Politico recently judged President Donald Trump’s prognostication that Alabama would feel the effects of Hurricane Dorian last August as its worst political prediction of 2019.
It’s not clear how that is a political prediction, except that it came from a political figure, but if that was the worst political prediction in the past year, we must have had an awfully good year.
We feel qualified to comment on misplaced 2019 predictions only because we’ve made many – most not published, thankfully – in our time.
Barack Obama would not win the presidential nomination in 2008, we felt, because we frankly didn’t believe enough Americans would vote for a black man, qualified or not, for president.
Then, we felt Obama would lose a very close election to Mitt Romney in 2012. All the polls – we realized four years later how wrong they could be – said the race had narrowed, and some said Romney had pulled ahead. And though Obama became the first U.S. president to receive fewer votes in his re-election than in his election, he still won handily enough.