For six and a half months, Kalshi's "Who will be Trump's next Press Secretary?" market was a ghost town. It opened on January 30, 2026, and then sat there, averaging under 200 contracts a day. Then the job was announced to be opening, and the thing detonated.
Here is the number that reframes everything else on this page: by Kalshi's own daily trade history, about 92 percent of every contract ever traded on this board changed hands in the four days from August 13 through August 16, 2026. Six months of accumulated interest, compressed into a long weekend.
That is the setup. The complication is that this board is not pricing confirmed process information. It is pricing name recognition, a leaked shortlist, and a thin book, and a senior White House official has already told a reporter that the shortlist is wrong. The one row on the board that actually responded to a fact is not a name at all, and I will come back to it.
The Quick Answer
Kalshi traders make Alina Habba the favorite to be Trump's next White House press secretary at a 31.5 cent midpoint (about +217), ahead of Anna Kelly at 27.5 cents (+264) and Scott Jennings at 18.5 cents (+441), as of 9:09 PM CT on August 16, 2026. Those three hold roughly 77.5 cents of a 25-contract board. The catch is that all three appeared on a Politico shortlist that a senior White House official then dismissed to Axios in one sentence: "Nobody on that list will be Press Secretary."
The full board, the settlement rule that quietly gutted one contract, the seven-hour swing that changed the lead tonight, and the structural risk that can make every single contract here a loser are all below.
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What Actually Happened
The trigger is not in dispute. On Wednesday, August 12, 2026, President Trump announced on Truth Social that press secretary Karoline Leavitt would leave the administration at the end of the month, saying she was departing to focus on her family. The Washington Examiner also covered it the same day.
What did not arrive with it was a successor. TIME reported on August 13 that the White House "has so far offered no further information" and redirected the magazine to Trump's and Leavitt's own posts when asked about candidates. As of this writing, no replacement has been named.
That gap is the entire market. An announced departure with no named successor and a very long fuse is exactly the condition under which a prediction market turns into a crowd guessing out loud, and the volume proves it.
The Board Just Woke Up, In Four Days
Kalshi publishes daily trade history for every contract. Summing it across all 25 contracts on this board gives a clean picture of a market that was asleep and then was not.
| Date | Contracts traded, board-wide |
|---|---|
| Jan 30 To Aug 12, 2026 (All Of It) | 31,716 |
| August 13, 2026 | 18,142 |
| August 14, 2026 | 113,694 |
| August 15, 2026 | 138,008 |
| August 16, 2026 | 99,311 |
The row I keep staring at is not the biggest one. It is August 15. The news broke on the 12th, the board woke up on the 13th, and yet the single heaviest day of trading in this market's life was three days after the announcement, on a Saturday. A single news shock usually front-loads and decays. This built for three days after the headline, which makes it look less like a market digesting information and more like a rolling attention trade. The opinions kept arriving long after the fact did.
Worth saying plainly, since it cuts against my own framing: Kalshi's 24-hour volume field disagrees with its candle history on this and other boards, so every figure above is taken from the daily trade history rather than the rolling counter. Where two of a venue's own surfaces disagree, we use the one we can reconcile and tell you which.
The Board Right Now
Every price below is the live bid, ask and midpoint read from Kalshi at 9:09 PM CT on August 16, 2026. It is 24 names plus one structural contract, "No new person." Midpoints are shown to one decimal on purpose, because rounding a 31.5 to a 32 is how you end up writing that one name is "priced double" another when it isn't.
| Contract | Bid | Ask | Mid | Last |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alina Habba | 31.0¢ | 32.0¢ | 31.5¢ | 33.0¢ |
| Anna Kelly | 27.0¢ | 28.0¢ | 27.5¢ | 28.0¢ |
| Scott Jennings | 18.0¢ | 19.0¢ | 18.5¢ | 18.0¢ |
| Elizabeth Pipko | 5.0¢ | 6.0¢ | 5.5¢ | 6.0¢ |
| Natalie Harp | 3.0¢ | 4.0¢ | 3.5¢ | 3.0¢ |
| Katie Miller | 2.0¢ | 3.0¢ | 2.5¢ | 2.0¢ |
| Rachel Campos-Duffy | 2.0¢ | 3.0¢ | 2.5¢ | 3.0¢ |
| No New Person | 1.4¢ | 2.9¢ | 2.1¢ | 1.4¢ |
| Taylor Budowich | 1.0¢ | 3.0¢ | 2.0¢ | 1.0¢ |
| Kari Lake | 1.4¢ | 1.7¢ | 1.5¢ | 1.4¢ |
| Tricia McLaughlin | 1.0¢ | 2.0¢ | 1.5¢ | 1.0¢ |
| Spencer Pratt | 1.0¢ | 2.0¢ | 1.5¢ | 1.0¢ |
| Roma Daravi | 1.0¢ | 2.0¢ | 1.5¢ | 1.0¢ |
| Danielle Alvarez | 1.0¢ | 2.0¢ | 1.5¢ | 1.0¢ |
| Jayme Franklin | 1.0¢ | 2.0¢ | 1.5¢ | 1.0¢ |
| Erika Kirk | 1.0¢ | 2.0¢ | 1.5¢ | 1.0¢ |
| Liz Huston | 1.0¢ | 2.0¢ | 1.5¢ | 1.0¢ |
| Matthew Boyle | 1.0¢ | 2.0¢ | 1.5¢ | 1.0¢ |
| Lara Trump | 1.0¢ | 2.0¢ | 1.5¢ | 2.0¢ |
| Sage Steele | 1.2¢ | 1.5¢ | 1.4¢ | 1.2¢ |
| Jason Miller | 1.1¢ | 1.3¢ | 1.2¢ | 1.1¢ |
| Steven Cheung | 1.1¢ | 1.3¢ | 1.2¢ | 1.1¢ |
| Laura Loomer | 0.0¢ | 1.0¢ | 0.5¢ | 1.0¢ |
| Monica Crowley | 0.0¢ | 1.0¢ | 0.5¢ | 1.0¢ |
| Tucker Carlson | 0.2¢ | 0.3¢ | 0.2¢ | 0.2¢ |
The rows worth staring at are near the bottom. Laura Loomer and Monica Crowley both show a zero bid against a one cent offer. There is no price there. Nobody is willing to pay anything at all, and the "0.5 cent midpoint" is an arithmetic formality rather than something you could sell into. When you read a long-tail board, the bid column tells you which contracts are alive and which are just listed. Thirteen of these 25 contracts are bid at a penny or less.
The top of the board is a different animal. Habba is quoted 31 bid at 32 offered, a one cent market on a 31.5 cent midpoint, a spread of about three percent of the price. Kelly and Jennings are quoted just as tightly. That is a genuinely liquid two-sided market by political-board standards, and it is the strongest evidence that the top three prices mean something even if the names turn out to be wrong. Compare that to Taylor Budowich at 1 bid, 3 offered, where the spread is as wide as the midpoint and twice the bid.
The One Contract That Answered To A Fact
I promised the row that responded to something real, so here it is: "No new person," bid 1.4 cents against a 2.9 cent offer.
Read the settlement rule and you will see why. Kalshi's terms for this market say it resolves on who first begins serving as White House press secretary, not who is nominated or announced, and that acting or interim service counts. Then comes the line that matters:
"If the person serving as White House Press Secretary at Issuance remains in the position through the expiration date, all markets referring to a person resolve to No, and 'No new person' resolves to Yes."
The person serving at issuance was Karoline Leavitt. For "No new person" to pay, she had to hold the job through January 21, 2029. Trump's August 12 post did not quite kill that outright, but it removed everything except the reversal case: Leavitt is still press secretary as of today, and announced departures occasionally get unannounced. That residual is the honest reason the offer is 2.9 cents rather than a tenth of a cent.
The path is worth reading in full, because it does not go one way. The contract closed at 3 cents on August 13, 1.5 cents on the 14th and 0.9 cents on the 15th, and it now sits at a 1.4 cent bid against a 2.9 cent offer. So it re-rated hard on the announcement, then more than doubled off its low on no new information at all. Even the one honest contract on this board is thinly enough held that it drifts.
That is still the difference between a market pricing news and a market pricing a hunch. One contract here moved because a fact changed. The other 24 are moving on a shortlist. If you want the general version of how these rules decide who gets paid, we walk through it in how Kalshi settlement works, and what a venue can and cannot change about a market you already hold is covered in can Kalshi change market rules after you bet.
The Problem With The Top Of The Board
Now the part that makes this market genuinely strange.
Politico reported a shortlist for the job: White House principal deputy press secretary Anna Kelly, senior adviser to the attorney general for U.S. attorneys Alina Habba, chief of protocol Monica Crowley, Katie Miller and Scott Jennings. As relayed by Townhall from Axios reporter Marc Caputo, a senior White House official's response to that list was, in full: "Nobody on that list will be Press Secretary."
Three of those five names are the top three contracts on Kalshi. Habba, Kelly and Jennings hold about 77.5 cents of the board between them. If that official is right, the three biggest positions in this market are all names an anonymous senior White House official has reportedly waved off. If the official is spinning, or is out of the loop, or is describing a search that has since changed, then the market is fine and the quote is noise. There is no way to know which from the outside, and I want to be careful here: an anonymous official dismissing a leaked list is a routine Washington move that sometimes reflects a decision and sometimes reflects irritation at the leak.
Here is the part I find genuinely interesting: the board did discount it, for about a day. Habba closed at 27 cents on August 13 and 12 cents on August 14, the day the quote circulated. The top three as a group went from 69 cents (Kelly 27, Habba 27, Jennings 15) to 54 cents (Kelly 25, Jennings 17, Habba 12) across that session. Kelly and Habba were tied at the top on the 13th; Kelly led outright on the 14th and 15th.
Then it un-discounted. Habba has round-tripped the whole way back and tonight sits above where she started, which means the top of this board has now been hers twice in four days. The dismissal moved the price for roughly 24 hours and then stopped mattering. Whether that is the market correctly judging an anonymous denial to be cheap talk, or simply forgetting it, is the open question on this page.
There is one more piece of context on the favorite, and the date on it matters a lot. In November 2024, when Habba was among the names being speculated about for this same job the first time around, she posted on X that "the role of Press Secretary is not a role I am considering," adding that she would "be better served in other capacities." Leavitt got the job instead. That statement is nearly two years old and she has said nothing we can find either way about the current opening, so it is history rather than a live declination. It is still the sort of history I would want to know before paying 31.5 cents.
Tonight The Lead Changed Hands
The daily numbers hide what happened over the last several hours, so here is the hourly picture for the top three, in Central time on August 16.
| Time (Hour-Ending, CT) | Habba | Kelly | Jennings |
|---|---|---|---|
| 12:00 PM | 15¢ | 34¢ | 19¢ |
| 2:00 PM | 14¢ | 32¢ | 28¢ |
| 4:00 PM | 21¢ | 31¢ | 23¢ |
| 6:00 PM | 22¢ | 32¢ | 20¢ |
| 7:00 PM | 27¢ | 31¢ | 19¢ |
| 8:00 PM | 32¢ | 31¢ | 20¢ |
| 9:00 PM | 33¢ | 28¢ | 18¢ |
Habba went from 14 cents at 2:00 PM to 33 cents at 9:00 PM. She did not drift there; she more than doubled in seven hours, on her two heaviest hours of the day, roughly 3,000 Habba contracts in each of the hours ending 4:00 PM and 8:00 PM. Kelly, who had led the board outright on the 14th and 15th, gave back four cents across the same stretch. Jennings had his own spike to 28 cents at 2:00 PM and gave all of it back by evening.
There is a plausible catalyst, and it is thinner than the price move suggests. At 3:07 PM CT, The Daily Beast reported that Trump was dining with his daughter Ivanka at his Bedminster golf club and that "at a nearby table, Alina Habba, one of his former personal attorneys, was also spotted dining." The outlet framed it as rumor, not reporting on the decision. Habba was 14 cents an hour before that story and 33 cents six hours after it.
I would not call that causation, and neither would the Daily Beast. What it illustrates is the actual sensitivity of this board: a sighting at a golf club, with no sourcing attached to the job itself, sits alongside a nineteen cent move in the favorite. That is the price elasticity of a market with no real information in it.
How To Read A Board That Just Woke Up
The August 13 prints are the lesson, and they are worth calling back to. When this market came alive, the first real closes included Natalie Harp at 23 cents, Lara Trump at 23 cents and Roma Daravi at 24 cents, each on somewhere between 100 and 650 contracts. Every one of those names now sits at 3.5 cents or below. Elizabeth Pipko printed 17 cents that day and trades at a 5.5 cent midpoint now.
Those were not wrong opinions so much as they were empty ones. A few hundred contracts on a brand-new board is not a market, it is the first two people to show up. Volume went up more than sixfold on August 14, and every name in that first wave is now down by two-thirds or more from where it printed. If you are ever tempted to treat day-one prints on a fresh political board as a consensus, that is the sequence to remember.
Four more things I would keep in front of me on a board shaped like this one:
- Every Contract On Today's Board Can Lose. This is the big one, and it is the structural fact most people miss. There is no "field" or "someone else" contract here, so an unlisted successor resolves all 24 named contracts No. Read literally, the published rule only says "No new person" pays if Leavitt stays; it is silent on what happens when an unlisted person takes the job. Kalshi can also add candidate contracts to a board like this before expiration, so the 24 names are not a fixed universe between now and 2029. Treat the everyone-loses scenario as a live risk rather than a certainty, and read the rules page before you size anything. That risk is normally small. It is not small on a board whose own shortlist a senior official has publicly dismissed.
- The Midpoints Do Not Add To 100. Sum all 25 and you get about 115.7 cents. That 15.7 cent overround is the spread across a long, thin field, and it is a real cost. On a two-sided market you can devig it, and we show the arithmetic in how to devig odds for Kalshi. On a board with thirteen penny bids, treat the prices as indicative and nothing more.
- An Empty Podium Is Not A Resolution. The rule counts acting or interim service, but it counts someone serving. If the job simply goes unfilled for a stretch, no contract pays and the expiration date stays out at January 2029. The reporting says weeks, not years, but the contract you hold is written to the outer date, not to the reporting.
- Size It Like The Guess It Is. A market with no announced successor and a shifting shortlist is the definition of a low-information bet. Our general framing on that is in how much money you should put on Kalshi.
Two Numbers The Board Does Not Show You
The first one is the board with the vig taken out. Those raw midpoints add to 115.7 cents, so quoting them as probabilities overstates every single name. Normalize them and the real market-implied read is meaningfully softer:
| Contract | Raw mid | Devigged | Devigged moneyline |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alina Habba | 31.5¢ | 27.2% | +267 |
| Anna Kelly | 27.5¢ | 23.8% | +321 |
| Scott Jennings | 18.5¢ | 16.0% | +525 |
That is a four-point haircut on the favorite, and it is the difference between "the market thinks she is nearly a one-in-three shot" and "the market thinks she is a bit better than one in four." If you take one number off this page, take the middle column, not the price.
The second is what the market did to the rest of the leaked list. Politico named five people. Three of them are the top three contracts here, worth 77.5 cents together. The other two are close to worthless: Katie Miller is bid 2 cents, and Monica Crowley, the sitting chief of protocol, cannot attract a single penny bid. Traders did not buy the shortlist. They bought three names off it and threw the other two away, which is worth remembering the next time a leak is described as "the shortlist." The names that trade are the names being talked about on television. The name that pays is the one who walks up to the podium.
If you want the rest of the genre, we track every secretary the market has priced for an exit in the Trump cabinet departures guide, the long-dated version in Trump early departure odds, and the sentiment read in what the market prices for Trump's approval rating. Whether any of it is available where you live is in are prediction markets legal, and a straight assessment of the venue is in can you trust Kalshi.
If you would rather spend your attention on markets where we actually do the modelling, our free expert picks today hub is the better door. This political board is one we watch and write up, not one our tools price.
Want the receipt when this settles? We grade our prediction-market calls in public once the market resolves, so you can check our work rather than take it. Every settled call we have made is on the full graded scoreboard, and this board will join it the moment someone actually walks up to that podium. No pick, no promo, just the outcome.
What Would Actually Move This
Three things, in descending order of how much I think they matter.
Someone actually starting the job. Note the wording, because the rule does: the market settles on who first begins serving, not who gets announced. An announcement moves the price hard, but a named successor who never assumes the office pays nobody. When someone does take the podium, 24 of these contracts go to zero and one goes toward a dollar, assuming the hire is one of the 24 names listed.
A statement from one of the top three. Habba, Kelly and Jennings are carrying 77.5 cents. A single sourced statement from any of them, in either direction, would move more price than anything else short of a hire. Note the asymmetry: a denial is cheap to give and easy to walk back, so the market has learned to discount them, and Habba's 2024 post is a good example of one that did not stick to the question being asked two years later.
Anything that turns the shortlist into a process. Most of the public texture here is a leaked list, an anonymous dismissal of that list, and a golf-club sighting. The exception, and the one piece of the record that is not a rumor, is NBC News reporting that Trump and chief of staff Susie Wiles have privately discussed two candidates, whom NBC did not name, and that the White House plans to hire in the coming weeks. That last phrase is the most useful thing on this page for anyone holding a contract: it argues the resolution date is weeks out, not the three-plus years the January 2029 expiration implies. The first sourced reporting that puts names to those two is the shot that resets this board.
Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated event-contract exchange rather than a sportsbook. You must be 18 or older and located in an eligible state to participate, availability varies by state and can change, and nothing on this page is financial or trading advice. This political market is covered for information only, with no endorsement of any person, party or outcome.
The Bottom Line
A board that traded 31,716 contracts in its first six and a half months traded more than ten times that in four days, and it did so without learning very much. The one contract that answered to an actual fact, "No new person," is now a rounding error. Everything above it is a crowd reading the same leaked shortlist, one that a senior official has already waved off, and reshuffling the order every few hours on things like who was seated near the President at lunch.
That is not a criticism of the traders. It is what a market looks like when the only real information is that the chair is scheduled to open. The prices here are worth watching precisely because they will be unrecognizable the day someone fills it, and when that happens this page will still have tonight's numbers on the record.
