Vice President JD Vance’s overseas visit to prop up a right-wing candidate may have backfired.
Vance spent the first half of the week in Budapest campaigning for authoritarian Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. The vice president treated the right-wing leader to a MAGA-style rally to hype him up as he faces re-election on Sunday, in what is expected to be an uphill battle.
CNN chief data analyst Harry Enten noted that Vance’s visit had caused prediction markets to change for Orbán, but not in the way he hoped.
“What are the prediction markets showing? To me looks like there’s a real chance that Viktor Orbán goes down to defeat. This is the Kalshi prediction market. Look, chance Orbán is Hungary’s prime minister after the 2026 election—you go back to the beginning of the year, it was basically an even split 48 percent chance that, in fact, he would be the prime minister after the election.
“Down it goes, down it goes!” Enten declared.
“We’re looking now at just a 31 percent chance, about a one in three shot,” he noted.
Enten said he was “looking at the numbers pre- and post-JD Vance visit,” noting that “if anything, they might have gone down slightly.”
“But there really has been no impact. JD Vance not helping out an ally of his abroad,” he noted.
The Daily Beast reached out to the vice president’s office for comment.
Orbán, MAGA’s European darling, has clamped down on press freedoms in Hungary and consolidated power to the executive branch as he has dismantled many checks and balances within the country’s government.
In addition to backing from President Donald Trump and Vance, Orbán is also backed by Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
“I do think that he’s made some smart decisions there that we could learn from in the United States,” Vance said of Orbán in 2024.
In a more troubling sign for Vance at home, Enten pointed to polling showing that “58 percent of Americans believe that the Trump administration is too focused on things abroad” and believe that the administration is not focused enough on domestic affairs.
Enten noted that Vance, who will likely run for president in 2028, is also widely unpopular among U.S. voters.
“Down he goes! JD Vance getting dragged down along with the president of the United States,” Enten said. “Vance is not doing hot to trot at this point.”
