After a disastrous showing in the annual predictions for 2025, the success rate can only improve in 2026, right? This year’s list starts off with a couple of election predictions, so ignore the first two if you want to skip the controversial stuff and head straight to science, movie and sports predictions.
- Democrats will hold 235-245 seats after the midterm elections.
At the time of writing Republicans hold the House by a 218-213 margin, and Democrats lead in “generic ballot” polling averages by about 5%. With Trump fully out of his honeymoon period and even some Republicans starting to push back on his actions, the political environment points to Democrats having a good election in ten months. - Democrats will pick up 3-4 seats in the Senate.
2026 isn’t a year in which Democrats have a lot of likely pickup opportunities in the Senate, and a few of the states they are defending could be tough for them to hold. That said, it seems like it’s going to be a bad year for Republicans, so it’s not unreasonable to think that Democrats will hold all of the seats they currently control, and make at least three additional gains in states like North Carolina, Maine, Alaska, Iowa or Ohio. - Rivian’s new R2 will win car of the year and be well on its way to becoming the best-selling electric vehicle in America.
Tesla’s Model Y was the best selling car in the world in 2023 because there are a lot of people who want both a small SUV and an electric vehicle. With Tesla now focused on self-driving and robots rather than building cars, and a CEO who cosplays as a supervillain, there is a pent-up demand for a great small SUV, and it seems like Rivian is poised to fill that void. As a three-time Subaru owner, I’ve got my eye on the R2 when the current Forester gets to the end of its usable life. - Avengers: Doomsday will be on its way to becoming one of Marvel’s biggest box office successes
As a fan of superhero movies I’m rooting for Marvel to get back on track, and the marketing so far for Avengers: Doomsday seems to show a film focused on characters over spectacle. If Marvel can deliver an interesting storyline and compelling character arcs, even with everyone waiting for streaming these days audiences will likely show up in the theaters to see it. - While there won’t be any eureka moments, by the end of 2026 there will have been at least one history-changing breakthrough driven by AI in an area like exoplanet discovery, earthquake detection, weather prediction, cancer diagnosis, or some other critical area.
AI is going to dramatically change many industries, just as the internet did 30 years ago. While most of these changes will happen incrementally and thus won’t be events that alter people’s lives suddenly, there will be at least one breakthrough in 2026 attributed to AI that will profoundly impact everyone on the planet. That development may be related to preventing cancer, fusion, or some other area, but I’m calling 2026 as the first year that the potential of AI makes a historic impact on humanity. - The Browns will win at least eight games in 2026.
I should know by now that making predictions about the Browns causes the universe to immediately smite them, so I’m sorry in advance for the inevitable 1-16 season that I have just caused. But if the universe overlooks this breach of the jinxing protocol, the Browns defense was really good, they had several close games in 2025 that could have gone either way, and with injured players returning and a lot of high draft picks incoming it’s hard to imagine that the offense won’t improve from “horrendous” to merely “bad”. A non-horrendous offense combined with an elite defense should make for a team that can go at least 8-9, right? - Someone is going to come up with a way to attend major concerts and sporting events using VR.
I’m actually guessing this development may still be a few years away, but in thinking about the Apple Vision Pro and similar headsets, it’s tough to come up with a compelling use case for buying them, but if there were VR cameras set up in the front row of a concert, fans would pay handsomely to be able to virtually attend. Or imagine if VR cameras were on the field during the Super Bowl and you could attend the game live OR view it later from field level? I did a Google search to see if this type of thing already exists and I couldn’t find anything, but I imagine all sorts of people would rent/buy a VR headset and pay a lot of money if it allowed them to virtually attend the Eras Tour in the front row or see the NBA playoffs from a courtside seat. - 2026 will see the world dramatically retaliate against Trump’s policies
Over the past year Trump has reneged on trade agreements, threatened allies, and turned the US into an unreliable partner. The rest of the world has mostly responded with targeted tariffs and other small measures, but especially after capturing the president of Venezuela and threatening to invade Greenland, 2026 will be the year that other countries stop holding back. It’s not hard to imagine exorbitant taxes on American tech companies, regulations that lock out American banks, tariffs that make US cars and planes unaffordable, visa restrictions on American travelers, etc. If the US can’t be trusted to honor its agreements then there is no point for other countries in spending time negotiating, and thus this year could be the year that they decide enough is enough. - There will be four successful launches and landings of Jeff Bezos’ New Glenn rocket
SpaceX has revolutionized the launch industry and led to a massive reduction in the cost to send payloads to orbit, but Jeff Bezos’ enormous New Glenn rocket also had two successful missions in 2025, including a successful landing. They have four missions on their 2026 manifest, including one to send a massive lander to the moon, and given their track record I think all four will be successful, and all four will also see the first stage stick the landing. It’s a great time to be a space nerd. - Apple will debut a foldable phone, but its sales will be underwhelming.
All sorts of rumors point to Apple debuting a foldable phone in 2026, but I’m deeply skeptical about this device. Tons of users have purchased an iPad as their tablet device, and the iPhone is obviously the most popular phone, but a foldable iPhone seems to give you the worst of the two; it’s too big for a phone, but too small for a tablet, and costs way more than either. I’m probably wrong, but from the leadership team that gave us the Apple Vision Pro but then forgot to make the argument about why anyone needs one, I’m not sure they’ve figured out why anyone would want this device before they debut it. - Tesla’s stock will crash from its current price of $420 (as of 20-January) by at least fifty percent.
A lot of people have lost a lot of money shorting Tesla stock, so odds of this being wrong are high, but Tesla’s valuation has always been based on the promise of growth, and their car sales are declining, they are no longer making major engineering innovations, their promise of self-driving vehicles has been “1-2 years away” for more than a decade, and their plan for a cheap robot in every house is nowhere close to reality. I’m almost certainly going to be wrong, but as far as I can tell Tesla is now not much different from most other mid-tier automakers. - 2026 will see Paramount+ and/or Peacock subsumed by another streaming provider.
Paramount+ and Peacock are two major streaming services that seem to be on the outside looking in, and 2026 might be the year that they get gobbled up by another streaming service. While Universal or Paramount may not sell their streaming platforms, they may instead make a co-branding deal that puts their content on another service like Disney, Netflix or Amazon. Eventually we may live in a world where Amazon Prime subscribers use whatever Amazon offers, while Disney+ and Netflix are the only other two major players. - With Jared Isaacman now in charge at NASA, several private partnerships will be announced including a mission to extend the life of the Hubble space telescope.
With the space shuttle long retired, any mission to the Hubble Space Telescope would need to be on a non-government vehicle, and NASA rejected that proposal in 2024. However, the new NASA administrator is an entrepreneur who has himself flown on two private space missions, and he’s the type that will support using private vehicles to extend the life of one of the world’s most valuable scientific instruments. Hubble is in dire need of repairs and likely only has five or so years left of limited capabilities without a servicing mission, and with new space telescopes taking a decade or more to build it seems like there should be strong support for fixing the one we’ve got. - With college athletes now getting salaries in the millions of dollars, at least one state will pursue revoking non-profit status for college athletics departments.
College athletics has been a big-money business for a long time, but with players and coaches now getting million dollar salaries more people are asking what these teams have to do with education. Senator Maria Cantwell has been investigating why this industry is given non-profit status, and while nothing will change at the federal level, 2026 could be the year where at least one state decides that its big athletic departments either need to be reined in or start being treated like normal for-profit enterprises. - At least one state will see gig workers unionize.
Gig workers like Uber and Lyft drivers operate in a world with no guarantees and no one watching out for their best interests. While the allure of setting your own schedule makes it worthwhile for some people, these companies seem to continually squeeze them for longer hours and lower wages while pushing riders to make up the difference in tips, which is an unsustainable path forward. Particularly given new laws passed in California, I’ll guess that 2026 is the year that sees gig workers in at least one state unionize to negotiate better terms for its workers.
Eighteen years of these predictions makes it clear that I’m really, really bad at this game, but it remains an extraordinarily interesting annual exercise. Everyone should look forward to returning in twelve months when Tesla stock is over $1000 a share and Avengers Doomsday is bombing in the theatres to revisit this yearly prognostication.