Pete Buttigieg For Vice President? Polymarket Sees Transportation Secretary’s Odds Surge

Will Pete Buttigieg return to the campaign center stage this summer? Prediction market users are starting to think so, with his odds reaching an all-time high of 25% this morning as bettors give the current U.S. Secretary of Transportation a serious look. 

Though sitting in a steady fourth-place position for the potential nod, Buttigieg has seen his star rise in the last 24 hours on Polymarket. His odds have risen from a meager 3% to 25% early Wednesday morning—before plateauing at around 10% at the time of publishing.

Buttigieg still trails behind VP-nominee frontrunners Mark Kelly of Arizona (33%), Roy Cooper of North Carolina (23%), and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania (17%). 

Buttigieg—who was brought into the national political spotlight when he ran his own presidential campaign in 2020—has served as Biden’s Secretary of Transportation throughout his term. In recent days, Buttigieg has appeared on news shows and in interviews as a well-spoken, confident, and firm proponent of his party’s cause. Going on the offense to effectively broadcast support for the party in recent days may be contributing to the surge in support for him as a dark horse VP nominee.

So far, Buttigieg has made no public indication that he is being vetted for the position. During a press briefing yesterday, however, he responded to a point blank question with a slight smile on his face that he was not able to discuss anything relating to elections while in front of a government building. And on Monday, he appeared on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show “in a personal capacity,” where he eloquently advocated for Kamala Harris to take over the campaign from Biden. Maddow, too, asked him point blank whether he would serve as her Vice President, which Buttigieg dodged in response, keeping the focus on Harris.

Predictions for the eventual new VP nomination can be tracked in real-time on prediction market platforms like Polymarket, which is crypto-based. Activity has churned from a flurry into a hailstorm in recent weeks.

Immediately following President Biden’s announcement Sunday to discontinue his reelection campaign, traffic on the website skyrocketed; the poll for Democratic VP Nomination soared from a $5.5M bet overall to its current position with $20.6M being staked across the entire poll. 

As noted on Polymarket’s account on X, one user walked away with over $700,000 this weekend after placing a $12,489 bet that Kamala Harris would be the Democratic presidential nominee. On the flip side, user AnonBidenBull lost a whopping $2 million from his confidence that Biden would be the Democratic nominee. 

Though Buttigieg trails in his overall chances of winning, his odds contain the most money on the line of all potential candidates, at $1.3 million, suggesting at least an intrigue among bettors to stake their claim on his future. Roy Cooper sits just behind Buttigieg with $1.16M placed on him.

User The_Guru55 controls the most shares of support for Buttigieg at 51,347. The same user has also placed bets across the candidate pool, including over 165,000 for Gretchen Whittmer and 50,000 for Mark Kelly, indicating users hedge bets across multiple polls. 

Some Polymarket users are clearly taking some wild positions in the off chance they pay out. For instance, a few high rollers are taking the 1-cent bet that the VP nominee will be former president Barack Obama; nearly $950,000 is riding on that seemingly looney bet (which, as it turns out, seems to be Constitutional).