One of the worst predictions: Jeb Bush will be the nominee. He didn't end up making it past the South Carolina primary. | AP Photo 16 worst predictions of 2016

Throughout the ups and downs of the 2016 campaign, the political class has been called many things — crooked, dishonest, rigged, take your pick — but prescient is not one of them.

We didn’t just mess up the finer points of this election; our failure to predict what 2016 had in store was a much larger failure to imagine that this kind of campaign that was even possible in American politics today.


Sure, nearly every election ends with professional political insiders scraping the egg off their faces, but 2016 is in a class of its own. If we were to boil down all of the hilariously wrong predictions about the presidential race down to just a few, the greatest hits would surely include these 16 complete flops.

1. Trump will not be the nominee

Predicted by: Almost everyone

Basically everyone with Internet access got this one wrong. Trump is “here to stay for a while, maybe through a few primaries—but he is not going to be the nominee,” said Charlie Black, former senior adviser to Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential bid, on “Meet the Press” in August 2015. On the same show, Republican ad consultant Alex Castellanos agreed: “Wait until [Trump’s supporters] learn that the guy’s been a Democrat longer than a Republican, that he’s advocated for things like partial birth abortion, universal healthcare run by the government.” Several months later, at a New Hampshire campaign in December 2015, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush joined the chorus: “I can guarantee you Donald Trump isn’t going to be the nominee.”

But the predictions that perhaps prompted the most self-reflection were made by the team FiveThirtyEight, the data journalism website founded by predictive model expert Nate Silver. One representative forecase from early in the primary race came from senior political analyst Harry Enten in an article titled “Why Donald Trump Isn’t a Real Candidate, In One Chart”: “Trump has a better chance of cameoing in another ‘Home Alone’ movie with Macaulay Culkin—or playing in the NBA Finals—than winning the Republican nomination.”

2. Jeb Bush will be the nominee

Predicted by: The Washington Post, Politico Magazine, Rush Limbaugh and many, many more

Early on in the GOP race—before all the candidates had even announced—the conventional wisdom congealed in the national media: Jeb Bush, the son and brother of the last two Republican presidents, was inevitable as the nominee. Nearly every political outlet fell victim to this line of thinking at one point or another, and Politico was no exception (“Newsflash: It’s Going to Be Hillary vs. Jeb,” blared one Politico Magazine headline in May 2015). As early as January 2015, Washington Post reporters Karen Tumulty and Matea Gold proclaimed Bush the frontrunner, explaining: “Republicans have a tradition of picking an anointed one early. That establishment candidate almost always ends up with the nomination.”

Then came Donald Trump. Even after Bush was humiliated by defeat and dropped out of the race in February 2016, Rush Limbaugh was still predicting Jeb would be the man: “He’s gonna win the nomination nonetheless,” Limbaugh said on his radio show while speculating about a contested Republican national convention.

3. Joe Biden will run

Predicted by: Bill Kristol (among others)

Between the months of August and October 2015, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol predicted on Twitter at least four times that Biden would jump into the presidential race. In October 2015, Biden finally announced that he wouldn’t run.

4. The 2016 Republican national convention will be brokered

Predicted by: John Kasich (among others)

This one might not have been a prediction so much as an excess of wishful thinking, but for a few weeks in spring, it seemed that everyone was gaming out all the possible scenarios for how we might get to that once-in-a-blue-moon fever dream of political junkies.

Asked in February about when the primary campaign would end, Marco Rubio campaign manager Terry Sullivan told the AP that he “would be surprised if it’s not May or the convention.” A month later, Ohio Gov. John Kasich echoed that sentiment during an appearance on CBS News’ “Face the Nation”: “Nobody’s going to have the delegates they need going to the convention.” Even academics got caught up in the excitement: Brookings Institution fellow Ellen Kamarck speculated in March that “some Trump delegates may decide that they really can’t put him at the head of the ticket and that the people back home will agree with them.”

Despite some low-level chaos at July’s Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Trump clinched the nomination with enough delegates on the first ballot.

5. Bernie Sanders won’t stand a chance at winning the Democratic nomination

Predicted by: Mark Halperin (et al)

By the end of 2015, Senator Bernie Sanders was proving to be a real force of disheveled charisma, but he was still brushed off as an unserious contender: “A nuisance rather than a real threat,” as Bloomberg’s Mark Halperin described him; “someone who will lack the resources and standing to truly threaten her,” said Geoffrey Skelley from Sabato’s Crystal Ball.

But then the Democratic primary stretched on, and on, and on, causing a massive headache for the Clinton camp and even pulling her to the left on big issues like the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Sanders eventually bowed out, but a coronation for Hillary it was not.

6. The 2016 Democratic National Convention will be contested

Predicted by: Bernie Sanders (among others)

In a May 2016 speech before the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., just two months before the Democratic National Convention, Bernie Sanders argued that Hillary Clinton would “need superdelegates to take her over the top at the convention in Philadelphia. In other words, it will be a contested convention.” Though the race was much closer than anyone would’ve predicted, the Democratic convention was not contested, and it was Sanders himself who took to the convention floor to ask that Clinton be proclaimed the nominee by acclamation.

7. Billionaires will buy the 2016 election

Predicted by: Campaign finance reform advocates (among others)

It’s almost hard to remember an age when the mere mention of the Koch brothers sent a shiver down liberals’ backs, but it was as recent as 2015. That year, the New York Times warned of the Kochs’ plan to spend $900 million in the 2016 election, prompting Democratic strategist David Axelrod to warn that their power had surpassed that of the official GOP. “Money in politics is a major story in the 2016 campaign,” insisted a 2015 Vox headline. “The question is whether we are in a new Gilded Age or well beyond it—to a Platinum Age,” warned Michael J. Malbin, president of the Campaign Finance Institute.

That was before the GOP’s best-funded candidate, Governor Jeb Bush, a man who was armed with the deep-pocketed “Right to Rise” Super PAC that raised more than $100 million to spend in the primaries, lost miserably (he ultimately won less than one-third the number of votes Ben Carson received) and dropped out. Similarly, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker—the Midwestern darling of conservative billionaires who had bankrolled his gubernatorial campaign to defend him from a 2012 recall effort—burned out long before the Iowa caucuses.

Instead, Donald Trump’s campaign rolled across the finish line with a shoestring budget and a DIY advertising plan based on free media coverage. While casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and others pitched in with money for the general election, 2016 was not determined by billionaires.

8. Hillary will win the Michigan Democratic primary in a landslide

Predicted by: Every single poll

On the day of Michigan’s Democratic primary in March, FiveThirtyEight’s polls-plus analysis predicted Clinton had a 99 percent chance of defeating Sanders the state. They had good reason: literally every single poll of Michiganders had her up by huge margins.

But that wasn’t how it worked out: Sanders won by 1.5 percentage points, something Nate Silver wrote “would be among the greatest polling errors in primary history.”

9. There will be a viable national third-party candidate

Predicted by: Bill Kristol (among many others)

In early February, social media and the press were “salivating” at the prospect of a Michael Bloomberg run when his adviser Doug Schoen told the Wall Street Journal the former New York mayor would be “a serious contender.” Bloomberg ended up not running.

By late May, when Trump was all but assured to be the Republican presidential nominee, serial bad-prediction-maker Bill Kristol tweeted: “There will be an independent candidate—an impressive one, with a strong team and a real chance.” He was talking about David French, a National Review writer who apparently didn’t know he was conservatives’ last great hope until he logged onto Twitter that day and saw that Kristol had anointed him. He respectfully declined.

All throughout the general election campaign, Green Party candidate Jill Stein and Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson have supposedly had real chances in an election when both major party nominees have historically high unfavorables. But neither took hold in any real way. Barring the biggest shock in the history of American politics, the winner of the November 8 election winner will have a D or R next to his or her name.

10. 2016 will be the Meerkat/Periscope election

Predicted by: Dan Pfeiffer (et al)

“If 2004 was about Meetup, 2008 was about Facebook, and 2012 was about Twitter, 2016 is going to be about Meerkat (or something just like it),” wrote former Obama communications aide Dan Pfeiffer in March 2015. At the time, Meerkat was a hot new app that allowed users to broadcast live video using the camera on their smartphones.

Little did Pfeiffer know that he had uncorked a swirl of think pieces on the transformative role that livestreaming video would play in 2016. “The 2016 Election Will Be Livestreamed” read one Huffington Post headline. “Welcome to the new frontier of campaign journalism,” wrote reporter Michael Calderone, “a never-ceasing stream of political events that anyone can broadcast or access with nothing but a smartphone.” The biggest two live streaming apps, Meerkat and Periscope, in the word of Washington’s reporters and political insiders, “were poised to upend politics,” “could make democracy more transparent.”

But after the initial buzz, Meerkat faded away. Periscope, a competitor, lives on via Twitter, and Facebook has introduced its own “Facebook Live” streaming capabilities. And though live video is changing the way people use social media, it doesn’t seem to have made much of a dent in the 2016 campaign.

11. Prediction: Republicans will have to embrace comprehensive immigration reform

Predicted by: The Republican National Committee

This one started with the Republican National Committee’s 2013 autopsy report, conducted after Mitt Romney’s drubbing in the 2012 presidential election. The report, a mix of analysis and prescription, included one unequivocal directive for the GOP: “We must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform.”

If you’ve been paying attention, that hasn’t happened. And, in fact, Republicans seem to be running a competitive national campaign with a candidate who has embraced almost the exact opposite position. Of course, if Trump loses, we’re back to talking about immigration reform as a must for both parties, but Trump’s rise has cast doubts on the idea that an anti-immigrant agenda is politically untouchable.

12. Texas will turn blue

Predicted by: Wishful Democratic pundits

This wishful prediction of Democratic pundits had its moment in the sun this year. Right after that 2005 “Access Hollywood” Trump videotape dropped, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, according to RealClearPolitics’ state average, shot up to within three percentage points of Trump in the deep-red state.

But as Trump regained his footing, a blue Texas seems to be a mirage—at least for the time being. As of this writing, FiveThirtyEight gives Trump a 95.6 percent chance of taking the state, shelving, for now, the Lone Star dreams of demographers and talking heads.

13. Polling is dead or dying

Predicted by: Jill Lepore and others

Sure, there are some big indications that polling is in trouble. Typical response rates are below 10 percent. The decrease in landlines—and correlated rise of mobile—changes the equation, too. When Matt Bevin won the Kentucky gubernatorial election in 2015 after every poll predicted that his Democratic rival Jack Conway would win, Governing magazine’s Alan Greenblatt wondered if it was “The End of Political Polling?” Polling, wrote New Yorker contributor Jill Lepore in 2015, was “teetering on the edge of disaster.”

Those predictions have hardly been borne out: Aside from the big Michigan primary upset, this year, polls were fairly accurate throughout the primaries, and news consumers still seem to be as poll-obsessed as ever.

14. Newt Gingrich will be Donald Trump’s running mate

Predicted by: Bill O’Reilly

In the weeks leading up to Trump’s vice president selection, all eyes were on former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who was himself telling outlets he was being vetted and was reportedly “actively lobbying” for the post. In early June, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly predicted to a live in-person audience that Gingrich would be Trump’s veep choice. Gingrich even had his contract with Fox News terminated because of the VP speculation.

In the end, he was passed over for Indiana Gov. Mike Pence.

15. Hillary will get indicted

Predicted by: Andrew Napolitano

On “The Kelly File” in September 2015, Fox News legal analyst Andrew Napolitano said that the FBI would recommend to the Justice Department that Clinton would be indicted for what he alleged was perjury (she said in a sworn statement that she had turned over all relevant emails for the FBI’s investigation).

Although FBI Director James Comey described Secretary Clinton’s email practices as “extremely careless,” there was, in the end, no indictment.

16. Prediction: “2016 GOP MVP will be @Reince.”

Predicted by: Bill Kristol

Just weeks before the convention, Bill Kristol was holding out hope that Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus would throw a last-minute Hail Mary to spare the party from a Trump candidacy. “Prediction: 2016 GOP MVP will be @Reince, who steps up, ensures open convention, saves party from Trump and produces ticket that wins in Nov,” the Weekly Standard editor tweeted in June 2016.

None of that happened—though of course we still don’t know about the winning ticket part—and most Republicans would likely not call Priebus an MVP of any team.