Republican Rep. Victoria Spartz’s election-night outlook took a sharp turn Tuesday when an opening batch of results put her Democratic challenger far ahead and sent her prediction-market odds tumbling.
The Indiana Republican entered the election as a clear favorite to hold her 5th Congressional District seat. But a Kalshi snapshot after results began coming in showed her chances of victory at just 41%, with Democrat J.D. Ford favored at 59%.
The platform displayed a 40-percentage-point decline for Spartz, a dramatic reversal for an incumbent who had been trading around an 81% chance of winning before Election Day.
The opening returns showed why traders were rattled.
At 6:22 p.m. Eastern, Decision Desk HQ showed Ford leading with 49,541 votes to Spartz’s 23,390. That gave the Democrat roughly 68% of the counted vote to the Republican’s 32%, with an estimated 28% of the district’s vote reported.
All 72,931 votes in that snapshot came from Hamilton County. The district’s five other counties had yet to report results on the tracker.
That left a substantial portion of the race outstanding, but the first batch was enough to knock Spartz from favorite to underdog on Kalshi.
The market figures reflect traders’ expectations of who will win, not the candidates’ vote shares. Neither the opening returns nor the plunge in Spartz’s odds amounted to a race call.
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