Campaign Trend exists to help campaigners adapt to technology. Most weeks that means showing you how to use a new feature, tool, or strategy. But prediction markets are different. This is a new technology that you won’t use, but will still affect your campaign.
The money involved isn’t trivial. Contracts on a typical competitive statewide race can exceed a million dollars. The Center for Campaign Innovation recently published a backgrounder on the reputational risk to campaigns if your employees or consultants make trades on your race, but this week’s Best Practice explains what you should do about it.
The Exchanges Already Ban It
Every contract on Kalshi already carries a trading prohibition list covering candidates, paid campaign staff, candidates’ immediate families, paid employees of national party committees, PAC employees, and third-party vendors. And Kalshi enforces its rules publicly.
The exchange has opened more than 150 insider trading investigations and blocked over 100 trades in the first part of 2026. It’s now running FEC payroll filings against its own user logs to catch staff trades. But the screening isn’t perfect and their are other ways prohibited traders can be found publicly.
Who Signs & When
Your policy should cover everyone the exchanges already prohibits from trading. For staff, you should have them sign the policy alongside other onboarding paperwork. For vendors and consultants, language should be added to their contracts. It’s especially important that they know the policy covers all of the employees at their firm, not just those working on your campaign.
CCI shared a model policy designed for candidate campaigns that anyone can adapt. This is a workplace rule, not a contract, but the important thing is deciding the rule before you need it.
The Temptation Is Real
For a young staffer or agency employee who sees non-public polling, upcoming endorsements, and opposition research before anyone else does, a well-timed trade on that information can equal several months’ salary. We know that campaigners are already doing this.
Your policy isn’t going to stop someone who can’t resist the temptation or catch them if they do it, but it ensures that nobody can say they didn’t know.
If Someone Trades Anyway
Decide now what happens if you find out someone traded contrary to your policy. Removing them is the cleanest answer. “We had a written policy, they violated it, and we removed them” is a one sentence answer to a press inquiry that ends the story, but “we don’t have a policy and we’re looking into it” leads to followups.
We already do this for our campaigns. Work out your response before you’re in the middle of a crisis. Prediction markets simply offer a new channel of risk.
Conclusion
These prediction markets for politics aren’t going anywhere and the enforcement headlines will keep coming. Having a written policy that everyone acknowledges is a simple solution to this new headache.