Democratic Midterm Sweep Undercuts US Sports Owners’ Election Bets

Democrats flipped both chambers of Congress on Tuesday, delivering a setback to professional sports owners who poured more than $100m into the election cycle, according to Front Office Sports. The result interrupted a pattern of heavy contributions that had favoured Republican candidates and committees across multiple contests this year.

Owners’ political spending has been extensive and bipartisan in practice: at least 10 sports owners backed Mike Rogers in Michigan; Jerry Jones donated $1m to Donald Trump’s super PAC and $250,000 to a committee supporting Ken Paxton; and Miriam Adelson gave at least $67m to Republican committees. At the same time, Democratic officials have overseen major expansions of legal sports gambling — New Jersey’s Phil Murphy placed his state’s first legal sports bet in 2018, Illinois governor JB Pritzker signed sports betting into law a year later, and New York’s mobile sportsbooks went live under Kathy Hochul in 2022 with the state taking 51% of revenue — and Pritzker and Hochul both won re-election on Tuesday.

The NFL’s move into betting and the rise of prediction markets have created new regulatory fights. On 8 October the league asked the US Supreme Court to treat prediction markets as state-regulated gambling, arguing the sums at stake are large; football accounted for $1.8bn in prediction-market trades on the season’s opening Sunday, more than half of all trading. Kalshi, a firm active in prediction markets, takes customers at 18 — three years younger than many legal sportsbooks permit — and has attracted scrutiny: the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has sued at least nine states over attempts to apply state gambling laws to such markets, Donald Trump Jr advises Kalshi, and Utah’s attorney general Derek Brown filed 13 felony counts against Kalshi and its two co‑founders.

Those enforcement dynamics intersected with ownership politics: the article says owners spent $20m electing the party whose administration has filed suits against prediction markets, and Democrats will control confirmation of the next CFTC commissioners after writing most of roughly 30 prediction-market bills in this Congress. At the ballot box, Nebraska voters rejected online sports betting by 54% to 46% after sportsbooks’ committees outspent opponents by 20 to one, according to the opposition; the industry’s next request to the lame‑duck Congress is to restore a full tax write‑off for gambling losses that Republicans capped at 90% last year.

Stadium financing and public subsidies remain central to owners’ political activity. The Chicago Bears have pressed Illinois for taxpayer help on a new stadium; on 1 October NFL commissioner Roger Goodell met with Governor Pritzker and urged action as the team also considers building in Indiana. Pritzker, who won a third term on Tuesday, has called for the legislature to vote during the autumn veto session on 17–19 November and 1–3 December. In Washington, the president threatened to scuttle the Commanders’ $3.8bn RFK Stadium deal unless the team restored its old nickname and then sought to attach his own name to the project.

Women’s sports and transgender participation were on several state ballots while the WNBA enjoyed record attention: Game 7 of the finals — in which the Golden State Valkyries beat the Atlanta Dream — drew 3.3 million viewers in the league’s first season under a new seven‑year labor deal. Four states voted on rules governing who can play on women’s teams: Arizona approved Proposition 318 requiring schools to assign teams by biological sex; Nebraska passed a similar measure with 67% and enshrined it in the state constitution; Washington’s Initiative 638 held a wide lead on Wednesday morning and Colorado’s Proposition 134 led narrowly. The US Supreme Court ruled on 30 June, by 6–3, that states may bar transgender girls from girls’ teams and that nothing requires them to allow such participation. The league’s labor deal contains one sentence on eligibility: “Only players who are women are eligible to play in the WNBA.”

Gambling-related legal trouble has also touched the NBA: federal prosecutors in Brooklyn charged Chauncey Billups and Terry Rozier last October, and that office has since indicted at least five NBA figures on gambling‑related counts. Commissioner Adam Silver has urged Congress to pass a single federal betting law and to give the league access to prediction‑market trading data. Financially, Silver gave about $41,000 to Democrats this cycle while Miriam Adelson contributed $67m to Republicans, with only one party securing control in the midterms.

Madison Square Garden’s tax status and Penn Station redevelopment remain politically charged. The Knicks’ arena pays no property tax and sits above a Penn Station overhaul estimated at around $8bn; the Trump administration moved the Metropolitan Transportation Authority aside and Amtrak selected the plan that kept Madison Square Garden in place. James Dolan hosted a Trump rally nine days before the 2024 election and hosted Trump in his suite for Game 3 of the NBA finals three weeks after the Penn Station decision; the arena’s 1982 tax break had cost the city nearly $1bn by 2023. Only the New York state government in Albany can repeal that break, and Governor Hochul — who won re‑election on Tuesday — has not acted; she also authorised $850m in public money for a Buffalo Bills stadium while her husband served as general counsel for the company that runs the Bills’ concessions, and both said he recused himself. The article notes the Knicks are defending champions and states plainly: Dolan is undefeated.

Several legislative and ownership threads now converge in Congress and among owners. The Senate’s college sports bill contains protections for women’s programs that expire after nine years, a point Senator Cory Booker opposed because the NCAA’s antitrust exemption would remain permanent; House Speaker Mike Johnson had said he would bring the bill to a vote even if Republicans lost the House, and Republicans did lose it. Owners continued to make cross‑party contributions: Tilman Fertitta bought the Connecticut Sun in May and gave $200,000 to the Republican National Committee; Josh Harris donated $255,000, largely to a Republican Senate PAC; David Blitzer gave more than $150,000, mostly to Democrats. Atlanta Dream players previously wore “Vote Warnock” shirts that helped defeat co‑owner Kelly Loeffler, who now runs the Small Business Administration for the president.

Kalshi took more than $1.4bn in bets on the election itself and has hired a lobbyist with ties to the man now in line to be speaker. Despite Tuesday’s losses for many high‑spending owners, the article argues the donor class remains positioned to influence both parties: owners and bookmakers gave to Democrats and Republicans alike, and the incoming Democratic majorities are expected to investigate issues that warrant review and then continue to sign stadium deals and betting legislation. Remember, this is by design.