South Carolina Republicans didn’t settle their SC governor nomination on Tuesday, but prediction markets still think Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette is the one to beat. 

Trump’s endorsed pick is headed to a runoff, yet Kalshi and Polymarket both keep her as the heavy favorite to replace Gov. Henry McMaster after heading into primary day with an 80% chance of winning. It’s just the latest race that Trump’s endorsed candidate has not come out cleanly after a series of big wins. 

But now, traders believe the first round is a delay, not a derailment. The runoff is on June 23.

Evette did not close the deal, but she did not lose her grip on the race either. She garnered the most votes at 29%, just ahead of her runoff opponent, Alan Wilson, at 26%.

The runoff means the primary is going longer than the Trump endorsement crowd probably wanted, yet the markets still have her at 76% on Kalshi and 76% on Polymarket. On Kalshi, traders have put $2.2 million on the contract. Polymarket has seen more than $600,000 in volume.  

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That’s enough volume behind those prices to suggest traders are not treating the runoff as a real threat to her nomination. The runoff also gives the race a cleaner test of how much Trump’s backing really means when the field is crowded. Leading up to primary day, the market strongly aligned with the endorsement. 

The results indicate that alignment was in the right direction, but not enough to finish the job outright on Tuesday.

Rep. Nancy Mace’s rough night, finishing fifth with 12% of the vote, was part of what made the result feel more settled than the headline runoff suggests. 

The race was supposed to be a bigger test of Trump’s influence within the GOP. Mace, however, never fully turned her old Trump-world stature into a path through the field. That left Evette as the main beneficiary of the president’s nod.

The important market question now is whether Mace’s collapse has simply cleared the runway for Evette, or whether the runoff gives other anti-establishment voters a last chance to consolidate elsewhere. For now, traders are still treating Evette like the likeliest nominee.

The SC governor race looked a lot like the kind of campaign prediction markets price quickly. Trump picks a candidate, the field narrows, and the market starts to treat that candidate as the obvious winner. 

The runoff interrupted the clean version of that story, but it did not break it.

The underlying structure of the race still favors Evette. She had the endorsement, she had the clearest lane, and she still looks like the candidate most likely to benefit from the general consolidation that usually follows a first-round miss. 

South Carolina did not hand Trump an easy primary-night win, but it also did not deliver the kind of rejection that would force a full market reset. Evette is still the favorite, the market still trusts the endorsement, and the runoff is now more of a formality check than a true toss-up.

That makes the race an interesting follow-up to Iowa, where a Trump-endorsed candidate heavily favored by prediction markets lost on primary day. In both cases, Trump’s endorsement boosted a candidate into market favoritism, but the vote count showed that primary electorates can still be messier than the odds imply.

The post Evette Heads to SC Governor Runoff Still Backed by 76% at Prediction Markets appeared first on DeFi Rate.

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