen, [then] politics may override the narrow bottom line.” Polymarket, which did not respond to multiple requests for comment, could always intervene and overrule UMA’s results. It didn’t do so after the Venezuela debacle, but earlier this year Polymarket refunded some users after UMA got a resolution wrong.

Other election-betting sites have more precautions in the case of a contested election. Both Kalshi and PredictIt determine market outcomes in-house. Xavier Sottile, the head of markets at Kalshi, said in an email that if Kalshi’s users have a credible reason to dispute who is declared the winner on the platform, the company has “an independent market outcome review committee” that includes “election-focused academics” to verify the resolution. But if people disagree on who won the election, some percentage of bettors are destined to be deeply unhappy, no matter how fairly these markets are resolved.

After the election, betting sites may look less like oracles than mirrors, reflecting the nation’s disunity back at us. In 2020, Trump’s outsize odds on prediction markets following Biden’s win led Nate Silver to write that that markets were “detached from reality.” So too is our country. Many Republicans falsely believe that Trump won the last election, a lie that Vance has repeated of late. In a way, prediction markets act as a microcosm of America’s political psyche, distilling the confusion of our political moment into tidy charts.

The Voluntad Popular party blames the Maduro government for death of co-founder Edwin Santos.

Pair honoured three months after election they say was rigged in favour of President Nicolas Maduro.

The two men are believed to be members of the Tren de Aragua gang.

Have you ever looked after toddlers who insist on showing you everything they have done—terrible stick-figure drawings, what they’ve left in the potty—and demand that you admire it? If you have, then you’ve experienced something very similar to Donald Trump’s performance at a Fox News town hall yesterday in Cumming, Georgia, with an all-female audience. “FEMA was so good with me,” he said at one point. “I defeated ISIS,” he added later. “I’m the father of IVF,” he claimed, with no further explanation.

The former president set a boastful tone early. The Fox News moderator, Harris Faulkner, told Trump that the Democrats were so worried about the town hall that the party had staged a “prebuttal” to the event, featuring Georgia’s two Democratic senators and the family of Amber Thurman, who died after having to leave the state to access abortion care. “We’ll get better ratings, I promise,” Trump replied, smirking. (Finally, someone willing to tell grief-stricken relatives to jazz it up a little.)

This event was supposed to involve Trump reaching beyond his comfort zone, after he had spent the past few weeks shoring up his advantage with men by embarking on a tour of bro podcasts. But these women were extremely friendly—suspiciously so. CNN later reported that Republican women’s groups had packed it with Trump supporters. Still, even in this gentle setting, the former president blustered, evaded questions, and contradicted himself.  

[Read: The women Trump is winning]

This election cycle has been dominated by podcast interviews with softball questions, but the Fox town hall reveals that the Trump campaign still believes that the legacy media can impart a useful sheen of gravitas, objectivity, and trustworthiness. If a candidate can get that without actually facing tough questions or a hostile audience, then so much the better. Why complain about “fake news” when you can make it? Thanks to Fox, Trump could court female voters without the risk of encountering any “nasty women”—or revealing his alienating, chauvinist side. (Fox did not respond to CNN’s questions about the event.)

This has been called the “boys vs. girls election”: Kamala Harris leads significantly among women, and Trump among men; in the final stretch of the campaign, though, each is conspicuously trying to reach the other half of the electorate. Hence Harris’s decision to release an “opportunity agenda for Black men”—including business loans, crypto protections, and the legalization of marijuana—and talk to male-focused outlets such as All the Smoke, Roland Martin Unfiltered, The Shade Room, and Charlamagne Tha God’s radio program.

For Trump, the main strategic aim of the Georgia town hall was surely to reverse out of his party’s unpopular positions on abortion and IVF. The former drew the most pointed question. “Women are entitled to do what they want to and need to do with their bodies, including their unborn—that’s on them,” a woman who identified herself as Pamela from Cumming asked. “Why is the government involved in women’s basic rights?”

This was the only time the former president made an attempt at being statesmanlike, focusing on the topic at hand rather than his personal grievances or dire warnings about immigration. The subject had been rightfully returned to the states, Trump maintained, and many had liberalized their regimes thanks to specific legislation and ballot measures. Some of the anti-abortion laws enacted elsewhere, he allowed, were “too tough, too tough.” He personally believed in exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother. This unusual clarity suggests that his strategists have hammered into him that the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, has repelled swing voters. He took credit, though in a peculiar way, for saving IVF in Alabama after that state’s supreme court ruled that frozen embryos should be regarded as children. In his telling, he was alerted to the situation by Senator Katie Britt, whom he described as “a young—just a fantastically attractive person—from Alabama.” He put out a statement supporting IVF, and the legislature acted quickly to protect it. “We really are the party for IVF,” he added. “We want fertilization.”

[Read: The people waiting for the end of IVF]

Others dispute Trump’s account, and his claims to moderation on reproductive issues yesterday weren’t entirely convincing. (Project 2025, a blueprint for a second Trump term that was compiled by many of his allies, calls for a raft of restrictions on abortion.) But at least it was something close to a direct answer. The first questioner, Lisa from Milton—whom CNN later identified as the president of Fulton County Republican Women—asked Trump about the economy. She got the briefest mention of the “liquid gold” underneath America, which will allegedly solve its economic problems. Then Trump segued into musing about his “favorite graph”—the one on illegal immigration that supposedly saved his life in Butler, Pennsylvania.

To give Faulkner some credit, she did try to return the conversation to reality at several points, with vibe-killing questions such as “And we can pay for that?” (That was in response to Trump’s suggestion that he would cut tax on benefits for seniors. Trump sailed on without acknowledging it.) He told Linda, also from Milton, that transgender women competing in female sports was “crazy,” ruefully shaking his head. “We’re not going to let it happen,” he added.

“How do you stop it?” Faulkner asked. “Do you go to the sports leagues?”

Nothing so complicated! “You just ban it,” he said. “The president bans it. You just don’t let it happen.” Now, the U.S. commander in chief might oversee the world’s biggest military and its largest economy, but he or she is not currently charged with setting the rules of Olympic boxing.

Next up was a single mom, Rachel, struggling with the cost of daycare. She was visibly emotional as she stood at the mic. “You have a beautiful voice, by the way,” Trump said, to put her at ease. In response to Rachel’s question about how her child tax credit had decreased, he mentioned his daughter Ivanka, who, he said “drove me crazy” about the issue. “She said, Dad, we have to do tax credits for women. The child tax credits. She was driving me crazy.” (Typical woman, always banging on about economic freedom this and reproductive rights that.) “Then I did it, and I got it just about done, and she said: Dad, you’ve got to double it up.” He noted that fellow Republicans had told him he would get no gratitude for this, and then promised Rachel that he would “readjust things.”

[Read: Trump called Harris ‘beautiful.’ Now he has a problem.]

Audience members seemed not to mind that there was only the vaguest relationship between many of their questions and the former president’s eventual answers. (Contrast that with Bloomberg News’s interview the day before, in which the editor in chief, John Micklethwait, rebuked Trump for referring to “Gavin Newscum” and dragged him back from a riff about voter fraud with the interjection: “The question is about Google.”) Some solid objects did appear through the mist, however. Trump promised an end to “sanctuary cities” and a 50 percent reduction in everyone’s energy bills, and he defended his “enemies from within” comments as a “pretty good presentation.”

Much like a toddler, Trump occasionally said something insightful in a naive and entirely unselfconscious manner. Talking about Aurora, Colorado, where he and his running mate, J. D. Vance, have claimed that Venezuelan gangs are running rampant—a claim that the city’s mayor has called “grossly exaggerated”—a brief cloud of empathy passed across the former president’s face. “They’ve taken over apartment buildings,” he said. “They’re in the real-estate business, just like I am.” (So true: The industry does attract some unsavory characters.) Later, talking about the number of court cases filed against him, Trump observed, “They do phony investigations. I’ve been investigated more than Alphonse Capone.” Sorry? Had someone left a pot of glue open near the stage? Did the former president really just compare himself to a big-time criminal who was notoriously convicted only of his smaller offenses?

And then, all too soon, the allotted hour was up. Fox, according to CNN, edited out at least one questioner’s enthusiastic endorsement of Trump. Even so, it was obvious that the ex-president’s many partisans at the event enjoyed themselves. Before asking about foreign policy, the last questioner, Alicia from Fulton County, thanked Trump for coming into “a roomful of women that the current administration would consider domestic terrorists.” (“That’s true,” he replied.) But had undecided women watching at home learned anything more about Trump that might inform their vote? No. Did they at least have a good time? Probably not.

Over the past week, Donald Trump has been on a fascist romp. At rallies in Colorado and California, he amped up his usual rants, and added a rancid grace note by suggesting that a woman heckler should “get the hell knocked out of her” by her mother after she gets back home. But on Sunday morning, he outdid himself in an interview on Fox News, by saying that “the enemy within”—Americans he described as “radical left lunatics,” including Representative Adam Schiff of California, whom he mentioned by name—are more dangerous than Russia or China, and could be “very easily handled” by the National Guard or the U.S. military.

This wasn’t the first time Trump suggested using America’s armed forces against its own people: As president, he thought of the military as his personal guard and regularly fantasized about commanding “his generals” to crush dissent, which is one reason former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley reportedly told Bob Woodward that he sees Trump as “fascist to his core.”

The term fascism has been so overused as a denunciation that many people have understandably tuned it out. But every American should be shocked to hear a presidential nominee say that other Americans (including a sitting member of Congress) are more dangerous than two nations pointing hundreds of nuclear warheads at America’s cities. During the Cold War, conservative members of the GOP would likely have labeled anyone saying such things as a “comsymp,” a fellow traveler, or even a traitor. Indeed, one might expect that other Republicans would be horrified to hear such hatred directed at their fellow citizens and such comfort given to the nation’s enemies.

Pretty to think so. But today’s Republican leaders are cowards, and some are even worse: They are complicit, as Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin proved today in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper. At least cowards run away. The GOP elected officials who cross the street against the light just to get away from the reporters are at least showing a tiny, molecular awareness of shame. Youngkin, however, smiled and dissembled and excused Trump’s hideousness with a kind of folksy shamelessness that made cowardice seem noble by comparison.

Tapper read Trump’s remarks verbatim, and then asked: “Is that something that you support?” Youngkin replied that Tapper misunderstood Trump, who he said was referring to undocumented immigrants. No, Tapper responded, Trump clearly meant American citizens. Tapper added that Trump had singled out Schiff. Youngkin aw-shucksed his way through stories about Venezuelan criminals and Virginians dying from fentanyl. “Obviously there is a border crisis,” Tapper said. “Obviously there are too many criminals who should not be in this country, and they should be jailed and deported completely, but that’s not what I’m talking about.” And then, to his credit, Tapper wouldn’t let go: What about Trump’s threat to use the military against Americans?

Well, Youngkin shrugged, he “can’t speak” for Trump, but he was certain that Tapper was “misrepresenting [Trump’s] thoughts.”

Some of the people who watched Youngkin’s appalling dishonesty immediately thought of one of the most famous passages from George Orwell’s 1984: “The Party told him to reject the evidence of his eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

But this interpretation gives Youngkin too much credit. Orwell’s dictators were able to terrify people with torture and deprivation into accepting the government’s lies. Youngkin, however, is not a terrified subject of an authoritarian regime: He’s just an opportunist. Like J. D. Vance, he knows exactly what he’s doing. Youngkin is demanding that everyone else play along and pretend that Trump is just a misunderstood immigration hawk, and then move on—all so that Youngkin can later say that he was a loyal Republican when he contends for the leadership of the GOP after Trump is either defeated, retired, or long gone.

In this, Youngkin joins a long list of utterly dishonorable people, including Nikki Haley, who ran against Trump with energy and honesty and then bowed and scraped after she was defeated. As The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, has noted, 10 Republican senators could have changed the course of history by supporting Trump’s impeachment. Ohio Senator Rob Portman, a supposed GOP moderate, is a particularly galling example. Portman twice voted against convicting Trump. He announced his retirement just weeks after the January 6 insurrection, and he had no electoral chances to protect (not that protecting one’s electoral chances is an honorable excuse). Still, he let Trump slide, perhaps out of fear of reproach from his neighbors back in Ohio.

It’s not exactly a revelation that the Republican Party’s elected ranks have become a haven for cranks and opportunists, and sometimes, it’s hard to tell the difference: When Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example, talks about how “they” can control the weather, it’s hard to tell if she is just a kook, if she herself is an anti-Semite, or if she is employing yet another anti-Semitic trope because she knows that some of the MAGA base feasts on such garbage.

For someone like Greene, the difference doesn’t matter. She is ignorant. And she traffics in ignorance. Her constituents have rewarded her with a safe seat in Congress. But in the Trump era, the conceit all along has been that more responsible Republicans such as Youngkin are lurking in the background, keeping their heads down while quietly and competently doing the people’s business.

Americans should therefore watch Youngkin’s exchange with Tapper for themselves. They should see that supposedly competent Republicans have already abandoned the party. To believe otherwise—especially after watching someone like Youngkin—is to truly obey the commandment to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.