I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, ad-free, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”
Today's post is a subscriber's only Friday edition, but feel free to share it. Just ask folks to subscribe. Thanks for supporting our work!
One of my favorite things to say in Tangle is that I'm bad at political prognostication. Or at least that I don't like to do it.
The reason being that anytime you make a political prediction — especially as a reporter or pundit or whatever I am — it ends up being lorded over you for years. Usually held up as a sign of your ineptitude, or your disconnect with the country, or your inability to think clearly.
In other words: Prognosticating about the future has near-zero upside and offers almost exclusively a little or a lot to lose.
Last April, I tried to reflect on my own conjecture by writing an entire issue dedicated to evaluating whether I was "right" about the things I had written. It was one of the most popular subscribers-only editions I've ever published, something I plan to do again at the end of this year, and went surprisingly well — I was happy with how much of my writing had held up.
Which got me thinking: Maybe I'm better at prognostication than I think? That also made me think: Why not test it? Just for fun, and maybe a touch of masochism?
So today, I decided to publish 19 predictions about the future that I can look back on and track. Some of these are, in my opinion, slam dunks. Others are a little closer to "hot takes" — things I have only moderate confidence will come true, but would like to be the guy to rightly predict. To gauge that, I've also rated every prediction on a confidence scale of 1 to 10 — with 10 being maximum confidence and 1 being lowest confidence. However, I'm not including any prediction that I don't think has a higher than 50% chance of coming true (otherwise I'd just be throwing darts randomly at the wall). So the rating of 1-10 is the strength of my belief as it exists above the threshold of being a 50% or better chance.
I'd love to hear what you think, or analyze any other predictions you might have about the future. So, without further ado, here they are...
