From Here to November: No One Knows What Happens Next | Opinion

In a January column, I wrote, "the next 10 months will be a wild, unpredictable, dangerous, and unprecedented roller coaster that will test and push to the limits—and beyond—every norm, law, and institution we have in this country. In a normal cycle, campaigns would spend the spring and summer preparing for a so-called 'October Surprise'—an unexpected event or scandal outside the campaign's control that has a big impact on the race. But this year, October surprises could come almost daily. Nearly every day over the next 10 months, we could see a judge, a jury, a prosecutor, a health scare, a simple trip on a stage, domestic unrest, or a major international crisis upend or decide the election."

On one hand, I was right. On the other, no one, including me, could have predicted just how wild, unprecedented, and history-making the last three weeks have been.

In three weeks, we have witnessed President Joe Biden's disastrous debate performance, a once unthinkable parade of Democrats calling on him to step aside, major Supreme Court rulings protecting former President Donald Trump, an assassination attempt on Trump, a major criminal case against Trump dismissed, and Biden coming down with COVID.

Literally, any single one of those events could have been enough to forever change the course of an election and become the subject of whole history books. Taken together, they are a seismic shock to our system, and the full force of the aftershocks have not been even close to absorbed yet.

There is simply no playbook for what we are going through. In this moment, the infamous Donald Rumsfeld saying comes to mind: "There are known knowns, and there are unknown unknowns."

The known known is that Donald Trump walked off the stage in Milwaukee on Thursday night, after accepting his party's nomination for the third straight cycle, the clear frontrunner to win the White House. Polling—both public and private—shows Trump in the lead in all seven battleground states and with a realistic shot of an electoral blowout. The Republican convention that just wrapped showcased a party unified, energized, and confident—something we did not see in either 2016 or 2020. The simple and undeniable fact is that despite multiple impeachments, indictments, and a failed coup attempt, Donald Trump has never been in a stronger political situation.

The other known known is that the Democratic Party is deeply divided and despondent, with the Biden campaign losing key support—both from donors and influential party leaders—almost hourly. It is a campaign on life support, with donors and congressional leaders ready to pull the plug at any moment. Polling shows that not only is Biden in danger of losing the White House, but his political freefall is impacting Democrats' chances of winning back the House and keeping the Senate.

At the very moment that Donald Trump is at the peak of his political strength, Joe Biden has reached his weakest political moment in his 50-plus-year political career. With just over 100 days until the election, Democrats are in a dire political situation, and the path forward seems far from clear and far from assured.

But there are unknown unknowns in this moment, too. For example, if Biden were to drop out, would another Democrat stack up any better? How would the public—which has been telling every pollster for more than two years they really don't want either Trump or Biden—react to a late entrant into the race? How will Trump's September sentencing for his criminal conviction shake up the race? Following the Supreme Court immunity ruling, will the judge hold hearings in the Jan. 6 case that would give the public a glimpse into the evidence Jack Smith has? Will either candidate—either of whom would be the oldest person ever elected to the White House—have a health scare? Will a foreign or domestic crisis happen? Can Joe Biden pull off one of the greatest political upsets in history? Can the anti-MAGA coalition—one of the steadiest and most reliable political coalitions of the last 50 years and that has won nearly every major election since 2017—hold together for one more election?

And those are just some of the unknowns.

Political races have lots of twists and turns. Just ask President Michael Dukakis or President Hillary Clinton, both of whom had leads larger than Trump's current lead in July in 1988 and 2016, respectively.

So, anyone telling you they know how this ends is lying to you.

If the last few years, if not the last few weeks, have taught us anything, it's that we should expect the unexpected over the next 100 days. In this moment, the unknown unknowns far outweigh the known knowns.

In that January column, I concluded by saying, "buckle up. Because now it gets crazy and unpredictable." It was true then. But it is even more true now.

Because the only real known known in this moment is that no one knows what happens next.

Doug Gordon is a Democratic strategist and co-founder of UpShift Strategies who has worked on numerous federal, state, and local campaigns and on Capitol Hill. He is on Twitter/X at @dgordon52.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.