The 14 predictions that came true in 2024 — and the 10 that didn’t

Making predictions is a tricky business, and here at Future Perfect, we don’t pretend to have a crystal ball. But we do think there’s real epistemic value in putting our forecasts out there and — just as importantly — owning up to how they turned out. (Something that happens too rarely in the media, as we learned after November’s election.) Looking back at our predictions for 2024, we had a wild ride trying to anticipate a year that threw more than a few curveballs our way.

For 2024, we made 24 predictions in total, covering everything from who would win the White House to whether Elon Musk could actually get those Cybertrucks on the road. When the dust settled, we got 14 right and 10 wrong — batting .583. That’s Shohei Ohtani on a hot streak, though down somewhat from our 2023 results. But I did say it was a topsy-turvy year.

Some calls were right on the money, though. We correctly saw Trump’s comeback and the GOP taking back the Senate. We nailed it when we said Oppenheimer would grab Best Picture (I mean, who didn’t love watching Cillian Murphy brood for three hours?). And we were spot-on about some big international news, like Claudia Sheinbaum making history as Mexico’s first woman president and Modi keeping his grip on power in India.

But hey, nobody’s perfect. We thought the FDA would greenlight MDMA therapy for PTSD — that was a swing and a miss. We seriously underestimated how many Cybertrucks Tesla would crank out. And while we got some tech predictions right (looking at you, Waymo and SpaceX), we whiffed on predicting OpenAI’s moves.

The whole point isn’t just to keep score — it’s about getting better at this prediction thing through practice and learning from our mistakes. And in a world that seems to get more unpredictable by the day, we think that’s a pretty useful skill to develop. —Bryan Walsh

The United States

Donald Trump will return to the White House (55 percent) — RIGHT

I like to imagine that at least one incredibly sheltered person is learning this fact from this article: Donald Trump was elected to a second nonconsecutive term as president. There wasn’t much courage or confidence in this prediction, which I put at only 55 percent odds.

My basic approach was to try to use a political science model incorporating national polling, and I came up with a prediction of a narrow Trump victory. President Joe Biden was fairly unpopular, and Trump was narrowly leading him in polling. I wasn’t confident that advantage would persist — but it did.

I will say that if I had updated my prediction throughout the year, it would have changed a lot. I remember in June, before the disastrous Biden-Trump debate, telling friends I gave Trump a 75 percent chance to win; after the debate, I bumped it up to around 90 percent. When Vice President Kamala Harris replaced Biden and surged in polling compared to her predecessor, I reverted to something like 50-50 odds. The actual race and its contours were changing dramatically, and my sense of the race changed dramatically too. Almost by coincidence, the ultimate election wound up being the narrow contest that polling would’ve predicted at the end of 2023. —Dylan Matthews

Republicans will recapture the Senate (85 percent) — RIGHT

I think my past self explained the reasoning here well: “There are many, many ways for Republicans to retake the Senate. Everything has to go right simultaneously for Democrats to keep it.” Everything did not go right simultaneously for Democrats this election. They had already lost a seat forever when Joe Manchin decided to retire in West Virginia, a place where no other Democrat-caucusing candidate could ever win, which left them with a 50-seat maximum in 2024.

Then they lost Sherrod Brown in Ohio and Jon Tester in Montana, red states that were going to be tough for Democrats to hang on to in a presidential election year. Then, in something of a shock, Pennsylvania’s Bob Casey was defeated by a private equity multimillionaire who doesn’t really live in the state and can’t tell the Philadelphia Eagles and Pittsburgh Steelers apart. When that guy wins, you know Democrats are having a bad year.

On the plus side, it could’ve been much, much worse for Democrats. Despite Harris losing Arizona, Democrat Ruben Gallego won the Senate race there narrowly. Tammy Baldwin barely hung on in Wisconsin, and Elissa Slotkin won an open seat in Michigan by 0.3 percentage points, even as those two states went for Trump. If the Senate results had followed the presidential map, Republicans would have a 56-seat majority and no trouble confirming anyone Trump wants in his Cabinet. Instead, they ended up with 53 seats, which might be just small enough to cause Trump actual trouble. —DM

Democrats will recapture the House (55 percent) — WRONG

My reasoning here was that Republicans held a very small majority in the House going into the election, and Democrats seemed likely to pick up a number of seats in New York in particular due to redistricting. Sure enough, the party picked up three seats in New York, but lost others to pick up only one seat on net — not enough to flip the chamber.

In my defense, I was clear this might happen, writing, “There’s still an easy-to-imagine world where Republicans hold the House, especially if Trump wins the presidential race and if he pulls out a popular vote victory this time.” As it happens, that is the world we live in. But with 220 Republicans in the House and 218 needed to pass anything, there might not be much that Trump can do with this majority. —DM

Inflation will come in under 3 points (65 percent) — RIGHT

I have not always had the best track record when it comes to inflation predictions, but this one worked out. It was clear in 2023 that inflation had started to decline rapidly in the wake of the Fed’s interest rate hikes, and that decline continued through 2024, enough so that the Fed was able to start cutting again.

By the Fed’s preferred measure — the personal consumption expenditures price index, minus food and energy — prices grew by 2.8 percent from October 2023 through October 2024. That’s an annual rate below 3 points, though not by a whole lot. The Fed’s goal is to get the number down to 2 percent. I find it hard to see prices stabilizing that much, especially if tariffs from the Trump administration cause consumer prices to spike in a one-off event. But we’re clearly doing better than a few years ago. —DM

2023 US car crash deaths will again exceed 40,000 (60 percent) — RIGHT

I like to make this prediction mainly to draw our readers’ attention to the scandalous number of Americans killed by our transportation system. In 2023, according to statistics released this year by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, that number dropped by about 3.6 percent from 2022, to a still-abysmal 40,990, a figure that remains significantly elevated after a Covid-era spike erased more than a decade of progress in reducing car crash deaths. 

How many is that, exactly? It’s about as many Americans as are killed by guns and more than double the number killed in homicides overall, though it’s far fewer than the numbers of Americans who die from diseases like heart disease and cancer. It’s twice the number of people killed by cars in the European Union, even though the EU has 100 million more people. And the federal car fatality statistics are actually around 10 percent lower than the true number of Americans killed by cars because they exclude some cases, including crashes on private roads and parking lots. 

If today’s rates remained steady, a rough estimate would suggest that about 1 percent of all Americans would be killed by cars — a stunningly high cost of admission into our car-dependent society. —Marina Bolotnikova

The world

Netanyahu will be unseated as Israeli prime minister (75 percent) — WRONG  

I almost always predict that Netanyahu will stay in power, but I made an exception when writing last year’s predictions because the Israeli public was so incredibly furious at him after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. Polls were showing that voters wanted him out — by a wide margin. I figured if ever there was a time when he could be pushed out, this was it. 

But even this wasn’t enough. Israel has a parliamentary system, where governments typically form on the basis of coalitions. Netanyahu is really, really good at pacifying his allies in the governing coalition — and they have kept him in power. —Sigal Samuel

The world will be hotter in 2024 than it was in 2023 (80 percent) — RIGHT

Climate change is very obviously making its effects felt. This summer was the hottest on record globally. By November, scientists said this year is “virtually certain” to break 2023’s record. They also noted that 2024 marks the first year that Earth is more than 1.5 degrees Celsius hotter than in the pre-industrial period.  

Sadly, this prediction was a pretty solid bet: You can make it every year and you’ll get it right about 80 percent of the time. As my colleague Kelsey Piper has noted, “This is based on looking at the last 25 years of atmospheric temperature data: On average, in four out of five years, this prediction would be right.” —SS

Narendra Modi will remain as prime minister of India after the country’s 2024 elections (85 percent) — RIGHT

Modi secured a third straight term as India’s prime minister after this spring’s massive elections, which saw over 640 million voters turn out. It’s an achievement equaled only by India’s founding prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and one that was about as easy to predict as any outcome in this record-breaking year of global elections. 

Modi rolled into the elections with an approval rating in the mid-70s, or roughly twice as high as Biden’s popularity around the same time. In a year when incumbent leaders around the world fell in election after election, Modi and his BJP party were a sure thing — so much so that my only regret was not choosing a probability of 99 percent.

Even so, this election did not turn out the way many prognosticators expected, myself included. The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance secured a majority in Parliament with 293 seats, but that was well short of the 400 seats the alliance was shooting for. And the BJP itself only won 240 seats, a significant drop from the 303 seats it had won in the previous election. As a result, the party lost its solo majority in the lower house of parliament for the first time in 10 years.

As my colleague Josh Keating wrote, the results were bad

Author Of article : Bryan Walsh, Dylan Matthews, Marina Bolotnikova, Sigal Samuel, Kenny Torrella, Izzie Ramirez

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