Today is a good day to revisit my predictions. And, be honest, this has been one of the hardest election seasons to game out in memory. The list of professional pundits and political analysts who now look foolish is very long. I haven’t anticipated every twist and turn and I haven’t gotten everything right, but I’m unaware of anyone who has come closer than me in projecting where this race would go.
I’ll tell you a secret about why my projections were so much better than average. I long ago lost any illusions I once had about the decency of the Republican base. That’s what separates me from someone like Dana Milbank.
He can eat his column now. I’ll supply salt, pepper, and some sriracha sauce.
As I said, this hasn’t been an easy election season for analysts. And it hasn’t rewarded the meek. It takes courage to take on Nate Silver when you think he’s dead wrong.
Marco Rubio’s campaign died last night. How many pundits and analysts fluffed him and told you he was a real threat? What did I say to Nate Silver about Marco Rubio?
I shouldn’t have to dig into the Pentagon-sized closet full of Marco Rubio skeletons to convince you that this charlatan isn’t the modern day Poppy Bush or Bob Dole. Those guys were World War Two veterans with a decent grasp of basic reality, not the kind of fools to deny climate science while representing Atlantis in the U.S. Senate.
When Nate told us not to freak out because Trump had no better than a 20% chance of winning the nomination, I told him he was wrong on two counts. First, Trump’s chances were significantly better than that, and, second, the likely alternatives were equally worthy of a good old-fashioned panic attack.
Before he even formally announced, I was telling you that Jeb was the second coming of Jon Huntsman. I consistently resisted the herd when they predicted that Trump had fatally wounded himself with some gaffe or outrage. I predicted both that Cruz would become the hard core conservative alternative to Trump and that he’d never be more than Trump’s caddie. And I’m basically alone in having predicted that John Kasich would, despite all appearances, eventually emerge as the establishment alternative to Trump.
So, out of eleventy-billion candidates, I identified the final three.
On the Democratic side, I’ve been a wet blanket for Sanders’ supporters. Because I had no wish to insult or demoralize his troops, I’ve largely ignored writing about the horse race aspects of the Democratic contest. I began telling you over two years ago that Hillary Clinton was so popular with Democrats that she would be the nominee. I told you that Sanders couldn’t win unless he won both Iowa and New Hampshire, and that he almost definitely could not win even if he did win those first two elections.
Sanders did better than I expected, but he never came remotely close to making this race competitive. And it’s not because he’s a “socialist” or that he has the wrong message. It’s because rank-and-file Democrats like Clinton — a lot. Self-identified progressives like her. Obviously, people of color like her, as you’ve seen from the primary and caucus results. Moderates like her. Conservative Democrats like her a little less this time around than they did in 2008, but they didn’t flock to Sanders in huge numbers.
This was just basic analysis. It had nothing to do with my personal preferences.
I’ll have more to say about the future of the campaign, but I had to stop here and toot my own horn. We’ve never seen an election season like this before, and people love to mock analysts when they fail–so, I’ve got to take credit when I perform on a high level.
