We all make mistakes. If you’re a professional journalist, your mistakes are memorialized publicly and permanently on the Internet.
But given the flood of information on the web, much of what we write and say and predict is washed away in the tide. In an effort to heighten accountability, I’ve made it a tradition to recap where I was wrong in the past year — bad predictions, factual errors, general slip-ups.
I had a few factual errors in my columns and blog posts. For instance, in trying to pay tribute to my WASPy former editor, Stephen Smith, I accused him of going to a different tony New England boarding school than the tony New England boarding school he actually went to.
Regarding the 2014 elections, I was overly hopeful that a free-market populism streak might infect the GOP and help set the tone for the midterm elections. In March, I wrote on how the fight over Obamacare’s insurer bailout and the Export-Import Bank could draw a clear contrast between big-government/big-business Democrats and free-market Republicans.
But the GOP never unified on either of these issues. Republicans moved the insurer bailout to the back burner, only dealing with it in the lame-duck session. On Ex-Im, the party punted until 2015. In fact, Democrats were more likely to campaign on their support for Ex-Im than Republicans were to tout their opposition. And in two GOP Senate pickups — Iowa and North Carolina — the Republican nominees were pretty openly corporatist.
There’s always next year, a guy can hope.
My political forecasts were good, but not perfect.
The sentence that was wrongest, after the fact, was in my column just after the Mississippi GOP Senate primary. Incumbent Thad Cochran finished second, barely earning a spot in a runoff. Insurgents usually do better in runoffs, and so I wrote that Mississippi voters “ forced [Cochran] into a runoff that he’s likely to lose.” Cochran, of course, won the runoff.
A month before the November election, I predicted Scott Walker winning big. He did. But I wrote, “Barring a serious misstep, Walker won’t merely win in November, he will win bigger than he has won before.” Instead, Walker’s portion of the vote fell a bit, from 53.08 percent in the 2012 recall to 52.29 percent in 2014 — slightly above his 52.24 percent in 2010.
As far as the Senate went, I called a GOP takeover, but I underestimated it. Given the fluid nature of the Kansas Senate race and Sen. Pat Roberts’ awful numbers for an incumbent, I gave that race to independent Democrat Greg Orman. I also predicted the Georgia Senate race would go to a runoff.
But if you read my article laying out my predictions, you’ll notice what doesn’t appear: the Virginia Senate race, in which Democrat Mark Warner eked out a win by less than one percentage point.
And this omission points to the theme of my biggest failings as a political columnist in 2014: I missed a handful of stories that were right under my nose.
Virginia is adjacent to DC, where I work — and Maryland, where I live — yet I spent zero time covering or writing about the Senate race I figured would be a shoo-in for Warner. Speaking of Maryland, we just elected a Republican governor — Larry Hogan. Search my archives and you won’t find me following that race, although I could have covered it from my own backyard.
I was in Illinois during my Wisconsin reporting trip, and I decided not to spend any time on that gubernatorial race, where a Republican also pulled off an upset.
And worst of all, I was completely blindsided by Dave Brat’s primary victory over House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. The Tea Party vs. the Establishment — populism vs. Wall Street — this race had everything I’m normally all over. And I missed it.
I’ll never be a perfect columnist. But here’s hoping this year, fewer stories sneak past me.
Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Sunday and Wednesday on washingtonexaminer.com.
