Prices as of September 1, 2026, 6:25 p.m. UTC. Model estimates generated September 1, 2026.
Kalshi listed a market on the Rhode Island lieutenant governor's race on August 31, and the exchange's opening read on it was a shrug. Two candidates at 48 cents each. Three candidates at two cents each. On a prediction market, a contract that costs 48 cents pays out a dollar if it comes true, so 48 cents is the market saying roughly "call it a coin flip between these two."
Rhode Island votes in eight days, on Wednesday, September 9. That is not a lot of time for a coin flip to resolve itself.
We put the race in front of nine AI models and showed them everything except the price: the complete polling table, the campaign finance filings, the endorsements, the settled result from the last time this exact contest was run, and the public record on the candidates. Then we asked each one to distribute a hundred points of probability across the five names. Not one of the nine came back with a coin flip.
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The Race Rhode Island Did Not Expect To Be Close
Sabina Matos has been lieutenant governor since 2021, when Dan McKee elevated her after he moved up to the governor's office. She won the job in her own right in 2022, taking 47.11% of a three-way Democratic primary against Deb Ruggiero and Cynthia Mendes, on 107,628 votes cast. Incumbency in a small blue state is normally the end of the story.
Then came 2023. Matos ran for the open seat in Rhode Island's 1st congressional district, and election officials in Jamestown, Newport and East Providence referred the signatures on her nomination papers to police. WPRI's Target 12 unit reported that the disputed papers included the name of at least one dead person, and Newport residents told the same outlet that signatures attributed to them were not theirs. East Providence city council members said the same. The state Board of Elections voted 5-1 to hand every one of her nomination papers to the attorney general while keeping her on the ballot, and later found no obvious pattern of fraud by the campaign itself.
Matos said she was "deeply sorry this happened" and blamed a vendor her campaign had hired to collect signatures. That vendor's operator, Holly McClaren of Harmony Solutions, later pleaded no contest to falsifying signatures and was sentenced to three years of unsupervised probation. Matos was never charged. Three years on, WPRI still frames her current race by it, describing her in August as "clinging to a slim lead as she tries to win another term following her scandal-tarred 2023 congressional campaign."
The challenger is Xay Khamsyvoravong, the former mayor of Newport. He has the money and an unusual share of the party's establishment. Through June 30 he had raised more than $117,000 in the quarter and held $333,000 in cash; Matos raised about $43,000 and carries nearly $98,000 in outstanding loans, per Rhode Island Current's review of the filings. U.S. Rep. Gabe Amo endorsed him over the incumbent, which members of a state's congressional delegation rarely do. So did Attorney General Peter Neronha. Matos holds the AFL-CIO, the building trades, two other unions, Pete Buttigieg and Latino Victory. The Rhode Island Democratic Party itself declined to endorse anyone.
Khamsyvoravong's own record carries one documented episode. As Newport mayor he accepted campaign contributions from developer Michael Schorsch and his affiliates; after Schorsch's company 1899 LLC won the Easton's Beach food service contract in April 2024, Newport This Week reported that "Khamsyvoravong said he donated $2,500 in Schorsch-related donations from 2023 to local nonprofits after 1899 won the beach food service contract."
Three other Democrats are on the ballot. Cindy Coyne is a retired state police lieutenant and former state senator; Sue AnderBois is a Providence city councilor with 11 state legislators behind her; Ross McCurdy ran as an independent for this office in 2022.
Here is the number that should govern how you read all of it. Across the three public polls of this primary, the largest single bloc is nobody: 42%, 43% and 48% undecided. Every candidate's polled support is smaller than the undecided share. Eight days out, the largest bloc in this race has not chosen.
What Nine Models Said When We Hid The Price
Each model was given the same data card and the same instruction: form one view of how the primary resolves, then split 100 points across the five contracts. None of them saw a market price at any point. Nine ran the first round; eight returned a revised number after reading the others' anonymized reasoning, and one declined to forecast on the revision round.
The Board
| Outcome | Polling (UNH, Aug 20-24) | Market price | Panel |
|---|---|---|---|
| Xay Khamsyvoravong | 22% | 48¢ | 48% |
| Sabina Matos | 20% | 48¢ | 33% |
| Sue AnderBois | 8% | 2¢ | 9% |
| Cindy Coyne | 5% | 2¢ | 7% |
| Ross McCurdy | 2% | 2¢ | 2.5% |
The panel figure is the median across the eight seats that returned a revised number. The market column is the midpoint of the bid and the ask, rounded to the nearest cent: both leaders are quoted 47 bid, 48 ask, and the three long shots 1 bid, 2 ask. The rounding is why the column adds to 102; the unrounded midpoints sum to 99.5.
On Khamsyvoravong the panel and the market land on the same number, and that agreement is itself the finding rather than a shrug. Six of the nine seats put him between 47% and 50%, and they got there for stated reasons that cancel: a clear polling trend, the biggest bank account in the field and the rarest endorsement in the state pushing him up, against a plurality rule that lets a wounded incumbent survive on a committed base, two rivals pulling from his own anti-incumbent lane, and 42% of the electorate still unchosen. The models did not fail to separate him from even money. They worked out why he sits there.
Everywhere else the panel and the market part company. The models take 15 points off the incumbent and hand 12 of them to the two candidates the board has written off at two cents. That is the whole disagreement, and it is worth stating plainly what it is not: our panel's public record shows it loses roughly two-thirds of the disputes it picks with a market price. A gap is a disagreement between two estimates, not a signal about what anyone should do.
More live boards from the same panel: Rhode Island governor primary, where Helena Foulkes trades at 98¢ against Gov. Dan McKee on this same September 9 ballot · California governor 2026, where Xavier Becerra sits at 96¢. Prices fetched September 1, 2026.
Every Seat's Number
| Seat | Khamsyvoravong | Matos | AnderBois | Coyne | McCurdy |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GLM | 50% | 32% | 9% | 6% | 3% |
| Grok | 49% | 33% | 9% | 7% | 2% |
| Gemini | 48% | 34% | 10% | 6% | 2% |
| DeepSeek | 48% | 34% | 9% | 7% | 2% |
| Kimi | 48% | 33% | 9% | 7% | 3% |
| Claude Fable | 47% | 33% | 10% | 7% | 3% |
| Claude Opus | 44% | 39% | 8.5% | 6.5% | 2% |
| Claude Sonnet | 40% | 32% | 13% | 10% | 5% |
| GPT (First Round Only) | 39% | 36% | 11% | 10% | 4% |
| Panel (Seat Median) | 48% | 33% | 9% | 7% | 2.5% |
The GPT seat's first-round figures are shown for completeness and are not in the median.
Every seat on this panel is graded against real market settlements — records to date: Claude Fable 87% on 1,322 graded calls · Claude Opus 87% on 1,392 graded calls · Claude Sonnet 86% on 1,369 graded calls · GPT 85% on 7,395 graded calls · Gemini 86% on 6,067 graded calls · Grok 84% on 5,135 graded calls · GLM 82% on 2,823 graded calls · Kimi 84% on 2,988 graded calls · DeepSeek 81% on 2,867 graded calls. Recomputed daily; the full scoreboard is public.
These are model estimates, not predictions of fact and not financial advice. Every number here gets graded in public once the market settles, on the full graded scoreboard. Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated exchange and its event contracts are 18+.
One more thing about that price. Of the 5,775 contracts traded on this board since it opened, every single one is on Coyne, AnderBois or McCurdy. The two front-runners have traded exactly zero contracts and hold zero open interest. Their 47-bid, 48-ask is a market maker's quote sitting on an empty book, not a price that anyone has yet paid. That is worth knowing before you treat 48 cents as the crowd's considered judgment.
Where The Panel Changed Its Mind
The revision round moved the board hard. Gemini opened at 63% on Khamsyvoravong and came back at 48%. Claude Fable came down from 55% to 47%. The models that started most confident in the challenger all retreated toward the middle.
Claude Opus came down too, from 54% to 44%. What separated it was where it put the incumbent: it lifted Matos from 34% to 39%, the highest number any seat gave her, because it stopped taking one of the card's headline facts at face value.
That fact is the Emerson crosstab, and the panel split evenly on it. Helena Foulkes leads the governor primary 45% to 30%, and among Foulkes voters Khamsyvoravong leads Matos 27% to 14%. Four of the eight seats that revised read it as a clean structural advantage for the challenger: the bigger coalition prefers him. The other four multiplied it out.
"Run the card's own crosstab: Foulkes 45 × 27/14 gives Khamsyvoravong 12.2 and Matos 6.3; McKee 30 × 34/10 gives Matos 10.2 and Khamsyvoravong 3.0 — Matos 16.5, Khamsyvoravong 15.2 among governor-decided voters. Composition is net-neutral."
— Claude Opus
Claude Sonnet did the same arithmetic independently and held its number rather than moving:
"Matos's McKee consolidation (24-pt margin) is proportionally stronger than Khamsyvoravong's Foulkes margin (13 pts), so this crosstab is closer to a wash than the clean tilt toward Khamsyvoravong that a naive reading suggests."
— Claude Sonnet
The multiplication checks out. Among the voters who have already picked a candidate for governor, Matos is weaker inside the bigger coalition but grips the smaller one far harder, and the two effects very nearly cancel. It says nothing about the quarter of the governor primary that is still undecided. That is a case where the widely repeated version of a poll finding does not survive being worked through.
The Argument For Matos The Panel Had To Answer
The strongest thing going for the incumbent is that all of this has been tried before, and it failed.
In June, the Rhode Island Association of Democratic City and Town Chairs endorsed Khamsyvoravong over Matos. That same organization endorsed Deb Ruggiero over Matos in 2022, and endorsed Nellie Gorbea for governor the same year. Matos won anyway with 47.11%. Gorbea finished third. The identical body, against the identical incumbent, in the identical office, went nought for one within living memory of every voter in this primary.
The models were made to test that. Most concluded the difference this time is money and a single well-funded challenger rather than the endorsement itself. Claude Opus laid out the check most explicitly, anchoring near an 85-90% renomination rate for sitting statewide officeholders and then asking which historical exceptions actually apply:
"Fresh unpriced scandal: PRESENT — the 2023 signature-vendor episode postdates her 2022 primary, she was uncharged, the vendor pled no contest, and WPRI still frames the race by it. Severe fundraising deficit: PRESENT and the strongest single fact. Elite/party defection: PARTIALLY present. Polling collapse: ABSENT — flat 18/20/20, led two of three polls."
— Claude Opus
That last line is the counterweight the board's 48 cents is probably paying for. Matos has not collapsed. She led two of the three published polls. She is flat, not falling.
Dark Horses The Panel Won't Dismiss
The market says Coyne and AnderBois are worth two cents apiece. The panel says seven and nine. In a five-way race decided by a plurality with no runoff, that gap deserves a sentence.
AnderBois is the one nearly every seat raised. Claude Sonnet put her at 13% and Claude Fable at 10%, on the theory that a Providence councilor with 11 state legislators behind her has an organized turnout base in exactly the kind of low-turnout September election where organization is worth more than name recognition. Roughly 17% of Rhode Island voters showed up for the 2022 state primaries. A candidate does not need a statewide following to win a plurality of a small, motivated electorate.
Coyne holds the police, fire and government employee unions, a bloc that votes. GLM flagged the scenario worth watching: if AnderBois consolidates the anti-incumbent vote that Khamsyvoravong is counting on, she does not just help herself, she fragments his coalition and helps Matos. Three candidates are competing for the same "time for someone new" voter, and Rhode Island awards this nomination to whoever gets the most votes, however small the share.
What Would Change The Panel's Mind
Four things the models named, each with the direction it pushes.
- Any Poll Fielded After August 24. The newest public survey of this race is the University of New Hampshire poll, in the field August 20-24 and released August 27. Matos above 26% moves the board back toward her; Khamsyvoravong above 28% pushes him past 55%.
- Early-Vote Composition. In-person early voting runs from August 20 through 4 p.m. on September 8. Returns concentrated in Providence-area or Foulkes-leaning municipalities favor Khamsyvoravong; returns weighted toward labor-heavy or McKee-aligned precincts favor Matos.
- Late Money. Third-quarter filings or independent spending that closes the gap raises Matos by several points, in the panel's read. Khamsyvoravong's $333,000 in cash on hand, set against an incumbent who raised about $43,000 in the quarter and carries nearly $98,000 in loans, was the most-cited finance fact across all nine seats. Note that those are different measures: the filings give his cash on hand and her quarterly total, and Rhode Island Current's writeup does not state hers side by side.
- Whether 2023 Is Re-Litigated On Air This Week. Several seats flagged that the signature episode is currently old news rather than an active attack. If it returns to television in the closing days, it moves against Matos; if it stays quiet, its effect is already in her flat-but-stable 20%.
When This Settles
| Primary | Wednesday, September 9, 2026, polls 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. |
| Early Voting | Runs to 4 p.m., Tuesday, September 8 |
| Contract Settles | On the nomination, via Kalshi's early-close condition |
| Listed Expiration | November 3, 2026 (the general election date, an outer bound) |
| General Election | Tuesday, November 3, against presumptive Republican nominee John Loughlin and independent Mabel Martinez |
One quirk worth pinning down, because several reference sites still print the wrong date: this primary was moved. It was set for Tuesday, September 8, until Gov. Dan McKee signed a bill on April 20 pushing it back a day. Labor Day falls on Monday, September 7 in 2026, and more than 430 of Rhode Island's polling places sit in schools, churches and town halls that are closed on the holiday, leaving no time to set them up, per the Providence Journal. The state last voted on a Wednesday in 2018. Kalshi's contracts carry a November 3 expiration, but each one closes early when someone wins the nomination, so the question is answered on primary night.
This page is re-scored when the story moves, and the prices on it carry the timestamp above.
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The Bottom Line
The market opened this board at a coin flip between an incumbent and a challenger. Nine models given the same facts and none of the prices kept the challenger at essentially the market's number and marked the incumbent 15 points lower, moving 12 of those points to two candidates the exchange has priced at two cents. The disagreement is about how much of a 42% undecided bloc a flat-polling incumbent, with the weakest quarterly fundraising of the active campaigns and loans still outstanding, can collect in eight days.
Rhode Island answers it on September 9. Every number above gets graded in public once the nomination is settled.
Hero illustration: OddsShopper, in the house collage style. Sabina Matos photo by Kenneth C. Zirkel, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0; photos cropped, toned, and composited.
