Tuesday’s election wasn’t good for the gaming industry. It went 2-for-7 in popular votes, an outcome that American Gaming Association President Bill Miller will be hard-pressed to spin. Indeed, Miller has been uncommonly quiet this week. Thanks to one unqualified mandate in Virginia and a much narrower one in Missouri, the night wasn’t a complete fiasco for Big Gaming. But it sure makes one sit up and think. Has the industry become over-confident? Has it succumbed to that feeling of invincibility known in Japan as “victory disease”?
The answer is a resounding “yes.” Take the near-failure of Amendment 2 in the Show-Me State. It eked out a win of roughly 4,500 votes statewide. As George F. Will likes to say, even a majority of one vote is a mandate of a sort. But we sure didn’t see this nail-biter coming. Support for Amendment 2 polled initially at 38%, escalating to 50%. And there it stopped. Amendment 2 passed with a bare 50.1% of the vote. By contrast, opposition went from a distant second place (25%) to near-victory. Undecided voters broke unanimously against sports betting, an outcome unprecedented in our electoral experience.
What went wrong? Proponents ran what seemed like a faultless campaign right to the very end, had the support of major-league sports franchises and leading newspapers, and had deep pockets. Yet they came within 5,000 votes of losing. By contrast, CEO Tom Reeg of opposing Caesars Entertainment has to be kicking himself for taking his foot off the “anti” gas pedal in mid-October, when Caesars nixed a $1 million ad buy, preferring to defer with door-to-door campaigning. That will go down as one of the biggest blunders in gaming history. Those last three weeks of TV advertising could have put the antis over the top. Whoops. And whew! Dodged a bullet, thanks to Caesars’ political incompetence.
DraftKings and FanDuel came up big (if perhaps shaken) winners, prompting DKNG CEO Jason Robins to go into a garish overreaction. If a state as sports-rich as Missouri can’t go for OSB by more than a handful of votes, then momentum is slowing, not accelerating. It can’t be coincidental that media coverage of sports betting is overwhelmingly negative these days, a phenomenon that Miller, Robins and others are trying to ignore rather than answer. (The failure of Democratic Party campaigns in 2024 ought to serve as an example of the dangers of playing rope-a-dope in politics.) If something as popular as OSB had rough sledding in Missouri, imagine how much more difficult the expansion of Internet casinos is going to become. God forbid there’s a financial calamity in the United States, but iGaming isn’t going to budge notably without a severe economic crisis to prompt it.
The one clear mandate that Big Gaming got this year was in Petersburg, where Cordish Gaming sailed through with 81% support. It’s an under-served market, in a state (Virginia) that is far from saturated with gambling—although Churchill Downs is trying hard to change that. Unlike bumbling, stumbling Urban One in Richmond, Cordish played all its cards right. We congratulate them on achieving overwhelming support for what is often something extremely divisive.
A casino that got slapped down hard was the proposed Bally’s Corp. one for Lake of the Ozarks. It was a topsy-turvy plebiscite, with support concentrated in the distant, big cities and rejection coming from the rural counties it was supposed to benefit. Those who say Americans vote against their best interests can cite this as a case study. It certainly showed that the presence of an ostensibly major casino company, support by premier newspapers and the lack of an organized opposition can still count for nothing when the public is skeptical. As it clearly was. Considering that Bally’s recently bailed out of a low-budget casino in Pennsylvania, its ability to follow through in the Ozarks (the kind of project it ought to be doing, not megaresorts) was highly questionable, but voters just weren’t sold on the idea that Missouri needs another riverboat.
Upon further review, the passage of Proposition JJ in Colorado was a minor setback for the industry. Previously, the state could only keep $29 million of OSB tax revenues and had to return the overage to operators. Now it gets the whole enchilada. This was to be expected. People love gambling but they don’t love gambling operators, and woe betide the one who thinks he’s going to be voted a tax break. Perhaps Big Gaming was lucky to even garner 24% of the electorate.
Putting a vote on a Pope County issue to all of Arkansas was a fiendishly clever move by anti-gambling prudes in that state. As popular as the idea of the casino may have been with its immediate constituency, statewide it rolled snake eyes. Perhaps it had something to do with Pope County still not seeing a casino six years after it was voted in initially. Blame bitter litigation between two Native American tribes over the concession. And blame devilishly unclear verbiage by opponents, whereby a “Yes” vote nixed the casino and a “No” vote supported it. Oh, and tucked away in the 500-word ‘explanation’ was a codicil whereby ALL future Arkansas casino projects have to have statewide support, regardless of location. It was a defeat within a defeat but probably couldn’t have been prevented.
However, the real canaries in the coal mine may have been two local votes, one in Illinois and the other in Maryland. In the first, 65% of voters in Downers Grove quashed the notion of bringing slot routes to that city, birthplace of actress Denise Richards and singer Sherrill Milnes. A similar proposal was nuked by 76% of the electorate in Chesapeake Beach, in the Free State vote.
It’s empirically, unquestionably and fiscally obvious that Americans love to gamble. The size of the industry alone betokens that—and even a Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter can figure it out. But there’s a time and a place for everything, and gambling may have become just a wee bit too ubiquitous for the body politic to digest. Every election is unique, but if you go from running the table in 2020 and 2022 to getting kicked around in 2024, something is unambiguously wrong.
For instance, you can hardly turn on your TV without getting blanketed by ads for sports betting. Overkill much? And maybe a slot route in every restaurant, bar and truck stop is excessive. (Momentum on that front has certainly slowed in the Land of Lincoln.) As much as we Americans love to engage in what the Brits call “a bit of a flutter,” it’s quite different than having Big Gaming all up in your business 24/7/365. The AGA and the industry should back off their cockiness, fine-tune their political marketing and maybe—just maybe —pick their fights more carefully. We certainly wouldn’t call the results of 2024 (especially that squeaker win in Missouri) a backlash. But a hard dose of reality? Definitely.
Jottings: Speaking of doses of reality, Full House Resorts was uncommonly candid (even penitent) in its 3Q24 earnings call. While The Temporary at American Place, in Waukegan, is gaining momentum, the effort to bring Las Vegas luxury to Colorado in the form of Chamonix is proving to be a struggle … Executives of Bally’s Corp. were understandably tight-lipped on their 3Q24 earnings call. The Missouri misfire went unmentioned, while a surprise came in the form of the disclosure that the company is venturing into brick-and-mortar British gambling by purchasing Asper’s Newcastle. The idea is to convert a healthy United Kingdom iGaming database into casino punters. Or it could be another of those wild, random, reactive stabs that Bally’s confuses with strategy … There was surprise in the October OSB results from New York State. Newcomer Fanatics zipped past Caesars Sportsbook and BetMGM into the #3 spot, distantly behind FanDuel and DraftKings with $12.5 million. Who’da thunk it? Maybe Fanatics’ ambitions to be in the Big Three nationally aren’t as delusional as they initially appeared.