Wednesday, December 11, 2024
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RALEIGH — After getting many political predictions wrong in 2016, including but not limited to the results of the presidential election, I threw my long-cherished crystal ball out and started building a new one.
Figuratively speaking, of course. I stopped relying on the polling aggregator I built earlier the decade. I took fewer glances at the aggregators built by other pundits and political websites. Instead, I looked at a broader set of metrics — survey data about public attitudes instead of partisan preferences, for example, and trends in voter registration and behavior.
I also started talking to a more varied collection of sources, via phone calls and email. I cast a wider net. I took more seriously John Stuart Mill’s warning that while “everyone well knows himself to be fallible, few think it necessary to take any precautions against their own fallibility.”
During the just-completed 2020 political season, then, I was less confident in my predictions — and far more accurate. Surely the two things are related. I figured Republicans would do well in North Carolina’s legislative and judicial races. I figured Thom Tillis would be reelected. I figured Donald Trump would not be. Turns out I figured correctly.
Still, past performance is no guarantee of future results. Over the past few weeks, I’ve gone fishing among my contacts again — casting my net widely for informed guesses about the coming year in North Carolina politics. There was reasonable consensus around five big questions, although not about the likely answers. Here are the questions:
By vetoing them, he sacrificed short-term gains (e.g. teachers got stiffed) in hopes of longer-term gains from a Democratic takeover of one or both legislative chambers. It was a bad bet.
I think legislative leaders would make a successful challenge less likely by adopting a neutral set of redistricting criteria as a separate bill early in the 2021 session, then applying them when the census data become available. But lawmakers may have other ideas.
Oh, wait, never mind. Even my hard-won humility about political predictions won’t keep me from offering a solid “yes” to that question. Make that four unanswered questions in North Carolina politics for 2021.