The Chopping Block · Nov 6, 2026 · 56m · 47m saved
With Haseeb Qureshi, General Partner at Dragonfly Capital (host) · Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly Capital · Tarun Chitra, CEO of Gauntlet · Robert Leshner, Founder & CEO of Superstate
Photo via fortune.com
Prediction markets priced total Democratic control of Congress at 99% by around 7pm on election night, hours before most television coverage caught up. Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly Capital, said a journalist friend was still texting him for updates an hour later, unaware the race was already decided.
"I had a journalist friend text me last night at like 8 o'clock: 'Are you watching the midterms? Are you glued to the results?' I'm like, what results? It's over. If you're watching the prediction market, it's over." — Tom Schmidt
Tom discussed the call on The Chopping Block. Haseeb Qureshi hosts the panel and runs Dragonfly Capital alongside Tom. Tarun Chitra, who built the risk-management firm Gauntlet, and Robert Leshner, who founded the tokenized-fund platform Superstate, round out the panel.
The full episode is covered here so you can skip it. 56 minutes of audio, 9 minutes of reading.
Here are the 6 calls that matter.
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Key Takeaways
Prediction markets priced total Democratic control of Congress at 99% by about 7pm on election night, before most TV coverage had caught up
Mississippi, a roughly 50-vote race, was the one miss — priced as low as 7% before resolving to 100%
Stand With Crypto's scorecards show a friendlier new Congress: 226 pro-crypto House members elected against 106 anti-crypto, and 19 pro-crypto senators against 8 anti-crypto
Sherrod Brown, a longtime crypto critic, still won despite roughly $40 million in opposition spending by the pro-crypto PAC Fairshake
a16z renamed its crypto arm a16z Frontier, expanding its mandate into agent-to-agent technology and new computing paradigms
The CFTC cleared single-stock perpetual futures for US exchanges, and CBOE and Citadel sued within hours
Anthropic's Q3 revenue hit $17 billion, up from $11.5 billion in Q2, even as the company swung back to an operating loss
Bigger AI models can strip safety filters off smaller ones, says Gauntlet's Tarun Chitra, who calls a ban on the practice technically unenforceable
1. Markets Called the Wave
Polymarket's favorite won 419 of 426 races on election night, and the panel's reading of the market's early call set up the rest of the conversation. Polling itself had underestimated the Democratic wave rather than overestimated it, despite a pre-election narrative that polls were biased, which meant markets tracking those polls were in aggregate still too conservative.
Prediction markets priced total Democratic control of Congress at 99% hours before TV coverage caught up
"I had a journalist friend text me last night at like 8 o'clock: 'Are you watching the midterms? Are you glued to the results?' I'm like, what results? It's over. If you're watching the prediction market, it's over." — Tom Schmidt
Individual deep-red races still moved sharply: Mississippi, decided by roughly 50 votes, was priced as low as 7% before resolving to 100%.
"Only thing everyone [messed] up was Mississippi, but that vote isn't still fully tallied and it's like a 50-vote delta... I don't think anything is quite at that precision for a human behavioral thing." — Tom Schmidt
The panel contrasted the result with Brazil's recent election, where prediction markets and public markets heavily favored the Bolsonaro-aligned candidate "Binario," but Lula won by about 3% — a miss the panel could not fully explain.
