81 Very Specific Predictions About The 2024 Election

OK fine some of them are about the NBA.

Ben Dreyfuss

Aug 22, 2023

woman in red panty and bra standing of black stone near waterfalls — What does this photo have to do with the story? Absolutely nothing. But she’s pretty, isn’t she? She is. Killer body. I searched for “beautiful bikini woman waterfall.” You’re welcome. It’s the least I could do, considering I didn’t copy-edit this post, and it’s probably filled with typos. Look at that ass, though! 10/10! A+. Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

People are often more confident about subjects they don’t know anything about than subjects they do know something about. The more you know about a subject, the more familiar you are with the nuance and the variables, whereas if you are stupid about something, you don’t know what you don’t know. You know some things, and you think those things are the things so you’re confident. It’s the people who know more than you who are saying, “Those things are not all the things, dumbass”

And verily and merrily, it was and will always be that the people most qualified to make predictions about the future are the least likely to do so. This is unfortunate because predictions about the future are great content. They are fun to read and fun to argue about. This gagging demand for impossibly confident predictions is then filled by uninformed, stupid people.

No one wins when those knuckle-dragging troglodytes own the prediction space. What the world needs is a moderately informed person of average intelligence who is brave enough to make predictions without fear or favor.

Ben Dreyfuss, reporting for duty,

The 2024 presidential election is a little more than 14 months away.

Here are 81 very specific predictions about the next few years.

GENERAL FACTS ABOUT THE WORLD OF 2024

There won’t be a recession, but everyone is still going to be upset about the economy.
Ukraine and Russia will still be at war, and we’ll still be funding Ukraine but it will have receded even further than it already has from the national consciousness.
The Lakers will finish second in the West and everyone will be really happy and confident going into the playoffs but they won’t win a title.
I’ll be doing well. Not sure what that means, but I’ll be good.
Marvel is going to have a few more bombs before they right the ship
There won’t be any huge national disasters that grip the nation. No pandemics, no summers of racial awakening, no terrorist attacks.
There will be the usual number of mass shootings but there won’t be any that claim more than 10 toddlers at once.
Sure, there will be some weather issues. But there won’t be anything on the scale that it would affect the national consciousness. There will be no Katrina. I’m gonna ballpark 500 more deaths than normal over the next year from unforeseen weather-related catastrophes in the United States.
The Supreme Court will sign off on the Perdue Pharma-Sackler settlement. Democrats will shout about how it shows that the Supreme Court is evil, but actually, they’ll have decided the case on sort of uncontroversial grounds and at least one of the liberal justices will join the opinion that bankruptcy courts have the power to immunize third parties from future liability in certain situations.
The ratings for the Oscars will be up a very little bit, but there won’t be any good jokes. Some people will pretend to get outraged by a very soft joke about the strikes. At least one winner will mention “creeping fascism” or “it can happen here” in their acceptance speech.
DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY
Biden will not debate RFK Jr or Marianne Williamson. He will win every single primary by a zillion points.
RFK Jr will not mount a third-party bid and will not endorse Trump. He will just go back to selling dangerous anti-vax books.
Biden will not die or suffer some medical disaster that interferes with his campaign. He will be nominated without intrigue.
Kamala will also not die and be renominated.
They both will still be pretty unpopular, but Biden inch nearer to positive approval as we get closer to the election for the boring reason that Democrats will “come home.”
HUNTER BIDEN LEGAL PROBLEMS
Hunter will eventually strike another plea deal. He won’t actually go to trial for any of this stuff.
The investigations into him will fail to turn up anything terribly interesting about Joe Biden.
GOP PRIMARY PART 1
DeSantis is not going to catch fire. He’ll have one semi-ok stretch in October or November and recover some small number of percentage points and that will lead to a round of “comeback kid” stories but then that momentum will go nowhere and by the time the Iowa caucus rolls around no one in the entire world will think he has an actual chance of winning the primary.
Along with DeSantis, this fall, a number of other GOP candidates will have tiny moments in the sun. None of them will probably even break 25%, but they’ll each get a small bump and then go back down.
Nothing will derail the Trump train over these months.
However, none of the main alternatives to Trump will drop out even after the contests start. Anyone who has enough money in their campaign coffers to field even a skeleton staff is going to keep doing it.
DeSantis specifically is not dropping out before Florida. But he won’t win Florida.
None of these losers will actually go for Trump’s jugular. (Christie will have done that lots of times, and he’ll do better than expected in New Hampshire and get a little fundraising bump which will let him nominally compete in at least some Super Tuesday states, but then he’ll be broke and be unable to continue)
TRUMP
Trump will eventually start going to the GOP debates. Not because it makes sense strategically but because he’ll be jealous and annoyed by the attention the debates get.
He’ll win all the debates.
He will finally actually return to Twitter.
In the spring/summer, Trump will go to trial for two of his cases: The NY case and one of the Jack Smith cases.
The GA one won’t happen before the election and neither will the other Jack Smith one.
He’ll be convicted of something in both of these trials.
The NY one is silly bullshit and he won’t face any negative consequence for that conviction, which he’ll appeal. That appeal won’t be settled in 2024.
He’ll be convicted of something in the federal trial. Sentencing will be scheduled for months later, and whenever it happens, he will not get a prison sentence. He’ll get a fine or probation or possibly house arrest or something like that, but that won’t actually interfere with his life either since he’ll be released on bond pending appeal.
GOP PRIMARY PART II
When the GOP convenes for their national convention in Milwaukee in August, Trump will have already been convicted of multiple felonies.
This is the scenario that DeSantis et al will have hoped for: Trump gets convicted and then the GOP delegates wake up to the drama inherent to having him as the nominee and turn their lonely eyes to a new candidate.
The political media will be so onboard with finally getting the brokered convention they have long dreamed of that they will ejaculate with stories about how two delegates from Oregon are indicating they might cast their ballots for the governor of Virginia or something.
All of this will be bullshit and the polls will never at any point suggest that GOP voters are turning on Trump, who will be nominated at the convention on the first ballot.
Trump’s VP will not be from the lunatic wing of the party. It will not be Kari Lake or MTG or someone like that. It will be Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, or some random person from Congress. Elise Stefanik or somebody like that. A person no one in the world cares about.
THE GENERAL ELECTION
As we enter September 2024, Biden will have a steady 4-point lead in national polls. There will be lots of news stories about how the polls are closer than they were in 2020 and, you know, Trump almost won in 2020!
The left will do their job, which is to stop embarrassing Biden for a few months by zipping it up and keeping quiet about their crazy ideas until after the election.
Trump will break with the GOP and commit to debates with Biden organized by the League for the Committee for Presidential Debates.
The first debate will be at either UNLV or ASU.
In that first debate, Biden will make some verbal gaffes. He’ll stumble on his words. Everyone who pays too much attention to politics will decide he lost the debate because of these stuttering stammering communication failures.
Very early the next morning, the first reaction polls will come out and show Biden winning decisively. (Because average normie voters don’t care about that stuff that much.)
The conservative media establishment will do their best to make the election about Biden’s failures on x/y/z. Some white woman is going to get killed at some point next year by an illegal immigrant and they’ll talk about her endlessly and valorize her parents—without their proactive participation—as the Khizar Khan of the election. This will completley fail to catch on because…
Trump will be so consumed by his own anger and fear over his felony convictions that he will make the entire campaign about how poeple should vote for him to get the deep state back for what they did to him (and you!)
None of the debates change anything.
There will be no real OCtober surprise, but the media, Trump, and Biden will all at various points act like some small international event no one cares about is a big deal.
THE ELECTION RESULTS
The polls will be pretty accurate!
Biden will win the popular vote by a smaller margin than he won it in 2020.
Biden will win a smaller electoral college victory than he did in 2020.
BUT: the tipping point state for Biden to secure 270 electoral votes will not be as close as it was in 2020. The Dem votes will be more efficiently distributed so even though it is technically a closer election, it will be less dramatic than 2020.
The Democrats will win back the House simply because the margin is so small.
Manchin will lose to Jim Justice
Democrats will lose one net seat in the Senate so they’ll be back to where they were in January of 2021.
ELECTION AFTERMATH
Trump is going to cry like a bitch but his cries won’t go anywhere.
There will not be red state legislatures trying to hand their electors to Trump even thougb Biden won the state.
There will not be some massive uprising of violent Maga lunatics in the streets.
Two or three random psychotic trump supporters will be arrested for making threats online. And one elected Democrat somewhere in the country will have their home graffiti.
The liberals who have complained about Manchin forever will act like his seat was meaningless and demand that Democrats pass things they cannot pass.
TRUMP POST-ELECTION
Trump will be low after this loss. He’ll be scared about going to prison. He’ll still be facing two more trials.
He will get found guilty of something in those last two trials as well. (One of which is the Georgia one.)
He will still not be sentenced to prison in any of them.
He’ll get suspended sentences or fines. Judges will go out of their way to keepo him out of prison for the reasonable worry that it would be too much of a strain on the corrections department to have a former president incarcerated.
BIDEN’S SECOND TERM
Nothing truly important will be passed in Congress lol.
His second term will be spent on executive orders about wind energy or whatever and a foreign policy dedicated to some unsexy thing like “getting closer to India”
The one exception is that most of the provisions of the Trump tax cut will be extended because it is set to expire on the eve of the 2028 election. The GOP will want this very much, and 10 Republican senators will agree to vote for cloture for some limited and minor Democratic immigration initiative like making the DREAM Act law or something.
We will establish formal diplomatic relations with Bhutan. (I bet you didn’t know we don’t have diplomatic relations with Bhutan! Now you do!)
There will be an unexpected conservative opening on the Supreme Court and Biden will fill with some lib, so the court will be at a greater equilibrium by 2028.
The war in Ukraine will just continue indefinitely at a lower level of intensity.
TRUMP 2025 AND ON
At some point in 2025 an appeals court will side with Trump about something to do with these trials. I am not saying they’ll toss out a conviction wholesale. But they will dismiss a pitiful count or lower his punishment or something. They will side with him on an issue that is real.
Trump will then spin this as judicial confirmation of his complete innocence, and this will become the standard line among Republicans.
This is the single worst outcome for the GOP. It will renew their voters’ loyalty to Trump.
In the 2026 midterms, the GOP will underperform for the exact same reason they did in 2022.
There will be no GOP bench for 2028 and Trump will run again.
If the GOP is going to escape him while he’s alive, it will be during the 2028 primary.
MISCELLANEOUS
The Lakers, by the end of Biden’s second term, will have won another championship.
The Celtics will not have won any more championships
I think at least one friend I am close with will probably die in a car accident or something. It will hit me hard.
But I’ll get through it because I have a great talent for survival.
By 2028, I think I’ll be more successful. Not famous in a real sense or wealthy in a spectacular sense, but I will have succeeded enough to, you know, get paid to do more speaking engagements than I get offered now. I’ll own a home. A nice home. Not a mansion in Malibu, but a nice house in a location that won’t turn me into a suicide bomber.
After 8 years with a Democratic president, the Left will be totally checked out, and its most annoying cultural instincts will be in hibernation. The only time the Left is able to grow is when Republicans are in office.
If the Democrats win in 2028, it will be a fatal blow to all of the left-wing instincts of people you hate. Because it will mean that those people by 2032 are too old to give a shit anymore. They’ll be too invested in their own boring cis heterosexual marriages to pay attention to anything but the Williams Sonoma catalog.