2023 Year In Review

What I Got Right And Wrong, And A Pivot

It’s liberating to do this in a situation where there’s not very much that went wrong for me, for once. Yes, I did write that one column saying Bonnie Crombie wouldn’t win the OLP leadership (as opposed to the numerous about why she shouldn’t), and there’s the delightfully awkward 48 hours where I thought the Alberta NDP were favoured in May, but I’ll take both those. Given the last three years have seen such predictive failures as Blue Texas, Blue Virginia Governor, and Premier Steven Del Duca, to have avoided a failure so catastrophic is a nice respite.

The successes of this year were also substantial, both predictive and analytical. Between this site’s coverage of the Alberta election that correctly understood that Danielle Smith was a favorite (essentially) the entire time to the work I’ve done for TheLines on the GOP nomination correctly assessing it’s gonna be Trump, it’s been a good year.

The writing I did in the spring working through the various stories of foreign interference, the role of CSIS, RCMP, and PMO intelligence, and why the litany of Sam Cooper stories don’t really hold up are amongst the very best things I’ve ever written, in my view. But it also proves a very basic and salient point; I’m not sure this site should be what it was originally supposed to be. And if there’s nothing else I learned from this year, it’s that.

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At a fairly simplistic level, the lesson of 2023 (and the lesson of the US midterms, too) is that I can be good at predicting things, when I’m not up my own ass. My final Alberta prediction was rather successful, I had a perfect US Senate map in 2022, and my final House prediction that year was actually 2 seats low on Democrats (though not as great at a district-specific level). Had 2020-vintage (or even post 2021 Canada, pre-2022 Ontario) Scrimshaw seen this run of form, I’m sure I’d be spending all my time continuing to make outlandish and bad predictions. But at this point, I’ve been around the block enough to know that prediction is as much a factor of luck as it is skill.

Given that, I’m not really sure what the virtue of making predictions the nature of my beast anymore is. I’m not saying I won’t make them – I’m recording a 2024 US Elections Draft for my podcast this week (I will try and get around to recording that more often in 2024, I promise) with longtime friend and content partner Ryan Jakubowski – but it’s going to be monumentally less of a role in my content than it was the last time I had to cover a Presidential election. (In all likelihood, the vast, vast majority of my predictive work will be betting columns for TheLines).

2023 was the year my work changed. In 2024, my work will continuing to be more about articulating a values set, and articulating those values in a way that can be useful at a time when so much is made of ideological dogma and rhetorical idiocy from both sides. This site has become far more than I ever thought it would be – at first a home for my lunacy, it’s somehow become a site that some number of people take seriously.

Without wanting to overstate my influence, it’s clear that this site has grown into more than just the outgrowth of my predictions. It’s grown into a reflection of a perspective often missing from the discourse, a defence of progressive pragmatism that actually stands for progressive values and isn’t just code for mealymouthed centrism. My work is a vehicle that clearly others find valuable, whether I really get why they do. I often maintain my relevance is just evidence of market failure, because someone should have market corrected me, to use the Bill Simmons-ism.

It's also, I think, more rewarding to prioritize work that isn’t predictive. The pieces I take the most pride in aren’t the Alberta predictions, but the pieces where I feel I articulate something in a way that’s been lacking. Whether it’s columns on foreign interference or Jagmeet Singh or housing, those are the ones I look back on with the most fondness, as opposed to the poll of the day or poll of the week stuff that represented a much greater share of my work in the past.

2023 was a quiet year in many ways for this site, but a healthy one for it. Had I been forced to cover some big election in the immediate aftermath of the midterms, and especially after Alberta, I’d have fallen back into a lot of bad habits. With a more level head, there’s a better chance that 2024 and beyond can go well. The oft-unsaid but fundamentally true insight into why most people talk themselves into terrible predictions is either hubris or boredom.

In 2020, I predicted a Democratic landslide mostly because it was more exciting to talk myself into a blue wave than it was to keep writing the same copy about how Biden had a sizable and clear lead in the rust belt, and while he (and Senate Democrats) had good chances in other states, fundamentally the race would be decided in the upper Midwest. In 2022, I went as all in on Del Duca winning, and on Pierre Poilievre having no chance of winning the next federal election, because I was high on my own supply after the 2021 Canadian election and thought I would never be wrong in Canada again. Now? I have no interest in making either of those mistakes again.

2023 has seen me write some of my best work, and some of the pieces I am proudest to have written. I have grown as a writer, and as a (for lack of a better word) thinker, and for your support during this transitional year I’m incredibly grateful. I can’t guarantee 2024 will be as successful, but step 1 of not making 2024 a repeat of past failures is admitting that I can’t perfectly predict the future, I can only control what I put into this world. And that’s why this site will continue to be at the vanguard of articulating a message worth fighting for, and focusing less on predicting whether I’ll be happy or sad on election nights.