Especially about the future
What are your predictions for 2026?
Yogi Berra noted “It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” That may not apply to whoever made $400,000 betting that Maduro would be ousted as Venezuelan leader in the hours before Saturday’s military operation.
Earlier this week, Representative Ritchie Torres introduced legislation that would make it illegal for government officials to make such bets using privileged information.
But let’s move on to more traditional political forecasting, courtesy of another WelcomeFester from New York. Every January, Matthew Yglesias writes a newsletter with an exercise on the value of predictions - and accountability:
Each year, I try to make a bunch of predictions about the year to come and then check back to see how I did.
The main point of this exercise is to humble myself with a reminder that predicting the future is really hard. For the predictions I made about 2025, I offered 50 different theses and said I had 80 percent credence in each of them.
For 2026, here are his predictions related to Democratic primaries and pickups:
Democrats win a majority in the House of Representatives
Democrats gain more than 10 seats in the House
Democrats gain fewer than 25 seats in the House
Democrats gain seats in the U.S. Senate
Graham Platner wins the Maine Senate nomination
James Talarico wins the Texas Senate nomination
Democrats hold the Senate seat in Michigan
Democrats hold the governor’s mansion in Wisconsin
Republicans hold the majority in the U.S. Senate
Kathy Hochul is re-elected governor of New York
Democrats win at least one of the Ohio/Iowa/Alaska Senate seats
Michael Bennet is elected governor of Colorado
Democrats flip at least one chamber of the New Hampshire state legislature
Democrats gain at least one net governorship
Dan Goldman loses his primary in NY-10
Texas redistricting does not yield Republicans the full five seats they were hoping for
Jon Ossoff wins re-election in Georgia
Democrats flip the senate seat in North Carolina
You can read all of them here.
Selecting 50 things that have an 80% chance of happening is a specific type of bet. In March Madness terms, this is picking all #4 seeds in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament (79.4% chance of winning the first round).
Most of WelcomePAC’s investments have gone to the opposite probability - finding candidates who look like a #15 or #16 seed (odds of victory: 7% and 1% respectively) but who actually have the odds of a #11 or #12 seed (39%).
At the moment, the three major prediction markets give Democrats a ~78% chance of winning the House and ~33% to win the Senate.
What are your predictions - and the probability of those predictions - for 2026?
Sticking with the March Madness theme I see a significant erosion in the college sports landscape during 2026. College football might be bullet proof but the rest make no sense (admission breaks and deficit spending for non-spectator sports).