Good Night and Good Luck

by | Nov 6, 2024 | Political Commentary

In 2006, when I was working in Washington, D.C. for a national trade organization, I was deeply consumed with that year’s midterm elections. I began obsessively tracking all the House and Senate races and, toward the end of the cycle, I made some predictions, which, as it turns out, were almost completely spot on. I only missed the House total by three seats and was nearly perfect in the Senate.

I began regularly making predictions, and in almost every election, I was very close, coming within a handful of seats. In 2012, I called every state correctly but one in the presidential race, and missed the House and the Senate by one seat each.

With the advent of the Trump era, I began to lose my touch. And I have never gotten it completely back. After Tuesday’s election, I had to make a very hard reckoning with myself, and I have come to realize something important. For as much as I have always prided myself on my objectivity, I realized I have been unable to be objective when it mattered, and my personal preferences have been clouding my judgment for years.

In the last week before the election, I wrote a column on this website in which I said that I thought both Kamala Harris and Senator Bob Casey were in trouble in Pennsylvania, and that Senator Sherrod Brown was likelier than not to lose his seat in Ohio. I was right. But I switched course just a few days later as soon as I found information that mirrored my biases. I have written for years about how polls were broken and should be disregarded, but as soon as I saw a polling result that showed what I hoped to see, I disregarded what I was clearly seeing—and everything I thought I had learned in the previous eight years.

On Tuesday night, a follower of mine on X.com, distraught by the results, lashed out angrily at me and my incorrect predictions. It made me think. And it made me realize that my inability to separate my wishes from my analysis, once again, was providing false hope to people who I never wished to mislead.

Over the last 15 years, I have earned a following of more than 13,000 people on X.com (formerly Twitter), who have come to trust my judgments. I have been featured in numerous publications and on several television and radio programs around the world. And I have done all of them—all of you—a disservice. I’m sorry.

So I have decided that I am getting out of the election prediction business. Not only do I no longer believe I can do it well or objectively, but I am actively letting down thousands of people who trust what I say. I will not do that anymore.

Going forward on this website and on social media, I will confine my observations to my own views on politics and analyzing election results. In particular, I will write about what I believe politicians will do and what my party, the Democratic Party, should do if it hopes to reverse the obvious disconnect between itself and the median voter in this country.

I fear that our country faces hard times now, and that much of the progress that has been won over the last hundred years will be undone by aggressive conservative populists in the next two years. I worry that the Social Security and Medicare I was hoping to have at some point in the next 15 years will no longer be there for myself or others. I fear the decisions that the conservative-dominated Supreme Court will make for the rest of my lifetime. There is nothing that can be done about any of that now, sadly.

I will likely be much less active on this site and on social media going forward, though I hope to maintain the friendships that I have made over the years. All that any of us can do now is get on with our lives and make the best of it. I have a terrific wife, a great home, an amazing job, good friends, and a master’s degree to pursue, and I am going to turn a much greater focus to all of those things going forward. I wish you all the best of luck in everything you want to do. Thank you for believing in me, and I sincerely apologize to everyone I have let down.

With a tip of the hat to the originator of the phrase, Edward R. Murrow: Good night, and good luck.