Jake Collective and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention are launching a $5 million, five-year initiative

Editor’s note, July 26, 8 am ET: We’re bringing you some of our best-loved Your Mileage May Vary columns while Sigal Samuel is on parental leave. The one below was originally published in December 2025.

This unconventional advice column offers you a unique framework for thinking through moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism: the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. Submit your own question here.

I’ve worked in communications for the past decade helping get important ideas out to the public. I’m good at what I do, and I think it’s useful, but I don’t really feel like I’m having a grand impact on the world.

Meanwhile, some of my friends have built their entire careers around the goal of having the biggest positive impact possible. They’re busy pulling big levers — doing global health work that saves lives, shaping federal policy that protects the environment, etc. I feel like my contribution is tiny in comparison.

I know life’s not a competition, but I grew up being told I was smart and had so much potential to change the world, and I worry I’m not living up to that. On the other hand, I also value work-life balance and relationships and experiences outside of work. Should I consider switching careers to something more impactful? Do I need to have an extraordinary career, or is it okay to just do an average amount of good and live a small(ish) life?

Dear Impact-Minded,

How do you feel about the fact that you’re going to die one day?

That might sound like a weird place to start, but I ask because I think fear of our mortality is what drives a lot of our modern quest for extraordinary careers. 

In fact, the American anthropologist Ernest Becker argued in his 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death, that one of the main functions of culture is to offer effective ways to manage the terror of knowing that we’re going to die and eventually be forgotten. 

The prospect of absolute annihilation is so terror-inducing, Becker argues, that we come up with all sorts of ways to convince ourselves we can achieve immortality. In the pre-modern era, most people looked to religion for this. It promised us literal immortality, in the form of an eternal soul that could enjoy a happy afterlife in heaven or maybe a nice reincarnation here on Earth. 

In the modern era, as religion’s dominance waned, we’ve had to come up with new types of “symbolic immortality.” That can come in the form of publishing an autobiography, being part of a great nation, or — especially popular starting in the 18th century — achieving social progress “at scale.” As the Industrial Revolution propelled globalization, and it became possible to think about affecting people halfway around the world, utilitarian philosophers argued that our actions are good to the extent that they create “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.”

The idea that we could use our working lives to maximize the good gave people a new way to be extraordinary and thus achieve a lasting legacy — that is, a sense of immortality. By belonging to the grand project of social progress, we could live on well past our physical death.

On the one hand, the tacit promise is comforting. If we all chase these superlative lives, we can participate in the great forever! But on the other hand, it creates a crushing amount of pressure. There’s a sense that you need to be engaged in a maximally heroic quest; otherwise, your life is basically meaningless. 

Not everyone, however, sees things this way. 

For an alternative, consider Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. Born in France in 1873, she only lived to the age of 24, and the last nine years of her life were spent cloistered in a convent. She was an extremely pious young woman who prioritized kindness. But she was acutely aware of her own imperfections and limitations. She didn’t believe she was a great soul capable of great, heroic deeds. She definitely didn’t think her vocation was to have a positive impact “at scale.” 

Instead, she developed a very different approach to goodness, which she called her “Little Way.” It wasn’t about trying to reach a wide swath of people. It was about trying to go deep on little, daily actions, infusing every glance and word with the purest love. 

When the other nuns in the convent annoyingly interrupted her with chit-chat while she was trying to write, she made sure “to appear happy and especially to be so.” When one made exasperating clicking noises during prayers, she worked so hard to conquer her irritability that she broke into a sweat. She made lots of sacrifices lovingly, and trusted that through that, she could achieve holiness — and, yes, eternal life. 

Saint Thérèse compared people to flowers. Although most people want to be a big, showy flower like a rose or lily, she wrote, she was content to be a little flower at the feet of Jesus:

If all the lowly flowers wished to be roses, nature would lose its springtide beauty, and the fields would no longer be enamelled with lovely hues. And so it is in the world of souls, Our Lord’s living garden. He has been pleased to create great Saints who may be compared to the lily and the rose, but He has also created lesser ones, who must be content to be daisies or simple violets flowering at His Feet.

Saint Thérèse became known as the Little Flower. After she died of tuberculosis, her spiritual memoir grew famous. People fell in love with her theology of the Little Way, and she ended up being one of the most popular saints in Catholic history.

I suspect she struck a chord with people because she offered them a strong counterpoint to the idea, which was gaining traction at the time, that it’s not enough to do good — we have to do the most good possible.

But, personally, I’m satisfied neither by the utilitarian perspective nor by Saint Thérèse’s perspective. Both are extremes: one says “you absolutely must do the most good,” and the other says “don’t even bother trying to help more people — just give the few people in your cloister the deepest love possible.” 

Yet, it’s a feature of our modern life that the fortunate among us have the capacity to go both wide and deep — to consider both scale and other dimensions of value. People who go all-in on just one of these tend to feel regret, whether it’s the effective altruist who’s so focused on helping at scale that he ignores everything else or the monk who spends decades in deep contemplation but doesn’t do a thing to help others.

So, when you consider your own potential, I’d encourage you to consider the full picture. I don’t think you should obsess over finding a career that’ll allow you to do “the most good.” But doing “more good”? Sure! If you can find a job like that, why not? 

But, as you look around to see whether there’s a job where you could have a bigger positive impact, you have to be mindful of a few things. For one, there are many different kinds of “good,” and you can’t always run an apples-to-apples comparison between them. (Is your current job doing more or less good than, say, being a journalist or an educator? Hard to say.) Also, there’s more to life than just “doing good” — a life well lived includes reveling in other precious things, like art or relationships, so you don’t want a job that’ll bar you from that. Plus, you don’t want a job that’ll be unsustainable for your physical or mental wellbeing or that’ll wreck your integrity by contravening other values you believe in. 

Ultimately, what’ll probably work best is settling on a career that lets you achieve a decent balance among multiple criteria: doing substantial good, allowing for a pluralistic enjoyment of all life’s riches, feeling sustainable, and fitting with your values. (And after scanning the landscape, you just might find that the best career for you overall is the one you’ve already got!)

You’ll notice that this doesn’t sound as “grand” as either the utilitarian recommendation or the Saint Thérèse recommendation. But that’s the point: Those are extreme visions of life, and if you ask me, they’re not even really about life at all. They’re about death and achieving a legacy that you think will earn you a kind of eternal life after death. The assumption is that you need to do something “grand” in order to make your time on Earth not worthless.  

There’s a radically different starting assumption available to you: What if life is just a gift, and the time you have on this mysterious, weird, wondrous Earth is inherently precious, even if it’s temporary? When you get a gift — like, say, a box of candy — the point is not to try to make it last forever. The point is to appreciate the candy! To savor it yourself, and also savor the pleasure of sharing it with others. 

If we embrace this view, then we don’t feel like we need to do something grand or extraordinary. Life is extraordinary, and living it well means relishing all the goods it offers us — and extending those goods to other beings so they can relish them too. Not out of fear that we’ll be worthless and forgettable otherwise, but simply because we realize we’ve been given talents and resources and, feeling grateful for them, we naturally want to share those gifts with others.

Bonus: What I’m reading

• Were people in the past just like us, with emotions just like ours? Or did sadness, say, feel very different to a medieval peasant than it does to us? In this article, Gal Beckerman explores the fascinating idea of “experiential relativity.”

• “How did choice become a proxy for freedom in so many domains in modern life?” asks this Aeon article. There might be better ways to make people freer than giving them a huge array of choices. 

• What a time to be alive! We all have access to the text that sculpted the personality of one of the world’s major AI chatbots. Behold, Claude’s “soul doc.”

Medicine has come a long way. We are living longer than ever, we have eradicated diseases that once seemed like a certain death sentence, and new improvements  are constantly being made to our quality of life. But despite all the advances, there’s a huge gap in women’s health. “I think there’s such an interconnectedness between society, culture, medicine, and science,” Dr. Elizabeth Comen told Vox. She’s a medical oncologist who specializes in breast cancer and an associate professor at NYU Langone. She says medicine often mirrors what’s happening in society at large. “For many societies across the globe, women did not have equal agency or power over their bodies, and that’s really reflected in the history of medicine.”

It’s reflected in medicine’s present, too. The share of women with heart disease in the United States is rising, there’s a cultural backlash and skepticism surrounding birth control, and almost half Americans are turning to social media influencers (many of whom aren’t credentialed) for medical information. 

Why is there such a disconnect when it comes to health care for women? And what will it take for it to end? We find out on this week’s episode of Vox’s weekly call-in podcast, Explain It to Me.

Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Evans, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

We are at this point where we know more about our bodies than we ever have before. Sometimes you go to the doctor, and it feels like they’re still catching up on some pretty basic aspects of women’s health. Why does it feel that way?

Because it’s true. It takes a long time for medical science to catch up with the glaring gaps in our healthcare system. The gaps are not just about the obvious women’s health issues. We focus a lot on breast cancer. We focus a lot on reproductive function or our gynecological needs. But the gaps exist head to toe from our neurologic care, our gastroenterology care, how our hearts function, how our immune system functions, how our joints function. The gaps are real, and the experiences are real.

Can you walk me through some of the history? What did it look like to study women’s health before the 20th century? What were we dealing with?

When we think about modern medicine today and these specialties of urology, gastroenterology, they really didn’t exist before the 1900s at all; those are relatively new concepts. For much of the history of medicine, at least in the Western world, the idea was that, at best, we were small men and, at worst, there were many ridiculous diagnoses like hysteria and a long legacy of dismissing women’s medical needs because we were largely not taken care of by women. Those women that were caregivers in the history of medicine, whether it was the midwives or other types of healers, were largely pushed out of medicine as it became codified, and the idea of medical science really came to rise in the late 19th century.

So, I’m guessing that they weren’t really talking about menopause at the time, let alone perimenopause.

Perimenopause wasn’t even discussed. That’s a relatively new term and new part of our lexicon when it comes to lay discussion and the public at large. With respect to menopause, one of the famous physicians, Roger Wilson, wrote a book [called] Feminine Forever and referred to women going through menopause as vapid cows. He was the one that advocated in the 1960s and 1970s for women to be on hormone replacement therapy. But understand that, in the 1850s, it’s not like people really were wildly aware of what estrogen, and testosterone, and progesterone did. These are all relatively new ideas — the concept of hormones and how they can travel in our body. And again, we have a long way to go.

I read that women were rarely included in clinical trials until the National Institutes of Health mandated it in 1993. I find that so surprising. Why were women missing there? 

Well, these studies were not designed with women in mind. Some of the massive cardiology studies for drugs that we use day in and day out were done on thousands of men and not women. There is so much to that history, including the animal models on which many of these drugs were developed. In order to develop a drug, often, they are developed on mouse models first. It wasn’t until 2016 that you were even required to state the sex of the mice that you were studying. In many of these instances, female mice were not even included in drug development.

Oh my gosh — even the mice? How were these hormones marketed to people when hormone replacement therapy first became a thing?

It depends on which advertisements that you look at. If you look at advertisements of women in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, a lot of women were being prescribed anti-anxiety medicine. “Can’t manage your household at home? Don’t want to take care of your kids? Here’s what will sedate you and at least make you able to prepare breakfast for your husband.” It’s really shocking, and yet, not that surprising. If you look at Instagram today, are we really that far off from what gets marketed to women? Women sink billions of dollars probably into sham supplements and sham treatments, because they don’t feel cared for when they go to the doctor. And what fills that space? A lot of people trying to market things that have no proven evidence.

I think it’s really interesting that, at one point, hormone replacement therapy was this big thing, because I feel like growing up in the ’90s and 2000s, hearing women who are older than me speak, they were kind of anti-hormones. How did the pendulum swing that way?

Well, the pendulum has swung in wildly different directions. At first, it was: Every woman needs to be on it. And there were wildly successful sales. Then, there was the women’s health study that exaggerated the risk of breast cancer. Understandably, women were terrified. They were told by the media and by reputable scientists that these risks were significantly high and that they could not be on it, and we didn’t leave them with any alternatives. Now, we’ve become much more granular about what we know and what we don’t know, but I still think we’re far behind on the science. There’s still a lot that we need to learn, but, fortunately, an understanding of the prior studies and what their limitations are has come to light.

There are all these gaps in trust and treatment. There’s going to be a fair amount of snake oil out there, but are there ways that this moment is actually driving better treatment for women?

I’m so grateful that we’re talking about it, but I am terrified of what I see from influencers on Instagram. People can fake their knowledge. There’s so much fake imagery and information that is out there. I wish that we could invest this in quality science, which is long and laborious and painful at times but gives us the quality answers that we need. Every day, I see the consequences of fake information online, whether it’s an incredible loss of financial resources or just wasting money so that you could buy a nice pair of shoes. That would make you feel better than the ridiculous thing online that’s over promising and under delivering. The fear mongering is out of control.

What do you think it will take to trust their doctors again, rather than turning to the treatments they’re being sold online that might be dangerous? What will it take for them to feel good about the interactions they’re having at the doctor’s office? 

I think it’s going to be really challenging. We can’t blame patients, because we’ve done them a disservice. Medicine has fragmented the care of many patients — not just women, but men as well. We have to build a health care system that allows for time to be with patients and really hold space for them. I think that’s where the trust is really going to be built, because, at the end of the day, despite all the technology that’s available, medicine is about human to human care. That is what everybody wants to be treated as: a human to be seen and heard in the ways that you can’t just reduce a body to biology.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio strongly condemned Ortega's election decree, but there is little evidence the White House is ready to intervene in Nicaragua.

Clint Reilly helped elect a who's who of California Democrats and trained generations of political consultants. He was a genius in the business of campaigns.

While Kennedy has refrained from commenting on the current court or President Trump, he has written a memoir that explains the reasoning behind the major decisions of his era.

The targeted killings were clearly a warning from organized crime, which constitutes a kind of parallel government in many parts of Mexico.

Last week, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a small pill called enlicitide. It is a tablet you swallow once a day on an empty stomach with a sip of black coffee, water, or tea. But it does something that until now took a needle and a specialist’s prescription: It lowers the most dangerous kind of cholesterol by nearly 60 percent, about as much as the strongest injectable drugs on the market.

If that sounds less innovative than some of the medical advances I sometimes cover here — there’s no AI or gene editing involved — you’re missing the story. Enlicitide is just the latest example of how medicine has been quietly making progress against the deadliest thing in the modern world.

That thing is heart disease. It has been the leading cause of death in the United States for essentially a century, and in 2025 it killed 694,708 Americans — about one in five deaths — more than every form of cancer combined. Around the world, cardiovascular disease kills roughly 20 million people a year, the biggest cause of death on the planet.

But today, our enemy is on the retreat. In the US, the age-adjusted death rate from cardiovascular disease has fallen about three-quarters since 1950. In plain terms: A 60-year-old today is roughly four times less likely to die of heart disease this year than a 60-year-old was when Harry Truman was president. As I wrote last year, deaths specifically from heart attacks are down 89 percent since 1970.

That progress comes down to a single number. Low-density lipoprotein, or LDL, aka the “bad” cholesterol your doctor always wants you to lower. Until recently, a high LDL score was all but inescapable, something you could nudge lower with a better diet and willpower but struggle to really fix. What has changed is that we can now lower LDL for nearly anyone who needs it — further, more easily, and earlier in life than before.

A lifesaving genetic mutation

It’s a story that goes back 20 years. In the early 2000s, two geneticists at University of Texas Southwestern, Helen Hobbs and Jonathan Cohen, wanted to solve a medical mystery: Why did some individuals have striking low cholesterol levels? They combed the Dallas Heart Study for an answer. They found a handful — many of them Black Americans — carrying a broken copy of a gene called PCSK9. Their bodies cleared LDL from the blood with unusual efficiency, and the payoff was staggering: carriers of the strongest variant had about 28 percent lower LDL and roughly 88 percent lower risk of heart disease than people who did not carry the mutation.

That finding proved lowering LDL prevents heart attacks, and it handed drugmakers a target: copy that gene. Every PCSK9 drug since — including the new enlicitide — imitates a mutation a few people in Dallas were simply born with.

Millions of Americans still take the old cholesterol-lowering workhorses, statins, and they’ve proven highly effective at reducing heart disease for most people. But not everyone: Some people can’t tolerate the muscle aches; others take them faithfully and still don’t get their LDL low enough. Enlicitide is built for exactly those people: a pill as cholesterol-lowering as an injection but without the needle, and a drug that spares them the statin muscle aches.

Closing the loop

If the pill is today, gene editing is tomorrow — and it may be the answer to a problem no pill can reliably solve: getting people to keep taking their medicine.

About half of patients on statins quit them within a year, and a daily pill, however potent, only helps the people who actually take it. So that demands a fix you can’t forget. A company called Verve Therapeutics, now owned by Eli Lilly, has been testing a treatment that makes a single-letter edit to the PCSK9 gene in the liver — one infusion, in theory for life. In its first human trial, published over the spring in the New England Journal of Medicine, a single dose cut LDL by as much as 62 percent, and held it there for more than a year. Instead of a pill mimicking the effects of the genetic mutation that protected those people in Dallas, gene editing just switches off the gene.

As important as it is, cholesterol isn’t the whole story when it comes to heart disease. There’s smoking, which declined from about 40 percent of US adults in the 1960s to under 15 percent today, sparing countless arteries. High blood pressure — the silent condition that killed President Franklin D. Roosevelt at 63 in 1945, when doctors had few effective ways to treat it — can now be caught early and treated with cheap generic pills.

And then there are the GLP-1s. More than one in 10 US adults say they are currently on an anti-obesity drug, and whatever else you may think of them, they’ll make a significant dent in heart disease. In one major trial semaglutide cut cardiovascular events by 20 percent.

The war continues

Still, the war on heart disease won’t be easy to win.

Just because a pill like enlicitide has been proven to lower a lab value does not mean it’s yet proven to lower deaths. They should — the injectable versions of these drugs cut heart attacks and strokes by about 20 percent in long trials. But enlicitide’s own outcomes study won’t conclude for years.

Heart disease is shifting, too. The same research showing heart-attack deaths down 89 percent found deaths from other heart conditions — heart failure, arrhythmias, hypertensive disease — up 81 percent since 1970, though because heart attacks were killing several times as many people, overall heart-disease deaths have still dropped by about two-thirds since 1970.  Some of that shift is perversely the result of success: people who might have died of an initial heart attack now live long enough for the heart to wear out in other ways. And some of this is the reverse of progress: As smoking and cholesterol fell, obesity climbed to about 40 percent of US adults, pulling diabetes and high blood pressure with it.

And then there’s perhaps the biggest problem in medicine: access. A 60 percent drop in cholesterol helps only the people who can actually get the drug. Half of patients abandon cheap statins within a year. Enlicitide arrives at about $300 a month with uncertain insurance coverage. The gene edit, whenever it becomes available, will certainly cost far more, and at first will reach only the sickest.

More than 60 percent of US adults are projected to have some form of heart disease over the course of their life. Precisely because the condition itself so widespread, treatments for heart disease will only be effective if they are equally widespread.

Which brings us back to that unassuming little pill. It’s just a tablet, doing what a generation of scientists spent their careers trying to do: turning one of the deadliest numbers in medicine into one you can change. It’s the kind of progress that’s too easy to miss — until it saves your life.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!

The gerontocracy is real: The median senator is 64 years old, and 20 members of Congress are over 80. One legal scholar called it the “old-igarchy.” It seems the combination of President Donald Trump’s recent 80th birthday, the sudden death of Sen. Lindsey Graham, and the currently unknown health status of Sen. Mitch McConnell has called collective attention to the advanced age of our elected officials — and with good reason. 

So this week, I talked with Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina on his 86th birthday. And I wanted to (delicately) ask a question that’s been brewing in my head since the whole fiasco with then-President Joe Biden: Why don’t the oldheads want to retire? 

Over a long interview, I asked the House Democratic leader about generational change, shifts in the electorate on corporate PAC money and artificial intelligence, and whether he thinks there are any lessons to learn from the 2024 election.

On the question of age, Clyburn told me, “I know people who are 66 years old with much less energy than I have, and none of the experience that I have.” Clyburn said he would also be open to a recently proposed law calling for members of Congress to take cognitive tests, though he dismissed the idea of term limits or an age cap. 

Here’s what else I learned: 

1. They aren’t giving up power because they don’t want to

That’s the whole thing. The reason the boomers (and Clyburn’s Silent Generation) won’t step aside isn’t that no one has asked. It’s that they don’t want to. And for Clyburn, I think the armor doubles as the blind spot. When I asked about younger generations being distrustful that older politicians can deliver, he invoked his grandparents, saying, “Don’t worry about what people call you. It’s what you answer to that’s the issue.”

And while that is wisdom, hardened over the decades, I don’t know if it works as well as a leadership philosophy. Stay the course and ignore the criticism can also be read as ignoring electoral feedback. “I don’t react to that stuff,” Clyburn said, when asked about calls for generational change.

2. Clyburn says what the establishment thinks: It’s the voters’ fault

Clyburn articulates the core view of establishment politics as cleanly as anyone: There is nothing much to change. He doesn’t believe the party made significant errors in 2024, and he doesn’t take the primary results in New York City, Colorado, and elsewhere to be anything other than a flash in the pan. Pushed on what political lesson he took from an administration built to stop Trump that ended with Trump back in office, he went to turnout: “When the white vote turned out 71 percent two years ago, and the Black vote turned out 59 percent, you tell me whose fault that is.” Asked directly whether the argument was that Black people let Kamala Harris down, he didn’t hesitate: “In many instances, absolutely.” 

At its heart, this is a philosophy that blames the voters and insulates the party establishment from reflection. 

But this is also why the next round of primaries is so important. It’s easy to file New York, Colorado, or Graham Platner’s rise in Maine as one-offs — local flukes, not an overwhelming trend. But the Michigan and Wisconsin primaries are coming, and those are the ones that decide whether this gets treated as a pattern. The temperature of the freakout is still yet to be set.

3. He defends the establishment’s alliance with the Congressional Black Caucus

The moderate wing of the Democratic Party is held up, at the grassroots, by Black voters — particularly in the South. Clyburn knows that, and he defended both the alliance and the corporate policies that tie them together. 

Clyburn holds that taking corporate dollars is necessary for minority candidates who don’t come from family wealth — “I would challenge you to find me one single vote I have ever cast that pharma supported and my constituents didn’t.” He deferred to a pro-Israel colleague, Rep. Gregory Meeks, on questions of Israel: “I’m guided by Gregory Meeks.” He made no apology for backing Andrew Cuomo over Zohran Mamdani in this year’s New York mayor’s race — the same Cuomo he’d said should resign in 2021.

I asked him what Black communities have gotten in exchange for that loyalty. His answer was an agenda: “What did we get out of our support for Obama? What did we get out of our support for Biden?” And that’s a real answer. But I think there’s also another one underneath it.

I see Clyburn’s actions through the context of changing power within the Democratic Party, just as much as what’s going on outside of it. The Black political class, specifically, is invested in holding its own position against the party’s rising coalitions, immigrant communities in particular. That’s part of what’s at the heart of Clyburn’s endorsements of Cuomo and Haley Stevens in Michigan, and even the recent fight over which states should vote first in the Democratic presidential primary. 

Find the full episode — including a bonus segment where Clyburn defends the party’s approach to Israel — wherever you get your podcasts.

Could you accidentally gamble away your right to vote?

If you live in Wisconsin, and you bought contracts on a prediction market like Kalshi about who would win elections there, you’ve done just that, according to state election officials. And they think that if you vote anyway, you could be prosecuted.

“We want voters to understand that they cannot legally make a bet on an election and cast a ballot in that same election,” Meagan Wolfe, administrator of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, said in a statement Tuesday, ahead of the state’s August 11 primaries.

The reason wasn’t a new law about online markets but a very old statute dating back to the year 1849 — just after Wisconsin became a state. 

“No person shall be allowed to vote in any election in which the person has made or become interested, directly or indirectly, in any bet or wager depending upon the result of the election,” the statute reads.

The bipartisan commission also said those voters could be on the hook for felony exposure, if they know about the prohibition and vote anyway. Intentionally voting while not being qualified to do so is a felony, per state law. “It’s important for voters to understand the consequences if they bet on an election outcome,” Wolfe said.

Many other states have laws on the books against gambling on elections. Wisconsin is the first where officials are saying people are banned from voting if they do it through prediction markets.

And it may not be the last, since New York has a very similar provision in both its constitution and state law. 

“In New York State, voting in an election in which an individual has placed any bet or wager on the result is prohibited,” Kathleen McGrath, director of public information for the New York State Board of Elections, told me. 

The New York attorney general’s office has not yet issued a formal opinion on whether Kalshi and Polymarket election bettors are barred from voting in elections they’ve wagered on. But they’re currently locked in a court battle to try and get Kalshi regulated under state gambling laws.

All this makes for a potentially explosive situation in the upcoming midterms, given the rapid growth of the industry, which has rolled out massive advertising campaigns and sponsorship deals to attract customers this election cycle. 

Prediction market companies have responded with fury. Benjamin Freeman of Kalshi posted on X that this was “insane,” blatantly unconstitutional,” “illegal,” “dishonest,” and “dystopian.” In an emailed statement, Kalshi said this was “incredibly dangerous to democracy.” 

Bettors may be less perturbed. “The reaction I am party to is almost amused by how idiotic it is — how unenforceable, and backwards, and emblematic of government regulators,” said Alex Keeney, who founded Eventual, a prediction market podcast he co-hosts with traders.

But Wisconsin Elections Commission member Ann Jacobs, who flagged the issue earlier this year and helped create the new guidance, told me in an interview that the decision was not taken lightly.

“This has been the law for a long time,” she said. “And if you don’t like the law, go talk to your legislator.”

So, where did this old law come from? Could it actually be enforced? And would it hold up against court challenges?

America’s hidden history of degenerate election gambling

It may seem surprising that a state would have such an old law of this nature on the books.

But, it turns out, many early 19th century Americans were degenerate election gamblers — so many that this became a topic of national conversation and condemnation.

In a 2012 paper, economic historian Paul Rhode and economist Koleman Strumpf wrote that betting on elections was “commonplace” since the US’s earliest years as a nation, but that it became “especially intense during the partisan conflicts of the Jacksonian era.” Newspapers, which in those days were mainly partisan, championed the practice.

Concerns eventually rose that election betting encouraged election rigging, just as people complain today that prop bets are corrupting sports. After the 1844 election, Rhode and Strumpf wrote, Whig Party members complained that “gamblers favoring Polk had committed voting fraud using the winnings from election bets to defray their expenses.” 

Then, in 1845, the governor of New York, Silas Wright, urged his state legislature to make “the extensive and rapidly increasing practice of betting on elections” illegal, due to the “corrupting tendencies which it exerts upon the election itself.” And, Rhode and Strumpf continue, evangelicals “preached long and hard against election betting” as part of the second Great Awakening movement.

The craze eventually faded, but it was peaking just around the time Wisconsin became a state in 1848. So its new state constitution specifically addressed the issue, saying “laws may be passed” excluding election bettors “from the right of suffrage.” Hence the 1849 law.

Why attention returned to this law in 2026

In recent years, in the rare occasions when the law has been noticed at all, it’s been treated as an amusing, antiquated curiosity. 

But the rise of prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket — and the corresponding surge in election betting — made it relevant again.

In March, after Jacobs of the Wisconsin Elections Commission heard a radio story about Polymarket, she posted on X: “WI friends – I know it’s all the rage to bet on everything, but you cannot bet on an election in Wisconsin!  If you do, your ballot can be challenged & thrown out.”

Kalshi has long taken the position that it doesn’t allow election “gambling,” but rather “financial products” called “event contracts.” But the commission’s legal staff studied the issue, and concluded earlier this month that it was “relatively clear” that a Wisconsinite “cannot, even indirectly” make a bet or wager on an election and then vote in that election. 

The press release warning voters — and the backlash from Kalshi and Polymarket — soon followed. 

How the law might (but probably wouldn’t) be enforced

So, what would happen, then, if an avid “event contract” trader decided to vote anyway?

Realistically, the answer is: probably nothing.

But if someone else had knowledge that this person was making election bets and voting, they could show up to try to get them disqualified.

“You would have to be there at the moment they showed up to vote — or when their absentee ballot is pulled out to be counted — and you’d say, ‘I’m challenging that voter,‘” Jeff Mandell, a Wisconsin election lawyer, told me. “But the chances that somebody is around with the right knowledge to block someone on one of these bases strikes me as pretty slender.”

The other theoretical risk is felony prosecution. Law enforcement officials could obtain information that people voted on elections they’d wagered on and, then, criminally charge them for  voting illegally. 

But Mandell pointed out that “that seems like a lot of work” for a prosecutor, adding, “I think that fears about enforcement, either civil or criminal, are probably overstated.”

Still, Jacobs argued, it’s possible. “This is the law,” Jacobs said. “It is a situation where, if people have placed a bet, they should consult with their own attorney and decide what to do.”

Would the law stand up to court challenge?

Since Wisconsin’s original state constitution specifically said the state could restrict election bettors from voting, the law would seem to be on firm ground.

There’s just one catch: That section of the constitution was repealed forty years ago. 

That repeal was made as part of a broader overhaul of the document and doesn’t appear to have been specifically targeted at the election betting issue. But it does mean that the statute doesn’t necessarily have the firm state constitutional footing it once did.

“The current constitutional language only authorizes the legislature to disenfranchise voters on two grounds — a felony conviction or incompetency — which does suggest that disenfranchisement on other grounds is impermissible,” Robert Yablon, a University of Wisconsin-Madison law professor, said in an email.

The law could also be challenged in federal court. As written, the law appears to prohibit even someone making a $1 bet with their friend on an election outcome from voting. Challengers could argue that law isn’t narrowly tailored enough to justify depriving qualified citizens of their voting rights.

For now, though, the law is on the books, and it says what it says. 

“As a policy, it makes sense,” Jacobs told Vox. “You want people to make their voting decisions based on who they think is best for the job — not who’s going to make them the most money.”

The New York question

Though the Wisconsin situation has made national headlines this week, it has largely escaped notice that New York has very similar provisions in both its constitution and in state law.

New York’s constitution says that no person who “shall make or become directly or indirectly interested in any bet or wager depending upon the result of any election, shall vote at such election.”

In fact, state law says that if a voter’s eligibility is challenged on these grounds, they must swear what is known as the “Bribery Oath,” swearing that they haven’t been paid to vote a certain way — and that they “have not made, or become directly or indirectly interested in any bet or wager depending upon the result of this election.”

When I inquired with New York state officials about whether these provisions about bets and wagers applied to Kalshi and Polymarket election event contracts, they declined to comment specifically on that.

But the New York attorney general’s office has repeatedly taken the position, both in their public rhetoric and in court, that prediction markets are “gambling platforms” that should be regulated by state gambling law. (Earlier this month, a judge gave the state a favorable ruling in a suit brought by Kalshi over this, though Kalshi is appealing.)

If New York reaches a similar interpretation as Wisconsin, Kalshi or Polymarket bettors on elections would not be legally permitted to vote in those elections. Of course, doing that comes with a risk of voter disenfranchisement, especially if this guidance isn’t well-publicized or is only belatedly clarified.

So, in both states, these very old laws have collided with a modern trend — and the result is a big mess.