America's Talking - Lawmaker: Prediction markets coming if Wisconsin doesn't approve sports betting

Episode Date: November 20, 2025

(The Center Square) – One of the sponsors of Wisconsin’s statewide sports wagering legislation is warning prediction markets could take over the sports wagering marketplace if state lawmakers don���t pass a law in the Assembly Wednesday allowing the state’s 11 tribes to offer online sports wagering in the state. Support this podcast: https://secure.anedot.com/franklin-news-foundation/ce052532-b1e4-41c4-945c-d7ce2f52c38a?source_code=xxxxxxRead more: https://www.thecentersquare.com/wisconsin/article_636ec6ef-a0ee-4c2b-a1a6-fdc30bfa8bde.html Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to America's Talking. I'm J.D. Davidson. Joining me today is John Stife. He's our Wisconsin reporter for the Center Square, and we're going to talk sports gambling. Where in Wisconsin, you can't do it. But, John, there's a push to kind of make that legal in the state. Right. And they're doing a technical amendment that would say that mobile sports wagering, if you do it through one of the 11th, tribes in the state that currently have gaming and their servers are on one of on tribal lands and you're in the state of wisconsin then it doesn't count as a bet so it's not a crime and it fits the mold and that's because there's an law from pre 93 that allowed these gaming packs with the 11 tribes in wisconsin to have gaming on the tribal lands and later it was amended to add

sports gaming. So why the push now by lawmakers to, I hesitate to say, make it legal, but make sports betting legal in the state? Well, it's because first of all, it's blowing up. There's, it's across the country. It's being legalized. And with all the things like the Cleveland Guardian situation where people got in trouble, players got in trouble. The players got in trouble. with it. They want to have a regulated market so that you can find out if people are betting on these weird niche things and figuring out why they're winning a bunch of money on that, which is corruption. So that's one reason. Another reason is nationally prediction markets have come into place in all these places that haven't allowed sports wagering legally in the regulated market,

and then the states aren't getting tax money from those prediction markets. The difference between sports wagering on the legal market and prediction markets is a whole thing. It's really technical and essentially you go to a sports book and you get a number and you're betting against the house and you're saying, okay, I think this team's going to win. On a prediction market, it's essentially they take a little cut and then you're betting against other people. You're like saying team A, I think they're going to win and then they leverage it against people that are putting money on Team B.

They also have things outside of sports, like who's going to win an election, things like that. And technically, federally, it's been allowed for them to operate in all these states that don't have these regulated sports wagering markets. So there's a lot to unpack here.

Let's start with, I think that was a pretty good explanation of the prediction market. It's basically you and I are betting. right we're going to bet on yeah right you and i are going to bet if the next car passes my house is going to be a white car or a red car and we're going to bet five dollars they get a dollar from each of us um do and there are ridiculous things like that on there like whether trump will say a specific word when he meets someone whether he will shake the hand of someone he's meeting

that literally happened yesterday in one of the white house accounts commented on it afterwards, which is a whole other thing. So, I mean, this could really, I mean, we could do four or five segments on this. You know, State Ohio, where I'm based is banning prop bets. This, if the prediction market is technically not betting, then prop bets would come back in states that have banned prop bet. But, and let's go, let's look broader nationally. What are the large sports gaming companies starting to do in other states that Wisconsin is worried is going to come in there?

So right now, Kalshi and Polly Market are two of the big prediction markets. But within the last week, Fanduel and Draft Kings, which are the two biggest legalized sports books in the country, have said we're going to put millions, like hundreds of millions into creating prediction markets, in states like Wisconsin that don't already have the legalized sports gaming. And the problem, again, for states with that is then they're not getting their cut. And Wisconsin, the cut comes from a revenue agreement between the state and the tribes. In other states, it's taxing agreements between the sports books and the state. And these prediction markets aren't involved in that at all. So the state's not getting money out of it.

So all the states that have held out like a Texas, a Georgia, a California on legalizing sports wagering, well, people are able to do it through these prediction markets there. The state's not getting money in a lot of ways it takes away that moral argument that, hey, this is a bad idea. We shouldn't have sports wagering. It shouldn't be legal in our state. Well, people are doing it through these sports event contracts on these prediction markets either way. how much money are we talking i mean in some states we're got to be talking close to billions of dollars right so like the numbers for calcio loan for the first week of november were 1.3 billion dollars was wagered there or they don't call it wagering but involved that's one week

yes it's one week for everything for an NFL weekend it's it's hundreds of million and this is going to go up as you see Fanduil and Draft Kings roll out what they're doing, putting more advertising behind it so more people are aware, hey, you can do this in this state, and it's not necessarily as nefarious as before when you're going through like Costa Rican offshore illegal sports gaming books. Like this is more regulated because it's a company, draft Kings and Fandul, that doesn't want to get in trouble.

with the federal government and all these state entities because they're making money in those too. So for the taxpayer, I got to look at this as somehow, I guess, putting our futuristic look on it, somehow state lawmakers need to figure out a way to tap this prediction market just as they do sports betting

and not give this way out for these men major sports betting organizations. I mean, obviously, you and I have covered state politics for a long time. Nobody's ever going to reduce the amount of money government gets. But if a state, even like Ohio or Wisconsin, could get close to a billion dollars in new revenue, that may not lower your property taxes or it may not lower a sales tax, but it could fight off an increase. So just to be clear the billion is what's being wagered. The tax money involved is right. But if you're talking one week a billion dollars, even if you're getting a 10% tax on that over the course of 52 weeks, hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars in states like California and Texas, who knows

what that could be like? Right. Because you look at states like North Carolina, recently they put it in place. They went over $100 million in tax money for the past year. Tennessee, it's like 12, 14 million in a month. So the numbers are. I mean, they're big. And I feel like as often is the case, general assemblies across the country are kind of behind this. And they may get stuck where they may not have a leg to stand on. And all of a sudden, they're going to lose this revenue option that could really help taxpayers.

And it happened quicker than people thought. They thought in Texas where you have the two-year process that, hey, we can sit on this for a little bit. Well, states like Wisconsin are figuring out maybe this is more of an urgent issue than we thought it was previously. John, thanks for joining us today. For America's Talking, I'm J.D. Davidson.