Why this prediction is hard to score

Sacks’ claim was conditional:

If Trump is unable to hold his usual in‑person campaign rallies during the remainder of the 2020 election cycle, this will likely shift the national vote margin by a few percentage points against him and could be sufficient to cause him to lose the election.

To evaluate it, we need to know:

1. Was Trump actually unable to hold his usual in‑person rallies for the remainder of the campaign?

   • After testing positive for COVID-19 on October 2, 2020, Trump canceled in‑person campaign events for a short period while quarantining and being treated. (en.wikipedia.org)
   • However, he resumed in‑person rallies on October 12, 2020, one week after being discharged from the hospital, and then held frequent large rallies in battleground states—often multiple rallies per day—through Election Day. (en.wikipedia.org)
   • So the strong condition "unable to hold his usual in‑person campaign rallies during the remainder of the election cycle" did not really occur; his rally schedule was briefly paused, then returned in force.

2. Did Trump lose by “a few percentage points”?

   • Joe Biden won 51.3% of the national popular vote to Trump’s 46.8%, a margin of about 4.5 percentage points, and won the Electoral College 306–232. (pollbludger.net)
   • That outcome matches the “few percentage points” loss Sacks described, but it happened even though Trump did resume large rallies.

3. Can we attribute that margin to an inability to hold rallies?

   • Because Trump was not actually prevented from holding his typical late‑campaign rallies (he held many after October 12), we are left with a counterfactual causal claim: if he had truly been unable to hold such rallies, would his margin have been even worse (or is that what caused the existing margin)?
   • Available analyses discuss COVID, Trump’s diagnosis, and broader issues as electoral liabilities, but they do not isolate the effect of a hypothetical total loss of rallies relative to the actual world where he still held many. (en.wikipedia.org)

Because the key condition of the prediction (no usual in‑person rallies for the rest of the campaign) did not actually hold, we cannot cleanly test whether that scenario would have shifted the vote margin by a few points and caused or cemented his loss. Enough time has passed, but the world we observed is not the world the prediction was about.

Conclusion: The prediction is about a counterfactual scenario that never fully happened, so its correctness cannot be determined from the real‑world outcome.

Therefore, the appropriate label is:

• result: ambiguous