The political prediction industry has never been known for getting it right, but 2016 was an unusually rough year for the soothsayers among us. In June, Britain defied the betting markets and voted to leave the European Union. In July, the Republican Party nominated a real-estate-mogul-turned-reality-TV-personality without political experience or conservative cred. In November, that same mogul beat President Barack Obama’s supposed heir apparent and the pollsters’ far and away favorite, Hillary Clinton, in the presidential race.
In a year of so many shockers, maybe it’s unfair to hold an erroneous prediction or 10 against anyone. But Politico Magazine has annually compiled a list of the worst political predictions, including those made within our own ranks, since 2013, and we’re not stopping now. So, without further ado, here are some of the political projections gone terribly wrong in 2016.
Hillary Clinton will be elected president
Frank Luntz on Twitter, November 8, 2016: “Hillary Clinton will be the next President of the United States.”
Save for liberal filmmaker Michael Moore, Trump-cheering Twitter personality Bill Mitchell and a smattering of others, nearly everyone in the country was surprised on election night when Donald Trump became the president-elect. For months, pundits ruled out any possibility that the billionaire real estate mogul could actually pull it off. In June, the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent called it “a fantasy.” In July, Moody’s Analytics suggested that the electoral outcome was a done deal—Clinton would win easily. In August, one of The POLITICO Caucus’s GOP insiders declared that for Trump to win, “it would take video evidence of a smiling Hillary drowning a litter of puppies while terrorists surrounded her with chants of ‘Death to America.’” In September, on With All Due Respect, 2008 Obama campaign manager David Plouffe broke down why he believed Hillary Clinton had a 100 percent chance of winning. In October, the editor-in-chief of GQ, Jim Nelson, penned an essay titled, “Let's Face It, Donald Trump Is About to Lose.” And the day before the election, Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball prophesied 322 electoral votes for Clinton and 216 for Trump.
For a time, it was almost laughable how uncompetitive the race seemed to be. In an October episode of Saturday Night Live, Cecily Strong (playing Martha Raddatz) introduced Alec Baldwin and Kate McKinnon (as Trump and Clinton) to the stage, announcing to the audience, “Please help us welcome the candidates, Republican nominee Donald Trump and—can we say this yet?—President Hillary Clinton,” to a burst of cheers and laughter. And President Barack Obama on Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show—after reading a tweet from Trump that stated, “President Obama will go down as perhaps the worst president in the history of the United States!”—confidently joked, “At least I will go down as president.”
Even Trump has admitted that, on the morning of November 8, he didn’t think he was going to win.
But it wasn’t just the pundits, the politicians, the comedians and Trump who got it so incredibly wrong. The professional pollsters who devised meticulous methodologies for forecasting election results were also caught with egg on their faces. The Princeton Election Consortium gave Clinton a 99 percent chance of winning. The Huffington Post’s forecast gave Clinton 98 percent, PredictWise gave her 89 percent, and the New York Times’s The Upshot gave her 85 percent. Even FiveThirtyEight, which was the most bullish on Trump, gave Clinton over a 71 percent chance of winning.
All of this, of course, gave us the most shocking election night in recent memory.
Trump won’t be the Republican nominee
Dana Milbank in the Washington Post, October 2, 2015: “I’m so certain Trump won’t win the nomination that I’ll eat my words if he does. Literally: The day Trump clinches the nomination I will eat the page on which this column is printed in Sunday’s Post.”
Despite Trump’s lead in just about every national poll since July 2015, very few political prognosticators foresaw a man so divergent from the typical nominee profile winning the Republican Party’s nomination—especially not over the likes of Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio. Almost every week brought a new proclamation that Trump had peaked and his demise was soon to come. At a town hall in New Hampshire, Bush said he could “guarantee” that Trump would not be the nominee.
“Maybe I'm wrong about this,” Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol said on Morning Joe in December 2015, “but I have enough faith in the Republican primary electorate that they will select a talented politician over a talented demagogue.”
(In May, Milbank came through on his promise in what may have been the least humble way possible: He sought the assistance of readers, acclaimed chefs and food critics to make swallowing literal newsprint the most enjoyable it could be.)
There will be a viable independent or third-party candidate
Bill Kristol on Twitter, May 29, 2016: “There will be an independent candidate--an impressive one, with a strong team and a real chance.”
In January and February, the press corps was “salivating” over the possibility of Michael Bloomberg entering the race. A pollster even published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal saying the former New York mayor would be a “serious contender.” But Bloomberg didn’t run. Outspoken Never-Trump conservatives continued searching for their white knight—floating names like Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Ben Sasse and even David French, a relatively unknown writer for National Review. But none of the alternatives panned out. Nor did Gary Johnson, the libertarian candidate who at one point was billed as the “best hope for America’s future.” In the end, the one conservative independent who did mount a bid, Evan McMullin, came in fifth place out of all the candidates with just 700,000 votes, trailing Johnson, the Green Party’s Jill Stein, and even the number of ballots that went to write-ins.
The Republican National Convention will be contested
John Kasich on Face the Nation, March 20, 2016: “Nobody's going to have the delegates they need going to the convention. Everyone will fall short.”
There was a groundswell of belief (driven perhaps less by reasoned analysis and more by wishful thinking on the part of conservatives alienated by Trump) in the early months of 2016 that the GOP nomination could be snatched from the delegate leader on the convention floor in July. In mid-March, even after Bush dropped out of the primary competition, Rush Limbaugh told his radio audience that he was certain the former president’s brother would be bequeathed the party’s nomination in Ohio (and if not Jeb, then Romney would get it). And in April, a whopping 90 percent of The POLITICO Caucus’ panel of Republican insiders was confident that the convention would be contested.
Trump secured the delegates necessary to clinch the nomination before the end of May, foreclosing the possibility of a last stand against him that summer. But that didn’t stop Bill Kristol from tweeting just weeks before the event, “Prediction: 2016 GOP MVP will be @Reince, who steps up, ensures open convention, saves party from Trump and produces ticket that wins in Nov.”
Women will form a firewall for Clinton against Trump
Washington Post’s The Daily 202, November 3, 2016: “College-educated white women are Hillary Clinton’s firewall.”
Democrats usually perform better among female voters than Republicans do, and this year was no different. But with the first female nominee up against a man who bragged about “grab[bing] [women] by the pussy,” many political soothsayers were confident in predicting that women would overwhelmingly favor Clinton to the point of ensuring her victory. In a July Salon article titled “The general election opposition that will finally stop Trump: women voters,” Stephanie Schriock wrote, “Women, who have been so frequently criticized, derided, humiliated and underestimated by Trump, will be the ones to bring him down.” And FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver emphatically asserted in October, “Women are defeating Trump.” But the most confident predictions came after the release of the video of Trump’s lewd comments to Billy Bush. That October night, Bob Beckel declared on CNN that the presidential race was “over.” And a few days later Philip Bump wrote a Washington Post article titled “Donald Trump is facing an apocalyptic election scenario, thanks to women voters.”
In the end, Trump won a majority of white female voters and lost the overall female vote by about the same margin as Romney lost to Obama in 2012.
Red states will go blue
Kyle Kondik in Politico Magazine, November 3, 2015: “Carson and Trump, through their lack of experience and long histories of overheated rhetoric … could even prompt a wholesale rejection of the Republicans in certain districts down the ticket, effectively making 2016 a Democratic wave year.”
Kondik, the managing editor of Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball, may have been overshooting when he suggested that the Democratic Party could take back the House this year, but he was not alone in thinking that Trump would allow the Democrats to win the White House and Senate in a blue wave that would force an existential crisis on the GOP. On the day of the election, FiveThirtyEight gave Senate candidate Katie McGinty a 61.7 percent chance of victory over Republican incumbent Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania, and it gave Senate candidate Russ Feingold an 81.7 percent chance of victory over Republican incumbent Ron Johnson in Wisconsin—both states that Clinton was also strongly favored to win. Overall, according to the Cook Political Report, Democrats would pick up five to seven Senate seats, and Clinton would likely turn at least a couple of red states blue in the presidential race. At one point this summer, there was even speculation that states as deep red as Texas and Arizona could go blue.
In the end, Trump flipped six states that Obama had won (Clinton flipped none); McGinty and Feingold were both defeated (Democrats picked up only two seats nationwide); and the Republicans retained their majorities in both the Senate and the House.
Hillary Clinton will defeat Bernie Sanders in the Michigan Democratic primary in a landslide
FiveThirtyEight, March 7, 2016: “Hillary Clinton has a greater than 99% chance of winning the Michigan primary.”
It should have been a warning sign for the Clinton campaign and for the data gurus when not a single poll in the entire state of Michigan had Bernie Sanders trailing by less than 5 percentage points. But, heading into March 8, Team Clinton as well as pundits nationwide were confident Michigan would stay in Hillary’s camp, thanks to her solid debate performance in Flint and her stronghold of African-American support. And yet the democratic socialist from Vermont—bolstered by a record-high youth vote and an impressive turnout of independents—pulled off a surprising upset that gave a burst of new life to his trailing primary campaign.
Merrick Garland will be confirmed for the Supreme Court
Harry Reid, March 17, 2016: “I'm confident he is going to get approval.”
The unexpected death of Antonin Scalia in February left a vacancy on the Supreme Court that Obama hoped to fill with D.C. Circuit Court judge Merrick Garland. But Republicans in the Senate controversially vowed to hold off on even giving Garland a hearing until a new president took office in January 2017. The more likely it looked that Clinton was going to defeat Trump, the more pundits suggested Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his colleagues might cave to pressure to confirm Garland. But in the end, the long game paid off, and Trump’s defeat of Clinton will almost certainly ensure a conservative-leaning Supreme Court for years to come.
The United Kingdom won’t vote to leave the European Union
Matthew Shaddick to International Business Times, June 17, 2016: “‘Leave’ needs to be well ahead at this stage in order to have any chance of winning, unless they can convince voters that staying in the EU is riskier than leaving. That’s not going to be an easy sell when most of the nation’s political parties and representatives of big business are mostly saying the opposite.”
The United States wasn’t the only place to experience a political shock this year. When Britain woke up on June 23 to vote on whether to remain in the European Union, most everyone assumed that the country would vote to stay—this despite the fact that polls were showing the vote to be too-close-to-call. Why? Because the betting markets showed overwhelming confidence that the Brits would vote to remain in the European Union. And according to The Economist, “It is an article of faith among economists that betting markets on politics provide by far the most reliable forecast of future events, easily outclassing both polls and panels of experts.” “I suspect Brexit won’t happen,” said Morgan Stanley CEO Jeff Gorman in a Bloomberg interview in May, an opinion shared by influential investors like John Vail and Jeff Gundlach. When asked about the Brexit referendum just a few days out, Shaddick, the head of politics trading at a London-based betting firm, suggested to the IB Times that British voters would opt to remain in the EU because there is a tendency among the undecided to favor the status quo, which he described as “the least risky option.”
After the Brexit results—“leave” won 51.9 percent to 48.1 percent—there were those who tried to caution the pundit class not to discount possibilities outside the bounds of “normal” political opinion, or even political data.
Well, we all know how that went.
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