Betting favorite to succeed Karoline Leavitt says she’s ‘not in the running’ for White House press secretary job

Betting markets are supposed to be smarter than this. Kalshi had Alina Habba as the favorite to replace Karoline Leavitt, and the woman herself had to log onto X and say, in effect, slow down, nobody offered me anything. That's a pretty clean example of how these prediction markets, for all the hype they get as some kind of oracle of political reality, are often just aggregating vibes and Twitter chatter into a number that looks more authoritative than it is.

It also says something about how the White House press shop is covered these days. A press secretary transition is genuinely a big story, and there's nothing wrong with speculating about who's next. But the speculation ran so far ahead of the facts that the speculated-about person had to publicly correct the record. That's not reporting getting ahead of the news. That's a market pricing in a rumor nobody bothered to check.

None of this is really about Habba, who by all accounts said flatly and without drama that she's not in the running. It's about the incentive structure of these betting platforms, which reward confident guessing over confirmed sourcing. When the guess gets treated as news, and outlets write it up as if the odds themselves are information, you get stories built on a foundation that evaporates the moment the subject types one sentence.