Late in the 2024 election, Elon Musk made a tantalizing and outlandish offer: a sweepstakes offering $1 million daily to voters who pledged to sign on to his petition proclaiming support for the First and Second Amendments. The stunt raised questions about money in politics, but also about the use of what appeared to be a lottery to sway voters’ choices. Later the political action committee admitted that it would select the “winners” ahead of time, not pluck them out by chance. So, not a lottery after all.
But it was a fitting ploy for our times, where elections are big business and the rules of the game are subject to plenty of manipulations: duplicitous texts, hours-long lines to vote in some neighborhoods, and of course, the arcane Electoral College that shapes how campaigns are run and whose votes are considered valuable. Musk’s purported lottery made sense in America’s betting-obsessed culture, where it isn’t enough to see stock markets rise and fall around election time; instead dedicated prediction markets now allow speculators to bet on electoral outcomes.
The widespread embrace of gambling, betting, and lotteries is a regressive method of shoring up revenues for public goods in an age of austerity and tax cuts. Lotteries, then, reflect and increase inequality, while holding out the promise of a big windfall for individual winners. Indeed, the same political and economic conditions that gave rise to the popularity of lotteries, games of chance, and speculation have also ushered in a new political era, shaped by Donald Trump—who, after all, built a career in casinos. Uncertainty and insecurity have made us into a nation of gamblers, betting that fortune’s wheel, rather than shared investment in our democracy, brings prosperity
Lotteries have a long history in the U.S., stretching back to the colonial era. Then, legislatures used lotteries to raise funds for colonial governments, relief for the poor, and universities, among other public goods. During the 1820s and 1830s, though, many states took steps to ban state and private lotteries after scandals emerged about rigged and unfair games. Reformers criticized lotteries as regressive and harmful to working people, and state constitutions soon prohibited them.
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After the Civil War, lotteries became popular again. Southern states saw them as an easy way to raise revenues without imposing new taxes. Soon, people were purchasing tickets for the Louisiana State Lottery by mail, not just within the state but across the nation. Concerned about the corruption of public morality, and as President Benjamin Harrison put it, “the robbery of the poor,” Congress used its power to regulate interstate commerce to crack down on state lotteries by the end of the 19th century.
But legal gambling emerged again in the 20th century. Nevada legalized casino gambling during the Great Depression. State lotteries followed, beginning with New Hampshire, in 1964. The Granite State was one of few states without income or sales taxes, and the lottery’s proceeds were to go to the public school system. Entering cost $3 and people dreamt about taking home the winnings, which were pegged to a horse race. People might walk away with a prize ranging from anywhere between few hundred dollars and $150,000.
People played enthusiastically, and other states soon followed in the 1970s and 1980s as cities and states became more fiscally strained, thanks to inflation, low corporate taxes, and veneration of the free market. Politicians hesitated to raise direct taxes on citizens, lest they lose reelection, and so lotteries became a popular method of raising funds.
Some states turned to casino gambling as another source of revenue. In 1976, New Jersey voters opted to legalize gambling in Atlantic City, a decision that drew casino operators to the storied boardwalk in droves over the next decade. The city was once a premiere destination for visitors hoping to catch sun and sea down the shore, but the city had fallen on hard times. Casino gambling was understood as a good bet for reviving tourism and raising revenues.
In 1984, Trump made his first foray into Atlantic City’s casino business, and he would expand his empire to three casinos over the following decade. He did well, but his casinos didn’t—the projects took on excessive debts, or failed to register a profit, and each underwent bankruptcies (Trump Taj Mahal in 1991, Trump Plaza and Trump Castle, 1992) before eventually shuttering or changing hands. Neither did the city’s residents; people’s homes had been cleared to make way for casinos that choked the city off from the beachfront. And yet, tourists flocked to the growing opportunities to hit it big. In 1986 Atlantic City welcomed 30 million visitors, making it the number one tourist destination in the country.
In the 1980s, the culture—like the administration of President Ronald Reagan—venerated wealth acquisition, and the expansion of the financial industry was accompanied by Hollywood films like Wall Street and Working Girl. Even when reckless speculation and deregulation led to crashes like the Savings and Loan Crisis and “Black Monday,” on Oct. 19, 1987, Americans doubled down on risk-taking and markets. Instead of creating a system that aimed to serve everybody’s needs, the logics of markets and competition triumphed and became applied to every part of life.
Such logic extended even to the immigration system. Since 1965, the system had largely limited visas to immigrants with a close family member or employer to sponsor them. Yet many more people want to immigrate to the U.S., drawn by better opportunities. In 1990, policymakers decided to create a way for them to get visas. Perhaps reflecting the glorification of risk-taking dominating the culture, they made it into a game of chance. The new Diversity Visa lottery gave people from around the world a chance to win an immigrant visa.
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Allocating valued but scarce goods via lottery made sense to policymakers for practical reasons; it was cheaper to administer this way than to sift through and assess detailed applications, weighing the pros and cons of each aspiring entrant. But it was a fortuitous choice: Making luck the animating premise of the program also appealed to aspiring immigrants who felt that chance offered better odds than restriction-minded bureaucrats.
This lottery, like others, acknowledges the randomness that shapes our lives, particularly in the 21st century as countries like the U.S. have reduced social safety nets and embraced deregulation, allowing inequality to shape our society and making rights dependent on things largely outside our control: where we are born, our gender, the state in which we reside. The resulting precarity only deepens our sense of insecurity and distrust.
Luck shapes our lives more than we are comfortable admitting, and the explosion of lotteries and gambling in our society in recent years both recognizes and reinforces this fact. When hard work and dedication don’t reliably bring us stability, it makes a kind of sense to turn to lottery tickets and betting in the hope of a big win—even when the odds are stacked against us.
Yet, while lotteries may be popular, and they may generate needed revenues, they are a poor substitute for robust investment in the public goods that we all depend upon, like schools, health care, infrastructure, and housing. Such insecurity and uncertainty may undermine our trust in each other, in the government, and in democracy itself to deliver what we need to survive and to thrive. After all, almost everyone who enters a lottery loses; the winner’s luck depends on everybody else’s lack of it.
Access to a good life seems more than ever to depend on luck. Now, by sending Trump back to the White House, the electorate appears to have spun the wheel on democracy itself, leaving us to hope that whatever luck we have had in building our fragile democracy thus far in our history doesn’t run out.
Carly Goodman is assistant professor of history at Rutgers University-Camden, senior editor at Made by History at TIME, and author of Dreamland: America’s Immigration Lottery in an Age of Restriction (UNC Press, 2023).
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
