As I did last year, I am going back over my posts from the previous year to acknowledge what I got wrong. The biggest errors came from making predictions about domestic politics that proved to be mostly uninformed speculation. This was especially true of my attempts to call the outcomes of the most competitive governors’ races in the midterms. Unlike the Senate races, I had paid relatively little attention to most of the governors’ races for most of the year, and it showed when it came time to pick winners. While I got most of my Senate predictions right, I was wrong about the gubernatorial elections in Wisconsin, Kansas, Michigan, Florida, Colorado, and Illinois. The remaining three that I picked correctly were the most obvious and almost impossible to get wrong. Despite following the Senate races much more closely, I still managed to be very wrong on a few. I thought Orman would pull off an upset in Kansas, and thought Hagan would hang on in North Carolina, and I was wrong on both counts. I predicted that Nunn would force a run-off, but instead she lost in a blowout. Earlier in the year, I had drawn attention to Cotton’s poor campaigning and weak polling, and I speculated that he might blow an easy pick-up for the GOP, but he went on to win in a huge landslide.

Though this was something I had already mentioned in last year’s review post, I didn’t fully appreciate until the fall of this year just how wrong I had been about it. I made the mistake of taking seriously signs that Republicans were jeopardizing their midterm election chances through their shutdown antics. As it turned out, the shutdown may have hurt Republicans’ favorability ratings then and later, but this had no discernible effect on their success at the polls the following year. The shutdown antics may have been useless, but they weren’t politically harmful for Republican candidates, and I put far too much stock in the idea that it would be a significant liability for them.

Likewise, I was far too hopeful that the abortive intervention in Syria in the summer of 2013 heralded a significant shift in public opinion about the use of force overseas. As we have seen over the last five months, there has been consistent majority support for the ISIS war from the start, and it took very little prompting for most Americans to rally behind an ill-advised and unnecessary war. I had expected that the ISIS war would become increasingly unpopular as it expanded and failed to achieve its stated goals, but so far nothing of the sort has happened. That could still change, but right now it appears that I significantly underestimated how tolerant of desultory military action the public would be.