Kalshi Election Predictions, Graded: The Market Puts Fishback Near 13% Of The Vote, And We Are Keeping The Receipt

Anyone can quote election odds the week before the vote. The only version of that sentence that means anything is the one written down before the result, left untouched, and graded after. That is what this page is: a running scorecard of what Kalshi's election markets said, frozen before each race is decided, then graded against certified results. Row 1 is the August 18, 2026 Florida Republican governor primary, and the name inside it that accounts for about 63% of every contract ever traded on this race's Kalshi winner board: James Fishback. The exact freeze rules, and what counts as a miss, are spelled out below, before the vote, so nobody can accuse us of grading on a curve.

The Quick Answer

Kalshi prices James Fishback at 1.5¢ to win the Florida Republican governor primary on August 18, 2026, about +6570 as a moneyline, while Byron Donalds' 98.5¢ bid works out to roughly -6570. But the winner market is not the interesting one. Kalshi's separate vote-share ladder puts the market's median for Fishback's vote share near 13%, with the deep, heavily traded rungs bracketing it between 10% and 15%. Before the first polls close, we freeze every price on both markets; certified results grade them. The full ladder, the freeze rules, and how a miss gets recorded are below.

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Why This Page Exists

We already grade ourselves. The model verdict scoreboard tracks every prediction our AI panel has logged against how markets actually settled, wins and losses in the same font. The scorecard below is its sister: it grades the market itself. Kalshi's prices get quoted everywhere as if they were forecasts, including by us in the daily Kalshi coverage hub, so the honest follow-up is to write the prices down at a fixed moment and check them against what certified.

That only works if the rules are set before the outcome. So the rules get committed now, on August 11, 2026, while the result is unknown to everyone, including the market.

What The Winner Market Says Right Now

Prices below were captured from Kalshi's API as of 5:51 PM ET on August 11, 2026, seven days before the primary. Kalshi's nominee event lists one yes/no contract per listed name; whichever listed name matches the certified Republican nominee for Florida governor settles YES.

Listed Name	Bid	Ask	Last Trade	Implied Probability (Mid)	Contracts Traded (Lifetime)
Byron Donalds	98.5¢	98.7¢	98.3¢	98.6%	3,385,767
James Fishback	1.4¢	1.5¢	1.5¢	1.5%	14,982,362
Jay Collins	0.2¢	0.4¢	0.3¢	0.3%	3,229,423
Paul Renner	0¢	0.1¢	0.1¢	<0.1%	1,280,924
Casey DeSantis	0¢	0.1¢	0.1¢	<0.1%	347,309
Charles Burkett	0¢	0.1¢	0.1¢	<0.1%	291,757
Matt Gaetz	0¢	0.1¢	0.1¢	<0.1%	124,607
Wilton Simpson	0¢	0.1¢	0.1¢	<0.1%	100,642
Jimmy Patronis	0¢	0.1¢	0.1¢	<0.1%	10,183

One caution before reading that table as a ballot: it is not one. Eleven Republicans qualified for the August 18 primary, and Kalshi's list matches only four of them: Donalds, Fishback, Collins, and Renner. The other five listed names, Casey DeSantis and Matt Gaetz among them, never qualified for this primary, so their contracts simply grade NO, and the seven qualified candidates without a contract sit outside the market entirely. The scorecard grades the listed contracts, nothing more.

The row worth staring at is the second one. A candidate the market prices at a penny and a half accounts for roughly 15 million of the event's 23.8 million lifetime traded contracts, about 63%, more than four times the volume on the favorite. Kalshi's open-interest count in the same snapshot shows roughly 9.8 million of those Fishback contracts still open. One honest caveat before that number does too much work: contract count flatters cheap contracts, because a dollar of trading mints far more penny contracts than 98¢ ones, so counts measure argument, not dollars at risk. The concentration is still striking. Hold that gap between attention and probability; it is the reason this page exists, and we will come back to it at the end. Our six-model panel's read on this same primary is a separate page, and it will be graded by the same result.

The Fishback Ladder: The Over/Under His Night Gets Judged Against

Because a 1.5¢ winner contract will almost certainly settle NO, the market that actually measures Fishback's night is Kalshi's James Fishback vote percent event, a vote-share ladder of fifteen separate contracts, each asking whether he receives at least X% of the certified primary vote. New to how these contracts price and settle? The mechanics are covered in our Kalshi guide. Here is the full ladder, same 5:51 PM ET August 11, 2026 snapshot:

Rung	Bid	Ask	Last Trade	Contracts Traded (Lifetime)	Listed Since
At Least 1%	99.9¢	100¢	99.9¢	919,735	April 1, 2026
At Least 3%	98.2¢	99.8¢	99.4¢	157,515	April 1, 2026
At Least 5%	94.2¢	94.8¢	94.0¢	104,716	April 1, 2026
At Least 6%	92.0¢	93.0¢	92.0¢	11,972	August 10, 2026
At Least 7%	87.0¢	91.0¢	87.0¢	8,512	August 10, 2026
At Least 8%	80.0¢	87.0¢	79.0¢	602	August 10, 2026
At Least 9%	75.0¢	78.0¢	74.0¢	3,713	August 10, 2026
At Least 10%	63.0¢	65.0¢	63.0¢	311,461	April 1, 2026
At Least 11%	58.0¢	64.0¢	65.0¢	6,289	August 10, 2026
At Least 12%	56.0¢	61.0¢	56.0¢	1,806	August 10, 2026
At Least 13%	52.0¢	60.0¢	45.0¢	1,985	August 10, 2026
At Least 14%	31.0¢	34.0¢	33.0¢	713	August 10, 2026
At Least 15%	30.0¢	32.0¢	31.0¢	173,996	July 9, 2026
At Least 20%	13.0¢	14.0¢	13.0¢	700,034	April 1, 2026
At Least 30%	2.8¢	3.3¢	3.4¢	682,696	April 1, 2026

Look at the last column before reading anything else into the thin rows. Eight of the fifteen rungs, 6% through 9% and 11% through 14%, were listed by Kalshi on August 10, 2026, the day before this snapshot; the original rungs date to April 1 and the 15% rung to July 9. So the interior books are not thin because interest died. They are one day old. And the expansion itself is information: the exchange built its new rungs exactly where the action had concentrated, in the 6-14% range. (Last prints go stale in thin books, which is why a couple of last-trade cells sit out of order; the bid/ask is the live number.)

Read it from the liquid rungs, because not all of these books are equal. The 10% rung, with over 300,000 contracts traded, sits near 64¢ at the mid, about -180 as a moneyline: the market makes him a solid favorite to reach double digits. At the 15% rung, 174,000 contracts have traded and the book quotes around 31¢ at the mid, about +220: clearing fifteen is a real underdog outcome. One of the most traded books on the whole ladder, the 20% rung, quotes 13.5¢ at the mid, roughly +640. So the liquid books bracket his share between 10% and 15%.

The interior rungs pin it tighter, with the caveat already on the table: they are thin and, mostly, a day old. Just over 700 contracts have traded on the 14% rung; the 8%, 12%, and 13% rungs, under 2,000 each. Taking the quotes at face value, the ladder flips from favorite to underdog between 13% (56¢ mid, on a wide 52/60 quote) and 14% (32.5¢ mid), which is why we describe the market's median as 13-14%. The symmetric caution: that 14% quote sits right on top of the deep 15% book next door, so the liquid read puts the flip somewhere between 13% and 15%, with the day-old interior quotes pinning it toward the bottom of that range. Near 13% is the honest one-number summary. When we freeze this ladder, we freeze bid and ask for every rung so the thinness is part of the record too.

The Grading Rules, Frozen Before The Vote

Here is the pre-commitment, stated as boringly as we can manage.

1. What gets frozen. Every contract on the winner market (ticker KXGOVFLNOMR-26, nine listed names in the August 11 snapshot) and every rung of the Fishback vote percent ladder (ticker KXVOTEPRIMARY-GOVFLNOMR26JFIS, fifteen rungs in the same snapshot), each recorded as best bid, best ask, and last trade. If Kalshi lists or delists contracts before the freeze, whatever is listed at the freeze moment is what freezes.

2. When. One final snapshot at 6:59 PM ET on Tuesday, August 18, 2026, one minute before the first Florida polls close at 7:00 PM ET. Panhandle counties on Central time close an hour later, so the snapshot precedes every closed poll and every reported vote. Nothing frozen after that moment counts.

3. What grades it. Certified official results as published by the Florida Division of Elections. Kalshi's rulebook for the vote-percent ladder settles the same way; it reads certified or official results only, never preliminary ones. If Kalshi settles the winner market earlier off the projected result, that changes nothing here: our grade waits for certification either way, and election-night preliminary counts grade nothing.

4. How each contract grades. The listed contract matching the certified nominee grades YES; every other listed contract grades NO, including the names that never qualified for the ballot. Qualified candidates Kalshi never listed sit outside the scorecard. Each ladder rung grades YES if Fishback's certified share of the valid primary vote is at least that rung's number, endpoints inclusive, matching the ladder's own written rules. No judgment calls, no partial credit.

The one-sentence version: everything freezes at 6:59 PM ET on August 18, 2026, certified results grade every contract mechanically, and a miss is recorded exactly like a hit.

5. How the market grades. The graded probability for every contract is its frozen bid/ask midpoint; bid, ask, and last are all recorded, but the midpoint is the number that gets scored. Three lines then go in the scorecard row, and all three are mechanical. First, sides: a frozen midpoint above 50¢ puts the market on the YES side of that contract, below 50¢ on the NO side, and any contract that settles against its side is recorded as a miss, printed at the same size as a hit. Second, the Fishback number: his certified share, set against the frozen median (13-14% on the August 11 quotes) and the liquid-book band of 10-15%. Third, two Brier scores, reported separately: one across the winner market's contracts and one across the ladder's rungs. The Brier score is the standard accuracy measure where 0.250 is a permanent coin flip and lower is better; the rungs restate a single quantity fifteen ways, so they never blend into the winner market's number. Two fallbacks, committed now: a contract with no bid grades at half its ask, and every midpoint clamps to the 0.1-99.9¢ range.

6. When Kalshi misses, the row says so. A scorecard that only remembers wins is marketing. If Fishback clears 20%, then today's 13¢, or whatever the 20% rung freezes at on August 18, stays on this page next to the result. If he lands at 6%, the frozen price on the 10% rung stays too. The frozen numbers are never restated, reweighted, or quietly improved; every update appends.

A Worked Example: How Row 1 Will Grade

To make the mechanics concrete, suppose the certified count lands Fishback at exactly 12.4% of the valid vote, with Donalds certified as the nominee. This is an illustration of the arithmetic, not a forecast, and it uses the live August 11, 2026 quotes purely to show how the frozen snapshot will be scored.

Contract	Price In This Illustration (Mid)	Settles	Market Side (Frozen Mid)	Graded
Donalds To Win	98.6¢	YES	YES	Hit
Fishback To Win	1.5¢	NO	NO	Hit
Fishback At Least 10%	64¢	YES	YES	Hit
Fishback At Least 13%	56¢ (on a 52/60 quote)	NO	YES	Miss
Fishback At Least 14%	32.5¢	NO	NO	Hit
Fishback At Least 20%	13.5¢	NO	NO	Hit

At 12.4%, every rung from 1% through 12% settles YES and every rung from 13% up settles NO. Notice the fourth row: the thin 13% rung was quoted above 50¢, putting the market on its YES side, and in this illustration it grades as a miss. That YES side rests on a wide 52/60 quote rather than a print, and its last trade was 45¢; the frozen mid is still what grades, which is exactly why the spread gets frozen with it. That row would sit in the scorecard permanently. The Brier arithmetic works the same way: a 98.6¢ favorite that wins contributes (0.986 minus 1) squared, or about 0.0002, nearly perfect, while that missed 56¢ midpoint on the 13% rung contributes (0.56 minus 0) squared, or about 0.31, worse than a coin flip. Sum one such term for every frozen contract within each market, divide by that market's contract count, and the row carries its two Brier scores. No judgment enters at any step, which is the point.

How The Scorecard Grows

A prediction market scorecard only means something if rows keep getting added under rules that never move. Every 2026 primary our prediction-market coverage takes a position on gets a row under these same terms: freeze at the last pre-close snapshot, grade on certification. The races that resolve on November 3, 2026, including the Senate and governor markets our midterms coverage prices week over week, get their rows graded when those results certify. And the cumulative record carries its own falsifiable claim: if these markets are well calibrated, frozen favorites priced at 90¢ or better should win at least nine times in ten, and 13¢ longshots should land about once in eight. By the time the November rows grade, there will be enough of them to start checking.

The Scorecard

#	Race	The Market's Line (When Frozen)	Certified Result	Grade
1	Florida Republican governor primary, August 18, 2026	Freezes 6:59 PM ET on August 18, 2026. Snapshot of August 11: Donalds 98.6¢ mid to win; Fishback median share near 13%	Certifies after August 18, 2026	Pending

One row, still pending, is exactly what this page should look like today. The prices above are the August 11, 2026 snapshot numbers; the frozen set replaces them in this table the evening of the primary, before any result exists. Florida's statewide certification typically lands within a few weeks of the vote, and the row grades the day the certified numbers publish.

What We Are Not Claiming

What gets graded here is market accuracy, nothing else. This scorecard does not endorse a candidate, characterize any candidate's voters, or recommend a trade, and a single row cannot vindicate or convict a market either way. If Fishback's 1.5¢ winner contract settles NO, that tells you almost nothing; 1.5¢ shots are supposed to lose about 985 times in a thousand. If it settles YES, that alone does not make the market broken. Whether prices like these are well calibrated is a question about many markets over time, which is why our accuracy explainer leans on academic calibration data, and why the documented tendency of longshots to be slightly overpriced, the favorite-longshot bias, is one of the patterns this scorecard will eventually test with our own frozen numbers.

The Bottom Line

The Florida board holds two numbers that cannot both be the story. Fifteen million contracts traded on James Fishback, and a 1.5¢ price. The count is flattered by the price, as covered above, yet the exchange still found the argument real enough to build eight new vote-share rungs around this one candidate the day before our snapshot. Attention and probability have come apart, and every screenshot of Fishback odds shared this week is, one way or another, a bet on which number mattered. Our answer is the boring one: write down the winner board, write down the ladder whose median sits near 13%, timestamp the freeze at 6:59 PM ET on August 18, 2026, and let the certified results settle the argument. This page records the number either way, and the next covered primary gets a row under the same rules. For the day-to-day coverage that feeds those rows, our full prediction-markets hub is the place to browse.

Market prices are what traders paid, not forecasts of fact, and any model figures referenced from this page are model estimates, not predictions of fact and not financial or voting advice. Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated exchange offering event contracts; 18+, availability varies by state.