[Q&A] Political Predictions Repository

Want to make your mark and be GWJ famous?

This is a place to deposit political predictions you'd like to make in public, so that they can be easily found and referenced in the future. Thus, it is not a discussion thread; discussions of predictions should take place in other threads as conversations proceed. Explicit clarification questions and answers are fine, but "Why do you think that?" expositions should occur elsewhere so as not to clutter the repository. Predictions should be narrowly defined; testable with publicly available information at all times; have an explicit date range; and refer to events, people and places explicitly so as to leave no doubt of resolution; and they should be numbered sequentially so that they are easier to find at later dates. Edits must be clearly marked and original text preserved through the use of strike-throughs if the prediction is modified. Please avoid the use of generalities - "The President will change his mind on this topic" is less useful than "The President will change his policy from yes to no on this topic", because the latter prevents a tiny change from being claimed as success. Failed predictions should be marked in bold at the top of the post via an edit, leaving the rest intact.

26. All of these bad things are blamed on anyone who supported Sanders prior to the DNC Primary. It won't matter that the bulk of them will have thrown their support behind whomever gets the nomination and urged others to get out the vote in November. Clearly anyone who supported Sanders at any point was birthed by an alcoholic drug-addict so they have brain damage.
26.1 Several folks in this community will continue their hypocritical nastiness. A few more members will finally hit their breaking point at the hypocrisy and fade away as well.

I'll pop in to check in again come December/January to see if things have improved, but it's been four years with no change so I find it highly doubtful. Sure, we've always had our divides, but 2016 put a particularly nasty fracture within the progressive/liberal community members of GWJ and clearly it hasn't mended yet. I don't know how folks like DSGamer and Bekkilyn have put up with it. I suspect my anxiety/depression spiralling completely out of control in late 2016/early 2017 and only worsening since then has something to do with it.

It won't matter that the bulk of them will have thrown their support behind whomever gets the nomination and urged others to get out the vote in November.

We've been seeing this retort since 2016 and while it is a valid point, it belies the fact that its Trump, and not some reasonable alternative candidate. After all we've been through with the mini me despot, that percentage better be less than the ~4% margin of error.

1) trump will narrowly win the 2020 election through easily verifiable fraud. No one will care enough to do anything except post snarky memes.

2) trump will narrowly lose the 2020 election despite easily verifiable fraud. He refuses to leave office citing his own departments fraud. No one will care enough to do anything except post snarky memes.

If nothing else, I believe the Secret Service would be required to remove the former President and Vice President at the request of a newly inaugurated President. Which I'm willing to bet they would do with alacrity.

Robear wrote:

If nothing else, I believe the Secret Service would be required to remove the former President and Vice President at the request of a newly inaugurated President. Which I'm willing to bet they would do with alacrity.

I wish I had your faith in our institutions. The last time a republican lead coup stole the presidency, I don’t remember the SS re installing Gore as president.

Unless you don’t see gorsuch and Kavanaugh siding with trump in this exact situation.

The first wave of the Coronavirus fades out in April as spring comes into full bloom. People turn their attention to other matters and it is largely forgotten - until the second, more virulent, wave hits in the early fall.

Panic sets in at the White House. Fearing that the combination of the falling stock market and his ineffectual response to the new stage of the pandemic will cost him the election, the President declares a state of emergency, places the country under martial law, and postpones the election until "things are back to normal" (which everyone reads as "never"). The House attempts to censure him, but the Senate sides against them - with no elections, none of them need to worry about being held accountable for their actions - and the Supreme Court unsurprisingly sides with the President as well.

With no other way to effectively combat this blatant power grab, the Pacific states and parts of the Northeast secede from the Union. This immediately angers the President, who hates it when people openly defy him, and in an attempt to both get revenge and show how great and powerful he is he tries to prevent the secession by force and begins the second American Civil War.

Please let me be wrong.

That's fiction, pal, until you can tell me the the political and legal mechanisms by which those States secede?

The first thing to explain is how Trump cancels or postpones the 2020 election when elections are controlled by states. He would have a lot of powers he could tap if he declared a national state of emergency, but canceling elections is not one of them.

OG_slinger wrote:

The first thing to explain is how Trump cancels or postpones the 2020 election when elections are controlled by states. He would have a lot of powers he could tap if he declared a national state of emergency, but canceling elections is not one of them.

That one's easy.

States with GOP governors and GOP controlled statehouses start goosestepping in line. There's enough of them that that would effectively screw the election.

Jonman wrote:

That's fiction, pal, until you can tell me the the political and legal mechanisms by which those States secede?

Is that now a requirement to do things with this government?

Chumpy_McChump wrote:
Jonman wrote:

That's fiction, pal, until you can tell me the the political and legal mechanisms by which those States secede?

Is that now a requirement to do things with this government?

Only if you're NOT the government.

Jonman wrote:

That's fiction, pal, until you can tell me the the political and legal mechanisms by which those States secede?

The same way they did last time? Whether there would be public support for secession is a different question, but the legal mechanism isn't really a mystery.

RBG will announce her retirement the day after a Democrat is sworn in as President. The Republican-held Senate will not vote on a replacement until another Republican is President.

26.1 We're not going to know the extent of COVID-19 deaths in the US

Prediction: we're not going to know the total death count for COVID-19 in the United States because the federal agencies will never test enough people to get the full picture. States that take steps to do their own testing (such as Washington and California) will be perceived as having worse outbreaks, but cities in states that don't will have equally high infections, they just won't be sure that they're from the coronavirus and so the popular perception will be that the problem is contained.

If it does die down in the summer, expect that the second wave next fall will catch millions unaware, having dismissed the disease as a Y2K-style overhyped hoax. Look for discussions of "liberal flu" or "it killed fewer people than the flu so it's not that bad" by the time late summer rolls around.

If it doesn't die down in the summer...I don't want to think about it.

There will probably be a Lancet paper or something estimating US deaths using more reliable data from other parts of the world.

1. There will be a proceeding event that tanks the economy

2. The US government's money will become seriously impaired, and lose it's effectiveness.

3 The unpaid federal government employees will slowly drift away.

4. Serious horrible distasters will result.

5 People will become embittered and lose faith in their governnent. Order will break down.

6. Worse things will occur.

[Idiotic rantings that read more like collapse fiction removed. SERIOUSLY sorry guys LMK if this too needs change to fit the general fornat]

It begins.

I see Drazzil posting first a 4:28 today AM, then 9:44 PM yesterday. Do we need to make a rule about time travellers in the Predictions threads?

Timestamps reflect edit times, I'm pretty sure.

[Edit to see if I'm a time traveller now]

Suppose I might as well add a prediction while I'm here:

In spite of mocking coronavirus as a hoax, the GOP will seize upon it this fall amid tightening / unfavorable polls, and declare that elections must be postponed indefinitely, for the good of the country.

SCOTUS will back the administration in the ensuing lawsuits, with Kavanaugh writing the majority opinion.

Sorry for the manic wall of text. I posted something that read more like disaster porn then anything connected to reality and for that I'm sorry. Bipolar ftl.

I really do need to stay out of these types of discussions for my own sanity.

Drazzil wrote:

Sorry for the manic wall of text. I posted something that read more like disaster porn then anything connected to reality and for that I'm sorry. Bipolar ftl.

I really do need to stay out of these types of discussions for my own sanity.

I actively encourage clients to find a balance between connection and overload. Sometimes that means shutting stuff off.

We all do it. Biggest thing people can do is take care of themselves first.

I have anxiety and am prone to catastrophic thinking. To say our current times is a challenge is a giant understatement.

In contrast with my usual pessimism, I'm going to predict:

27.1 If society collapses, either on the large scale (government falls, total chaos) or small (local quarantine, etc.) humans will in general tend to band together and form communities. Emergent groups will form, exhibiting community resilience.

Is this where I post Recession predictions?

Here's a scary one: Biden snags the nod and the stock market collapses. Then Trump campaigns on punishing the financial class while pointing out Biden's long and cozy relationship with the financial elite?

Drazzil wrote:

Here's a scary one: Biden snags the nod and the stock market collapses. Then Trump campaigns on punishing the financial class while pointing out Biden's long and cozy relationship with the financial elite?

Trump's spent the last three years taking credit for the stock market's performance and the economy. If it either collapses then he'll be blamed for it. And, as we're seeing with COVID-19, he'll spend months denying the stock market collapses and, when that fails, that he was responsible for it.

And then there's the irony of a supposed New York billionaire who owes hundreds of millions of dollars to the financial class--who he gave a $1.5 trillion tax cut to--suddenly successfully campaigning on punishing said financial class.

Trump's been campaigning on (white) nationalism, racism, and the myth that he's a successful businessman for five years now. He knows this schtick works for the people he's trying to reach and won't change it. Nor is Trump the kind of candidate that could quickly pivot his campaign to something new should something happen. Everytime he opened his mouth he'd be undermining whatever new message his campaign was trying to push out.

OG_slinger wrote:
Drazzil wrote:

Here's a scary one: Biden snags the nod and the stock market collapses. Then Trump campaigns on punishing the financial class while pointing out Biden's long and cozy relationship with the financial elite?

Trump's spent the last three years taking credit for the stock market's performance and the economy. If it either collapses then he'll be blamed for it. And, as we're seeing with COVID-19, he'll spend months denying the stock market collapses and, when that fails, that he was responsible for it.

And then there's the irony of a supposed New York billionaire who owes hundreds of millions of dollars to the financial class--who he gave a $1.5 trillion tax cut to--suddenly successfully campaigning on punishing said financial class.

Trump's been campaigning on (white) nationalism, racism, and the myth that he's a successful businessman for five years now. He knows this schtick works for the people he's trying to reach and won't change it. Nor is Trump the kind of candidate that could quickly pivot his campaign to something new should something happen. Everytime he opened his mouth he'd be undermining whatever new message his campaign was trying to push out.

Thanks for explaining this for me. You're right... Probabally. This said, the American voter has a really short attention span and the Average Trumpaloo is terribly misguided I seriously wouldn't put it past Trump to pull a 180, and wouldn't put it beyond some portion of voters to lap it up. I have NO faith in the average voter at this point in time. Trump's message is mercurial and the average voter has all the sanity of an old timey hatter.

There is no point reasoning with Trumpanzees. A sizable number of them are still convinced Obama was president during 9-11.

OG_slinger wrote:
Drazzil wrote:

Here's a scary one: Biden snags the nod and the stock market collapses. Then Trump campaigns on punishing the financial class while pointing out Biden's long and cozy relationship with the financial elite?

Trump's spent the last three years taking credit for the stock market's performance and the economy. If it either collapses then he'll be blamed for it. And, as we're seeing with COVID-19, he'll spend months denying the stock market collapses and, when that fails, that he was responsible for it.

And then there's the irony of a supposed New York billionaire who owes hundreds of millions of dollars to the financial class--who he gave a $1.5 trillion tax cut to--suddenly successfully campaigning on punishing said financial class.

Trump's been campaigning on (white) nationalism, racism, and the myth that he's a successful businessman for five years now. He knows this schtick works for the people he's trying to reach and won't change it. Nor is Trump the kind of candidate that could quickly pivot his campaign to something new should something happen. Everytime he opened his mouth he'd be undermining whatever new message his campaign was trying to push out.

It's not Trump's fault if our previous robust economy is attacked from within by The Democrat Party and "George Soros type globalists". He is trying to save our jobs and keep out immigrants. /s

Those predictions are based on the cute premise that Facts Matter.