Polymarket's Rigged Election Odds: What's Really Skewing the Numbers

So, Zohran Mamdani has a 90% chance to be the next mayor of New York City. At least, that’s the reality being sold on giant digital billboards in Times Square, beamed directly into the eyeballs of tourists and commuters. The problem? That "reality" is being bought and paid for by a network of anonymous crypto wallets, most of them funded from China and the Middle East.

Give me a break.

This isn't an election; it's a beta test for a new kind of information warfare, and we're all the unwilling lab rats. The whole thing stinks. We’re watching a candidate, Mamdani, literally stand up at a rally and brag about his odds on betting markets like Kalshi—"they have our chances of victory in the 90s!" he says, beaming. But he conveniently leaves out the part where those odds are being artificially pumped up on an unregulated sister market, Polymarket, by what looks like a coordinated bot network.

This is a level of cynical, circular logic that you almost have to respect. It’s like a movie studio buying up all the tickets to its own terrible film to claim the #1 spot at the box office, then using that fake success to convince everyone else they should see it. Does anyone actually care about the truth anymore, or are we just living in a world of manufactured consent?

The Digital Puppet Show

Let’s get into the weeds, because this is where the scam really reveals itself. A group of blockchain sleuths called WAS Intel—God bless the internet’s private detectives—decided to follow the money. And what they found is a joke. The top 10 wallets betting on Mamdani control a staggering 40% of the entire market. One account, “dubdubdub2,” has dropped $1.2 million betting on Mamdani since September. This isn’t some passionate supporter in Queens putting down a fifty-dollar bill; this is institutional-level cash.

And here’s the kicker: they keep betting even when the odds are at 91%. There’s no financial upside. You’re risking a fortune to make pennies. No, 'bad' doesn't cover it—this is a five-alarm dumpster fire of market manipulation. It ain't about winning money. It's about buying a headline. The prize isn’t the payout; it’s the perception that Mamdani is inevitable.

The money trail leads back to crypto exchanges like Binance, Bybit, and OKX—platforms with massive user bases in China and the Middle East, and notably, not legally accessible to most Americans. WAS Intel found that the same funding sources pop up across dozens of the top wallets, suggesting one entity is spreading its cash around to create the illusion of a crowd, a finding that supports reports that Pro-Mamdani bets from China, Middle East skewing market odds: experts. Imagine one guy in a dark room, wearing a dozen different trench coats and fake mustaches, trying to convince you he’s a popular movement. It’s that, but with crypto.

And the platforms themselves? Polymarket "declined to comment." Offcourse they did. Why would they kill the golden goose? They’re getting transaction fees from this charade. This whole thing is a perfect, self-contained ecosystem of bullshit, where foreign money can directly influence the perceived viability of a candidate for one of the most important offices in America, and everyone just shrugs.

The Contagion Spreads to Reality

You might be thinking, "Who cares? It's just some crypto bro website." But that's where you're wrong. This digital illusion bleeds into the real world. Because Polymarket’s odds are so skewed, arbitrage bots immediately get to work on legitimate, US-regulated markets like Kalshi. They exploit the price difference, and in doing so, they drag Kalshi’s odds right up to match Polymarket's. Suddenly, the fake number becomes the "real" number on a platform that news outlets and regular people actually trust.

This is how the virus spreads. Prominent people like investor Bill Ackman are now tweeting about how voters are losing hope because of these manufactured odds. A Berkeley professor, Don Moore, flat-out says these markets "present an opportunity to manipulate perception" and can actually suppress voter turnout. If your guy is a guaranteed winner, why bother showing up? If he’s a guaranteed loser, same question.

And as if that weren't enough, there are reports that TikTok’s algorithm is mysteriously "amplifying" Mamdani's content while burying his opponent, Andrew Cuomo. It's a multi-front war. They're hitting us with fake betting odds, algorithmic content boosts... I'm honestly surprised they haven't started projecting his face onto the moon. It all feels so coordinated, and yet so brazenly out in the open. We can see the blockchain transactions, we can see the data, and yet nothing happens.

The whole situation is infuriating. I can barely get my food delivery app to find my own apartment, but some shadowy syndicate can flawlessly execute a cross-platform, international psyop to tilt a mayoral election. And we're all just supposed to sit here and watch...

But What If the Real World Fights Back?

Just when you’re ready to give up and accept our new bot-driven political reality, something funny happens: a poll. A real, old-fashioned poll with people answering phones and talking about their opinions. And guess what? It tells a completely different story.

A poll released just yesterday shows the race is tightening, fast. Andrew Cuomo, running as an independent after getting trounced in the Democratic primary, is making a late surge. He’s erased a 30-point deficit with Hispanic voters and is now leading Mamdani among independents. The pollsters are saying the race is much closer then the betting markets suggest, a development that caused such a stir that Polymarket says Mamdani's 'odds collapse' after new poll: Oct. 28 NYC election update.

Suddenly, the emperor has no clothes. The 90% "inevitability" built on a mountain of shady crypto bets is starting to look awfully fragile. The real kingmaker in this race might not be a whale on Polymarket, but Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate. According to the poll, his supporters prefer Cuomo over Mamdani by a massive 36% to 2% margin. If Sliwa's base decides to vote strategically, they could hand the election to Cuomo.

Maybe I'm getting too worked up. Maybe, just maybe, this is all just high-tech noise. Perhaps at the end of the day, after all the algorithmic manipulation and blockchain shenanigans, people will still just walk into a voting booth and pull the lever for the person they actually want to run their city. One can hope, right? But with only a week to go, we're about to find out if the simulation wins or if reality still has a pulse.

So We're Just Pretending This Is Real?

Forget who wins. The real story here is that the membrane between digital illusion and political reality has been completely shattered. We now have concrete, on-the-record proof that foreign entities can spend millions in untraceable crypto to create a false narrative of momentum for a political candidate, and our entire media and political ecosystem just plays along. The election itself almost feels secondary. The precedent has been set: if you have enough money and a few good bots, you can buy the appearance of destiny. And nobody seems to have a clue what to do about it.