One of the parts of The McLaughlin Group that I enjoy every week, and at the end of every year, is that they make predictions. One of the things that I don’t like is that they aren’t held to account for their predictions. If you don’t call them on the quality of their earlier predictions, how do you know how their newer predictions will go? For this reason, I like to score myself on my predictions. You can see my predictions for 2021 here — of course I missed what would turn out to be the biggest, most defining story of 2021, that being the January 6th insurrection. And on the rest...well, I had some big hits, but also some big misses.
Let’s go through my predictions one by one, and you’ll see what I mean.
1) Warnock and Ossoff will win their Senate races in Georgia.
This prediction happened and was easily my biggest “hit.” In my (entirely unscientific) poll of what predictions readers thought would be misses, this one got the most votes — 17% — right after two variations of “all of these look correct.” It’s entirely reasonable to have thought that two progressives would have a hard time getting elected in Georgia. And yet, here we are.
Warnock will have to defend one of those two seats in 2022, and the smart money is that he will face former NFL star Herschel Walker, who is currently leading the Republican field. Polls this far out aren’t very good predictors, but for what they are worth, they show a tight race. I’ve pitched in some bucks, and you should too. Donate to Ralph Warnock’s 2022 campaign (via ActBlue) here. 1/1
2) Trump’s post-election grift will continue clean through 2021.
And of course, he’s still raising money off the narrative that the election was stolen from him. Allegedly, there will be a big announcement one week from today, on January 6th 2022. No doubt this will be another bit of grift. 2/2
3) The City and State of New York will indict Trump on a host of white collar crimes.
This hasn’t materialized, and while it might happen in 2022, I’m not holding my breath. 2/3
4) COVID-19 deaths (2020 and 2021 combined) will exceed 660,000 Americans by July 1, 2021
At the time I made this prediction, the CDC reported that about 330,000 Americans had died from COVID-19. My prediction was that this number would double in six months. By July 1st, we fell just short of that — 605,000 dead — according to the CDC. We can thank the initial success of the vaccine effort for that.
So my prediction didn’t happen, right?
Ah, not so fast. According to the University of Washington’s COVID-19 model, the CDC model is grossly undercounting COVID-19 deaths by about one-third. Once you factor those in (see the “Excess” tab), the number of deaths attributable to COVID-19 is over 900,000! So, I’m calling this prediction maybe happened and scoring myself a half point.
Of course, that was before delta and omicron hit. Six months later, we’re at more than 800K dead by the official CDC undercount, and that is likely to go up, up, up in January 2022. 2.5/4
5) Democrats will win convincingly in Virginia, keeping the Governor’s seat and expanding their leads in both chambers of the legislature.
This was probably my biggest miss of 2021. What happened instead, of course, is that the Virginia Governor’s seat went to a Trump wannabe, and the House of Delegates flipped to Republican control after Democrats lost seven seats. The other chamber of the Virginia Legislature remains in Democratic control. As a presage for 2022, the results of the Virginia and New Jersey elections (where the Democrats barely held on) make for a rather bleak look. 2.5/5
6) There will be another war in Southeastern Europe
We came very close to this in November when Azerbaijani forces pushed into Armenian territory; the resulting clashes killed a handful of troops on both sides and led to the capture of 32 Armenian soldiers. Russia negotiated a cease-fire which probably kept the situation from escalating. Keep an eye on this one. 2.5/6
7) The US will see a spike (at least 10%) in sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies in late 2021.
This happened more or less as predicted this Summer, before the spread of the delta variant, and then the omicron variant, put a damper on things. 3.5/7
8) The Peace and Neutrality for Taiwan ballot measure will go down in flames.
I’m calling this one a miss, because I (rather stupidly) didn’t realize that the P&N measure was for the 2019 ballot, not for the 2021 ballot. 3.5/8
Tomorrow, I will publish my 2022 predictions. Spoiler alert — it’s going to be bleak.