Prices as of August 29, 2026 at 6:31 a.m. ET, read from Kalshi's live quotes. Model estimates generated overnight, price-blind, on a data card that carried Tom Begich's suspension and the challenge to Treg Taylor's candidacy. The state's target date to certify is August 31, which is also the last day anyone can leave the ballot, so this board reprices again on Monday.
In the hour before noon Alaska time on Friday, Kalshi's contract on Tom Begich becoming governor collapsed from 15¢ to 2¢ on more than 40,000 contracts. Nobody had said anything in public. Begich made it official that evening: after finishing second in the primary, he is suspending his campaign and endorsing the man who finished first, fellow Democrat Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins. By the time the Anchorage Daily News had the quotes, the market had been trading the outcome for eight hours, and the separate contract on him withdrawing had been moving since Thursday afternoon.
When we last scored this race a week ago, the panel wrote that a Begich exit was one of the two developments that would move the board hardest (the other was a Republican leaving the field), because it hands one lane a single candidate while the other lane cannot consolidate. That is now the likely ballot, pending one piece of paper due Monday. Alaska's November election for governor will pit one Democrat against three Republicans under ranked-choice rules, and the two leading Republicans have said, on the record, that they are staying. We re-ran all seven working seats of our AI panel on the new field, blind to every price, and every seat came back above the market's overnight read, a gap the market has spent the hours since closing but has not closed. The reason lives in a rule about ballots that stop counting, and it is below, after the record of what actually happened on Friday.
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What Happened On Friday
Begich told the Daily News that the decision rested on data suggesting "a Democrat was likely to win the governor's race if only one such candidate appears on the November ballot." His own line was blunter: "It was a better chance of winning if one of us went on alone." He also named money, saying that raising enough to run a real campaign "is hard when you're No. 2, not No. 1." His formal statement, reported by The Alaska Story, read: "Today, Julia and I are suspending our campaign and endorsing Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins for Governor of Alaska."
One detail matters for anyone holding a contract. Suspending a campaign and leaving the ballot are different acts. The Division of Elections requires a written withdrawal notice by the close of business on Monday, August 31, and until that document is filed and accepted, Begich remains one of the four candidates advancing from the primary. Every seat on the panel priced that step at 90% to 92% likely to complete, and Kalshi's separate contract on Begich dropping out before September 1 closed Friday at 99¢. The intent is not in doubt. The paperwork is Monday's business.
The Republican lane did the opposite. Dave Bronson, who finished fourth overall and second among Republicans, had signed a District 8 Republican vetting document agreeing to drop out if he received less than a majority, then announced after the primary that he would stay on the November ballot regardless. His campaign's argument, made by running mate Josh Church at an August 26 candidate forum, was that "80% of the Republican votes were cast for someone other than the leading Republican candidate," so Bernadette Wilson has no mandate to be that candidate; Bronson's own line was "We are staying in this race because we believe Alaskans deserve a choice." Wilson has likewise indicated she is not dropping out.
Then there is the chair Begich leaves behind. Under Alaska's top-four rules, a withdrawn finalist is replaced by the fifth-place finisher, and fifth place belongs to Treg Taylor, the former attorney general and a Republican. On the same Friday, the Daily News reported that staff of the Alaska Public Offices Commission recommended that Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom "not certify Mr. Taylor's nomination for the office of governor," because he never completed the financial disclosure the law requires despite months of requests. Taylor reported more than $1 million in rental income without fully identifying his tenants, which he says he withheld "to protect their privacy," and he did not attend Wednesday's hearing. If the full commission follows its staff, the sixth-place finisher, Republican Click Bishop, could be elevated instead. The timing of that ruling has not been reported.
The market read all of this in sequence. Kalshi's contract on Begich withdrawing jumped from 8¢ to 60¢ on Thursday afternoon, a day before he spoke, and Kreiss-Tomkins' winner contract went from 34¢ to 44¢ in the same hour Begich's collapsed. By Friday night, with the announcement public, Kreiss-Tomkins was bid at 47¢ while Wilson's last trade sat unchanged at 36¢ over a 35¢ bid. Bronson lost six cents on the day, from 17¢ to 11¢. And the repricing did not stop at the close: by early Saturday morning, Kreiss-Tomkins' bid had climbed to 50¢ with the last trade at 55¢, Bronson had slipped further to a 9¢ bid, and Begich's contract was down to a tenth of a cent. The price history moved hours before the news did, and that timing is worth carrying into Monday: this board reprices on filings, not on press releases.
The Ballot Alaska Will Actually Vote On
Alaska runs one nonpartisan primary in which every candidate shares a ballot and the top four advance to a ranked-choice general on November 3. These are the Division of Elections figures from the August 28 report, with 400 of 402 precincts reported. The count is not final until the state certifies on August 31, so the 415-vote gap for fifth place is not locked.
| Ticket | Party | Votes | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kreiss-Tomkins / Johnson | DEM/NON | 36,961 | 22.52% |
| Begich / Hnilicka | D | 34,149 | 20.80% |
| Wilson / Shower | R | 16,456 | 10.02% |
| Bronson / Church | R | 13,349 | 8.13% |
| Taylor / English | R | 11,924 | 7.26% |
| Bishop / Schuerch | REP/NON | 11,509 | 7.01% |
| Crum / Craig | R | 8,914 | 5.43% |
| Hughes / Gettys | R | 8,776 | 5.35% |
| Walker / Hoffbeck | NON | 7,333 | 4.47% |
Turnout was 27.75% of registered voters, and the late mail moved the table in two ways that matter. The two Democrats now hold 43.32% between them, up from 41.66% in the August 21 count, which is the bloc Kreiss-Tomkins inherits if Begich's voters follow his endorsement. And Taylor widened his lead over Bishop for fifth place from 283 votes in the August 21 count to 415, so the promotion chair is his unless the commission takes it away.
The November ballot, then, is Kreiss-Tomkins against Wilson, Bronson, and either Taylor or Bishop. Republican-labeled tickets took just under half the primary vote, spread across a dozen names; the single best Republican managed 10.02%. Under ranked choice, a bloc that large does not need to win first preferences. It needs its voters to rank the other Republicans, and to keep ranking after their first choice is eliminated. Alaska's statewide House races have tested exactly that in back-to-back cycles, and the answer flipped only when the crowded lane consolidated before the ballot.
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The Board
Read these off the bid, the price a buyer will actually pay you right now, because three of these books are wide. The AI blend is the median of seven independent model estimates, made without sight of any price, after a revision round in which each seat read the others' reasoning.
| Candidate | Primary finish | Kalshi bid / ask | AI panel blend |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins (D) | 1st, 22.52% | 50¢ / 53¢ | 55% |
| Bernadette Wilson (R) | 3rd, 10.02% | 35¢ / 36¢ | 25% |
| Dave Bronson (R) | 4th, 8.13% | 9.1¢ / 16¢ | 9% |
| Treg Taylor (R) | 5th, 7.26% | 1.7¢ / 5¢ | 5% |
| Click Bishop (R) | 6th, 7.01% | 0.5¢ / 4.5¢ | 4% |
| Tom Begich (D) | 2nd, 20.80% | 0.1¢ / 0.9¢ | 1.5% |
| Any Other Candidate | — | — | 2% |
The panel is five points above the market's bid on the new favorite (two above the 53¢ ask a buyer would actually pay) and ten below it on the old favorite, Bernadette Wilson. The five is what remains of eight. When the seats ran overnight, the bid was 47¢; by Saturday morning the market had climbed to 50¢ and closed three cents of the gap on its own. Every one of the seven seats made Kreiss-Tomkins the favorite, and the market has now caught up to exactly the lowest of them, Kimi at 50%. Nothing about the models' reasoning is exotic. They read the same three facts the market read on Friday and drew a straighter line from them.
There is a liquidity fact to carry into every number above. Wilson's contract has traded about 1,500 contracts in the last 24 hours against more than 105,000 on Begich's. Begich's exit was priced by a stampede; the new favorite's own book saw about 8,300 contracts, and Wilson's price barely moved because almost nobody was on the other side of it. A 35¢ bid that has not been tested since the field changed is a quote, not a verdict.
More live boards from the same panel: every 2026 governor board we track · Alaska's Senate race, on the same ballot, where Kalshi's combo market bids a Democratic sweep of governor and Senate at 38¢ against a Republican sweep at 30¢ · the Senate control board. Prices fetched August 29, 2026.
Every Seat's Number
Each model received the same fetched card: the final pre-certification count, the withdrawal and promotion rules, Begich's statements and the fact that his notice was not yet filed, the Taylor certification challenge, Bronson's refusal to exit, both of Alaska's live ranked-choice precedents with their transfer arithmetic, the candidate files, and the competing ballot measure. None of them saw a price. These are the second-round numbers, after every seat read the others' reasoning anonymously and could revise. Two seats of the wider panel did not run this board.
| Seat | Kreiss-Tomkins | Wilson | Bronson | Taylor | Bishop | Begich | Other |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Fable | 56% | 24% | 9% | 4.5% | 3% | 1.5% | 2% |
| Claude Opus | 52% | 27% | 9% | 5% | 3.5% | 1.5% | 2% |
| Claude Sonnet | 56% | 22% | 9% | 6% | 4% | 1.5% | 1.5% |
| GPT | 55% | 25% | 8% | 4.5% | 4% | 1.5% | 2% |
| Gemini | 56% | 23% | 9% | 6% | 4% | 1% | 1% |
| Kimi | 50% | 28% | 9% | 5% | 4% | 2% | 2% |
| Grok | 55% | 25% | 8.5% | 5% | 3.5% | 1.5% | 1.5% |
| Panel Blend (Median) | 55% | 25% | 9% | 5% | 4% | 1.5% | 2% |
The blend row is each column's own median, so it will not sum to exactly 100.
Every seat on this panel is graded against real market settlements — records to date: Claude Fable 84% on 810 graded calls · Claude Opus 84% on 880 graded calls · Claude Sonnet 82% on 855 graded calls · GPT 84% on 6,480 graded calls · Gemini 86% on 5,172 graded calls · Kimi 82% on 2,576 graded calls · Grok 84% on 4,448 graded calls. Recomputed daily; the full scoreboard is public.
Models are frequently wrong, and the market price reflects real traders' money.* Every number in this piece gets graded in public once the race settles, on the full graded scoreboard.
Two Leak Rounds: Why The Panel Is Above The Market
Alaska has run this exact system at statewide scale in back-to-back cycles and produced opposite results, and the panel's whole case is that the November field now matches the 2022 condition, not the 2024 one.
2022, when the transfers failed. In the special U.S. House election, Mary Peltola took 39.66% of first preferences against Sarah Palin's 30.92% and Nick Begich III's 27.84%. The two Republicans held 58.76% of the ballots between them, an outright majority, and lost. Begich III opened with 52,536 first-choice votes, picked up write-in transfers to stand at 53,810 when he was eliminated, and his ballots then split 27,053 to Palin and 15,467 to Peltola, with the remaining 11,290 ranking nobody left and dropping out of the count. Peltola won the final round 51.48% to 48.52%. Roughly 29% of the eliminated Republican's ballots went to the Democrat and 21% exhausted, off a single elimination. (The November 2022 rematch, with both Republicans still on the ballot, repeated the result.)
2024, when the consolidation worked. After the top-four primary, Republicans Nancy Dahlstrom and Matthew Salisbury withdrew and the fifth- and sixth-place finishers moved up, leaving one serious Republican in the lane. Begich III led round one 48.41% to 46.37% and closed it out 51.22% to 48.78%, unseating Peltola.
| 2022 special (transfers failed) | 2024 general (consolidation worked) | |
|---|---|---|
| Republicans On The Ballot | 2 (Palin, Begich III) | 1 (Begich III) after two withdrawals |
| Republican First-Preference Share | 58.76% | 48.41% |
| Eliminated Republican's Ballots | 50% to Palin, 29% to Peltola, 21% exhausted | no Republican elimination needed |
| Final Round | Peltola 51.48% | Begich III 51.22% |
| 2026 Governor Field | 3 Republicans, 1 Democrat |
The rules did not change between those two years. What changed was whether the crowded lane consolidated before the general or had to survive the count. In 2026 the withdrawal window did its work on the Democratic side, and every seat treated that as the load-bearing fact.
"One consolidated Democrat near 44% first preferences against three Republicans forcing two leaky elimination rounds — the 2022 transfer-failure condition, not 2024's pre-general consolidation." — Claude Opus
Two rounds is the operative fact. With three Republicans on the ballot, two of them get eliminated before any Republican faces Kreiss-Tomkins one on one, and each elimination is a chance for ballots to cross over or stop. The seats modeled the weaker Republican eliminations at 50% to 65% flowing to another Republican, 15% to 30% crossing to Kreiss-Tomkins, and 15% to 25% exhausting. Starting from a first-preference floor in the low-to-mid 40s, the consolidated Democrat needs very little of that leakage to clear 50% of the ballots still counting.
"Bronson's Anchorage bloc is the leak — his mayoral record repels the same moderates Wilson needs." — Claude Opus
And the 2022 count is the hard evidence under that: 29% of the eliminated Republican's ballots crossed and 21% exhausted off one elimination. The seats' own write-ups rounded that exhaustion to 19%, computed off the pre-transfer base, so if anything the official tabulation runs slightly worse for the Republican lane than the panel modeled. Two sequential eliminations compound the leak.
The exhaustion estimate has a specific cause, and it is the sharpest thing on this board. Wilson is a named sponsor of the campaign behind Ballot Measure 2, the initiative to repeal ranked-choice voting, and it sits on the same November ballot as her own race. A candidate publicly identified with repealing ranked choice is asking those same voters to fill in a second and third choice for her. Gemini, the panel's best-graded seat, put it as a requirement rather than a risk: Wilson "requires near-perfect Republican transfer consolidation during the count."
What holds the panel at 55% rather than higher is real and every seat named it. Alaska voted for Donald Trump by 13.1 points in 2024. No Democrat has won the governorship since Tony Knowles left office in 2002. A 27.75% primary is not the November electorate, the repeal measure will pull motivated conservatives to the polls (the 2024 attempt to repeal the same system failed by 743 votes, the narrowest statewide margin in Alaska history), and nobody has published a general-election poll on this field. Kreiss-Tomkins also carries the race's sharpest attack line: more than three quarters of his $1.8 million haul came from out of state, including $372,000 from six employees of the California AI company Anthropic, a backlash he answered by proposing a moratorium on new data centers. (Disclosure: three of the seven models on this panel are made by that company.) Bronson's record cuts the other way: his single term as Anchorage mayor was marked by conflict with the Assembly over COVID-19 measures and appointments, an apology after condoning protesters wearing yellow Stars of David at a mask hearing, and a whistleblower-retaliation suit from his dismissed municipal manager that the Assembly voted to settle, all documented by ProPublica. Multiple seats cited that record as the reason his ballots leak rather than transfer.
Where The Panel Changed Its Mind
The revision round pulled the panel together from both ends, which is the pattern you want to see when a field has just changed.
Claude Opus came into round one as the panel's high seat at 67% for Kreiss-Tomkins, then cut to 52% after reading the others, and said exactly why it was giving back 15 points.
"What I weight against the group's higher JKRE numbers: Trump +13 is large, November's electorate is far bigger than 27.75% primary turnout, Measure 2 pulls repeal-motivated conservatives out, and no Democrat has won the office since Knowles. Those are real, unmodeled-by-polling headwinds — the card carries no post-primary general-election survey." — Claude Opus
Claude Sonnet moved the opposite direction, from 45% to 56%, once it counted the elimination rounds instead of the candidates: three Republicans means two leak rounds, "the same asymmetry that flipped 2022 into 2024, except here it cuts for the Democrat, not against." Kimi came down from 60% to 50% and Gemini from 63% to 56% on the baseline arguments. GPT barely moved, from 51% to 55%, and Grok rose into the pack from 46%; GPT's reason for holding is the fairest summary of the whole round: "I do not move to the 60s because the statewide baseline and measure-driven turnout keep a Republican consolidation-in-count path live." The seven seats finished within six points of one another on the favorite. A week ago they were spread across 18.
Dark Horses The Panel Won't Dismiss
Treg Taylor is the board's most divided book: his last trade printed at 6¢ on roughly 6,700 contracts, above even the panel's 5%, while the bid sat at 1.7¢. He is the man the promotion rule puts on the ballot the moment Begich's paperwork lands, a former attorney general with statewide name recognition, and the seats gave him roughly 55% to 62% odds of taking the chair (a number that bundles the APOC fight with the chance that late counting flips the 415-vote fifth-place gap), on the logic that a commission can still accept a disclosure defect as cured, even one already past its deadlines. His book is 1.7¢ bid against 5¢ ask, a spread wider than his entire price, which is the market saying it has not decided either.
Click Bishop at 0.5¢ is the board's largest gap in relative terms: the panel carried him at 4%, eight times the bid. If the commission bars Taylor, the former labor commissioner takes the chair, and Gemini flagged him as the more moderate of the two promotion candidates, with better transfer appeal. That is a claim about ranked-choice behavior more than about Bishop: the fourth Republican's job in this field is to hand ballots on cleanly, and the panel thinks the market has not priced which of the two men would do it better.
Dave Bronson at 9¢ is the one place the market has already come all the way to the panel. The seats scored him at 9% while his contract was still bid at 11¢; by Saturday morning the bid had slid to 9.1¢, right on the panel's number. The seats read his contract as pricing a candidate who leads the Republican lane on stubbornness and trails it on transfer appeal.
What Would Change The Panel's Mind
- Bronson, Taylor Or Bishop Files A Withdrawal By Monday. Nothing else on this list comes close. A Republican lane cut to two names flips the governing precedent from 2022 to 2024; two seats put Wilson near 50% and Kreiss-Tomkins in the mid-30s in that world. Bronson has said no: he signed a vetting pledge before the primary and then announced he would stay anyway.
- Begich's Written Notice Does Not Arrive. Two Democrats re-split the lane, Kreiss-Tomkins drops toward the mid-30s, and Begich's tenth-of-a-cent contract becomes the cheapest thing on the board to have paid out. No seat put this above 10%.
- The Commission Rules On Taylor. Certified, his 1.7¢ reprices toward the panel's 5%; barred, Bishop's 0.5¢ does. Either way the top line barely moves, because the seats treat the fourth Republican as a transfer source, not a contender.
- Any Published General-Election Poll. None exists for this field. A ranked poll showing Republican second-choice discipline above 70% with low exhaustion would push Wilson up and Kreiss-Tomkins toward a coin flip; one showing Wilson within single digits on final-round preferences would do the same.
| Date | What happens |
|---|---|
| August 31, 2026 | Target date for state certification of the primary, and the close-of-business deadline for any withdrawal, including Begich's written notice |
| Early September 2026 | The final November field is locked; the Taylor or Bishop promotion is known, pending the commission's ruling |
| November 3, 2026 | Ranked-choice general election, alongside Ballot Measure 2 on repealing the system itself |
| December 3, 2026 | Expected expiration on the Kalshi winner market, with early close once the winner is sworn in |
This page is re-scored whenever the story moves, and the "as of" stamp at the top carries the evidence. The next scheduled move is Monday's deadline.
The Bottom Line
A week ago the market and the panel agreed on the favorite and disagreed about why. Now they disagree on the size of the favorite, and the argument is cleaner than it has ever been on this board. The market has Kreiss-Tomkins at 50¢ because one Democrat against three Republicans in a Trump-plus-13 state is a coin flip. The panel has him at 55% because Alaska's own 2022 count showed what a split lane does under ranked choice, and this lane is split three ways, not two.
Three of the books on this board are wide enough that the midpoint misstates what you can actually sell: Bronson 9.1¢ against 16¢, Taylor 1.7¢ against 5¢, Bishop 0.5¢ against 4.5¢. The discipline this page has used since the primary still applies: argue from the bid, because that is the number someone will actually pay you, and treat the ask as insurance against Monday's headline. Then aim one question at one number. The party market's 49¢ Republican side is only about three cents above the sum of the four Republican candidates' bids: the books agree with each other; what is contested is which Republican that 49¢ concentrates into, and Wilson's 35¢ is where the market currently answers it. Under 2022's leak-and-exhaust arithmetic, with a repeal sponsor asking voters to rank her on the ballot she wants abolished, the panel's 55% sits above Kreiss-Tomkins' 50¢ instead. You cannot trade this race on OddsShopper, but that too-high-or-too-low discipline is exactly what our sports tools are built around, and you can see how we apply it on tonight's games with our free expert picks.
Begich left the race on Friday, his written withdrawal is due Monday, and the Republicans have until that same deadline to decide whether to answer him. The panel's number says they won't. The market's number says it is not so sure. One of them is wrong by about five cents, and Alaska will tell us which on November 3.
Hero illustration: OddsShopper, in the house collage style; its chart shows Kalshi bids at the overnight panel read (August 29, 1 a.m. ET); the board above carries the latest prices. Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins photo by Gillfoto, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0; Bernadette Wilson photo by Paxson Woelber, the Alaska Landmine, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0; photos cropped, toned, and composited.
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