Why Predictions Matter (Even the Wrong Ones)

At the end of the year, it has become something of a tradition for columnists to reflect on the things they got wrong over the past 12 months. This year, however, we all got the same damn thing wrong. At times I thought that Donald Trump might really be elected president, but I always got sucked back into the groupthink of the pundit class. Trump had no ground game, his campaign was incompetent, he had absurdly high unfavorables, and his fundraising was weak. We were right about all of these things; we were simply wrong that they were a decisive bar to the presidency -- at least when facing a candidate as bad as Hillary Clinton.

So instead, I’m going to reflect on something I got right a few years back -- which is, funnily enough, the same thing I got wrong.