GoKawiilUtah is home to some of the strongest anti-gambling laws in the US, with vehement opposition dating back more than a century. But as prediction markets have surged – allowing users to bet on almost anything, from elections to sports to geopolitical events – the state has not escaped the nationwide boom.
Its Republican leaders are fighting back, setting up a battle between one of the country’s most conservative states and a rapidly growing industry that is embraced by a Republican administration in Washington – and members of the US president’s own family.
“It’s a unique issue,” Brady Brammer, a Republican state senator in Utah, said. “Because you have a lot of very conservative Republicans [in Utah] who are standing up to a conservative administration, essentially without dissent among them.”
Prediction markets such as Kalshi – recently valued at $22bn – and Polymarket allow users to “trade” on events from Oscar picks to election outcomes, and have surged in popularity in recent years.
The platforms have long contended that they do not facilitate gambling – an argument they have used to bypass the conventional regulatory landscape for gambling firms – and they operate almost nationwide.
With the backing of federal regulators under Donald Trump, they classify their products as financial exchanges, governed by federal commodities law, rather than state gambling rules.
Unlike casinos or traditional sports books, which set the odds on customers’ bets, prediction market users “trade” against one another while the platforms collect transaction fees. A Kalshi spokesperson said the platform “operates like any other derivative market”.
But around the country, an increasing number of state officials are taking a different view. Prediction markets are simply gambling by another name, they argue, and an encroachment on state authority.
So far, roughly 20 federal lawsuits have been filed nationwide over the platforms, with early rulings seeing split results. Among the most outspoken opponents of these platforms are Republican lawmakers in Utah, a key battleground in this escalating engagement.
Spencer Cox, the Republican governor of Utah, has no time for the industry’s arguments. Prediction markets are “gambling – pure and simple”, he declared in February, and have “no place in Utah”.
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