The ground shifted under the Republican Party overnight. A blue wave swept Tuesday’s midterms, handing Democrats a win that outran even their own best-case scenarios, and leaving the GOP staring down two years in which it will need new faces, or a real reinvention, if it wants to put up a fight in the next presidential race. One early sign of that scramble: Ron DeSantis’ odds of winning the 2028 Republican nomination jumped overnight, with Kalshi flagging a move of “over 100%” early Wednesday.
That phrase undersells it a little: the Florida governor’s price didn’t just double, it roughly tripled, climbing from under 5% to 16% in a single day, a gain of more than 200%.
DeSantis’ 2028 nomination odds more than triple to 16%
At 3:23 AM ET Wednesday, Kalshi posted that DeSantis’ odds had surged past the 100% mark. On Tuesday, before results came in, the market had him at 4.8%, with J.D. Vance at 34% and Marco Rubio at 23%. By the time of the post, DeSantis had climbed to 16% (up 12.2 points on the day), Vance had slipped to 30%, and Rubio had edged up to 25%.
Polymarket showed a smaller version of the same shift on Tuesday, pricing Vance at 36.1%, Rubio at 18.6% and DeSantis at 4.0%: a sign that the move started on Kalshi before spreading elsewhere.
New: Jon Ossof sees massive boost in 2028 Democratic Nomination odds
Why the odds moved: DeSantis’ Iran war and gas price comments before the midterms
The night before voters went to the polls, DeSantis joined Stephen A. Smith’s SiriusXM show and broke from the White House’s preferred line. He called the war with Iran a “big, big drag” on Republican candidates, pointing to gas prices that hit $4.11 a gallon on Election Day, a record for any Election Day in U.S. history, according to AAA.
“We just got to be honest. Gas is higher. It hurts people, working-class people, and it’s higher because of this conflict. That’s just a fact.”
DeSantis said, adding that any Republican who won’t say the same to voters is “gaslighting them.”
He also warned that a war dragging into the rest of Trump’s term would be “devastating” to the president’s agenda and “very, very difficult” for the party in the next cycle. DeSantis pointed to AI, data centers and Big Tech as areas where he thinks Republicans are out of step, arguing the party does best “when we are standing for small business folks, people that are working hard.”
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Vance and Rubio slide as Republicans take stock of the rout
Those comments landed the night before Republicans’ roughest election in years. Democrats won control of both the House and the Senate on Tuesday, flipping Senate seats in North Carolina, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Texas and South Carolina, several for the first time in decades, while also holding onto Michigan’s open seat in one of the cycle’s most contentious races.
Trump’s approval rating sat at 38%, on pace to be the lowest of any president heading into a midterm. But Trump distanced himself from the results. “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” he wrote on Truth Social Tuesday night. One senior Republican strategist put the blame elsewhere, telling CBS News that the story of the night was Trump’s own approval numbers. A separate GOP official called the results a “bloodbath,” saying, “I don’t think anybody imagined the bottom falling out the way it did.”
Now, if anything, Trump’s impeachment odds look more likely than him nominating a successor in 2028.
Vance and Rubio, the two names most tied to the current administration, saw their prices dip as DeSantis, who had just put daylight between himself and Trump on Iran, picked up ground.
2028 Republican nominee odds today: the top candidates
| Candidate | Kalshi | Polymarket |
| J.D. Vance | 30% | 31% |
| Marco Rubio | 25% | 19% |
| Ron DeSantis | 16% | 16% |
What DeSantis has said about running in 2028
DeSantis hasn’t announced anything, and he’s term-limited out of the governor’s mansion in January 2027. But he’s kept the door open. Asked directly by Sean Hannity earlier this year whether he’d run again, DeSantis said, “We’ll see,” adding that without Trump in the 2024 race, he believes he would have won “like 90%” of Trump’s Iowa caucus voters.
A separate Kalshi market asking whether DeSantis will actually enter the 2028 race, a different question from whether he wins it, has him trading around 72%, up several points since the midterms. Vance sits at 74% on that market and Rubio at 54%.
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What could move the odds next
DeSantis’ price on prediction markets moved on one night’s headlines, and a market like this can give it back just as fast. Worth watching: whether DeSantis keeps criticizing the administration’s handling of Iran and gas prices in the weeks ahead, how Vance and Rubio respond to the midterm losses, and whether DeSantis says anything more concrete about 2028 once he leaves the governor’s office.
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