James_September-October_2026_web - Flipbook - Page 79
It is often thought that the nineyear-old character Cole Sear in the
movie The Sixth Sense said, “I see
things.” In reality, he said, “I see
dead people.” As a pollster and
political analyst, I don’t see dead
people! But over the years, I’ve
used data, polling and intuition to
predict some significant moments
that ended up changing the direction of politics in America.
I’ve also gotten things wrong.
Sometimes the numbers just aren’t
right, or the crystal ball gets fuzzy.
However, in the years leading up to
the first presidential election of Donald Trump, I had a couple of very
good calls. They explain a great deal
about where we are today.
For years, I wrote a syndicated
column through Creators Syndicate.
It ran in medium-sized daily newspapers and on conservative online
sites such as Townhall. I retired
from writing the column in May
2016 after it became obvious that
Trump would win the GOP presidential nomination and that, with
the previously unseen speed at
which he moved the news cycle, a
weekly column could never keep up.
The first call came well over a
year before the collapse of the U.S.
financial markets in 2008. Something seemed odd to me, and I first
wrote about it in August 2007 in my
nationally syndicated column:
“The stock market is now arti昀椀cially supported by infusions of
Federal cash printed so rapidly
that the ink hasn’t dried.
“As we all know, the dollar has
been falling rapidly. News this
week that China, which holds a
massive amount of our currency,
will be divesting itself of the dollar over time has sent shivers of
fear through the 昀椀nancial world.
“Two weeks ago, I sold every
stick of stock I own. That’s only
the second time I’ve done that.
The 昀椀rst time was in the spring of
2000. I think you can remember
what followed then— the internet crash.”
I’m not pretending to be an
economist. But when you are
polling across the nation every day
and data comes back saying that
people feel burdened by debt, or
that people in high-growth areas
are scared to death that the value
of their homes is plummeting, you
don’t have to be Milton Friedman
to know that something is not right.
This was a rapidly developing
storm, one that some of us could
see coming.
A year later, our economy
started to crumble underneath us.
The 2008 financial crisis was likely
the final blow to any chance John
McCain had of defeating Barack
Obama in the presidential election.
FORSEEING THE POSSIBILITY
OF TRUMP’S ELECTION
Let me be the first to tell you
that I’m not always as good at
following my predictions as I am
at making them. Sometimes what
I have predicted has drawn pure
laughter and been dismissed out of
hand. But every now and then I get
lucky— and have the last laugh.
In December 2014 I was sitting
in a hotel restaurant and reading
about Trump making noises about
running for president. Of course,
the press treated it as a joke. But as
we moved into the seventh year of
Barack Obama’s presidency, and
knowing Trump’s history, something told me he had more than
just a chance.
December, in the pre-Trump
years, was usually a slow time for
news and politics. So I figured there
was no harm in writing a column
whose headline has been reworked
over the years but which originally
read, “Why Donald Trump Could
Win.” Editors at various publications turned it into “Why Donald
Trump Should Run.”
Mind you, I had no idea whether Trump would actually run. And
my little column had no impact on
his decision. But when the column
began appearing online and in
newspapers my friend Chris Ruddy who created Newsmax called.
He asked whether I had seen
Trump’s tweet. I admitted that I
didn’t follow Twitter so he forwarded it to me. Trump had tweeted
the column in what I believe was
one of his earliest purely political
online missives.
Here is the column Trump
tweeted, broken into segments,
S E PT E M B E R/O C TO BER 2026
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