What I ultimately learned in 2024 about making predictions

[Hardkill]

One overarching lesson I've ultimately learned this year is that I shouldn't have gotten so attached to any predictions made by any expert, especially when it comes to predictions made more than about one or two months in advance of any event.

One thing I realized by the end of this year was how utterly futile it is to predict the outcome of any election, including a presidential election, more than a month in advance.

Credit where credit is due, Leo did correctly sense that Trump was likely to win about one or two weeks out from the election. However, during 2021, 2022, 2023, and even at the beginning of 2024, he wrongly believed that Trump would lose decisively and that Biden would likely win re-election, as long as he and his party had kept governing effectively. This assessment was also influenced by the fact that Trump and his party had alienated many moderate and independent voters after a series of very despicable and unpopular actions of him and his party since 2017.

Yes, I mistakenly believed that Trump and his party would likely lose the 2024 election, especially after renowned forecasters like Michael Moore and Allan Lichtman officially predicted a Trump loss about two months out from the election.

However, I must admit that I always had a nagging feeling about Trump's potential return to power, ever since he left office in 2021. I explicitly stated on record on this forum multiple times how very worried I was about Trump's possible return to power. Despite my best efforts to dismiss this feeling, telling myself that Trump and his party were already so unpopular and had done so much harm to the country, the concern lingered.

I am not trying to accuse anyone on this forum, including Leo himself, of wrongly assuring us that Trump could never win the presidency again or expressing confidence that the majority of Americans would never be fooled by Trump and MAGA again. Nobody is perfect, and I am sure that individuals like Leo did their best to understand where the country would head by 2024.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the truly contemptible display of ignorance and shortsightedness by the majority of the electorate, who re-elected Trump even after everything he did and even despite how hateful the entire Republican party has become.

Also, a lot of people on here including myself kept flip-flopping with their 2024 predictions too much throughout the entire race. As soon as Harris became the new Democratic nominee, Many people including Leo himself, predicted that she would likely defeat Trump. I wasn't sure at first if she really had a chance. Then, as time went on people like me thought she was going to win, while some of the same people who initially predicted Harris would win said that they weren't sure anymore if she would and that it will end up being very close. Finally, Leo changed his mind again and predicted that she would likely lose to Trump.

A second thing is that you don't know who is electable for any office, especially for president, until that candidate has been through the primaries. Nobody knows how well Harris would have done if Biden had announced early last year that he wouldn't run for re-election and she had gone through the entire 2024 presidential primaries. In fact, it's impossible to predict with any likelihood how well other potential candidates like Newsom, Josh Shapiro, Wes Moore, Andy Beshear, Buttigieg, Walz, Whitmer, JB Pritzker, or someone else we've never heard of before, would have fared against Trump. For all we know, any of them might have performed worse than Harris did against Trump.

It's also worth noting that none of these candidates have yet fully demonstrated the exceptional level of oratory skills that legendary presidents like FDR, JFK, or Obama in 2008 had. It's unclear whether any of them would even be as strong of a presidential candidate as Bill Clinton was in the 1990s. That's why we have to wait and see how well any of them will do in the 2028 Democratic presidential primaries.

How about all of those economists and financial experts out there who wrongly predicted a recession in 2022, 2023, or 2024? The economy instead achieved an extraordinary soft landing and is still going remarkably strong all around.

Moreover, I now really get why most political pundits have been wrong about a multitude of issues. Most of them incorrectly predicted the outcome of the 2022 midterms, and many were surprised by the numerous historic accomplishments of Biden and his party during his presidency. This is particularly noteworthy, given the profound polarization that has developed and the increasing hostility of federal courts in recent years.

Even medical and scientific experts sometimes can make wrong predictions. I never thought that everything they knew about COVID was completely wrong or a total lie. However, they wrongly predicted that the COVID pandemic would end by late 2021 to early 2022 and didn't foresee how much trouble the public health officials would have with leading, advising, and communicating with the American people on managing COVID.

I'm pretty sure there have been plenty of other times when experts made ridiculously wrong predictions on all sorts of issues over the past few years. I just can't think of any more specific examples off the top of my head.

So, from now on, I will consider any prediction made by anybody as being really subject to change. That doesn't mean that I am going to take any serious predictions made by anyone with real expertise on a matter lightly. I will just consider predictions made by a legitimate expert more than about one or two months out as having a high likelihood, but still has a very good chance of changing and I will considered predictions made in the very near term as having a very high likelihood of occurring.