That was quite an election night we had, wasn’t it?

As all my normal (ten) readers know, I jumped on a ledge the week before election day to make a series of predictions about what I expected would happen in the 2024 election. I was confident in these predictions, but as we all know, when you are waiting for the results to come in, you begin to second-guess your choices and fret that you might actually be wrong.  

Luckily, I spent the whole election day handing out literature at a polling place, which kept me busy and relatively worry-free. And then, as I prepared to go to the Ryan Mackenzie victory party, one of my “little birds” reached out to me and provided me with an inside video view of the Kamala Harris campaign.  

And after watching what (NSFW) was happening in Kamala Harris HQ, I knew that my predictions were going to work out fine.

Let’s evaluate them now. Not just those specific electoral forecasts; I will also evaluate earlier predictions I made about the 2024 election campaigns.

1. I predicted that Donald Trump would win the popular vote. I was correct.

2. I predicted that Trump would win, rather easily, the electoral college by sweeping the battleground states of AZ, GA, MI, NC, NV, PA, and WI and ending up with 312 electoral votes. I was, again, correct. (I did think there might be a Trump upset in another state, which, unfortunately, did not happen.)

3. I predicted that Trump would win the popular vote by a 51 percent to 47 percent margin over Harris. On the day after election day, I was correct, although somewhat inevitably, this margin seems to be getting narrower, as Democrats “find” new Democrat votes in California and elsewhere. I made this prediction based on my belief that some of the polls – see Atlas, Gallup, Rasmussen, etc. – were largely correct and that there would be an underestimation of Trump’s support in the RealClearPolitics average because the other, more incorrect, polls – see Marist, Morning Consult, Siena, etc. – would also be included in the average.    

4. I predicted that the Biden-Harris administration’s unpopularity, especially relating to the three key issues – 1) the economy, especially inflation; 2) the border; and 3) world chaos – would be very harmful to Harris. It was, as indicated by the exit polls.

5. In multiple earlier columns, I predicted that if Harris was unable to undermine Trump’s record as president, which was considered strong, especially on the economy, this would endanger her campaign. Exit polls show that it did. 

6. I predicted that the GOP would win the U.S. Senate and pick up a total of seven new seats. I missed that exact number by one or two (depending on when and how AZ, NV, and PA are finally awarded). But I also missed which seats would turn over. I thought both MI and WI were likely to go Republican and that NV would not because the GOP candidate had severe burns, and NV tends to underestimate Democrats in the polling. In the latter (NV), I am happy if I am proven wrong.  

7. I predicted that the GOP would win the U.S. House and pick up 15 to 20 seats. Here, I seem to have mostly blown this forecast (although they will hold it, and may win some seats). There were three reasons for my mistake. First, there was a decisive number of Trump voters who did not vote for other Republicans, of any stripe. (Which is interesting, because this is similar to what happened with Nixon in 1972 and with Reagan in the 80’s – the Reagan Democrats – where Democrats voted for the GOP president but for Democrats elsewhere.) Second, I second-guessed myself and caved in to my desire to see a bigger GOP win. After going through prior examples of House cycles, it occurred to me that the Democrats' 2018 gain, which had gone down twice, might be close to being done. But I then thought, too optimistically, that it probably wasn’t, and if Trump won 51 percent to 47 percent, the voters would reward the GOP with additional seats. That didn’t happen. Third, the GOP may have a “wasted votes” problem, i.e., their voters were more packed in GOP districts than the Democrat voters were packed in Democrat districts. 

8. In an earlier column, I had predicted that the Democrat partisan lawfare would not harm, and would instead, probably help, Trump. I thought the cases they prosecuted against Trump were very legally suspect, and this would make it easy for Trump to point out the partisanship of the efforts. (It did with my father, a former Reagan Democrat-turned-moderate-Republican who supported Nikki Haley.) As the end result of the election shows, I was certainly correct. In the primaries, as the Democrats figured out, any lawfare attack on Trump – for example, the indictments – boosted his polling and fundraising among Republicans. In the general, as the Democrats eventually figured out, any lawfare attack on Trump – such as his convictions – also certainly boosted his fundraising, and if it did lower his polling, it did so very temporarily. This is why, in the end, the New York Judge chose not to imprison Trump immediately after he was found guilty; he knew this would only make Trump more popular.  

9. In multiple earlier columns, I had predicted that the Democrat campaign to label Trump as the “devil,” i.e., as a crude barbarian crook who abuses women and minorities and wants to overthrow America’s democratic society in favor of dictatorship, would not help them to defeat him. Because this name-calling had been done to death already to him over nine years, and those people who were still undecided regarding Donald Trump would now be totally immune to another such campaign. Because, as I also said, of the concept demonstrated by the fable “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” (It also didn’t help that the Democrats called every other Republican presidential candidate under the sun the “devil.”) I was 100 percent correct.

10. I predicted that the Democrats, because of their Doom Loop, would, nevertheless, keep returning to that “devil” argument. Because, as I surmised, they really believed that Trump was uniquely evil, and they really believed that eventually, all others would agree with them as well. They had become fanatics on the issue. And as I said before, it is always a mistake to believe your own propaganda and become a fanatic.

One final prediction that I made which was only partly right. My buddy Ryan Mackenzie did win his race to become the U.S. Congressman-elect in PA-7, representing my home area of the Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania. But Ryan did not capture 55 percent of the vote, as I had predicted.  

So, I take full responsibility for causing him, and my other ten readers, any grief over this errant prediction. I totally blew it – I trusted Robby the Robot to put in the proper punch cards, and in the proper sequence, into my big-as-a-factory, unbelievably complicated, math-heavy, scientific model, which puts all other models to shame, and he totally screwed it up!  Stupid robot!

I take full responsibility for having a faulty robot. He will be fixed.