Oops! The Worst Political Predictions of 2022 The red wave never arrived, nor did the Russian victory over Ukraine. And that’s just the start of an incredible year in bad prognostication. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/12/31/the-worst-political-predictions-of-2022-00074872 After years of assembling the annual “worst predictions” list for POLITICO Magazine, I’ve come to understand a difference, subtle but distinct, between bad predictions and ones that are truly awful. We start with a quick taxonomy of three different bad prediction archetypes: Misreading: When you make a sincere, clear-eyed attempt to see things as they are, and come to a reasonable conclusion — but the great world spins and things turn out differently because you missed something that proved important. (Example: A political pundit looking at high inflation rates, general voter dissatisfaction and historic midterm trends and concluding that Democrats will get wiped out in the November elections.) Wishcasting: When you base a prediction less on a sober reading of what is likely to happen than on what you’d personally like to happen. (For a non-political example, me predicting in August that this will be the year the Detroit Lions win the Super Bowl.) “I Know Better, But Must Rally the Troops”: When you are aware that what you’re publicly predicting is quite unlikely, but are in a position of leadership and feel the need to project confidence, lest your supporters lose enthusiasm. (Example: Nancy Pelosi predicting in October that Democrats would not only hold the House, but expand their majority.) You will find examples of all of these in the list below. What elevates something above a merely bad prediction is, I think, hubris — a certain performative insincerity whereby the person who makes a prediction surely knows better than to be totally sure of what they’re saying, but is driven to say it anyway. When your words have the whiff of “I have no doubt, and will not entertain it, nor should you,” there’s a good chance you should at least ask why you’re so certain. There is something about politics that attracts hubris, or at least brings out the hubristic side in people. This is likely bad for our politics, our discourse, maybe even our nation. But it’s good for the listicle-industrial complex. Here, POLITICO Magazine’s annual roundup of some of the worst predictions of the year. We’ve gone as far back as Dec. 2021 to find them, as that is when people really started placing their bets for 2022. The Supreme Court won’t overturn Roe, and the abortion rights fight won’t help Dems in 2022 Predicted by: Karl Rove, Dec. 29, 2021 By the end of 2021, the fate of Roe v. Wade was more or less a foregone conclusion — following the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2020 and subsequent appointment of Amy Coney Barrett, conservatives had a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court, and a glide path to overturning the 1973 ruling enshrining abortion rights. And yet, the notion that it would happen seemed somewhat… unreal. Doing so would, yes, upend precedent and offer a rare instance of the court taking a way an individual right it had previously recognized. More than that: For a body like the Supreme Court — at once seemingly obsessed with the notion that it is above the fray, even as it routinely enters the fray and polices its boundaries — it seemed transparently partisan, a monumental change borne purely out of a shift in the body’s ideological makeup rather than the basic facts at issue. Given all that, it was somewhat understandable why Karl Rove was skeptical that the court would take the plunge. “The Supreme Court will significantly weaken Roe v. Wade but not overturn it outright; states will be allowed to define more of their abortion policies,” he predicted last December. In the ensuing fallout, “abortion rights’ becomes the left’s rallying cry but is only a minor electoral advantage.” If the first of those two predictions was understandable but incorrect, the second was both incorrect and an instance of wishcasting that betrayed an absolute misreading of the electorate. With the benefit of hindsight, it seems clear that the court’s Dobbs ruling fundamentally upended the midterms, propelling Democrats to a surprisingly strong result. Abortion rights proved to be a pivotal issue in swing states like Pennsylvania and Michigan and helped Dems expand their narrow grasp on a Senate majority. “I don’t think I will be arrested” Predicted by: Sam Bankman-Fried, Dec. 12 The New York Times, later that same day: “Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX, was arrested in the Bahamas on Monday after U.S. prosecutors filed criminal charges.” December 2021 will be “the peak” of the inflation crisis Predicted by: President Joe Biden, Dec. 10, 2021 Last December, when CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked Biden about runaway inflation, the president was unambiguous about the road ahead. “I think it’s the peak of the crisis,” he said. “And I think you’ll see a change sooner and quicker and more rapidly … than most people think.” Reader, I suspect you will know from experience that December 2021 was not, in fact, the peak of inflation. That month, the annualized rate of inflation was 7 percent. It was 7.5 percent in January, 7.9 percent in February, 8.5 percent in March, 8.3 percent in April, 8.6 percent in May, 9.1 percent in June, and has come down slightly since then — though was still above 7 percent in November, the month with the most recently available numbers. Russia won’t actually invade Ukraine Predicted by: Ben Hall, Dec. 31, 2021 In its annual lookahead at the year to come, the Financial Times surveyed the world as it stood at the end of 2021. In response to the question “Will Russia invade Ukraine?”, FT Europe Editor Ben Hall was blunt: “No.” “A large-scale invasion would risk heavy Russian casualties and would run counter to Vladimir Putin’s preference for subterfuge and plausible deniability,” he continued. “Putin can achieve many of his aims without it: destabilising Ukraine, deterring Kyiv’s allies from providing military aid, intimidating Nato and forcing more concessions in talks to end the fighting in the Donbas. However, Moscow may yet escalate further, stepping up the conflict in the breakaway region, stirring up trouble in other parts of Ukraine or targeted incursions. The ability to escalate is the Kremlin’s strongest asset.” Less than two months later, Russia mounted a large-scale invasion of Ukraine, mounting heavy casualties for Russian forces (Hall got that part absolutely right) and driving the West to provide substantial military aid to Kyiv. RED TSUNAMI! Predicted by … Joe Concha, Dec. 13, 2021: “We’re looking at a red tsunami in November, given the situation with inflation, crime, education and the border.” Edward Luce, Dec. 31, 2021: “Democrats will lose both the House of Representatives and the Senate in a clean Republican sweep. … 2022 will look more like the ‘shellacking’ Barack Obama’s Democrats received in 2010.” Geraldo Rivera, Dec. 31, 2021: “The Republican Party will sweep [the] table. I think there’ll be a seminal sea change in American politics and the GOP will be the dominant party.” Dick Morris, Dec. 31, 2021: Republican “gains in the House will be in the neighborhood of 60-80 seats.” Corbin Trent, Jan. 1: “[Biden will] probably get demolished in the midterms.” Mike Huckabee, Jan. 1: “There’s going to be a huge electoral sweep in 2022 for Republicans, not just in the House and Senate, but also in the Governor races.” Henry Olsen, June 1: “The GOP midterm wave is set — and Democrats can’t do anything about it.” (To his immense credit, after election day, Olsen wrote a detailed and candid column owning up to the fact his repeated predictions were off, and explaining what he missed.) Elon Musk, June 15: “Massive red wave in 2022.” Cenk Uygur, Oct. 18: “The jury’s in. It looks like the Democrats are going to lose the midterms. … They don’t have enough time to turn things around.” Stephen Miller, Oct. 20: “Rampant crime, rampant inflation, rampant illegal immigration, poverty, joblessness, critical race theory, crazy gender ideology in our schools. We are going to see a red tsunami.” Josh Kraushaar, Oct. 23: “Two weeks out from the midterms, evidence points to a re-emerging red wave that could sweep in GOP control of both chambers.” Ted Cruz, Oct. 27: “We’re not just going to see a red wave, we’re going to see a red tsunami.” Josh Hammer, Nov. 7: “The Democratic Party is, at this point, best described as a wounded dog wagged by an intersectional, woke-besotted tail. … Americans just can’t take it anymore. The red wave did not materialize out of nowhere – it’s been building for months. And if the terminally out-of-touch Democrats hadn’t been [so] deaf, dumb and blind to the pleas of their own constituents, maybe they could have headed off the disaster. … The red wave is very real, and Democrats should prepare accordingly for heavy losses Tuesday evening. … I predict Republicans nab a 54-46 Senate majority. All close races will break their way; such is the nature of a wave year.” Jim Geraghty, Nov. 7: “Now that we’re at the election’s eve, I think we’re on the higher end of a red-wave year, and approaching ‘red tsunami’ territory. Frank Luntz, Nov. 7: “When the dust settles from the 2022 midterms, the GOP will have between 233-240 House seats — outdoing their total from 1994.” Tucker Carlson, Nov. 7: “This is what panic looks like. These [Democrats] are people who know they’re about to get crushed.” Mike Pence, Nov. 8: “The Red Wave is coming!” Election Day came, and no wave crested. Republicans regained control of the House, but won fewer races than almost any observer projected — a net of nine seats. Democrats not only held their Senate majority, they added one seat to it (Pennsylvania). Swing-state gubernatorial races broke in favor of Dems in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin, while Republicans won in Georgia and Nevada. Call the result what you want — a trickle, a ripple, a splash, a dribble — but it was not a wave election, let alone a tsunami, bloodbath or any other hyperbolic maritime cliche. “It’s all over but the crying” in Nevada’s Senate race, and “Laxalt is going to win this” Predicted by: Josh Holmes on Twitter, Nov. 9 Among the handful of swing-state Senate races in 2022, Nevada’s battle between Democratic incumbent Catherine Cortez Masto and GOP challenger Adam Laxalt was notable in the way it almost perfectly matched a generic Republican and a generic Democrat in a closely divided battleground. Nevada has a history of late-breaking ballot counts amassing in favor of Democrats — a fact which could’ve proved useful to remember if Holmes, a longtime political adviser to Mitch McConnell, wanted to avoid making statements about the race that practically dripped with hubris. When, on Oct. 31, the New York Times and Siena College released a series of Senate polls generally favorable to Democrats, Holmes took exception: “Some red hot D samples here. Not enough data in the tabs to figure out why but I can guarantee zero of these races will end with numbers like this.” The NYT/Siena poll showed John Fetterman besting Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania by 5 points, 49 percent to 44 percent; Fetterman won the election by 4.9 points, 51.2 percent to 46.3 percent. It showed Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock over Herschel Walker by 3 points, 49 percent to 46 percent; Warnock won the runoff election by 2.8 points, 51.4 percent to 48.6 percent. It showed Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly over Blake Masters by 6 points, 51 percent to 45 percent; Kelly won by 4.9 points, 51.4 percent to 46.5 percent. And it showed Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto and Adam Laxalt tied at 47 percent. As the votes rolled in, the margin was tight, but Holmes was confident enough to make a prediction on the evening of Nov. 9: “Barring something statistically unforeseeable, it’s all over but the crying here. Laxalt is going to win this.” What happened next was entirely foreseeable: The late ballots broke in favor of Cortez Masto, who eked out a victory by just under 1 percentage point. (Much more at above url)
Let's take a look at the year ahead... The BEST 2023 Predictions: Musk kills Twitter, Kanye babbles, DeSantis labeled a toad https://www.usatoday.com/story/opin...itter-elon-musk-super-bowl-trump/10938362002/