What I got wrong in 2024

Here's a strange but true fact: One year ago today, the attention of the political world was focused on which Republican presidential candidate would win the Iowa caucuses. A lot happened in 2024 — which, for political pundits, meant there were a lot of chances to get things wrong.

I don't much like the p-word, but I made my fair share of predictions in 2024, so I suppose I qualify. But at least I have one annual tradition to keep myself honest: Every year around this time, I go through all the predictions I made over the past 12 months that crashed and burned. To me, the price of admission for making political predictions should be to face the music and own up if and when you get them wrong. I think if everyone had to do that, it would lead to better, more thoughtful predictions in the first place.

Perhaps for that reason, and perhaps luckily for me, I didn't stake out a position on the biggest political question of the year: who would win the presidential election. (All the polling data pointed to the race being a toss-up, and it was indeed close.) But there were plenty of other big twists and turns on the campaign trail that I failed to see coming — most glaringly, President Joe Biden's decision to drop out of the race.

Even at the beginning of the year, there was idle speculation that Biden wouldn't make it to November — because of a medical episode, or a coup within the Democratic Party, or who knows what reason. You'd have to ask one of the people who was making this argument, because I dismissed it as outright preposterous. In a January episode of the 538 Politics podcast, I said, "Joe Biden is almost certainly going to be the Democratic nominee." In February, even after a special counsel report shone a harsh spotlight on Biden's age-related decline, I wrote that the idea of Biden dropping out was "'West Wing'-esque fan fiction." And playing a game of "Buy, Sell, Hold" on the podcast in May, I estimated that there was just a 1 percent chance of Biden dropping out.

All of that was defensible, I think, but then I stuck to my guns even after Biden turned in an all-time stinker of a debate performance in June. On July 1, I tweeted that I still thought Biden's chances of being the Democratic nominee were 95 percent. In an article on July 10, I cited the far greater number of congressional Democrats who had publicly expressed support for Biden than had called for him to drop out as evidence that he could ride it out — ignoring the fact that what congressional Democrats were doing privately was very different from what they were doing publicly. It wasn't until July 18 — after it was reported that Biden's own resolve was softening and just three days before he ultimately withdrew — that I finally admitted Biden was likely to drop out.

Why was I so stubborn in my belief that Biden would weather the storm? There was no historical precedent for a major party's presumptive nominee to withdraw like Biden did — after clinching his party's nomination, and just a few months out from the general election — and I doubted that the Democratic Party was strong enough to drive him from the race against his wishes. But I didn't fully appreciate the fact that, sometimes, rarely, unprecedented events do happen — especially in the presence of other unprecedented factors, like a presidential candidate running at age 81. And as I discovered at the Democratic National Convention, the ingredients were there for the Democratic Party to act decisively against Biden.

That wasn't the only thing I was wrong about in 2024, though. In that same game of "Buy, Sell, Hold" in May, I scoffed at the idea that Biden and former President Donald Trump would agree to hold any debates, arguing that neither candidate had an incentive to agree to them. I followed that up with a tweet at 8 a.m. on May 15 saying, "Yeah, we aren't getting any debates." By noon that same day, though, the two candidates had agreed to circumvent the Commission on Presidential Debates and hold debates in June and September — another unprecedented move that, of course, Biden would quickly come to regret.

In fact, that May podcast game was a veritable treasure trove of bad Nathaniel takes. Host Galen Druke, bless his heart, also snuck in a question about whether former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley would endorse Trump by the end of May. I said I didn't understand why she would do so: If she was inclined to endorse Trump quickly, I argued, she would have done it shortly after dropping out in March; otherwise, wouldn't she wait until the fall to maximize the endorsement's impact? Apparently not: She announced her support for Trump on May 22.

I must have been distracted in May, because another of my missteps came at the end of that month, when a New York jury convicted Trump of 34 felonies, making him the first former president convicted of a crime. I suggested that the guilty verdict would cost Trump a significant amount of support, at least temporarily, in the presidential race, citing three hypothetical polls that found Trump losing an average of 6 percentage points in head-to-head polls with Biden if he was convicted.

In reality, Trump's lead in 538's national polling average barely budged in the weeks following his conviction. My problem here was being too credulous of polls of hypothetical events. As many smarter analysts pointed out at the time, people are bad at predicting how they're going to react to new information; speculative polls asking people how they might vote if a certain thing happens are simply no substitute for actual polls after that thing has actually occurred. (Given how unpredictable the news could be in Trump's impending second term, this will certainly be a lesson I take into 2025.)

That wasn't the only one of my expectations that Trump defied. In a March vice-presidential draft, I was utterly convinced that Trump would pick South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem as his running mate. As I argued back in November 2023, it just made so much sense: As a woman, she offered demographic balance for the ticket, and as a fellow culture warrior and early Trump endorser, she also had unimpeachable MAGA credentials. Alas, fate intervened: Noem shot herself in the foot when she disclosed in her memoir that she had killed a disobedient puppy. Granted, I don't think anyone saw that bizarre controversy coming, but Noem had plenty of other scandals swirling around her even before that. Plus, I shouldn't have been so confident in any one name when Trump had so many other options. To my credit, later in that VP draft, I also picked the man Trump actually chose, Sen. JD Vance.

And while it feels like a million years ago, we also have receipts to review from the GOP presidential primaries. While I was always confident that Trump would win the Republican nomination, I was perhaps a little too confident. After his win in the New Hampshire primary, I predicted that Trump would win all 56 presidential nominating contests. He did not — Haley won Vermont and Washington, D.C., which just goes to show how hard it is to sweep the presidential primary calendar!

Finally, we come to my most embarrassing failure of 2024. In March, producer Tony Chow gave the 538 staff 12 quotes and asked us who said them: Biden, Trump, or someone from ABC's "The Bachelor" franchise. I got only eight of 12 correct — a frankly disqualifying performance for this "Bachelor"-cum-politics fan.

Ah well — there's always next year.