Prices as of September 1, 2026, at 11:35 a.m. Eastern, pulled from Kalshi's public API while polls were open.
The Quick Answer: Massachusetts votes today, and the market graded the ballot weeks ago. Of the 11 nominee boards Kalshi has on this primary, ten trade at 88 cents or better for the favorite (Ed Markey at 99.5, an unopposed John Deaton at 99.5, Dan Koh at 88), and exactly one still trades like a race: MA-08, where Stephen Lynch is bid at 79 cents against Patrick Roath at 20. The full board, the three-cent spreads that say which heavy favorites the market trusts least, and the dead names still sitting on these boards are all below.
Massachusetts holds its state primary today, polls open 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. Eastern per the WBUR voter guide, and on Kalshi, where a price in cents is a probability, primary day reads less like an election than like a grading session. Most of the market's work already happened. The Democratic Senate board alone has seen more than 2.1 million contracts change hands lifetime, and what all that money left behind is a ballot priced into three tiers: races the market calls finished, one race it refuses to call, and a middle tier where the price says "decided" but the spread between what buyers offer and sellers ask quietly disagrees. That spread is the tell worth holding onto. By the end of this piece it will point you at two more districts, beyond the obvious one, where tonight could still produce a story.
Every Massachusetts Board On Kalshi, In One Table
| Race | Leader | Bid / Ask (¢) | Next name on the board | Bid / Ask (¢) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| U.S. Senate (D) | Ed Markey | 99.5 / 99.7 | Seth Moulton | 0.4 / 0.6 |
| U.S. Senate (R) | John Deaton | 99.5 / 99.9 | Lewis Evangelidis | 0.1 / 0.5 |
| Governor (R) | Michael Minogue | 98.0 / 99.3 | Brian Shortsleeve | 0.9 / 2.0 |
| MA-01 (D) | Richard Neal | 90 / 93 | Jeromie Whalen | 8 / 11 |
| MA-03 (D) | Lori Trahan | 99 / 100 | Gaige Clark | 0 / 1 |
| MA-04 (D) | Jake Auchincloss | 96 / 97 | Jason Poulos | 3 / 6 |
| MA-05 (D) | Katherine Clark | 98.5 / 99.1 | Jonathan Paz | 0.7 / 1.5 |
| MA-06 (D) | Dan Koh | 88 / 89 | Tram Nguyen | 12 / 14 |
| MA-06 (R) | Micah Jones | 99 / 100 | John Field | 0 / 1 |
| MA-08 (D) | Stephen Lynch | 79 / 82 | Patrick Roath | 20 / 22 |
| MA-09 (D) | Bill Keating | 96 / 99 | Craig Swallow | 2 / 4 |
Each row shows a board's two highest-priced strikes; most boards carry more names at a penny or less, and not all of them are on the actual ballot — more on that below.
One row breaks the pattern, and it is not close. Every favorite on this ballot except one is priced 88 cents or higher. Lynch at 79 bid is the only number that leaves a challenger a real chance, roughly one in five for Roath. It is the one door the market leaves open; start with the doors it slammed.
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The Decided Tier: What The Market Called Weeks Ago
The headline race stopped being a race in mid-August. Suffolk University's poll for the Boston Globe, in the field August 13 to 16, had Markey beating Moulton 52.2% to 37.6%, UMass Amherst and WCVB, in the field August 5 to 12, had it 54% to 28%. On August 18, the day both polls were public, Markey's contract jumped from 83 cents to 90. By this morning it sat at 99.5 bid. The Boston Globe editorial board backed Moulton on August 18; Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez backed Markey, and the money sided with the polls over the editorial page. The live trade on this race moved on long ago, to how big the win is: the margin board prices a Markey victory of 20 points or more at 79 to 80 cents. We walked that whole ladder, band by band, in our Markey vs Moulton primary-day piece, which is the scoreboard to hold against tonight's returns.
The rest of the decided tier is quieter, and in one case the certainty is structural rather than predictive. John Deaton is bid at 99.5 cents to be the Republican Senate nominee because he is running unopposed — every other name on his board is off the actual ballot, so the half-cent the market withholds is house caution, not doubt, and the case for what Deaton does with the nomination matters more for November than for tonight. Lori Trahan at 99 in MA-03, Katherine Clark at 98.5 in MA-05 and Micah Jones at 99 on the MA-06 Republican side are priced the same way, but each of those boards still carries at least one priced opponent. The one contested-and-still-decided statewide race is the Republican governor primary, where Al Jazeera's primary-day rundown frames Michael Minogue against Brian Shortsleeve as a real ideological choice between two veterans split on abortion rights. The market does not treat it as one: Minogue 98 bid, Shortsleeve 2 asked. Maura Healey, running unopposed on the Democratic side, has no primary board at all, because there is nothing to price.
Here is the strange part, and it sets up everything below: in three of these "finished" races, the loser's contract has traded more than the winner's. Moulton's strike has seen about 1.05 million contracts lifetime to Markey's 1.02 million. Jeromie Whalen's MA-01 contract out-traded Richard Neal's, roughly 67,600 to 60,100. Jason Poulos out-traded Jake Auchincloss, about 36,700 to 26,000. Most of that longshot money piles into strikes the spreads are perfectly confident about; Markey's spread is two-tenths of a cent and Auchincloss's is one. Only in MA-01 do the heavy challenger volume and a wide spread point the same way. Hold that thought.
The Live Race: MA-08 Is The Whole Show Tonight
The loudest endorsement signals in MA-08 all point one way. The Boston Globe endorsed Patrick Roath on August 23. Former governor Deval Patrick endorsed him in January. David Hogg's Leaders We Deserve PAC put its weight behind him, making the case in its own August post and sponsoring an August 11 poll showing him gaining. Roath, 39, a voting-rights attorney, has spent the summer arguing that Lynch's centrist record no longer fits the district.
The money read all of that and still wants Lynch. His contract sat at 79 bid, 82 asked this morning, against Roath at 20 bid, 22 asked. That is the endorsements-versus-electorate collision we unpacked in our MA-08 deep dive, which tracked the money moving toward the 13-term incumbent all week even as the Globe's editorial landed for the challenger. Lynch has held the seat since 2001, and his contract is the busiest House strike on the ballot at about 122,200 contracts traded, so this price is the most heavily voted-on House number Massachusetts has. And here is the detail the endorsement roll-call misses: unlike MA-01 and MA-04, where challenger contracts out-traded the incumbents', Roath's strike has traded only about 76,300 contracts to Lynch's 122,200. In the one race where the underdog actually has an institutional wave behind him, the longshot money never showed up. A 79-cent favorite still loses one time in five. If tonight produces an upset anywhere, the market says it is here, and if Lynch holds, the market faded the entire pro-Roath endorsement wave and won.
The Tightest Spread Sits On The Race Without An Independent Poll
MA-06 should be the hardest race on the board to price. It is the open seat Seth Moulton gave up to run for Senate, the field is crowded, and, as our MA-06 breakdown documented, no independent public poll had surfaced — only sponsor-funded numbers. Instead of uncertainty, the board carries the tightest spread of any contested primary on the ballot: Dan Koh at 88 bid, 89 asked, one cent between what buyers offer and sellers ask, tighter than the spread on 96-cent Bill Keating.
The confidence comes from the money trail, which is public even where the polling is not. DraftKings wrote a $250,000 check to New Leadership PAC, the super PAC spending for Koh — the check that breakdown traced through the FEC filings. Koh's roughly $4.7 million raised laps Tram Nguyen's $895,000, per Al Jazeera's primary-day summary, with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris both endorsing him. Nguyen answered late: Ayanna Pressley and Lori Trahan endorsed her on August 24, and her contract asks 14 cents, the most expensive underdog on the ballot after Roath. The full money trail, the sponsored-poll fights and the red-boxing accusations are in that breakdown. What tonight tests is whether a one-cent spread built almost entirely on fundraising and endorsements survives contact with an electorate nobody independently measured.
The Spread Tell: Which Heavy Favorites The Market Trusts Least
A bid-ask gap is the market admitting what it does not know: the wider the gap, the less agreement between buyers and sellers about the real number. This is the tell promised at the top of the page, and read through it, the decided tier splits.
Koh at 88 carries a one-cent spread. Auchincloss at 96 carries one cent. Markey's is two-tenths of a cent. Then there is Richard Neal in MA-01: 90 bid, 93 asked, a three-cent spread — tied with Bill Keating's in MA-09 for the widest on any favorite above 88, and the only one of the two on a board where the challenger's contract has out-traded the incumbent's. Neal has held the seat since 1989 and has spent heavily to defend it against Jeromie Whalen, an 11-year high school teacher in Northampton making his first run, but the race got exactly one debate, on August 26, and Whalen carries Our Revolution's endorsement into a low-turnout electorate. Whalen asks 11 cents. The market is not predicting an upset in Springfield (90 bid is still a heavy favorite), but of every heavy favorite on this ballot, MA-01 is where the price-setters agree least. Keating's three cents in MA-09 ride on light volume, about 25,200 contracts on his strike, which is its own kind of doubt. If you are watching two more districts tonight beyond MA-08, the spreads just picked them for you.
The Dead Names Still On The Boards
The intent of a nominee board is the certified ballot; the reality is that Kalshi lists strikes when races form, and some names age out without being removed. Today's boards carry several. The Republican Senate board still lists Charlie Baker, Christopher Thrasher and Lewis Evangelidis behind Deaton, all at half a cent or less, on a primary with exactly one name on the ballot. The Republican governor board lists Karyn Polito, Bruce Tarr, Peter Durant, Mike Kennealy, Lewis Evangelidis and Michael Soter, all at zero or a tenth of a cent, when the actual ballot is a two-man race between Minogue and Shortsleeve. The Democratic Senate board still carries Ayanna Pressley at a tenth of a cent; the certified field is Markey, Moulton, Alexander Rikleen and William Gates, so Pressley is not on the ballot, and Gates, who is, was never listed at all. The MA-06 board lists both Moulton, who gave up the seat, and Salem mayor Dominick Pangallo, who declined to run. Chris Boyd sits on the MA-04 board after withdrawing.
None of this is a trading signal. A zero-cent strike on a candidate who is not on the ballot is furniture, not a fade: it cannot pay yes, so nobody bothers to trade it to a true zero. But it is a reading skill this ballot happens to teach well. Before treating any strike as live, check the name against the certified field, because a board is a menu of what was once plausible, not a mirror of what is on the ballot. It is the same verification habit that separates a price from a story anywhere on the full 2026 election board slate we track.
- The Money Spent A Day Catching Up To The Poll
- New Hampshire Senate Odds: Is 88 Cents Too Confident?
- Why Ed Markey (D) Will Win the MA Senate Primary
- Why Scott Brown (R) Will Win the NH Senate Primary
- Why Ashley Moody (R) Will Win the Florida Senate Primary
What Settles Tonight
The lopsided calls should come fast after 8 p.m.; MA-08, riding on primary-day turnout in a state whose semi-closed rules let unenrolled voters pull either ballot, may not. Watch the geography before the networks call it: early returns from Lynch's South Boston base against Roath's Jamaica Plain will tell you whether 79 cents was the right number before any anchor does. Markey's margin ladder grades band by band as returns land, and the nominee boards settle once the results are official.
Then primary day folds into the general. The Democratic Senate nominee meets Deaton in November on the map that decides Senate control, and our daily Kalshi board read will carry tomorrow's grades on everything above. The one number to keep on your screen at 8:01 is the one this whole page kept circling back to: Lynch, 79 bid. Either the busiest House strike in the state read the only live race right, or the Globe, Deval Patrick and David Hogg did.
Prediction markets are the one board OddsShopper reads without a betting tool attached. But if you want what our experts are actually playing tonight in the markets we do cover, the free expert picks hub is live.
Prices quoted are live Kalshi market prices as of September 1, 2026, at 11:35 a.m. Eastern, and will keep moving until these markets settle on the certified results. Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated event-contract exchange (18+; availability varies by state). OddsShopper covers prediction markets as an independent analyst: any model or panel figures referenced are model estimates, not predictions of fact and not financial advice. This article does not advocate for or against any candidate or party. Trading involves risk; contracts can go to zero.
