Like many American political watchers, a Nevada resident named Domer had an opinion about who would emerge from turmoil within the Republican Party to become the next speaker of the House of Representatives.
Unlike most of them, he made $13,000 when Mike Johnson was finally elected last month.
The fact that political gambling is illegal in the United States has not deterred Domer (a nickname he gave to AFP) or others like him from using online overseas markets to wager on American politics.
Domer, who says he earns about $500,000 a year betting on politics across the globe including in Italy and South Africa, is often active in chatrooms on Discord and other sites that buzz with debate among aficionados.
“There’s a lot of trash talk — it’s similar to sports betting,” he says. “It’s combative and congenial at the same time.”
– Markets versus polls –
Political betting was common — and legal — in the United States until the rise of relatively accurate polling in the 1930s.
Futures trading regulations passed in 1936, as well as crackdowns on sports betting and the perception of gambling as seedy all helped put an end to markets that once populated…
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