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This is the time when every pundit explains that Kamala Harris lost due to this thing he saw coming first. So, now’s my turn.

Before explaining how I was right all along, let me admit: not that I predicted Trump’s victory.

Nor did I forecast that Harris would win either. As usual, I didn’t make any election predictions.

One reason I don’t forecast elections is because I’ve been writing this Wednesday-morning column for a long time, and I’ve always assumed that if, when penning it on Monday night of election week, I make a prediction that turns out wrong, everybody will point out what a maroon I am. But if it turns out I’m right, everyone will assume I wrote it Tuesday night after the polls closed.

So, what would be the point?

But, I also have a pretty good memory. So I can remember that I’ve been wrong a lot.

Further, I’m not that impressed by making correct predictions.

For one reason, it helps to be a fox, who knows many things, rather than a hedgehog, who knows one big thing.

While I have a lot of opinions, there are even more things that I know that I know very little about, such as the politics of abortion. It doesn’t seem practical to ban it, but it also seems kind of gruesome to favor it. So I don’t like thinking about it.

For a long time, that didn’t seem to matter much politically.

Then suddenly, it became the most important issue.

Then it wound up mattering less than expected.

How come?

Beats me.

For another reason, you’ll derive the most engagement and reputation from making predictions on questions that seem close to being toss-ups. If you get all the 60–40 elections right, nobody much cares. But if you get one 50.1–49.9 question right, you are a genius.

This first occurred to me in 2009 while watching a seesaw 35–34 football game between the great quarterbacks Tom Brady and Peyton Manning, as recounted in my Taki’s Magazine column “Quibbling Rivalry.”

At the time, a favorite topic of argument was: Would Manning or Brady prove the best quarterback ever? People loved kicking this around in 2009 because the evidence seemed very close for both contenders and thus was a galvanizing subject for controversy. As Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker told me in 2002:

Mental effort seems to be engaged most with the knife edge at which one finds extreme and radically different consequences with each outcome, but the considerations militating towards each one are close to equal.

In the long run, Brady, by winning seven Super Bowls to Manning’s two, would prove unquestionably the greater quarterback. So nobody bothers to argue about this anymore.

A confession: Although in 2009 I wrote:

I experienced a moment of middle-aged serenity. I realized that I didn’t actually need to have an opinion on perhaps the leading topic of office water cooler debate in this decade: Which quarterback is better?

My private view back then was that Manning would prove to be the best.

Oh well, I’m glad I kept my mouth shut.

As I wrote fifteen years ago:

As you may have noticed by now, I’m like that: clueless about most subjects that most people are most desperate to discuss. Who will win the Super Bowl? Will the stock market go up or down tomorrow? Will the health bill pass? Which party will win the next election?

Don’t ask me.

Those questions concern competitive institutions that are structured in ways that make their outcomes hard to foresee…and therefore captivating.

And even if your prediction turns out to be right in the long run, how do you know when the long run will finally arrive?

For example, I’ve been arguing since 2000 that immigration restriction is a better issue for the GOP than the Republican establishment believed. I’d say that as of 2024, I’ve proved prescient on that.

On the other hand, I can also remember that there have been a number of elections during that period when nobody seemed to care much about immigration. Since the late 20th century, the brilliant economist and investor John Maynard Keynes has been credited with saying, “The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” Like so many insightful quotes attributed to famous guys, Keynes probably never said this. But it’s worth bearing in mind.

So, what happened in 2024?

One striking development is that the trend of Hispanics, especially Latino men, voting more for Trump that emerged in the poverty-stricken Rio Grande Valley of Texas in 2020 seems to have spread cross-country in 2024.

Exit polls are inherently dubious these days when so many people vote early, but the NBC exit poll asserted that 46 percent of Hispanics voted for Trump, with 55 percent of Hispanic men going for him. Meanwhile, the Fox News exit poll found 42 percent of Hispanics voting for Trump, including 47 percent of Hispanic men.

(Also, black men are said to have voted 21 percent for Trump vs. only 7 percent for black women.)

There are huge cultural gaps between the rural Rio Grande Valley and the urban New York City area. But the trend that first seemed to surface in public consciousness in June 2020 in McAllen, Texas, when Mexican-American Daniel Pena waved a chain saw at Black Lives Matter protesters while shouting “Go home” (interestingly, Pena got off with time served, a suspended sentence, and anger management courses), resurfaced in the Tri-State region.

We can reality-check exit poll ethnic demographics by comparing them to ethnically skewed neighborhoods (although this doesn’t work for sex differences in voting, since men and women mostly live together). For example, in 56 percent Hispanic Bronx County in New York City, Trump’s share increased from 9 percent in 2016 to 16 percent in 2020 to 27 percent in 2024. Even more spectacularly, some heavily Hispanic parts of blue-state New Jersey, such as 43 percent Latino Passaic County, flipped to Trump.

A famous political-science aphorism coined a couple of generations ago by Milton Himmelfarb, uncle of William Kristol, is that “Jews earn like Episcopalians, and vote like Puerto Ricans.” (According to NBC, only 22 percent of Jews voted for Trump, while Fox found a more typical 31 percent Jewish support.) But do Puerto Ricans vote like Puerto Ricans in the Trump Era?

Why did Latino men surge toward the right?

I suspect the Theory of Intersectionality proved too persuasive to Democrat thought leaders, such as they are. The Democrats’ Coalition of the Fringes was more effective when each victim group got, seemingly, a brief turn at the top. Sometimes over the course of the Great Awokening, the top dogs were women, sometimes blacks, other times gays, immigrants, Hispanics, Jews, Muslims, etc.

But when the churn ground to a halt in the 2020s with black women and transgenders as the permanent peaks of the Pyramid of Privilege, then other groups, most notably Latino men, started to say: Forget this, I’m out of here.

A big problem for the Democrats is that their moves to benefit from Diversity weren’t a conspiracy organized by a brilliant brain trust of number crunchers. They tended to kick out their David Shor types, who were smart enough to grasp what they were up to.

Thus, most Democratic pundits really were semi-shocked when accused of engaging in a Great Replacement to boost their vote. They felt that there was nothing cynical about their crusade to replace white men. It’s simply that white men are bad and deserve to be replaced. Any electoral benefits accruing to Democrats are merely due to the arc of history bending toward justice.

So, nobody could warn Democrats in terms they’d respond to that their recent orgy of pandering to black women (e.g., nominating the unimpressive Kamala for veep and then for president) didn’t make much sense pragmatically: Democrats were already close to maxed out on the black woman vote. In their minds, they weren’t assembling a Coalition of the Fringes for practical reasons; they were appointing black women because their lack of achievement since 1619 just demonstrated that black women were the most oppressed and thus must be the most competent.

Conspiracy theories assume that the other side is much smarter than your side.

But usually both sides are pretty dumb.