Bill Kristol: A 'shmexpert'?

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.

"I'm thinking I was a tad early in my #PeakTrump predictions," Bill Kristol confessed on Twitter the morning after Donald Trump cruised to a 20-point victory in the New Hampshire Republican primary.

Kristol, the founder and editor of The Weekly Standard, has made an unfortunate habit of wrongly declaring Trump has peaked ever since the billionaire launched his presidential campaign last June.

In fact, New York magazine counted 11 times Kristol declared "Peak Trump" on Twitter between Trump's entrance into the race and Jan. 29.

But it is not at all clear that Trump has peaked yet, given his New Hampshire landslide and his rising poll numbers since he entered the race.

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Marc Fitch, who wrote the book "Shmexperts: How Ideology and Power Politics are Disguised as Science," is hardly surprised that a professional political commentator like Kristol gets his predictions wrong so often.

"Political experts are probably the most notorious and unreliable experts," Fitch told WND. "Philip Tetlock, in his book, 'Expert Political Judgment,' found the political experts we watch on television and read about in the newspapers are hardly ever right. According to his numbers, a blindfolded monkey has more chance of hitting the bulls-eye on the dartboard."

At times, Kristol has seemed like a man throwing darts while wearing a blindfold. After initially greeting Trump's candidacy with a lukewarm response, Kristol reversed course in July after Trump said John McCain was not a war hero.

Appearing on ABC, Kristol said of Trump, "He's dead to me."

The pundit then predicted: "I don't think he’ll stay up in the polls, incidentally. Republican primary voters are pro-respect the military. And he showed disrespect for the military."

However, Trump only experienced a minor, short-lived dip before his poll numbers started climbing again, and he continued to lead the field by a wide margin.

In late December, when ABC News asked Kristol to lay out a scenario in which Trump would not win the GOP nomination, the pundit said Trump's "mystique" would disappear if he lost Iowa.

Of course, Trump went on to lose Iowa, but he held onto his large lead in the polls and then won New Hampshire decisively.

Kristol is not the only pundit to have underestimated Trump's candidacy.

Syndicated columnist George Will expressed hope last April that Trump would run so he would be "predictably shellacked."

Columnist and political commentator Charles Krauthammer, speaking on Fox News after the very first GOP debate last Aug. 6, declared, "The real story is the collapse of Trump in this debate."

Fitch believes when pundits such as Kristol, Will and Krauthammer make pronouncements like this, they are not merely offering objective analysis; they are also trying to tell ordinary Americans what to believe.

"One thing you have to remember about political experts is that they have a vested interest in trying to steer the conversation and the outcome in their own favor," Fitch said. "By mere virtue of their elevated public stature, commentators such as George Will and Bill Kristol are able to guide elections according to their own beliefs. Frankly, the establishment Republican Party made them the experts that they are and now they are defending that status by trying to direct the conversation in their favor."

Fitch said "experts" believe if they declare an outcome to be unlikely, people will follow along and change their opinions to align with those of the experts. Sometimes it works as planned, but in the case of Trump and Bernie Sanders, it has not.

Incidentally, Krauthammer declared early last June, "Look, Kim Kardashian has a better shot at winning the presidency than Bernie Sanders. We have never had a socialist run seriously. We aren't ever going to have one."

After Sanders' drubbing of Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire, perhaps Kardashian should start exploring a 2020 run.

Fitch said Krauthammer's conventional belief about socialist candidates no longer applies.

"Conventional wisdom used to be that you couldn't run, much less win, as a socialist," Fitch said. "That rule has gone by the wayside as well. This is a very interesting election cycle because the boundaries are being transgressed and the experts who made and enforced those boundaries – told us what is acceptable and what is not – are left with their foot in their collective mouth."

Kristol jammed his foot further down his throat five days before the New Hampshire vote, predicting Marco Rubio would win the primary with 25 percent of the vote, followed by Ted Cruz at 22 percent, Trump at 19 percent, Kasich at 17, and all others in single digits.

As it turned out, Trump won with 35 percent. Rubio stumbled to fifth place with 10 percent of the vote.

Kristol had a reputation for failed predictions long before the current election cycle. In June 2011, he began a Weekly Standard article by writing: "I'm told by two reliable sources that Rudy Giuliani intends to run for the GOP nomination for president in 2012. He may throw his hat in the ring soon."

On election night 2008, Kristol predicted John McCain would win the presidency and Sen. Ted Stevens would hold onto his Senate seat from Alaska. Both men lost.

In December 2006, more than a year before the first votes were cast in the 2008 election cycle, he boldly declared on Fox News: "If [Hillary Clinton] gets a race against John Edwards and Barack Obama, she's going to be the nominee. Gore is the only threat to her then. Barack Obama is not going to beat Hillary Clinton in a single Democratic primary."

In March 2003, while discussing the war in Iraq, Kristol declared, "I think we'll be vindicated when we discover the weapons of mass destruction and when we liberate the people of Iraq."

Fitch said Kristol and other pundits continue to be sought out as political experts, despite failed predictions, because they are articulate, intelligent, and typically have access to insider information. Those factors do not make them infallible, Fitch noted, but it explains why they are consulted for analysis over and over again.

"They have already established themselves as an 'authoritative voice' on political subjects, so naturally the media turn to such voices to share their thoughts and predictions with the public," Fitch explained. "And the public doesn't want to hear someone who is unsure of themselves or waffling on who the next president will be. The public wants to be 'in the know' just like the famous people and pundits, and so we turn and listen to them."

Fitch said the simple fact that Kristol and others are part of the media establishment insulates them from accountability for their failed predictions.

"Answer me this: If Donald Trump ends up winning, who will people listen to in the future?" Fitch asked rhetorically. "George Will, who said it would never happen, or Bubba from Idaho, who said Trump would win all along? George or Bill Kristol will continue to be on television but we'll never hear from Bubba again."

The reason, according to Fitch, is that the "experts" have an air of credibility, whether deserved or not.

"We will continue to come back to the experts, even if they are wrong, because we WANT to believe in man's ability to gather all the facts, analyze them in a rational way and make a pronouncement on the future," he explained. "We want to believe this is possible and that the best and brightest among us can do it. So we keep listening."