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I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.” Are you new here? Sign up to get our newsletter daily. Would you rather listen? You can find our podcast here.
Editor's note: You are on our free mailing list. This is a preview of today's subscribers only Friday editions, which is one of our most popular of the year. You'll be asked to become a member to read the whole thing — please do! One of the reasons I started Tangle is the lack of accountability in the media and punditry space. Every day, journalists, columnists, talking heads and (especially) economists share their opinions online, often without ever reflecting on what they got right or wrong. A few years ago, after completing my first year writing this newsletter daily, I decided to go back and review my work. The response from readers was overwhelmingly positive, and I vowed to do it every year for the rest of my time writing Tangle. To my delight, I’ve seen this practice become more popular among other independent media outlets. The writer Matthew Yglesias helpfully calls this exercise — apologies for the language — the practice of "trying to be less full of shit." Yglesias, in a piece making some of his own predictions about the future, cited a couple great examples of people who were gleefully wrong about really big things and simply ignored what happened: First was Elon Musk, who tweeted shortly after Sam Bankman-Fried's cryptocurrency empire fell apart that SBF would not be investigated because he was a Democratic donor, and Democrats control Congress and have appointees at the Justice Department. Musk's tweet was liked over 130,000 times and got over 22,000 retweets: Of course, shortly afterward, SBF was swiftly arrested, extradited, charged, and is now being investigated. Musk's tweet is still up, and he’s never addressed it. The other example Yglesias cited was "left-wing people confidently asserting that Joe Manchin’s objections to Build Back Better were offered in bad faith due to his fealty to the coal industry." Of course, Manchin eventually came around on the Inflation Reduction Act, and progressive activists have since taken credit for the expansive climate proposals he helped pass. As Yglesias put it, “if Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, and Ron Wyden had listened to progressive activists’ diagnosis of the situation, they would have pulled the plug on talks prematurely and there would have been neither an IRA nor a bipartisan infrastructure bill. The legacy of the 117th Congress would instead have been a bunch of tweets about politically destructive efforts to kneecap U.S. energy production via executive order.” I like these two examples because they represent two major stories from 2022 and two clear examples of people or groups sounding off and ignoring when they were wrong. They’re also very different from each other: One, a person making a flippant tweet, and the other a political faction that built an entire strategy around an idea that was just wrong. There are many, many more such examples when you look at the full spectrum of journalism and punditry. In order to try to be less a part of the problem, I've spent the last few weeks sifting through our archive and re-reading some of the top newsletters from the last year. In particular, I've been reading "my take" and examining how those takes have held up. As I said last time we did this, I've written well over 200 newsletters about politics in the last year. Each of those newsletters is somewhere between 3,500 to 4,000 words, with anywhere from 1,000 to 2,000 words of my own original writing and thoughts. So it'd be impossible to review them all in detail here. Instead, I've taken submissions from my staff and from readers, and pulled a few where I took a relatively strong stance to review. I'm going to share with you key excerpts from my writing and my overarching take, and then a brief "reflection" section along with a grade — on the A (very good) to F (very bad) scale. Last year, I also made 19 predictions about the future. At the end of the newsletter, I’ll update you on those, along with some rapid fire assorted notes in the same spirit. I hope you enjoy it.
Midterm preview.On November 8th, we published our final preview of the midterms. In that edition, I had one major point (emphasis added): This election does not seem particularly complicated to me. It's a midterm election, inflation is high, Biden's approval ratings are low, and Democrats are likely to lose a lot of House seats and probably the Senate, too. Historically, the party in the White House loses 28 House seats and four Senate seats, on average. Democrats' saving grace is that in several of the most important Senate races, there are Republican candidates that appeal strongly to base voters on the right but have very high disapproval ratings among moderates and independents. It's possible that saves them a Senate majority, but I think it is unlikely.
I also warned readers that results from certain swing states could take days or weeks to get in, predicted Mehmet Oz would beat John Fetterman, and expressed concern about allegations of fraud proliferating as delays in vote counting happened. Reflection: Basically all of these things were wrong. Democrats picked up a Senate seat and almost retained the House. Democrats dominated in swing states, and Republicans outperformed expectations mostly in New York, which I didn't see coming. There was only one state where allegations of fraud became an issue, which was Arizona. Everywhere else, candidates who lost conceded, went away quietly, and allegations of fraud were sparse. My only saving grace is that I hedged on the possibility Democrats might hold the Senate and also included Simon Rosenberg's optimistic take on Democrats’ chances. Aside from that though, anywhere I made a prediction, I was wrong. Grade: F
Gerrymandering.In February, I wrote about the Democrats’ gerrymandered map in New York. In that piece, this is what I wrote: This crap is contagious... As I wrote in our special edition on gerrymandering, I believe the threat it poses is one of the most dangerous in all of American democracy. When it comes to congressional races, it is not hyperbolic to say that we are no longer choosing our politicians — they are choosing us. That is not the system we are supposed to have here. It's also worth pointing out that this could go south for Democrats in a hurry. Maps are being challenged across the country, and a few wins for Republicans paired with a couple of losses for Democrats could bring the sum total of the gerrymander races back to favoring Republicans nationally — though it does appear clear it won't be the nightmare scenario many Democrats had feared.
Reflection: Well... I basically nailed this. Democrats' maps were struck down, Republicans picked up several House seats in New York, and one could argue that the outcome in New York directly led to the loss of a Democrat majority in the House. This went about as badly as it could have gone, and in the interim, gerrymandering has continued to worsen. Grade: A
Elon and Twitter.Several times this year, I wrote about Elon Musk and Twitter. It began when he was going to join the board, and then when he was considering buying shares in the company, and eventually when he bought and took over the whole thing. In November, I covered Elon's total takeover: I was glad when Musk was supposed to join Twitter's board and a bit more apprehensive when he decided to buy it. Since then, based on everything Musk has said and the reporting around what he's done internally, my position is that in five years Twitter probably won't be all that different than it is now. In fact, I suspect the entire circus around him taking it over will be looked back on as one of the great overreactions of 2022. If Musk can generate more revenue to roll out more features, actually eliminate the spambots (which he says is his number one priority) and usher in a more balanced moderation team, it may actually be a better platform in five years than it is now.
Reflection: I've already said this on Twitter (meta), but I think I was wrong about Elon. I gave him a very charitable read, and he has really let me down. I'm an avid Twitter user. It is probably the social media platform I spend the most time on, and it is changing rapidly. It is also not going smoothly. New features seem to be popping up every week, and some of them stick around for mere hours before disappearing. Others are useless or buggy. My own Twitter account is incessantly giving me errors or behaving weirdly, and a few times in the last couple months my feed has just been the same two people tweeting for entire pages. Many of the changes I was really hoping for (like a diverse, open council making moderation decisions, or eliminating bots, or paid accounts) are yet to be rolled out or have been bungled badly. Meanwhile, Musk has spent his time banning accounts that report on him or mock him, under trumped up charges of family safety. He's been leaking internal documents (which I like) to reporters, but then turning on the reporters who give honest assessments of those documents and Musk’s behavior (which I loathe). In sum: While the platform so far looks much the same, it is buggier and worse than it was six months ago, Musk has fired a bunch of people, has yet to make the positive major changes he promised, has sloppily rolled out changes that aren't that great, has made moderation decisions without any transparency, and continues to tweet inaccurate information and lazy political commentary out to his millions of followers. It's a big womp. I was wrong, and I'm super bummed about it. I hope it changes, and in a year my prediction is more accurate, but I’m not optimistic. Grade: D-
Roe being struck down.In June, I wrote about Roe v. Wade being struck down. This was the fourth time I had written about abortion and Roe v. Wade specifically last year (we ended up covering it seven times in total). But this was the big one, right after the Supreme Court's ruling. Here are a few of the sentences that stuck out to me: There is no indication that our legal or health care system is prepared to navigate what is about to happen... Laws like the one in Texas encourage citizens to report abortions like car thefts in hopes of targeting abortion providers. But there are reasons to believe women themselves will be targeted next: Louisiana has already advanced a bill to target abortion patients before withdrawing it, a sign the movement may be more split on this issue than some claim... These laws will (and already do) allow states to detain, monitor and criminalize any pregnant women taking actions they perceive as being dangerous to the fetus.
Wealthy folks living in states that ban abortion will, for now, be able to order abortion pills online (though that is another legal battle already underway) or cross state lines to seek out abortion care... Anti-abortion laws might successfully reduce the total number of abortions, at least the documented ones, but they will increase the number of unsafe abortions... the polling on abortion is messy, but we can say with confidence that most Americans want these women to have a choice early on in pregnancy.
Reflection: It's been a mixed bag. On one hand, from my perch as a man living in a state where there aren't strict abortion laws, it'd be easy to feel like nothing has changed. Nationally, abortion rates fell by about 6% in the first two months after Roe was overturned, which isn’t as much as I expected. In the first few months after Roe fell, 13 states banned or severely limited abortion, mostly in the south. Legal abortions fell to near zero in those states, including in Texas, where legal abortion dropped 97%. 16 states had near total abortion bans in effect at some point in 2022. In the first couple of months, data suggests that about half the women who were unable to get abortions in states with bans traveled to another state to get one. That is in line with what I wrote. There hasn’t been a wave of women prosecuted for abortions, so I’ve (thankfully) been wrong about that so far. Numbers are hard to come by, and we won't have official abortion numbers from the CDC or solid data on how the law changes have impacted women's health care or invited prosecution for several more months or years. But we already have a plethora of horror stories of women being denied care or facing delayed care. The reporter Jessica Valenti has been tracking these stories in a daily newsletter since Roe fell, and she’s written with compelling detail that it's worse than you think. I said the bans would cause chaos in the health care system, given the uneven state-by-state laws and the many unforeseen consequences I was sure would come. Even so, I didn't expect the changes to have impacts on access to cancer, arthritis, lupus and ulcer drugs, but it did. Those are the kinds of unintended consequences I was referring to. One point I made but didn't really drive home was this: "The polling on abortion is messy, but we can say with confidence that most Americans want these women to have a choice early on in pregnancy." Nowhere in this piece did I really flesh out the potential political impacts of overturning Roe v. Wade, and I certainly didn't expect the huge political blowback we saw. Looking back, that was a big part of the picture I missed, and given my position after the midterms that abortion reshaped the entire 2022 election, it's something I wish I had written more about. I'm not sure whether it's the political blowback or the dog catching the car scenario, but Republicans seem to have also taken their foot off the gas on pushing strict anti-abortion legislation, which (for now) does not line up with what I expected. Grade: B-
The McCarthy tapes.In April, tapes were released in which Kevin McCarthy was recorded talking about how Trump was responsible for inciting the January 6 riots. We covered the story, with a focus on McCarthy's odds of becoming House Speaker and the many rifts inside the GOP. Here is what I wrote: [McCarthy] has to pretend that the anti-Trump, pro-war, old school Bush-era conservatism of Liz Cheney can coexist with Madison Cawthorne's scorched earth, "tweet through it," Republicans-are-all-involved-in-sex-drug-parties congressional membership. Of course, these two poles of the Republican party can’t co-exist, at least not for long and not in any functional capacity. No more than "The Squad" and Joe Manchin can coexist. Eventually, one faction of the Republican party or the other is going to "win" and take the power center back. One could argue that the fight is already over, with Trump still lording over every little thing, but the 2022 and 2024 elections will be the real tests.
Based on everything Trump has said and done since these revelations, I see no reason not to expect McCarthy to end up as speaker anyway, if (or when) Republicans take control of Congress. In the immediate term, the only thing Republicans can concern themselves with is ensuring a 2022 midterm sweep. And to do that, they'll need to put on brave faces and muster a modicum of unity, all while walking the line with Trump. Cross him and you'll get trashed, primaried or worse. Trump has proven he’s willing to tank fellow Republicans even if it means helping Democrats, just to settle a score.
Reflection: This was a piece one of the Tangle editors submitted for review, and it was fascinating to go back and read it. I think I got a lot right: McCarthy ended up as Speaker, there was a huge fight along the way, it is clear Republicans are having trouble coexisting, and Trump did trash any primary Republicans who challenged him publicly. Throughout the piece, though, I spoke as if the Republican sweep (House, Senate and White House in 2024) was a foregone conclusion, and I overstated Trump's strength as someone who could tank a candidate with a tweet or Fox News interview. Republicans didn't win the Senate, and in 2022, Trump's effectiveness at driving the narrative or sinking candidates was much less potent than I expected. Grade: B
Shireen Abu Akleh.In July, I wrote about the death of Shireen Abu Akleh, the famous Palestinian journalist. At the time I wrote this piece, a lot of people were still contesting the idea that Abu Akleh had been killed by an Israeli soldier. This is what I wrote in "my take." There is a fundamental question at the heart of this story: Who killed Shireen Abu Akleh? And the answer seems clear. It was an Israeli soldier. The United Nations' investigation seemed the most thorough, and it was rather conclusive. Despite the organization's bias against Israel (yes, that's real) its conclusion is now supported by thorough reporting, with video evidence and witness testimony, laid out by The Washington Post, The New York Times, and CNN... To be crystal clear, this should not be controversial or contested. There is no actual counter-narrative here anymore.
Reflection: When I wrote this piece, a lot of my more conservative, pro-Israel readers unsubscribed. Many wrote in with nasty emails to me, too. I wish they were still reading, because basically everything I wrote in this piece (which I was very cautious about) was right. In September, after many more investigations and media reports, the IDF admitted there was a "high possibility" one of its troops shot Abu Akleh. That is about as close to an outright admission as you're ever going to get to killing a journalist in cold blood. Re-reading the piece now, with all the additional journalism we have about this incident, the IDF's comments, and the investigations that have happened, I'm not sure I'd change a sentence. All the evidence was there in the videos, many of which I spent hours watching. I'm proud of the accuracy of this piece, despite how tragic the event was. Grade: A+
California's elections.In June, I wrote about the California elections, which largely centered around crime and the fate of progressive prosecutor Chesa Boudin, who was recalled. Here is an excerpt of what I wrote: I know from being dialed into the news that San Francisco may look like a war zone of post-apocalyptic crime and debauchery. Fox News has, incredibly, mentioned Chesa Boudin 1,400 times in the last year. I've seen the videos of people stuffing trash bags full of products in pharmacies and of elderly Asian people being beaten in the street. I also know, from living in New York City, that these kinds of news stories can mislead viewers into believing everyone is simply living amid this constant state of lawlessness and accepting it... And yet... the image of a city on fire doesn't match the reality, either.
Many journalists and academics have made the point better than I can, but the truth is the data tell a different story. By any objective measure, it’s a pretty mixed bag. Some crime has increased in San Francisco; some crime has lessened; much of it can be tied to the beginning of the pandemic; and none of it is that far outside what is happening nationally, on average.
Reflection: Few pieces I wrote in 2022 received as much negative feedback as this one. Growing up, my dad loved repeating the old Russian proverb that "if one person tells you you’re drunk, you can tell 'em to piss off, but if two people tell you you're drunk, maybe you’d better go home and lie down." Well, I got dozens and dozens of emails from readers in San Francisco, Oakland, and across the Bay area who told me I was just plain wrong. I published some of that feedback in an 11-page Google document where readers tore me apart. The gist of the feedback was this: People who had lived in these areas for decades were seeing very clear, obvious changes on the ground. They had good reason to believe the data I cited was bogus. And they had plenty of reasons to believe Chesa Boudin and other Democratic officials had made the situation worse. A few people sent me this very good article on how San Francisco became a failed city. In the end, I retracted much of what I wrote. There were elements of it I stood by (like the sensationalism of the story by the media or the inherent difficulty of life in any densely populated city), but I got a lot wrong. Grade: D-
Railroad workers.In December, I wrote about the potential for a railroad strike and President Biden's reaction to it. In particular, I focused on what the workers were asking for. Yes, some railway workers making $115,000 or $150,000 may be the envy of other blue collar Americans, but railroad work has extremely stringent demands most workplaces don’t. And if Union Pacific, the largest railroad in the country, went from $6.5 billion to $5.8 billion in yearly profit to pay for it, it would cover the entire cost of 15 paid sick days for every railway worker in the country. They're asking for four.
Even when I put on my hard-nosed, no nonsense, anti-union, capitalist cap, which isn’t hard for me to find, there's still a good argument for the workers here: Right now, we're in the midst of a labor shortage. We’re living at a time when Americans are truly understanding the value and importance of our supply chain. The free market has determined that these workers are incredibly valuable, because they'd be nearly impossible to replace.
Throughout the piece, I also referenced the state by state differences in how these workers negotiate pay, Biden's difficult position as a pro-union president trying to end the negotiations, and my support for the workers' position even if I didn't love the possibility of a strike right before the holidays. Reflection: I missed some key stuff in this piece. Quite a few readers wrote in and asked why I didn't supply the full details of the rail workers’ vacation and sick leave policy. A glance at the freight rail employee time off policies might make you jealous: "Railroad employees receive substantial paid time off each year, as well as generous paid sick leave for longer-term illnesses," The Association of American Railroads says. "Excluding time off covered by sickness benefits, the average employee receives 25-29 days of paid time off depending upon craft, with the most senior employees receiving 37-39 days of paid time off. Sickness benefits differ between crafts." Together, with very competitive pay, one could have made a strong argument the railroad workers had better benefits than the vast majority of Americans. I didn't feature that argument prominently enough, and I didn't address it in "my take." In retrospect, I think if I could rewrite this piece, I would have much more strongly aligned myself with "the right's" take, which was that the unions had already won hard-earned concessions, had great contracts, and would have been overplaying their hand had they tried to go on strike. Ultimately, Biden did the right thing (for the country as a whole) by ending things where they were, even if it was slightly hypocritical given his pledged support of unions. Grade: C-
Assorted notes.Here are some rapid fire reflections on the year we just had: We started the year with 49 corrections and ended with 75, meaning we tallied up 26 corrections this year. Given our leniency on what qualifies as a correction, I am actually pretty pleased with this number, even if I hope to see it in the single digits one day. During the saber rattling about the possibility of China invading Taiwan, I've repeatedly said I thought it was very unlikely to happen. So far, so good. When Russia was lining up on the borders of Ukraine, I also expressed skepticism that Putin would invade. I got that very wrong. Once he did invade, I told readers we were in for months or years of a devastating war, and one we’d have access to (visually) in a way we never have before. Unfortunately, I was right. We also warned repeatedly about a brutal energy squeeze from Russia across Europe this winter, but that hasn't materialized at all. I thought the Child Tax Credit would be a wildly popular, long-term solution to childhood poverty, but instead it ended with very little fanfare. I said I've never been more torn about an issue than whether we should abolish the filibuster, but after a year where Congress was surprisingly efficient with the filibuster in place, I think I'm back to believing we should leave it as it is. When covering the Colorado Springs shooter, I quoted Will Bunch, who said "The gunman’s dad, tracked down by a San Diego TV reporter, expressed no remorse for the nightclub massacre." This wasn't true. One reader proved to me that the gunman's dad did express remorse, but videos that went viral on Twitter had been edited. I was right about my initial concern over inflation but wrong about how much it would impact voters. My pieces on student debt cancellation have aged like fine wine, though my writing on whether it was legal still needs more time to ferment. We repeatedly referenced data from APVoteCast that some political analysts have now called into question, and we also fell for the monkeypox panic that never really came to be. Finally, last year, I made 19 predictions about the future. I did this mostly as a litmus test of my own prescience. So far, nine of the 19 predictions have been resolved. I have gotten seven of the nine correct. Here they are: - Donald Trump will run for president in 2024. — Correct
- Republicans will take back the House of Representatives in 2022. — Correct
- The Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade precedent in this term. — Correct
- Dr. Mehmet Oz will win his high-profile Senate race in Pennsylvania. — Incorrect
- Stephen Breyer will retire from the Supreme Court before Biden leaves office. — Correct
- By 2023, zero states will have mask mandates anywhere in the U.S. — Correct
- Stacey Abrams will lose in the Georgia governor's race. — Correct
- The Child Tax Credit passed this year will become permanent, or be renewed for a long-term, 5+ year timeframe. — Incorrect
- Fewer than 50% of American adults will be fully vaccinated and have a booster shot by January 1st, 2023. — Correct
All in all, I think we had a pretty good year. I got some stuff wrong, a few things badly, but I was quite proud of how the vast majority of our newsletters held up — and I am pleasantly surprised at how well my 19 predictions are going so far. Even in the newsletters where “my take” was off the mark, accurate analysis of the situation was present from others, which is the real beauty and purpose of Tangle. I’m just one voice in a sea of them, and given the wide range of perspectives we include, you’re always going to get some very cogent analysis that ages well. Thank you so much for a great year of reading, criticizing, supporting and sharing our work. I look forward to all the great things to come in 2023! Enjoyed our 2022 coverage?If you enjoyed Tangle in 2022, please think about taking one or two of the following actions for us: Thank you!
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