Prices and panel verdicts as of August 23, 2026 · edited September 5, 2026 · 7 min read · by Jake Hari
On June 16, Gentner Drummond finished first in a nine-way Republican primary for governor of Oklahoma, 1,141 votes ahead of Mike Mazzei. Eighteen days earlier, Donald Trump had endorsed Mazzei.
Drummond won anyway. Then the market decided it did not matter.
The Quick Answer
Going into the August 25 runoff, Kalshi priced Mike Mazzei at 78 cents to win the Republican nomination and Gentner Drummond at 22. Eight AI models that priced the same race without seeing the market called it a coin flip, 54-46 for Mazzei.
That 24-point gap was among the widest we have recorded between the panel and the market on an election contract. The runoff has been held and the contract has settled. Everything below is the August 23 snapshot, kept as written so the call can be graded against the result.
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What Did The Market Say?
Prices were read from Kalshi's public API on August 23, 2026, two days before the runoff. Kalshi listed seven contracts on the event. Five settled to No after the June primary, two of them for candidates who never made the ballot, and two were live.
| Candidate | What he is | Market price | AI panel |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mike Mazzei | Former state senator, former budget secretary, Trump's pick | 79¢ | 54% |
| Gentner Drummond | Sitting attorney general, won round one | 23¢ | 46% |
The table shows the last trade; the quote was 22 to 23 cents on Drummond and 78 to 79 on Mazzei, with about 524,000 contracts traded on each side, deep for an election board.
What Did The Panel Say?
Each model saw the same fetched briefing and no price at all. Numbers are each seat's probability that Drummond wins the nomination, after a second round in which every model read the others' reasoning anonymously and could revise.
| Seat | First estimate | After revision | Move |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Sonnet | 45% | 54% | +9 |
| Claude Opus | 45% | 53% | +8 |
| DeepSeek | 55% | 48% | −7 |
| Claude Fable | 43% | 46% | +3 |
| Kimi | 54% | 46% | −8 |
| GPT | 43% | 45% | +2 |
| GLM | 49% | 45% | −4 |
| Gemini | 42% | 44% | +2 |
| Panel (seat median) | 45% | 46% | +1 |
| Market | — | 22 to 23¢ | — |
Every seat on this panel is graded against real market settlements — records to date: Claude Fable 82% on 616 graded calls · Claude Opus 83% on 686 graded calls · Claude Sonnet 81% on 664 graded calls · GPT 84% on 5,836 graded calls · Gemini 86% on 4,570 graded calls · Kimi 82% on 2,442 graded calls · GLM 81% on 2,465 graded calls · DeepSeek 80% on 2,490 graded calls. Recomputed daily; the full scoreboard is public.
After the second round, all eight seats landed between 44% and 54%. They converged there because the two strongest forces in the race cancelled. Mazzei owned the one bloc with a clear organizing cue and the turnout math that usually favors it. Drummond owned the larger bloc, the better favorability, the cash for the closing week and the only poll with no disclosed campaign or PAC sponsor, which had the race tied.
The panel's verdict was a coin flip. A market at 78-22 was not pricing a coin flip. The most Mazzei-friendly seat still gave Drummond 44%, and the market gave him half that.
Every number on this page is graded in public on the full graded scoreboard.
More boards from the same panel: California Governor Odds (Xavier Becerra 96¢, the most settled governor board on the exchange) · Alaska Governor Odds (Bernadette Wilson 38¢ in a field nobody can clear) · 2026 Governor Races: Odds for Every Battleground, where Oklahoma's November contract sat at 93¢ for the Republican. Prices fetched August 23, 2026.
How Did The Price Get Here?
This race broke on one project.
Emirates Global Aluminium and Century Aluminum want to build a $4 billion aluminum smelter at Inola, about 30 miles east of Tulsa, backed by a $500 million U.S. Energy Department grant and sovereign wealth funds tied to the United Arab Emirates government. Drummond, as attorney general, sued to block it over electricity, water and farmland. His line, per Reuters: "I'm not going to let it be built. We have to protect farmland."
Mazzei had opposed the smelter too. He reversed on May 29, the day Trump endorsed him, and said he was "proud to stand with President Trump and support a project he's made clear is a national security imperative." Drummond's answer, from the same reporting: "Mazzei was all too happy to sell out Oklahoma."
On July 15, Trump released a one-minute campaign video, transcribed in full by News 9:
Mike is running against a total RINO named Gentner Drummond, nothing but trouble, who is just another grandstander always looking to sell out Oklahoma to the radical left.
The smelter is not universally loved where it would be built. At an Inola city council meeting, residents heckled Energy Department officials with "Build it in Mar-a-Lago!"
The endorsement did its damage to the price in one session. On May 29, Drummond's contract fell from the mid-40s to single digits and Mazzei's rose from 19 cents to 84, the largest single-day move the board ever saw.
Drummond did not trade above 30 cents again before the runoff.
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The Market Card
| Event | Oklahoma Republican Governor nominee, 2026 (Kalshi event KXGOVOKNOMR-26) |
| Settles | A candidate's contract pays $1 if he wins the Republican nomination, as certified by the Republican Party of Oklahoma. Runoff election day was Tuesday, August 25, 2026 |
| Availability | Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated designated contract market. These are event contracts, not sportsbook wagers. 18+ |
Where Did The Round-One Votes Go?
Round one left 192,576 votes, 47.8% of the primary electorate, with candidates who were no longer on the ballot. That was the whole game, and the panel spent most of its reasoning there.
Certified first-round results, June 16, 2026:
| Candidate | Votes | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Gentner Drummond | 105,832 | 26.3% |
| Mike Mazzei | 104,691 | 26.0% |
| Chip Keating | 74,379 | 18.5% |
| Jake A. Merrick | 58,341 | 14.5% |
| Charles McCall | 47,519 | 11.8% |
| Four others combined | 12,337 | 3.1% |
Only one eliminated candidate endorsed. Jake Merrick, whose 14.5% was the most ideologically committed bloc in the field, backed Mazzei. So did term-limited Governor Kevin Stitt, who had backed Chip Keating in round one, and John O'Connor, the attorney general Drummond unseated in 2022. Keating and Charles McCall, whose voters were 30.3% of the primary electorate between them, said nothing before the runoff.
All eight seats named a Keating or McCall endorsement as the one event that would move them most. It was the only thing the panel agreed on unanimously.
What Did The Polls Say?
The complete public polling record for this runoff:
| Pollster | Field dates | Sample | Margin | Drummond | Mazzei | Undecided |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CHS & Associates (R) | Completed Aug 6, 2026 | 600 LV | ±4.0% | 44% | 44% | 12% |
| Pulse Decision Science (R) | Aug 2 to 4, 2026 | 600 LV | ±4.0% | 38% | 44% | 18% |
| Pulse Decision Science (R) | Jun 21 to 23, 2026 | 606 LV | ±4.0% | 38% | 44% | 18% |
| Cygnal (R) | Jun 18 to 19, 2026 | 600 LV | ±4.0% | 44% | 42% | 14% |
The CHS dates come from the pollster's own release; the other three are as the public aggregator lists them, with no primary release retrievable.
Two things about that table matter more than the numbers in it.
First, there was no nonpartisan public poll of this race. Every survey came from a Republican firm. The two Pulse Decision Science polls were run by Club for Growth Action, a super PAC that endorsed Mazzei, and its June and August releases report an identical 38-44-18 line two months apart.
More than $13 million was spent across Oklahoma's August 25 runoffs after July 1, most of it on this race. A number that survives that unchanged is telling you what its sponsor wants you to hear.
Second, the newest poll finished interviewing on August 6 and was published August 11, 19 days before the runoff and two weeks before early voting opened. The closing stretch of the campaign was invisible to it.
The one poll that published its internals, the CHS Sooner Survey, is what the models argued over. It found a likely electorate of 38% self-identified "Trump Republicans" and 56% "traditional Republicans." Trump Republicans backed Mazzei 62-22. Traditional Republicans backed Drummond 60-30.
Most of the panel read that as a Mazzei edge, because his margin inside his group was wider. Claude Sonnet did the multiplication and reached the opposite conclusion:
The decisive test is arithmetic several other forecasters get wrong. Trump Republicans are only 38% of the likely electorate versus 56% traditional. Weighting by actual size: Mazzei gets 0.38x62+0.56x30=40.4, Drummond gets 0.38x22+0.56x60=42.0. Drummond +1.6, which is what the reported 44-44 topline already reflects. — Claude Sonnet
[Editor's note: the CHS topline is a 44-44 tie. The slight Drummond edge Sonnet describes is the poll's without-leaners number, Drummond 42 and Mazzei 40.]
The bigger margin belonged to the smaller group. That was the whole disagreement.
Where The Panel Changed Its Mind
Between rounds, five seats moved toward Drummond and three moved away. Claude Opus went from 45% to 53% on a piece of the calendar the rest of the panel had underweighted:
Trump endorsed Mazzei 18 days BEFORE round one and Mazzei still trailed; that edge is already priced in, and transfer math plus the independent poll both say tie. — Claude Opus
Opus also rejected the load-bearing assumption on the Mazzei side, that a low-turnout August runoff would enrich the electorate with Trump Republicans. Its argument: low-propensity populist voters do not usually outvote habitual ones in a sleepy runoff, and CHS had already screened for a runoff universe, so applying the shift again double-counts.
Kimi moved the other way, from 54% to 46%, on the transfer math:
Merrick's 14.5% was the field's most ideological, Trump-style bloc, he endorsed Mazzei, and the CHS crosstabs show that voter type breaking 62-22 for Mazzei. Net, I score the transfer math as a small Mazzei gain: he captures most of Merrick, splits Keating, and loses McCall, worth roughly two to three points off a dead-even first round. — Kimi
Gemini held at 44% because it did not trust the polling at all:
I place near-zero weight on the polling record. Every survey carries a partisan label, the Club for Growth internals are suspiciously duplicated across months, and the most credible snapshot is 19 days stale. — Gemini
Why Was The Market At 78?
Three possibilities, and we could not separate them before the vote.
The first: traders priced the Trump endorsement as close to decisive in a Republican primary and treated the rest as noise. That heuristic has a real track record, and the panel's arithmetic cannot refute it.
The second: the market saw something the panel could not. Early voting ran August 20 through 22, and over that stretch Mazzei's contract climbed from 72 cents to 79 on the heaviest volume since the June primary week. Money arriving during early voting and moving one direction is more recent evidence than anything the models were given.
The third: the market was anchored to a May 29 repricing that was correct on the day and never re-examined, and a 44-44 poll released in August never got the attention the endorsement did.
Our reading, stated plainly before the result: the panel's arithmetic on the crosstabs was sound, and 22 cents on a candidate who led round one after his opponent had already been endorsed looked low. But the panel was reasoning from a nineteen-day-old snapshot, and the market was not.
The Bottom Line
The market and the panel could not both be right, and August 25 settled it in public. Either a contract priced at 22 cents paid a dollar on a board with half a million contracts a side, or the panel spent a lot of arithmetic on a question a single endorsement had answered in May. The grade is on the scoreboard either way, and the nominee faces Democrat Cyndi Munson on November 3.
Prices and panel verdicts as of August 23, 2026.
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