5 Things I Got Wrong This Year: 2015

8 min readDec 24, 2015

One of the worst aspects of political punditry is that it’s totally unaccountable. The incentive structure in political bloviation is totally fucked up — you get rewarded for making bold, gutsy calls that attract a lot of attention and garner a lot of clicks, but get zero punishment when you turn out to be wildly wrong.

In the long run, this means that people who opine on politics have little incentive to be cautious and even less incentive to learn from their mistakes. This is bad both for the body politic as a whole — a democracy can’t function without basic levels of trust, and every false prediction undermines the trust in the media as a whole — and for the individual pundit, who never grows or learns from their predictions.

I may not be a professional pundit, but as my annoyed Facebook friends can probably tell you, I have a lot of opinions and I aint afraid to share ’em. (You should ask them about the time I derailed a successful bar flirtation with an extended explanation of San Francisco zoning law. It was, uh, not my finest hour….)

Everyone who expresses an opinion has a moral obligation to try to be right; your opinions might influence others, and if you’re wrong, that influence could lead them to make decisions that are actively harmful. That obligation extends to me.

In that spirit, I’m making a list of the 5 things I got wrong this year.

1. Star Wars was great. (NO SPOILERS, I SWEAR.)

What Did I Predict? I thought The Force Awakens would suck. I was deeply skeptical George Lucas, who is both Star Wars’ greatest strength and greatest weakness, would let go of the franchise as promised. I was not a huge fan of what JJ Abrams had done with Star Trek. And frankly, I was so burned by the prequels that it was hard to be optimistic about Star Wars anymore.

Why Was I Wrong? Disney was pretty brutally efficient in cutting off Lucas’ access to the saga. Most news reports indicate he had no idea what was going on with the production until its tail end. JJ Abrams’ weak performance in Star Trek was mostly because he was just not a Star Trek guy, but his genuine love of Star Wars really shone through in Episode 7. Of course, TFA was not without its flaws — it leaned a little too much on the original trilogy, it didn’t do a great job of worldbuilding, and so on —but for the most part it felt like Star Wars, and that was all I really needed.

What Did I Learn? Trust the Force, Luke.

2. Jeb Bush is apparently the dumber Bush.

What Did I Predict? While I was never sold on the idea that Jeb was the inevitable frontrunner, I thought his massive warchest, Bush network, and record of fairly conservative governance would help him stay close to the top.

Why Was I Wrong? All of Jeb’s glaring weaknesses — the Bush name, the lack of charisma, heretical positions on immigration and Common Core — encountered a political cycle that was uniquely unforgiving to all of them. Bush is so establishment he was literally born into it; this might have been fine in 2012, but in an election cycle where two of the leading candidates include a reality show star and celebrity doctor, it’s utterly toxic. Bush is relatively pro-immigrant in a political environment where deporting all Muslims and having Mexico pay for a giant wall are massively popular policy proposals. Bush is a boring and uninteresting speaker facing an array of rivals that include a reality TV star, a former debate champion, a man routinely dubbed “the GOP’s Obama.” Bush was a bad candidate in an even worse political environment.

What Did I Learn? Candidate quality is really, really, really important. If your gut feeling is that a candidate is weak even though he looks great on paper, trust it. You’re probably right.

3. #FeelTheBern

What Did I Predict? I did not think Bernie Sanders would break beyond 5% nationally, to be honest. The Democratic Party has a long history of far left, crazy looking old men running to push their party to the left — Mike Gravel, anyone — and I assumed Bernie was just another one of them.

Why Was I Wrong? The Democratic Party has moved significantly to the left in the past few years. Not nearly as far left as the GOP has moved right, but on a variety of issues, including race relations, feminism, and economic inequality, the party has moved further to the left than I had expected. This shouldn’t be surprising; both the left and the right tend to become more extreme during periods of economic weakness and rising inequality.

(Want to know just how big the ideological gap is between the Democrats and the Republicans is, by the way? While Bernie has done really well, he’s still not likely to win, and Clinton’s been able to kneecap him by strategically shifting left on a few key issues. On the other hand, the establishment has totally lost control over the GOP, with the combined vote total between Trump (a fascist), Carson (nice but crazy guy), and Cruz (who would be the most ideologically conservative nominee in the history of the GOP exceeding 60%.)

Part of this shift to the left is happening because “socialism” is simply no longer a scary word in American politics. In fact, polls show most Democrats now prefer socialism to capitalism! I suspect a lot of this is a weird byproduct of the GOP’s constant bashing of Obama as a socialist. After all, a Democrat might think, “If you call Obama a socialist over and over, and it turns out I kind of like Obama, perhaps this socialism thing isn’t so bad?”

Another factor I underestimated is the salience of the e-mail scandal. While the email scandal was in practice a total nothingburger, I underestimated just how badly the media abhorred a vacuum. Though most Democratic voters did not give a flying fuck about the scandal, the constant drumbeat of accusation was enough to give Clinton a whiff of scandal, creating an opening for someone who exudes integrity like Bernie.

What Did I Learn? No politician can be all things to all people. The media hates an uncontested race, and will exploit the fissures candidates carefully tried to paper over in their coalition to generate headlines.

Also, the basic status quo of American politics is broken, and people know it; this increases the probability of improbable events.

4. Pro-density politics had a big year.

What Did I Predict? Anyone who has been my Facebook friend more than a day can testify that I’m pretty obsessed with the issues of housing and land use. I’ve been a housing geek since I read Matthew Yglesia’s The Rent is Too Damn High as a wee undergrad, but I’ve been pretty resigned to toiling away in relative obscurity on the issue. Zoning law is just not a very sexy part of public policy, after all.

Why Was I Wrong? The tech boom ran headfirst into the regulatory mess that is San Francisco housing law, and left a tremendous amount of wreckage in its wake. While San Francisco has not been an affordable city in a long time, things have never gotten so bad so quickly before; it seems like every other day that I read about a shack selling for $350,000 or a camping tent renting for $900 a month. While this trend is uniquely bad in San Francisco, it is by no means unique to our City. The return to the City has pushed up rents and triggered vicious fights over land use all across the country, including Seattle, New York, and Washington DC.

Three major factors made this a big year for pro-density politics

A) The rise of grassroots pro-density movements. One of the things Supervisor Scott Wiener, a local elected official known for his pro-housing leanings, has told me many times, is that he’s routinely amazed by the growth of a genuine, grassroots, pro-housing movement. For years, the density debate has been dominated by a complex debate between pro-density technocrats, developers, anti-density neighborhood groups, and activists seeking to extract affordability concessions.

But activists like Sonja Trauss have garnered national headlines by blowing up this paradigm, using traditional organizing tactics and imagery to push for less strict zoning laws and increased housing production. This has infuriated the traditional housing activist base to no end (with constant cries of “astroturf!”) and upended the conversation on housing.

B) The emerging national elite consensus on density. National figures have, for the most part, sat the zoning debate out, considering it a local issue. But as evidence has emerged that restrictive zoning is one of the major causes of inequality (and, I suspect, as the national economic debates over Keynesian stimulus and the minimum wage have petered out) major national economic figures on both the right and the left have weighed in on this issue, and declared that zoning laws are too strict.

While libertarian thinkers like economist Edward Glaeser have long argued for zoning reform, the fact that American left’s most pre-eminent public economist, Paul Krugman, and the chief economist of the Obama administration, Jason Furman, both came out publicly in favor of increased density is game changing. As anyone involved in local housing activism can tell you, the moment you suggest housing production is overregulated, you get dubbed a developer shill and a closet Republican —it’s much easier to answer that argument when you’ve got the Obama administration backing you up.

C) A lot of big land use fights. This year had a series of massive, knock-down, dragout battles over land use, ranging from the Mission Moratorium to the AirBnB initiative in San Francisco, the fight over single family zoning in Seattle, and DeBlasio’s battle to produce more affordable housing in New York. These clashes have garnered national attention and elevated the issue of housing to the national level.

What Did I Learn? Building movements is very, very, very hard, but also very, very, very fun.