How 2024 really went wrong
I’ve been doing some soul searching these past few days, and I believe that the most valuable role I can play going forward is to help keep all of you in one piece, united, informed, level headed, and in a position to fight and win and survive this upcoming battle. So that’s what I’m going to focus on going forward. But today I feel compelled to explore why I wasn’t able to predict 2024 correctly. This is not a mea culpa. Nor is it intended to be defensive. Instead I think I simply owe it to you to explain, best I can, how this went wrong.
Heading into 2024 I said it was overwhelmingly likely that Trump would be convicted, go to prison, and lose the election, in some order. I still think it was absolutely correct to expect that this would very likely happen. Hear me out, because I think I can make this case rather strongly.
For one thing, when Jack Smith indicted Trump for stealing classified documents, there was a random draw to determine which federal judge in that circuit would receive the case. There was only a one in seven chance that Aileen Cannon would be selected. That’s only a 14% chance. If the case had randomly gone to any of the other judges in that circuit, it would have gone to trial in early 2024 and Trump would have already been handed a lengthy prison sentence by now. Even if Trump had managed to delay his prison sentence on appeal, there’s no way the most tepid voters in the middle would have gone for a guy who was on his way to prison. Even in the logic of the dumbest of swing voters, no one can magically fix inflation from a prison cell.
For that matter, if DA Fani Willis hadn’t been caught having an affair with a subordinate working on the case, Trump’s Fulton County criminal trial also would have happened in early 2024, and he’d have had a lengthy state prison sentence hanging around his neck in that trial. I’m not blaming Willis for this. I don’t think her personal life is anyone’s business. I think she got railroaded. But as a matter of causality, if nothing had ever come out about her sex life, Trump would already be in state prison by now.
Then there’s the Trump criminal case that did go to trial. We all watched New York Judge Juan Merchan handle himself perfectly professionally throughout the trial, as his decades long record suggested he would. Then after Trump was convicted, Merchan inexplicably decided to delay Trump’s sentencing multiple times so that it wouldn’t happen until after the election. What prompted a respected veteran judge to suddenly go rogue? We may never know. But if Merchan had done his job, Trump would have been handed a prison sentence six months ago, and it would very likely have cost him the election.
Then there’s the fact that President Joe Biden just happened to come down with such a severe cold on the day of the debate that he ended up taking too much cold medicine and came off as disoriented, which then allowed the media to railroad him out of the election. What are the odds that Biden would have come down with a severe cold on the most important day of the election cycle?
Each of the above developments was unlikely on its own. The kicker is that all of the above things had to happen in order for Trump to end up winning. Do you know what the odds are of all of them happening? Come to think of it, let’s do some quick math.
The odds of Aileen Cannon getting the Florida trial were one in seven, or 14%. I’m going to assign some approximate odds to the other occurrences as well. You’re welcome to quibble with these numbers if you want, but certainly none of them are off by all that much – and as you’ll see, it won’t change the overall math.
What were the odds that one of the prosecutors pursuing Trump would end up getting caught having an affair with a subordinate? Could anyone have seen something so bizarre coming? We’ll say 5%.
What were the odds that a judge as respected as Merchan would go rogue like he did? We’ll say 5% again. We’re guessing, but again, this is for illustrative purposes.
What are the odds that Biden would come down with such a severe cold before the debate that he ended up taking too much sudafed to be able to think clearly? How many days a year does that happen to you? Three days a year? Biden is older so we’ll double that and say six days a year, out of 365 days a year. So the odds of this happening to him on debate day were about 2%.
Remember, all of these unlikely things had to happen in order for Trump to skate like he did. If you’ve studied statistics, you know that the mathematically correct way to calculate the odds of all of these things happening is to multiply their odds together as decimals. That would be .14 times .05 times .05 times .02, which is .0000007. Turn that back into a percentage and it’s 0.0007%. This in turn means that there was a greater than 99.9% chance that at least one of the above occurrences wouldn’t happen. And I firmly believe that if any one of the above things had gone the other way, Trump wouldn’t have skated like this.
Like I said, you’re welcome to assign different percentages to the odds of each of the above occurrences happening. But you’re still going to end up with a far less than 1% chance that all of the above things would go wrong. It was just a perfect storm of bad luck, an extraordinarily unlikely series of events, an outcome that no one could have reasonably predicted.
As for those talking heads and pundits and doomsday types who insisted from the start that Trump was going to get away with it no matter what: really? Are you telling me that these people correctly foresaw Trump getting lucky on a one-in-seven random drawing, correctly foresaw a prosecutor sex scandal, correctly foresaw a respected New York judge going rogue, and correctly foresaw Biden catching a severe cold before the debate? Really? No. Of course not. No one saw any of those things coming. The people who insisted Trump was going to get away with it all were merely taking the unlikely worst possible scenario and insisting it was going to happen so they could bring attention to themselves. It’s the way the industry works.
But this isn’t about other pundits. This is about the simple fact that I wasn’t able to call 2024 correctly. I could have chosen to just ignore this, not mention it, move the goalposts, and hope you all forget that I called it wrong. But I don’t want to do things that way. It’s important to talk about why we get things wrong, so we can learn from it and use it to our advantage next time. But no matter how I look at this, Trump had a far greater than 99% chance of losing and going to prison, or going to prison and losing. I stand by the validity of my prediction, even though a series of extraordinarily unlikely events led to an extraordinarily tragic outcome.
Thanks for allowing me to get this off my chest. My political analysis and predictions are always based on the odds and what’s most likely to happen, which is why my predictions prove correct most of the time. It just didn’t this time. I stand by the validity of my overall work.
I also want to address a couple of bookends. First, for all the years of everyone bashing Merrick Garland, it ended up not mattering at all that he took as long to indict Donald Trump as he did. As I said, the Trump trial in Florida would have happened with plenty of time if it had been randomly assigned to any other judge in the circuit. And no matter how swiftly Garland had moved, the trial still wouldn’t have happened before the election once it was assigned to Cannon. And since the Supreme Court was never going to allow Trump to go on federal trial for January 6th before the election, Garland’s timeframe in that indictment didn’t matter either. Nothing that Garland (or any other AG in his place) could have done differently would have had a different outcome.
Second, and I think this is the real lesson in all of this: each time any of you came to me down the stretch in a panic or looking for reassurance, I gave you the same answer. I told you to stop wasting your time fretting and instead spend your time trying to get more votes for our side. This was the correct answer. Sitting around fretting never gets your side more votes. Going out and getting your side more votes is, obviously, what gets your side more votes. Many of you did precisely that. And if even one of the above unlikely bad breaks hadn’t happened, your work is what would have caused us to win the election.
My approach is not going to change. My predictions are going to be based on the odds, so I’m going to proven correct most of the time but not all of the time. And no matter how well or poorly any given fight is going, I’m always going to tell you to stop wasting your time fretting or staring at your TV because there’s no point. Whatever the odds of winning any given battle, the odds go down if you sit and fret, and the odds go up if you join the ranks of the activists and fight. So let’s fight.
