Are pundits getting worse? Or is politics getting more unpredictable? The answer might be both. Photograph by John Locher / AP

This is a difficult time in the business of political predictions. A befuddled Tony Blair told the Financial Times this week, “I really mean it when I say that I’m not sure I fully understand politics right now, which is an odd thing to say when I’ve spent my life in it.” It’s not simply the unexpected strength of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, both of whom, it was assumed, would run aground before they could even reach this week’s Republican caucus in Nevada or the Democratic primary in South Carolina. The earliest moments of the 2016 campaign were marked by a conspicuous pageant of wrongness. Last year’s predictions, as collected by Politico, included explanations of not only how the presidential campaign would be conducted (“Meerkat will change politics forever”) but also who could conduct it (“Joe Biden/Elizabeth Warren/Mitt Romney”) and what would they would need, above all (“Money will be everything”).

Trump has been catnip for predictors declaring his imminent political collapse; his candidacy has reached the “beginning of the end,” or some other description of demise, no fewer than thirty-three times in publications that span the ideological spectrum, according to a tally by ThinkProgress. While liberals might be expected to have misunderstood Trump’s appeal, they have not done worse than Republicans such as Charles Krauthammer, of Fox News, who explained, after the first Republican debate, last August, that Trump was “lost for most of the debate,” and concluded, “The real story is the collapse of Trump.” The pattern has even befallen the statistician Nate Silver, who emerged, in 2008, as the answer to the very problem of unfounded certainty but nevertheless calculated, last November, that Trump’s support was “about the same share of people who think the Apollo moon landings were faked.” And, lest anyone suspect this author of unfairness, I can report that in the last few months, a wise editor has twice removed my declarations, in one piece or another, that Trump has reached the beginning of the end.

So are the predictors getting worse? Or is the political world getting more unpredictable? Both, although one should be cautious about assuming that there ever was a golden age of political predictability. First, on the predictors: changes in the technology of media and the status of celebrity are steadily driving forecasters further from accuracy, even as technology increases our assumption that accuracy should be possible. More than a decade ago, the professor Philip Tetlock, of the Wharton School, who specializes in decision-making and social and cultural psychology, published “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?” It was based on a long-term study of two hundred and eighty-four people who make their living “commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends.” He asked them a range of questions, such as “Would the United States go to war in the Persian Gulf?” He amassed more than eighty thousand predictions and then waited for history to yield a verdict. In his now-somewhat-famous conclusion, Tetlock reported that human beings who hold forth on the state of the world to come are, by and large, “poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys.”

From that broad reading of the data, Tetlock pulled some important details: the longer the range, the lower the accuracy, so that “when you move beyond about one year,” predictions rarely perform better than random chance (i.e., dart-chucking primates); second, he found that analysts are prone to unassailable, and unwarranted, personal confidence: “When they say they're eighty or ninety per cent confident, they're often right only sixty or seventy per cent of the time.” Lastly, he found that fame breeds certainty, such that prominent predictors were “more overconfident than their colleagues who eked out existences far from the limelight.”

Since then, all three of those dynamics have become more pronounced. A predictor who confines himself to a one-year horizon would barely be able to forecast the results of Super Tuesday, much less the election, because the campaigns have lengthened; Ted Cruz entered the race in March, 2015, nearly six months earlier than the equivalent point, in September, 2003, when John Kerry announced his candidacy. (Why? Partly to raise more money.) Second, as more readers move to the Web, writers have adopted the click-bait pose of total certainty, instead of permitting qualifications and unknowns. (Tetlock’s advice? Beware of "experts who say 'moreover' more often than they say 'however.’ ”) Moreover, the emphasis on celebrity has grown, too, as rising generations report a measurably greater desire to be famous than previous cohorts did.

But the element that has caught forecasters most off-guard this year has been a more fundamental change—a seeming decline in the predictability of politics because of a shift in how institutions shape outcomes. In an admirable explanation of where he and others went astray, Silver wrote that he was overly skeptical of Trump’s prospects because he “assumed that influential Republicans would do almost anything they could to prevent him from being nominated.” He relied on the presumption, once sound, that the Party itself would make decisive choices, in the form of endorsements and funding, that would bless some candidates and doom others. The parties, it turns out, are weaker and more out of touch than observers understood.

The same might be said of us, the “traditional” media. Reporters have discovered that we don’t understand the electorate as well as we thought we did, and that we have a limited ability to shape it. “Part of this is social vanity,” as my colleague Benjamin Wallace-Wells put it on a recent edition of the Politics and More podcast. “I think we want to presume that the person who is going to be elected President, who other people respect, looks more or less like we do in the media.”

The vanity is receding only up to a point. Even now, after so many have been wrong for so long, the temptation endures. Last Saturday, as Republicans prepared to vote in South Carolina, The Hill canvassed predictors, including former Congressman John LeBoutillier, the New York Republican who co-hosts "Political Insiders," on Fox News. LeBoutillier explained that Cruz “will score a surprisingly close second-place finish.” (Cruz placed third, losing to Trump by ten points.)

LeBoutillier was, of course, not alone. For a very precious few being wrong over and over again has become a form of self-branding. For months Bill Kristol, the neoconservative intellectual, has been peering around important turns in the race and announcing the future with the hashtag “#PeakTrump.” Last week, before the vote in South Carolina, he finally retired the illusion of correctness and tweeted, simply, “One last time--don't they say 12th time is the charm? And this time I mean it... #PeakTrump!”