Prices as of September 10, 2026, 3:20 a.m. Eastern for the November board; the primary board settled. Kalshi finalized it at 9:25 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday, September 9, 2026, an hour after the Associated Press called the primary for Helena Foulkes. First published August 25 from a record of 35 dated sources; Updated September 8 with the closing board, the final polls, the early-vote count and the settlement rule. Updated September 9 with the election-day tape and the morning turnout. Updated September 10 with the result, the final tape, the settlement and the November board (November prices as of 3:20 a.m. Eastern).
Helena Foulkes beat Gov. Dan McKee 62% to 38% in the Rhode Island Democratic primary for governor on Wednesday, September 9, 2026, and the Associated Press called it at 8:23 p.m., 23 minutes after the polls closed, per Ocean State Media's report, carried by NHPR. Kalshi stopped trading the board at 9:20 p.m. and finalized it at 9:25: the Foulkes contract paid $1, the McKee and Gregory Stevens contracts paid nothing. Her contract's last print was 99.9 cents at 8:32 p.m.; his was a tenth of a cent at 9:04. NBC News's tally at 2:22 a.m. Thursday had it 62.4 to 37.6 with 97.3% of the expected vote counted. Across its life the event traded 1.22 million contracts, 787,272 of them on the incumbent, and about 535,000 of his changed hands on election day alone. McKee is the first sitting Rhode Island governor to lose a primary since Bruce Sundlun in 1994 and, in the AP's words, "the first governor in any U.S. state to lose a party primary since 2018." Below: the final six hours of the tape, the panel's 88.5 graded against the price, the polls against the result, the turnout, and the two boards still open: November, where a Democrat holding the office in January is 94 cents bid and 98 ask, and the Republican nomination, priced at 99.4 for Aaron Guckian with no AP call.
Dan McKee had heard enough. Tuesday night, August 18, at Rhode Island College, with WPRI 12's Tim White and Ted Nesi moderating the last televised debate of the Democratic primary for governor, the incumbent turned on Helena Foulkes. "Respect this office. I am the governor of the state of Rhode Island," he said, and then, as WJAR reported it that night, "I am the state of Rhode Island." Foulkes, the former CVS Pharmacy president who lost to him in 2022, cut in: "Governor, stop." Then: "I'm not disparaging the state of Rhode Island. I'm disparaging the governor." RI Current's Nancy Lavin noted she was smiling as she said it.
The same day, the Salve Regina Pell Center released its Embold Research poll of 857 likely voters, taken August 3 through 11: Foulkes 48%, McKee 28%, 22% undecided. His own state party declined to endorse him in June. The state AFL-CIO, which backed him in 2022, passed in July. She had $3.33 million in the bank to his $648,000. Rhode Island voted on Wednesday, and she won by 24.
McKee conceded in Providence. "I've called Foulkes to congratulate her on her victory and promised a smooth transition," he said, per the Boston Globe, and, in the AP's account: "This is something that I think is difficult to deal with, but we just got to hold our heads high." Foulkes, at Track 15 in Providence around 9:15 p.m., per the Globe: "The cliche in this state has been that you gotta know a guy to get something done. Those days are gone." And, to the crowd, per the AP: "Tonight, we may have won the Democratic primary for governor, but let me be clear about what happens next: You will have a governor for everyone."
On Kalshi, where a price in cents is a probability, the contract that pays $1 if Foulkes wins the nomination had buyers at 94.7 cents and sellers at 96.7 on the afternoon of Tuesday, August 25, with the last trade at 96.1. Call it 95.6 in the middle, about a 96% chance, or roughly -2,170 in sportsbook terms. McKee's contract sat at 4.5 cents on the buy side and 6.2 on the sell side, about 5.4: a 5% shot, roughly +1,750.
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The Board
Settled September 9, 2026, 9:25 p.m. Eastern (Kalshi, cents = probability; the primary board is closed):
| Outcome | Aug. 25 mid (launch) | Sept. 8 close | Sept. 9, 3:05 p.m. bid / ask | Last print | Settled |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Helena Foulkes | 95.6¢ | 99.3¢ | 98.0 / 98.5 | 99.9¢ (8:32 p.m.) | Yes, paid $1 |
| Dan McKee | 5.4¢ | 0.6¢ | 1.7 / 2.2 | 0.1¢ (9:04 p.m.) | No, paid $0 |
| Gregory Stevens | not quoted | 0.1¢ | 0 / 0.1 | 0.1¢ | No, paid $0 |
Read McKee's row first, because the incumbent's contract woke up the moment the polls did. In the hour after they opened at 7 a.m., 88,335 McKee contracts changed hands and the price went from 0.8 cents to 1.9; in the 8 a.m. hour another 55,756 traded and a print touched 4 cents, a level his contract had not seen since September 2. The largest fill of the morning, 10,390 contracts at 0.9 cents at 7:30 a.m., was about $94 of stake for a $10,390 payout if he wins; two 9,850-contract prints at 1.9 cents followed at 8:05 and 8:14. The buying came in a second wave after lunch, 62,671 contracts in the 2 p.m. hour alone, and by 3:05 p.m. the day's total on his side was 295,459 contracts across 323 fills, 289,933 of them, 98%, started by buyers of Yes. Sellers of McKee were not absent. They were waiting above the market: the book at 3:05 p.m. showed about 62,000 contracts offered between 2.3 and 2.5 cents, against fewer than 15,000 bid between 1.1 and 1.7.
Foulkes's side tells the same story from the other direction. Of the 75,452 contracts that traded on her contract on election day through 3:05 p.m., 72,691, 96%, were started by sellers of Yes, and the biggest of them, 18,665 contracts at 99.3, printed at 5:22 a.m., before a single polling place opened. She held 99.0 through the 7 a.m. hour, slid to 98.5 in the 8 a.m., and touched 97.7 in the 9 a.m., her lowest print since August 30. She bounced to 99.3 at 10 on 1,348 contracts, then settled back to 98 by early afternoon on a pair of 5,198- and 4,731-contract sales at 98.2 at 1:18 p.m. The bounce on thin size is the tell: nobody was defending 99 with volume.
None of that was information. No poll was published Wednesday, no result existed before 8 p.m., and the AP's count was hours away. What the afternoon tape showed was positioning: at 99.5 there was nothing left to make on Foulkes, so the money that wanted to be in this market on election night went to the only rung where a cent still bought something. That was why the open interest sat where it did. At 3:05 p.m. there were 497,306 contracts open on McKee against 259,394 on Foulkes; his rung had more than doubled from 220,852 at Tuesday's close, hers had grown from 188,423. Every open McKee contract was a pair, a Yes holder who paid a cent or two and a No holder who paid the other 98-odd, and at Wednesday's mid the Yes side of that half-million was worth about $9,700 while the No side was worth about $488,000. The people still holding McKee were, overwhelmingly, people betting he loses, collecting two cents to say the polls hold, plus a long tail of $100 lottery tickets against a $10,000 payout. By 3:05 p.m. the incumbent's contract had traded 547,678 contracts in its life to the favorite's 360,344, about 929,000 across the event; by settlement those were 787,272 and 412,038, and the event finished at 1.22 million.
The book got here in two moves that mattered. The first came within a day of this page's launch: Foulkes closed August 25 at 96 and August 26 at 99, on 174 contracts. The second was size rather than price. On September 3 at 10:53 a.m. a single buyer took 48,000 Foulkes contracts at 99.6, the largest print in the market's life, and on Labor Day, the holiday that moved this primary, 72,833 contracts traded in her contract across 140 fills, buyers of Yes and of No both among them. McKee's last bounce with a news event under it came on September 1, the day WJAR reported his first television ad in weeks: a 4,900-contract order was filled at 4.2 cents at 3:27 p.m. and two small prints touched 9, before the day closed at 2.9. He closed at 1.3 on each of the next three days and did not close above 1.1 again before the vote; the eve itself ended with Foulkes at 99.3 and McKee at 0.6 after a 25,000-contract buy of Foulkes at 99.8 at 8:09 p.m. and a 28,794-contract sale at 99.6 an hour later, the two largest prints of election eve and a preview of the selling that arrived with the morning.
The Last Six Hours
From 3:05 p.m. to its last print at 9:04, the McKee contract traded another 240,019 contracts across 275 fills, and the Foulkes contract 51,695 across 71. His election-day total came to about 535,000 contracts, 68% of everything his contract traded in its life. The price did not move with the count, because there was no count: it held between 1.5 and 2.5 cents from 3 p.m. to 7:30, with an 8,139-contract buy at 2.3 at 3:37 p.m. the largest fill of the afternoon, and the 7 p.m. hour, the last with the polls open, was his busiest since the 7 a.m. open, 75,651 contracts across 76 fills.
The turn came at 7:31 p.m., 29 minutes before the polls closed, on no public number. In one second, 7:31:21, three sells took 6,944 McKee contracts at 1.3 cents, 4,705 at 1.4 and 2,500 at 1.5; six seconds later, at 7:31:27, three buys took 9,999 Foulkes contracts at 98.8, 3,106 at 98.7 and 1,513 at 98.7. That is 14,149 contracts sold on one name and 14,618 bought on the other inside seven seconds, the shape of one account switching rungs, or two reading the same thing. It did not stop there: at 7:51 a 3,971-contract sale hit 1.0 cent, seconds later a 1,061-lot printed at a half-cent, matching the morning's low, and at 7:57:34 p.m., two and a half minutes before the polls closed, a single 10,116-contract sale went through at 0.6 cents, the largest fill of the evening on either side until the settlement flow began. Buyers were still there: a 5,403-contract buy at 1.3 at 7:54 and a 2,155-lot at 1.7 at 7:57 were the last bids of size on the incumbent with the polls open; two smaller buys at 1.5 and 1.4 printed at 7:59.
Seven seconds, two rungs, 29 minutes before the polls closed, on no public number: that was the market's call. The AP's came 52 minutes later.
After 8 p.m. the tape was the count. One buyer paid 2.9 cents for 1,476 McKee contracts at 8:05:42, the highest print since the morning and the last one above a cent; by 8:09 sellers were hitting 0.2, by 8:17 a 961-contract sale printed at a tenth of a cent, and at 8:17:32 Foulkes traded at 99.9, where she stayed. At 8:19:05 someone sold 6,498 Foulkes contracts at 99.9, in two fills, rather than wait for the dollar, and at 8:19:45, three minutes before the Associated Press called the race, four fills of 3,333, 5,398, 4,444 and 4,792 McKee contracts went through at a tenth and two-tenths of a cent, all started on the Yes side. At a tenth of a cent the tape cannot tell a $5 lottery ticket from a No holder taking 99.9 now instead of $1 at settlement, and it did not matter which: the AP called it at 8:23, at 8:25:56 another 17,700 contracts printed at 0.1, and at 8:32:59 a 14,014-contract fill at 0.1, the largest single print of the night on his side, went through in the same second as the last Foulkes trade, five contracts at 99.9. The McKee contract's final print, 92 contracts at a tenth of a cent, came at 9:04:50 p.m. Kalshi stopped trading at 9:20:45 and finalized at 9:25:45.
What settled was bigger than what had traded by mid-afternoon. Open interest on the McKee rung went from 497,306 contracts at 3:05 p.m. to 689,467 at the close, another 192,000 pairs opened in the last six hours, almost all of them a Yes side paying a cent or less against a No side paying 99 or more. The Foulkes rung grew from 259,394 to 293,137. At settlement the exchange paid $1 on every winning contract: about $293,000 to Foulkes Yes holders, about $689,000 to McKee No holders, and about $21,000 on the No side of the Stevens contract, which had been paper since the July 10 filing deadline. Call it a million dollars paid out on a primary the polls had at 15 to 38 points, and the losing side of all of it, the Yes tickets on the incumbent and the No tickets on the favorite, had been bought for cents.
In poll terms, the market ran further past the polls in the final two weeks, not back toward them, and the result said it was right to. The three August polls put Foulkes between 15 and 38 points ahead with 22 to 25 percent undecided; she won by 24. In round numbers, against the Pell Center's 48-28 the 22 undecided points split 14 to her and 10 to him; against Emerson's 45-30, 17 and 8; against UNH's 56-18 she gained 6 and he gained 20, which is another way of saying UNH had the loser 20 points too low, and 10 and 12 points below where the other two polls had him. A buyer of McKee at 2.2 cents on election day needed him to take nearly every undecided voter in the Pell poll; he took fewer than half of them.
What The Models Think
We also asked a panel of AI models the same question without showing them the price, only the sourced record below. Six of the panel's eight seats ran this board. Blended together, their middle answer put Foulkes at 88.5%, about seven points below the 95.6-cent market, and the widest gap between any two models was 14 points. Their reasons for holding back: the 22% still undecided, the memory of 2022, when the last public poll had McKee up three points inside the margin of error, Foulkes surged from third, and he held on by 3,300 votes, and an older September primary electorate that turns out reliably. One model's reasoning, in short: Foulkes leads every poll, most recently 48-28 in the largest independent survey, against an incumbent whose own state party withheld its endorsement.
These are model estimates, not predictions. The market had real money behind it; the panel had only the record. Graded: the panel's 88.5 was on the right side and too timid. The market's 95.6 at launch, 99.3 at Tuesday's close and 98.3 at 3 p.m. Wednesday were all closer to the $1 the contract paid, so on the scorecard this one goes to the market, by about seven points at launch. The panel's three reasons for holding back, the undecideds, the memory of 2022 and an older electorate, were all real, and none of them mattered at a 20-point poll lead: the undecideds broke to the leader roughly two to one, which is the normal way an incumbent under 30 loses, and 2022 was a four-name ballot that had no third name this time.
The Bridge That Was Supposed To Reopen Before This Primary
McKee was not first elected to the office he says he is. He inherited it on March 2, 2021, when Gina Raimondo left for the Commerce Department, then held it in 2022, beating Foulkes by just over 3,300 votes in the primary and Republican Ashley Kalus by 19 points in November. Of every governor board we track this cycle, his was the only one where the sitting governor was a heavy underdog in his own primary.
The reason has a name. On December 11, 2023, the westbound Washington Bridge, the Interstate 195 span carrying about 90,000 vehicles a day, closed abruptly after the state found a "critical failure of some original bridge components." The replacement was due by August 2026, which The Public's Radio noted at the time meant "before the next statewide primary for governor." Then the request for bids drew zero bidders. Asked for a schedule on July 9, 2024, per The Public's Radio, McKee said: "We're going to know what the timeline is when we get the timeline." On August 19, 2026, WJAR reported the contract at $428 million, about $60 million over the proposal, with completion now fall 2028. Foulkes, at the WPRI debate: "He was desperate to build a bridge by this election."
The other weight on him is a report. On October 29, 2024, Attorney General Peter Neronha and the state police closed a two-year investigation and, as WPRI's Eli Sherman reported, found McKee "personally and directly intervened" and "steered a lucrative, federally-funded state contract" worth about $5 million to the ILO Group. No charges were brought. McKee's response, per WJAR: "The cloud is gone." And of the state's top prosecutor: "I don't trust the attorney general."
"The Governor has not and cannot dispute any fact set forth in either report. The rest is deflection." (Office of Attorney General Peter Neronha, via The Public's Radio, October 31, 2024)
Neronha has since endorsed Foulkes. Both the bridge and the report were in the price before the market had any size, on a few thousand contracts in June, and nothing that traded after re-litigated either. The scorecard of every election board we track keeps the receipts on prices like these, and the wider 2026 governor map shows how rare they are.
CVS, Trump, And The Party That Would Not Choose
McKee's counterattack is Foulkes's four years running CVS Pharmacy, January 2014 to February 2018. He opened the first debate, on WPRO radio on August 3, with it: "My opponent worked in a boardroom, putting profits over people for her entire career." He has also tied her to CVS's corporate giving to Donald Trump. Her answer, per RI Current: "I've never given a dime to Donald Trump and the governor knows that. It's a whole bunch of lies."
By the third debate the charge was opioids. McKee, on August 18: "They pressured pharmacists to fill prescriptions they shouldn't have… My opponent is a corporate elite person." Foulkes, whose "over 600" is the company's "nearly 600": "We cut off over 600 pill mill doctors… I think it's atrocious the governor is politicizing this issue… He is desperate."
The documented record sits between them. RI Current's Philip Eil fact-checked the opioid attack on July 27: the Justice Department's 2024 lawsuit says CVS "knowingly" filled prescriptions for problem prescribers "despite repeated escalations," and six of the seven doctors it names were active during her tenure. Foulkes is not named individually anywhere in the suit. CVS says it blocked "nearly 600" practitioners on her watch and paid roughly $5 billion in opioid settlements in 2022.
Then the institutions walked. At the state Democratic convention on June 20, the endorsement vote went McKee 81, Foulkes 75, 11 abstaining, short of the 84 he needed, per RI Current. McKee: "It's the people that are going to elect me. It's not a hierarchy of any political machine."
"I don't recall an incumbent governor ever not winning the endorsement, and I've been around a long time." (Analyst Joe Fleming, RI Current, June 20, 2026)
On July 15 the AFL-CIO's executive committee declined to vote at all; president Patrick Crowley, to WPRI's Ted Nesi: "The consensus was we don't have a consensus." The cash gap, per the Boston Globe on August 21, is five to one. The market priced all of it: the bridge, the investigation, the lawsuit fight over CVS, the party that would not choose. On Polymarket, as of August 25, Foulkes had moved from about 89 cents to 95.5 over the week that held the August 18 debate and the 48-28 poll, a gain of just over 6 cents; McKee fell about 4, from roughly 8 to 3.75.
The market barely existed to react to the institutions in real time. On Kalshi, the McKee contract had about 3,450 contracts open the day before the convention and closed June 19 at 16 cents; a week later, on June 24, it closed at 8.6 on 557 contracts, roughly half its pre-convention price in a book a few thousand contracts deep. July 15 came and went with no trade at all; the next print, on July 19, was 11 cents against a book that bid 2 and asked 10, the widest spread of the campaign. The two institutional passes and the five-to-one cash gap were priced by a few thousand contracts in June and July. The 900,000 came later, once the polls did. McKee ran the CVS and opioid attack through three debates and one ad and finished at 38; the market never had to reprice it.
The Three Polls That Closed The Argument
On August 25 this page said the price would move on one thing, a final independent poll. Two were published that same week, Emerson on Tuesday, August 25, and the University of New Hampshire on Thursday, August 27, and together with the Pell Center survey the lede is built on, they disagreed with each other more than any of them disagreed with the market.
| Pollster | In the field | Foulkes | McKee | Undecided | Sample |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pell Center / Embold Research | Aug. 3-11 | 48% | 28% | 22% | 857 likely voters, ±3.6 |
| UNH Survey Center | Aug. 20-24 | 56% | 18% | 23% | 446 likely Democratic primary voters, ±4.6 |
| Emerson College / WPRI 12 | Aug. 21-22 | 45% | 30% | 25% | 528 likely Democratic primary voters, ±4.2 |
The Emerson number is the one McKee's campaign wanted read aloud. Against the same pollster's May survey, per Emerson, "Foulkes' support increased five points, from 40% to 45%, and McKee's support increased ten points," from 20 to 30, a 15-point race with a quarter of the electorate unassigned. Two days after Emerson's release, UNH, in the field August 20 to 24, published a 38-point gap, the widest of the cycle, and McKee's spokesperson Sophie Mestas called it "bogus," per RI Current: "UNH has been an unreliable pollster across New England for years, and this is not an accurate reflection of the current state of the race." The UNH Survey Center's director, Andrew Smith, conceded the one point every primary pollster concedes: "You tend to get a lot of people saying they're going to vote and they don't."
The market did not pick a poll. It read all three the same way, as an incumbent who could not get above 30 in any of them, and Foulkes did not close a day below 97.6 from August 26 to the vote, while the campaign argued about which pollster to believe. Even the friendliest number, 45-30 with 25 undecided, sends McKee to the finish behind unless he wins more than four of every five undecided voters; the 2022 primary, when he did come from behind, was a four-name ballot on which Nellie Gorbea took 26.2 percent, per the Associated Press count. There was no third name on Wednesday's ballot to split Foulkes's side, and the two-way race ended 62-38.
The Number Nobody Polled
The one figure McKee's side pointed to in August was turnout, the union ground game behind the "Rule of 90" pledge and the 34,000 workers whose unions endorsed him. Most of that number was in before election day, and it was not small. By noon on Tuesday, with four hours of early voting left, 32,575 Rhode Islanders had voted early in person, per RI Current, nearly double the 16,900 who did before the 2022 primary and more than the 12,100 who did before the 2024 one. Another 11,425 mail ballots had come back of 15,726 sent out, short of the 17,300 mail ballots cast in 2022. As of noon Tuesday that was 5.6 percent of registered voters, and the AP's own tally had roughly 30,000 Democratic ballots against 3,500 Republican by the Thursday before. By the time early voting closed at 4 p.m. Tuesday the in-person figure had passed 37,000, more than double 2022, and by 9 a.m. Wednesday, two hours into election day, 61,488 ballots were in, 7.8% of registered voters, per Ocean State Media's count. Their reporters found the morning slow in Pawtucket, about 500 voters through one Providence polling place by 2 p.m., and a steady stream with no lines in Westerly at 3. By 6 p.m., per the same Ocean State Media count, more than 139,000 people had voted, over 17% of those registered and already past the total number of ballots cast in the 2022 primary, with two hours of voting left. The union ground game showed up. It was not enough; he lost with turnout up.
Neither campaign closed the way a campaign closes when it thinks the race is tied. McKee's final ad, which WJAR reported aired September 1 after weeks with nothing on television, opens on the kitchen-table image from his 2022 ads with his mother: "Four years ago, you met my family at this kitchen table. Working families need a governor focused on them." It calls Foulkes a "corporate CEO who donated to Mitch McConnell and put profits over working people." Foulkes's last ad does not mention him. "This election is about your future. I'm an optimist. And I know we can do better." Her total primary spending was roughly $6 million to his $3 million, a two-to-one gap in spend against the five-to-one gap in cash on hand. McKee's own framing of the choice, to the AP on September 5: "Who's the option here? It's a corporate person that the Democrats can't stand." Hers: "It's a great moment to be an outsider."
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What Moves The Price From Here
The rule was one sentence, and the exchange did not wait long to apply it. The Foulkes contract resolved Yes "if Helena Foulkes wins the nomination for the Democratic Party to contest the 2026 Rhode Island Governorship"; Kalshi listed no settlement source for this board, said the market could close early once the result was known, and carried a nominal close date of November 3. It closed at 9:20 p.m. on September 9, 57 minutes after the AP call, and finalized five minutes later, with the state Board of Elections' count still unofficial and NBC's tally short of 100% of the expected vote. A network call is not the nomination, this page said on Tuesday. In practice a 24-point margin with most of the vote counted was nomination enough for the exchange, and that is the note for the next close race: Kalshi settled on the count, not on a certificate. The Stevens contract, the odd leg, paid its No side on 20,678 open contracts; he had filed, then, per RI Current, "did not have any verified signatures next to their names on the online state tracker" when nomination papers were due at 4 p.m. on July 10, and never made the ballot.
What the win means is on the record. The AP's line, in its decision notes, was that McKee would become "the nation's first elected governor since 2014 to lose renomination and the first in Rhode Island since 1994"; 2014 was Hawaii's Neil Abercrombie, beaten 67-32 by David Ige, and the last sitting governor of any kind to lose a primary was Kansas Republican Jeff Colyer in August 2018, per The Downballot, and Colyer, who inherited the office from Sam Brownback and never won it, is why the AP's results story counts governors from 2018 while its decision notes counted elected governors from 2014. Rhode Island's 1994 name is Sundlun, from the top of this page, beaten 57.22% to 27.67% by Myrth York, 32 years ago. There are now two.
The board that is still open is November. On Kalshi's Rhode Island governor winner market, a Democrat inaugurated after the 2026 election is 94 cents bid and 98 ask as of 3:20 a.m. Thursday, last trade 98, on 10,320 contracts of lifetime volume and about 7,150 open. The Republican side is a half-cent bid and 5.7 ask, last 6.7. A third contract, on Ken Block, the Barrington software engineer running as an independent after a 2010 run as a Moderate and a 2014 loss in the Republican primary, per WPRI, is 1 cent bid and 4 ask. The four-cent spread on the Democratic contract is the book, not a doubt: 984 contracts were bid at 94 and 30 offered at 98 when this was written, with the next 2,500 offered at 98.6. Rhode Island last elected a Republican governor in 2006, and Polymarket priced a Republican winning this one at under 2 cents on August 25.
Who that Republican is remains, as of this writing, uncalled by the AP and priced as decided by the market. Aaron Guckian, the party's 2022 nominee for lieutenant governor, led first-time candidate Elaine Pelino by fewer than 300 votes at 12:05 a.m. Thursday, per Ocean State Media, with the AP not projecting a winner; the Providence Journal had it 51-49 with 99.7% of precincts in at 11:30 p.m. Kalshi's Republican nominee board had Guckian at 99.4 bid, 100 ask on 110,107 contracts of lifetime volume, against Pelino at zero bid, 0.4 ask on 102,469. That is a bigger book than the Democratic contract on the November board by 20 to one, on a primary decided by a few hundred votes, and it is the one rung on the Rhode Island governor boards where a recount could still move a price. Three independents, Block, Jasjit Gotra and C.D. Reynolds, qualified for the November 3 ballot, per Ocean State Media.
- November Is The Board Left. Democrat 94 bid, 98 ask. The next thing that moves it is a general-election poll with Foulkes, the Republican nominee and Block on it, and none exists yet.
- The Republican Board Called It Before The AP Did. Guckian at 99.4 with fewer than 300 votes between him and Pelino and no AP call. Rhode Island has no automatic recount, but a candidate inside the state's thresholds can request one; if the final count flips, that rung goes from 99 to zero, and if it does not, the 99.4 bid earns its last half-cent.
- This Page Is Done Unless November Moves. It refreshes if the Democratic contract trades below 90, or if the Republican nomination is decided the other way.
The same ballot carried a second Democratic primary the market found far harder to call, and it settled the same night: Sabina Matos won the nomination, per Ocean State Media, and Kalshi finalized her contract Yes on the Rhode Island lieutenant governor board, where she and Xay Khamsyvoravong had been quoted at the same price on August 25.
This one was decided on Wednesday, September 9, 2026. It was supposed to be Tuesday the 8th, but Labor Day fell on Monday the 7th and closes the schools and churches that host more than 430 of the state's polling places, so on April 20 McKee signed the bill moving the primary back a day, per the Providence Journal. The governor picked the date. The voters picked the nominee, and 62 of every 100 of them did not pick him.
Hero illustration: OddsShopper, in the house collage style. Dan McKee photo by Kenneth C. Zirkel, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0; Helena Foulkes photo by Digitas Photos, licensed CC BY 2.0; photos cropped, toned, and composited. The primary board quoted here settled on Kalshi at 9:25 p.m. Eastern on September 9, 2026; the November prices are live Kalshi market prices as of September 10, 2026, 3:20 a.m. Eastern, and will keep moving. 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.
