My best Good Judgement score of the year was somewhat accidental
Lucking out with uncertainty
I’ll be speaking with Justin Vela of GEOSTREAMS, an ESG consultancy, about what startups and investors should take away from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It’s free to attend and you can send us any questions you’d like us to address in advance.
I checked in on the Good Judgement Open to make forecasts for 2022 and discovered that one of my 2021 forecasts had been a big winner.
I made the forecast in August 2020 and forgot that I had done so. At that time, it looked like Democrats would control the Senate with approximately 52 seats and there would be considerable momentum for filibuster reform.
After the November elections, when the Senate would either be Republican or evenly divided, the chances for filibuster reform looked completely dead. Those prospects only grew slightly over the spring of 2021 when Democratic Senators started talking more vocally about eliminating the filibuster to pass voting rights legislation. But then they died down again almost to nothing as the reconciliation package known as Build Back Better took up most of the legislative oxygen. As December approached, with the question about to close, the final crowd forecast was only 2% that it would happen.
The debt ceiling deal
As it turned out, the filibuster was curtailed. The Senate agreed to a rules change by which the debt ceiling could be raised by a simple majority and not be subject to a filibuster.
It served the purpose of both Democratic and Republican leadership. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer no longer had to worry about the debt ceiling being taken hostage by Republicans. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell didn’t have to worry about the debt ceiling being taken hostage by other Republicans.
The deal was presaged by the short-term debt limit extension in October. McConnell had pushed for Democrats to raise the debt ceiling by a simple majority in a reconciliation package. It would have sapped a little bit of Schumer’s political capital, by squeezing it into the BBB and perhaps forcing a faster timeline on that than he would have wanted. Schumer refused to do so, pushing McConnell to supply Republican votes to avoid breaching the debt ceiling.
However, the vote split the Republican caucus. McConnell could only get 11 votes to invoke cloture on the debt ceiling. Generally speaking, any game of legislative chicken that results in a party splitting is one to be avoided.
December deal
This makes the agreement to curtail the filibuster on the debt ceiling a logical move. McConnell got to protect his members from forcing them into votes that might hurt them in primary elections. Schumer avoided needing to go through the cloture process and protected reconciliation from being tied to the debt ceiling.
This is the stuff that bipartisan deals are made of. Both sides benefit from the agreement in an asymmetrical way. Winning elections might be a zero-sum game - either a Democrat, Republican, or Independent gets it. But the interests of McConnell and Schumer were in this case not solely about elections. Schumer got a potential procedural and policy win. McConnell protected his own position by helping his biggest supporters within the caucus (whose arms he’d be otherwise twisting at the next vote).
Why didn’t anyone see this coming?
With a final crowd forecast of only 2%, it’s fair to argue that the wisdom of the crowds failed here.
You could also argue that the issue is so specific that it shouldn’t count. It only allows for one other bill relevant to the debt ceiling to be brought up without the filibuster. That technically satisfies the question, which only called for “the scope of matters on which a filibuster cannot be used” to be expanded, but is not as wide-ranging as what everyone expected, which was a wholescale elimination of the filibuster or a carve-out for voting rights.
Precisely because it was such an unexpected and technical matter is why this question is such an important example of a forecasting pitfall.
When talking about the elimination of the filibuster, everyone “knew” what we were talking about. The voting rights carve out had been discussed and debated for months in Washington. It was the first thing everyone thought about when asked about the filibuster. It was clear and obvious that, if there were a fracturing in the filibuster’s hold, it would come on that issue and from Senators Manchin and Sinema.
Instead, the filibuster got weakened for the debt ceiling and the prime mover was McConnell. It was very likely that McConnell would never go along with anything that slightly weakened the filibuster. But very likely does not mean certain!
Politics is full of black swan events, unexpected convergences of interests, and the unforeseeable. It’s one reason why the Good Judgement Open is a great tool (and I certainly recommend signing up). Because it incentivizes its participants to think probabilistically, it forces us to question the certainties that conventional wisdom peddles.
I may not get as lucky as I did on this question again. But my 2022 predictions will certainly be informed by the reminder not to have such certainty.
Learn more about the wisdom of the crowds and other forecasting techniques in the Two Lanterns Political Risk Academy