2024: End of Year Predictions Scorecard

Topic: Perspective

When I was just an aspiring Army ROTC cadet, one of my detachment’s cadre officers told me, when I asked what it would be like to be a Military Intelligence officer, “a good intelligence officer is worth his weight in gold.”

Of course, it’s easy to tell if you have a good intelligence officer on your hands given enough time and predictions to evaluate. If you’re still alive and accomplishing your mission, odds are you have a good one who gets stuff right most of the time. I’m assuming if you’ve been with me within the pages of this journal for the duration, you’re here because you have confidence in my ability to get things right. In fact, I’ll bet the New York Times is right there with you on it, especially since I proved all their experts to be…full of shit.

This post will review my Ten Bold Predictions for 2024, which I issued on January 1, and let me tell you, I did better this year than I did last year, when I drilled 6 out of 10 of my Ten Bold Predictions for 2023, and scored partial hits on two others.

The purpose of this post is singular – accountability. On the other end of this evaluation, you’ll get Ten Bold Predictions for 2025, a year that offers more promise than any in recent memory. Without further ado, let’s get rolling:

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I. RFK, Jr., will Underwhelm as a Presidential Candidate

Robert F. Kennedy’s greatest political days are hopefully ahead of him, and I am personally very excited about his potential impact should he ultimately be confirmed by the U.S. Senate as Health and Human Services Secretary. Donald Trump obviously knew Kennedy could have taken important chunks of the vote from him, otherwise there would have been no need to form an anti-establishment alliance beginning in late August.

Kennedy wound up pulling in 756,393 votes, but didn’t win a single county equivalent. Granted, much of this performance is owed to Kennedy removing himself from ballots and telling people to vote for Trump, but there was a discussion not so long ago about him potentially winning electoral votes, which hasn’t been accomplished by a candidate from outside one of the two major parties since 1968. This is a direct hit.

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II. Veepstakes Final Four

I missed with my Vice Presidential speculation in 2023, when I figured Kari Lake would emerge as a top candidate for Trump’s main battle buddy, and I whiffed on it again in 2024. I primarily floated three names this time around. Two were from the GOP professional class – Kristi Noem, Governor of South Dakota, and Greg Abbott, Governor of Texas. Trump won both of their states by commanding margins and didn’t need either on ticket to shore up those electoral votes.

I also named Ben Carson as a possible candidate, who has a bit of outsider appeal and could have been offered in an appeal to minority voters and suburbanites. Kennedy, as an off-the-wall unity compromise, lingered in my thoughts for a moment, though I dismissed his selection by the end of the prediction as unlikely. I had not anticipated the selection of J.D. Vance, who was just elected to the Senate for the first time in 2022, and it didn’t take me long to figure out why Trump picked him. This is a miss for me, and probably for many others who dabbled in early V.P. speculation.

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III. GOP Primary Hindenburg

Right off the bat, I had no hesitation in stating Trump would easily win the GOP nomination. Chris Christie and Asa Hutchison got honorable mentions on my way down the list to Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, who were both assured a pathway to the GOP nomination existed against the political King Kong of this era who only grew more popular with each attempt to remove him from political life.

DeSantis dropped out by the end of January before having to deal with facing Trump in the Florida presidential primary, and Haley decided to stick around for Super Tuesday – long enough to win Washington, D.C., and Vermont, but nothing else. This pick was one of the easier ones I’ve ever made, and a direct hit.

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IV. All Judicial Persecution of Trump Will Fail

This one, with the entire political world seeking to ensnare Trump, took some faith. I had also, at the time of the prediction, lived through more than eight years of Trump embodying the persona of what I like to call Teflon Don, a man who absolutely nothing sticks to. None of the court cases against Trump, like in Juan Merchan’s third world court, have had any impact, and Jack Smith is on his way out because he would rather be forgotten than mess with the bull and get his horns.

Someone somewhere is going to want to slap something on Trump for posterity to remember, but it doesn’t matter – he is on his way to becoming the 47^th President of the United States, this stuff didn’t stick and didn’t stop him, and I scored a direct hit in calling it like it turned out.

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V. The U.S. Supreme Court will Invalidate All Moves to Remove Trump from Ballots

At this point in 2023, Colorado (Supreme Court) and Maine (Secretary of State) had ruled President Trump could not appear on the forthcoming 2024 ballot. As it turned out, President Trump ran in both of those states, and although he didn’t win either outright, he took the one electoral vote assigned to Maine’s 2^nd Congressional District for the third consecutive election.

Both states, and any other states harboring such a stupid, tyrannical idea, were smacked down by the U.S. Supreme Court, just like I said, in a March 4 decision siding with Trump. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a very detailed direct hit including the proper assessment of who was going to get Trump back on the ballot where he was, or could potentially be, removed.

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VI. Violence (or War) will be the “COVID” of 2024

Every sign in the world, evident to nearly all by the time of the election, pointed to Trump routing the Democrat nominee in the 2024 race. Most people reading this journal know that trends, indicators, bellwethers, and predictors pointed to Trump winning the 2020 election, as well; however, the political class responded to those signs by creating the COVID crisis, which led to the relaxing of election laws and rules nationwide, and the creation, out of thin air, of many procedures states were in no way prepared to oversee, such as mass mail-in balloting.

When I made this prediction, I thought mass violence could be unleashed in the U.S. stemming from our open border and create the false demand for remote voting; I also anticipated the establishment could be cooking up overseas entanglements to help the incumbent president, although modern history does not suggest it would have helped him. Regardless, those war drums banged all year long and forced Trump’s campaign to work around an increasingly divided mess in Ukraine, East Asia, and the Middle East, and all the bad actors that brought that situation to fruition remain eager to create a foreign policy nightmare to hamper the one-term Trump agenda preparing to kick off in less than one month. I give myself a partial hit on this one.

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VII. Joe Biden will not Debate Donald Trump

When I wrote these predictions, I did not have “June Presidential Debate” on my Bingo card. It turns out that I missed this prediction about three months earlier than I would have anticipated if I would have been told ahead of time I would miss it. The bigger question remains as to whether Biden’s handlers sacrificed him on the public stage to take him out, given that his polling was showing a 1980s-level massacre taking shape.

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VIII. Trump will Channel Jackson, Polk, and Grant

Andrew Jackson banged the “stolen election” war drum from 1824 until his election in 1828, and got stronger because of it. Trump was given many opportunities to back away from his claims the 2020 election was rigged and knew better than to concede it and thereby honor such a corrupt system of seating elected officials. Neither Jackson nor Trump ever gave up the position of decrying the outright corruption of the entrenched political class.

James Polk promised to run only once for President and give up the White House after just one term, which was a promise he kept. Trump, of course, is term limited, but despite the efforts of the DeSantis campaign to paint his single term limit as a weakness, Trump used it as a strength, and so far, hasn’t given any indication he will forsake the leverage offered to him by holding just a single term, and not needing to worry about reelection, he needs to get drastic agenda items accomplished.

Ulysses S. Grant took the fight to the Confederacy when the cocktail class generals of the Union Army didn’t want to get down and dirty after getting smoked for the first two years of the Civil War. Trump is the first Republican presidential candidate in a generation to have serious rallies in New York, California, and other deep blue areas to generate national interest and support and put the enemy (Harris) on defense for a change.

This prediction, although somewhat subjective, is a direct hit.

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IX. Non-white Voters will Re-write Election Math

I told you so, and I told you so again. In fact, I don’t know if there is a bigger direct hit than this one, and it was such a consequential hit that it got Trump elected President again when the left have been cheering the decline of the white population for decades now. This map of Hispanic South Texas says it all:

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X. 2024: Light Appears at the End of the Tunnel

Speaking of Bingo cards, I’m capping this assessment off by claiming my free space right here in the form of a subjectively awarded direct hit rather than a partial hit, which could apply depending on what your view of light at the end of the tunnel looks like. You may have noticed that I did not make a prediction on the outcome of the 2024 election in my treatise, although I did make a formal one on November 5, 2024, that correctly called all 56 races for electoral votes, while all the magicians and sorcerers who uphold the polling dark arts again fell on their swords in disgrace.

The Fourth Turning is still required reading as far as I’m concerned, and with 2024 having seen Trump survive multiple attempts on his life, the decay, failure, and political humbling of a sitting president, and waves of millions of American minorities waking up to the lies they’ve been sold, as well as the forming of previously unheard of political coalitions spanning many ideologies, it couldn’t be more obvious that life in America is changing.

This brings us the potential for unmatched peril, with enemies of freedom clinging to every last life raft, but also for the potential to see the arrival of a much-needed renaissance, spiritual revival, and rejuvenation of the American spirit which will spread freedom seeds to the most distant corners of the world.

As for me, I met my stated goal for 2024:

Did you think I was going to make an outright prediction about the 2024 election? It’s alright if you did. I am going to be busy for the next 306 days throwing my best pitch every single day, executing in my lane, doing what I do well. Still, there exist many things outside of my control. All I can do is my best, and that is what I will do, trusting God for results.

My short-term goal is to restore President Trump to the White House.

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Final Scorecard

7 Direct Hits

1 Partial Hit

2 Misses

This marks an improvement of one for direct hits over 2023, with the same number of misses (two). Some are a bit subjective, but others hit right on the screws. I’m happy with my predictions, and also happy with how the 2024 election turned out, despite plenty of work still to be done that cost us incalculable numbers of down ballot races.

So, what do you think? Want to keep me around for another year? I hope so, because my Ten Bold Predictions for 2025 will run on New Year’s Day, and I am very excited about the year to come, although it will not be without its own distinct challenges.

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Seth Keshel, MBA, is a former Army Captain of Military Intelligence and Afghanistan veteran. His analytical method of election forecasting and analytics is known worldwide, and he has been commended by President Donald J. Trump for his work in the field.