Political writers often get away without being held accountable for their mistakes, so it’s important for us to review and correct for our mistakes as much as we can. As I did last year, I’ll do my best to acknowledge and explain my errors and bad predictions over the last year in the hope of avoiding them in the next.

Some of my most obvious and glaring errors this year come, as they usually do, from my attempts at political prognostication. Over the summer, I was far too confident that Trump would cease to be a factor in the nomination contest by the end of the year. In response to a question on Facebook, I said that Trump would certainly fade by the end of the year. Not only has this not happened, but he has retained and even gained support far beyond what I ever thought possible. I couldn’t get past the absurdity of Trump the man to recognize the enormous dissatisfaction with the GOP’s leaders that continues to propel him into the lead. The fact that almost no one took Trump’s candidacy seriously when it began doesn’t change the fact that I got this one completely wrong and missed what is arguably the most notable political story of the year for many months.

One of the other completely wrong calls I made late last year and again early this year was my prediction that Rubio wouldn’t run for president this year. I underestimated how ambitious he is, and I mistakenly assumed he had some loyalty towards Jeb Bush that he doesn’t have. The main reason that I got this so wrong was that I allowed my confidence that a Rubio campaign would be unsuccessful to color my thinking about whether there would be a campaign in the first place. Likewise, I dismissed Cruz’s candidacy as nothing more than his latest stunt and woefully underestimated how many conservatives would flock to his campaign. I made major errors when writing about three of the most competitive Republican presidential candidates, and in each case that happened because I allowed my low opinion of the candidate to influence my thinking.

On the Democratic side, I thought that having Webb and Sanders as challengers to Clinton could spark a real foreign policy debate over the administration’s record and force Clinton to answer for her abysmal record. There was a little of this in some of the early Democratic debates, but Clinton has mostly been able to brush off criticisms from her challengers and hasn’t had to do much work to justify her decisions. Her party is all too content with their front-runner, and there seem to be few Democratic voters that have any interest in holding her lousy foreign policy record against her. Once Webb dropped out, there wasn’t a candidate who could effectively attack her on these issues. This was clearly a case of wishful thinking on my part, and I’ll have to do better to guard against that in the future.

Regarding the war on ISIS, I erred in assuming that the public would gradually tire of the illegal and desultory intervention in Iraq and Syria. While there hasn’t been that much change in public opinion since the start of the year, the change that has occurred has been in favor of more aggressive tactics and slightly increased support for sending ground forces into combat. The public isn’t turning against the war, and as long as there are relatively few American casualties the public seems likely to support it for quite a while. When I argued that the public would tire of the war, I let myself forget that the public doesn’t judge desultory air wars all that harshly.

I believe those are the biggest mistakes I made this year. I’ll try to do better in 2016.