Washington 2026 outlook: Stormy politics and weather

Last year’s predictions were on target, so I’m climbing out on a limb again

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(Bill Sternberg is a veteran Washington journalist and former editorial page editor of USA Today.)

PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. (Callaway Climate Insights) — Throughout my career in journalism, I’ve been skeptical about predictions, particularly the unscientific kind.

Once I spent many hours analyzing the much-ballyhooed weather forecasts in The Old Farmer’s Almanac. The Almanac’s accuracy, it turned out, was precisely what you would expect from chance, no better or worse than flipping a coin.

Another time I trained my sights on noted seeress Jeane Dixon, whose syndicated prognostications were published every December in hundreds of newspapers around the United States. Let’s just say her crystal ball was cloudy far more often than it was clear.

A year before Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned in disgrace, Dixon predicted that “there is great success, fame and fortune ahead of him.” Similarly, she wrote that a wiretapping scandal involving Richard Nixon “will show him as a sincere man and will help his public image.” Cuban dictator Fidel Castro remained in power decades after Dixon repeatedly forecast his demise. One year, the famed astrologer said that Hank Aaron would never break Babe Ruth’s home-run record. And so on.

When I became an opinion editor, I soon realized the editorials that aged poorly were inevitably those that tried to peer into the future. In 2015, after Donald Trump declared John McCain is “not a war hero” because he was captured in Vietnam, the editorial board wrote: “The classless attack on McCain might or might not turn out to mark the end of Trump’s presidential ambitions. This much is assured: The mouth will keep moving, and one day it will open wide and swallow his candidacy whole.”

After that didn’t happen, I decreed that the word “will” was to be reserved for certainties such as sunrises and eclipses. Other forecasts were to be hedged with weasel words such as “might,” “could” or “is likely to.”

Given all this, you’d think that I’d steer clear of the prediction business. But the urge to prognosticate is too powerful, even for those of us who should know better. (As Yogi Berra reputedly said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”) So last year at this time, I made a series of forecasts about how much of President Joe Biden’s climate legacy would survive the second Trump administration.

Looking back, most of my calls were on target, though I underestimated how much the Trump administration would do administratively without congressional involvement, and I didn’t foresee Elon Musk’s adventures in DOGE-land. (The messy breakup of Musk and Trump, however, was entirely predictable.)

Here’s a report card on last year’s climate-related predictions, followed by some new limb-climbing for 2026: