While the U.S. presidential election process had not yet produced a clear winner by Wednesday morning, it was a night of decisive victories for the tide of legal sports betting.

Voters said yes to legalizing sports betting in all three states where the question was on the ballot: Louisiana, Maryland, and South Dakota (for the casino-friendly city of Deadwood). In Maryland, 66% of voters approved, and in South Dakota, 59% of voters approved. In Louisiana, where the vote was handled by parish, 55 of 64 parishes approved, including key cities like Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

That brings the grand total to 26 states (plus Washington, D.C.) that have either launched legal sports betting or passed the legislation and are waiting to launch. (Colorado, Nebraska, and Virginia voters also said yes to expanding casino gaming in their states.)

But the newest three states don’t just flip a switch now and turn on the gambling faucet. Lawmakers have to pass companion legislation to determine specific details like tax rates. In all three states, it will likely take until 2021 to fully pass and launch sports betting. (Mobile betting on smartphones must be legalized separately; 12 states have done so.)

DraftKings and FanDuel, the fantasy sports companies now rapidly launching legal sportsbooks across the country, spent heavily on TV and radio advertising in the weeks leading up to Election Day in states where sports betting was on the ballot. In Louisiana, each company spent more than $250,000.

Since 2018, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on sports betting, gaming companies have been in an arms race to launch sportsbooks in states that have legalized.

And in the past year, a second arms race has unfolded: a battle to rack up betting sponsorships directly with pro sports franchises.

DraftKings has announced sports betting partnerships with the New England Patriots, New York Giants, and Philadelphia Eagles in the NFL, and with the MLB’s Chicago Cubs. (DraftKings went public in April by merging with an already-public SPAC; its shares are up 110% since.) FanDuel has signed betting partnerships with the Denver Broncos and with the Memphis Grizzlies, the company’s first NBA team betting deal. Meanwhile, the Tennessee Titans signed a betting deal with BetMGM.

“We’re seeing record engagement levels,” DraftKings CEO Jason Robins said on Yahoo Finance in the first week of the 2020 NFL season. “It’s not just because we’ve entered new states—even in the existing states we were in at the start of last NFL season, like New Jersey and West Virginia, we’ve seen enormous year-over-year growth in those markets as well.”

As the tide of legalization continues, expect the frenzied race to sign team betting deals to accelerate. And that trend is sure to change the fabric of U.S. pro sports leagues over time.

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Daniel Roberts is an editor-at-large at Yahoo Finance and closely covers sports business. Follow him on Twitter at @readDanwrite.

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