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Last updated Nov 29, 2025
Prediction
Sacks
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Sacks @ 01:50:27Ambiguous
politicsgovernment
Conditional on Joe Biden winning the presidency by a very narrow electoral margin (on the order of ~2 electoral votes) and Republicans retaining control of the U.S. Senate in the 2020 election, the U.S. will experience a relatively calm four‑year period (2021–2025) of divided government in which partisan political tensions and national “temperature” decline, major new legislation is limited, and most people can largely “ignore Washington” for those four years.
this scenario which I've we've called the soft landing, where let's say you had a Biden victory by two electoral votes. The Republicans hold on to the Senate… It could be a really good situation for the country for the next four years. You know, temperature would go down… I think we would get what we want, which is the ability to ignore Washington for four years.View on YouTube
Explanation

Why this prediction is scored as ambiguous

  1. The prediction was explicitly conditional on a scenario that did not occur.
    Sacks framed this as a “soft landing” scenario where: (a) Joe Biden wins the presidency by about two electoral votes, and (b) Republicans retain control of the U.S. Senate. In reality, Biden won the Electoral College 306–232, a 74‑vote margin, not a razor‑thin ~2‑vote win. (archives.gov) After the January 5, 2021 Georgia runoffs, Democrats won both Senate seats, producing a 50–50 Senate with Vice President Harris giving Democrats effective control—so Republicans did not hold the Senate during Biden’s first two years. (en.wikipedia.org) Because the specific antecedent (“Biden by ~2 EV + GOP Senate”) never happened, we cannot directly observe whether his forecast about that particular configuration would have been right.

  2. The 2021–2025 period we actually got looked very different from his described ‘soft landing’.
    In the real timeline, unified Democratic control in 2021–2022 produced several large, contentious laws (e.g., the American Rescue Plan, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act), i.e., not “limited” major legislation. (en.wikipedia.org) Political tensions also remained high or worsened: the January 6, 2021 Capitol attack and its long aftermath kept national politics highly salient, not something most people could “ignore,” and surveys through 2022–2024 show deep, persistent polarization and widespread frustration with politics. (en.wikipedia.org) Those facts strongly contradict the spirit of his “temperature would go down, we could ignore Washington” narrative—but they occur under a different institutional setup than the one he conditioned on.

  3. Why this leads to an ‘ambiguous’ verdict rather than ‘right’ or ‘wrong’.
    Formally, Sacks’ claim was a counterfactual: if Biden barely squeaked by in the Electoral College and Republicans kept the Senate, then politics over the next four years would be relatively calm, with limited legislation and lower partisan temperature. Because that antecedent never came to pass, we cannot empirically test his core proposition about that exact divided‑government configuration. At the same time, the real 2021–2025 period does not resemble his forecasted “soft landing,” but that’s evidence against his broader intuition, not a clean falsification of the specific conditional claim. Hence the most accurate scoring under your scheme is “ambiguous”: enough time has passed, but the required condition never occurred, so the prediction’s truth value cannot be definitively determined from observed outcomes.