In early April, Stephanie Cutter, a former senior adviser to the 2024 Harris campaign and former Obama deputy campaign manager, was announced as a policy adviser for the prediction market firm Kalshi, where she will presumably work alongside Kalshi’s strategic adviser, Donald Trump Jr. In addition to her new gig, Kalshi has hired Precision Strategies, the communications firm Cutter co-founded, where she currently works as managing partner. Precision Strategies will help bolster the quasi-gambling firm’s presence in Washington as lawmakers become increasingly skeptical of the prediction markets industry. So far, so revolving door.
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Cutter is not the first prominent Democratic insider to have moved from selling cryptocurrency to peddling prediction markets. Sean Patrick Maloney, the former DCCC chair, recently launched a prediction markets trade group that is backed by Kalshi. David Plouffe, Cutter’s former colleague on the Obama and Harris campaigns and at Precision Strategies, might also be interested in joining the effort. He has previously advised both Coinbase and Binance. Perhaps the most shameless sellout of the Obama presidency, former principal deputy solicitor general Neal Katyal, is also working on behalf of Kalshi.Everybody's gotta eat, but I'm pretty sure Cutter has enough cash to eat well for the rest of her life.
I'm not always a perfect judge of character, and sadly I've found that "being more cynical" is the best defense against getting conned by people, but it is often not too hard to look at the people in politics and guess which ones are not, actually, primarily in it for the Do Gooding.
I won't claim I have had numerous opportunities to sell out, or that I never had my price for doing so, either, but I am regularly stunned by how easily people transition from supposedly being one of the good guys to working for Evil Corp.
Yes I do think there's something corrupt about being a senior adviser to a Dem presidential candidate while having one eye on your next lucrative gig.