UPDATE: We have updated this article to reflect the current 69% share of money — up from 65% early yesterday and 68% yesterday evening — on Polymarket, implying that at 69% of users believe Steyer to be the likely winner.
If you want to understand where the California governor's race actually stands right now, skip the pundit panels and go straight to the money. On Polymarket — the prediction market where real dollars get wagered on real outcomes — Tom Steyer has rocketed from 7% implied probability of winning to 69% in under three weeks, on nearly $10 million in total volume. The chart looks like a launch trajectory. Something definitely happened.
What happened, obviously, is Eric Swalwell. The San Francisco Chronicle broke sexual misconduct allegations against the congressman on April 10; by Sunday night he had suspended his campaign; by Monday afternoon he had resigned from Congress entirely. He was the Democratic polling leader, and his exit created a vacuum that prediction market traders filled — almost entirely — with Steyer. A SurveyUSA poll taken right as the allegations broke showed Steyer already topping the field at 21%, according to the Polymarket market context. The money moved fast: Steyer is now at 65%, Katie Porter at 11.5%, Matt Mahan and Steve Hilton knotted around 8%, and everyone else at noise level.
The Market's Logic vs. The Polling Reality
Here's where it gets interesting, though. Prediction market traders have clearly crowned Steyer — but actual voter data tells a more complicated story. The UC Berkeley Citrin Center/Politico poll shows that among Swalwell's former supporters, 39% name Porter as their second choice. Steyer comes in at a distant 15%, per the San Francisco Chronicle. If that data holds, Porter should be surging alongside Steyer right now — not trailing him by 53 points on a prediction market with nearly $10 million behind it. The parallel market on Kalshi shows the same picture: Steyer near 55%, Porter and Mahan both hovering around 15%, per Newsweek. This isn't one platform's quirk.
Part of the Steyer thesis is structural rather than sentimental. He is self-funding heavily, which matters enormously in California's brutal media market. He has the money to keep advertising while rivals are still scrambling to consolidate Swalwell's donor network. The institutional endorsement machine is also moving his direction — Rep. Jared Huffman, multiple state Assembly members, state Sen. Lola Smallwood-Cuevas, and Rep. Ro Khanna co-starring in his TV ads, per the Chronicle. That's the kind of political infrastructure that tends to compound rather than cancel out when a race reshuffles this fast.
The Chaos Isn't Fully Settled
The markets may be pricing in a certainty that doesn't fully exist yet. Because Swalwell missed the statutory deadline to formally withdraw, his name will still appear on the June 2 ballot — meaning some meaningful chunk of his support simply evaporates into wasted votes rather than flowing cleanly to anyone, according to CalMatters. The nightmare scenario for California Democrats — two Republicans advancing to the November general in the deepest-blue state in America — hasn't disappeared from the board.
The donor and labor ecosystem is still very much in motion, too. The California Teachers Association, which rescinded its Swalwell endorsement, is meeting Tuesday to decide its next move. SEIU — 750,000 members — could revisit its endorsement as well. Meanwhile, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan's PAC quietly pulled in $10 million since Friday alone, including a $1 million check from developer Rick Caruso, and launched a major TV ad campaign Monday, per Politico. Congressional Democrats who are privately skeptical of Porter — multiple members told the Chronicle she has a reputation for being difficult to work with — are said to be looking at both Mahan and Xavier Becerra as somewhere to park their support.
The Number That Should Give Steyer Bulls Pause
Nearly $10 million in Polymarket volume is real conviction. But that 65% is built on a week of post-Swalwell momentum, not on actual primary votes — and mail-in ballots start landing in Californians' mailboxes on May 4. Dan Schnur at UC Berkeley's Institute of Governmental Studies told the Press Democrat that while Steyer and Porter are "best positioned" to benefit, both are "flawed candidates" — and the upheaval opens a real lane for Mahan as a centrist alternative. Political science professor Christian Grose put it more bluntly to Time: "It's so fluid."
Fluid is the right word. Steyer's 65% reflects where sophisticated traders are putting their money right now, and to be fair, those same traders correctly sniffed out the Swalwell collapse before anyone in the establishment wanted to acknowledge it. But the California Democratic Party's next tracking poll — going into the field this week, capturing voter sentiment in the post-Swalwell world for the first time — will be the first hard data point that doesn't come from a prediction market. If it shows Porter surging, or Mahan breaking through, those odds are going to get a lot more interesting very quickly.
