Blanche Lincoln, the former Arkansas senator who warned colleagues in 2010 that sports event contracts would be used “solely for gambling,” now lobbies federal regulators to allow them for the prediction market Kalshi, Ars Technica reported on Thursday.
The firm she founded, Lincoln Policy Group, has received $480,000 from Kalshi since 2024 to lobby Congress and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for looser rules on event contracts, according to the report. Her old words haven’t gone away. Lawyers for states and tribes still cite them in about 20 lawsuits over whether states can enforce their gambling laws against the platforms.
Ms. Lincoln, a Democrat, chaired the Senate Agriculture Committee and was a primary author of Title VII of the Dodd-Frank Act, which gave the CFTC authority over swaps. During debate on the bill in July 2010, she told fellow senators what she expected the markets to try.
“It would be quite easy to construct an event contract around sporting events such as the Super Bowl, the Kentucky Derby, and Masters golf tournament. These types of contracts would not serve any real commercial purpose. Rather, they would be used solely for gambling.”
Congress didn’t ban those contracts outright. It wrote a broad public-interest standard and left the call to the CFTC, which in 2011 adopted Rule 40.11. The rule bars registered exchanges from listing contracts that involve “terrorism, assassination, war, gaming, or an activity that is unlawful under any State or Federal law,” though the agency can approve or deny individual contracts.
Her position shifted in steps. In an August 2024 letter, written after she began working for Kalshi, Ms. Lincoln opposed a Biden-era CFTC proposal to extend the ban to election bets. In that same letter she said sports results lack “significant economic consequences,” which put her close to where she stood in 2010. Kalshi wasn’t offering sports wagers then.
It began on Jan. 23, 2025, three days after President Trump’s second inauguration, announcing: “The Golden Age of markets is here.” Afterward, Ms. Lincoln told the CFTC it should permit the sports contracts she had once described as pure gambling. In a 2025 public letter, she argued that Kalshi should be allowed to offer sports bets in every state, according to OpenSecrets.
Ilya Beylin, a business law professor at Seton Hall Law School who studies prediction markets, told Ars Technica the timing made sense. “The Biden-era CFTC considered event contracts on sporting events prohibited under CFTC Rule 40.11,” he said. “Lawyers working with Kalshi understood this… The second Trump administration radically changed its approach to sports contracts and stopped enforcing CFTC Rule 40.11.”
The Trump CFTC has let sports contracts trade nationwide, including in states that restrict sports betting, and says states must be kept from enforcing their own laws against the markets. Donald Trump Jr. advises both Kalshi and Polymarket, and 1789 Capital, a venture firm where he is a partner, is one of Polymarket’s largest investors.
Kalshi says on its website that because it “works like the stock market rather than a casino,” it is subject to federal rather than state law. It blames much of the opposition on “the gaming cartel.”
Kevin O’Toole, executive director of the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board, wrote to the CFTC early this year that the agency had addressed Ms. Lincoln’s concerns for more than 14 and a half years. “Today, the landscape has deteriorated,” he wrote, listing Kalshi markets on who will win Survivor and whether Mr. Trump would say “Make Iran Great Again” in April 2026.
Steve Edwards, chairman of the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community, told the agency that her 2010 remarks show “Congress clearly intended the Act to prohibit—not enable—sports wagering through event contracts.” One federal judge has quoted the same remarks as evidence of what Congress meant.
The courts have split. Last month a Sixth Circuit panel ruled that states may regulate prediction markets as gambling, and the appeals court said states can enforce their laws against Kalshi, making a Supreme Court case likely.
The industry is spending to shape the outcome. Kalshi, Polymarket and the Coalition for Prediction Markets have put at least $3 million into federal and state lobbying and campaign contributions so far this year, OpenSecrets reported.
Kalshi says it doesn’t list markets on itself. On Polymarket, users can bet on whether the Supreme Court will take the case.