Biggest lesson from my four decades of covering politics: Prepare to be surprised

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

74% : The best scenario for Trump would see steady economic growth, declining interest rates and a reduction of tensions overseas.
58% : Trump made further gains among Latino voters in 2024.
56% : That's especially true for Medicaid, which, among other things, now pays for more than 6 in 10 residents of nursing homes nationwide and 4 in 10 babies delivered in most states.
55% : Trump promised in the campaign to "drive down the rates so you will be able to pay 2% again.
55% : So do long-term movements of public attitudes and values, like the three-decade-long trend toward greater acceptance of same-sex marriages.
49% : Those minefields for Trump can be easily foreseen.
48% : As I wrote the week after the election, as best we can tell from surveys, those voters hired Trump to accomplish two things -- keep inflation down and reduce the number of immigrants entering the country.
46% : Republicans in Congress could try to reduce the deficit by slicing the cost of Medicaid, health insurance subsidies and food stamps -- all programs that the GOP has gone after in the past.
36% : Beyond clashes over high-level jobs, Trump faces policy risks.
30% : How the public will respond to mass deportation of immigrants, for example, may depend on what Trump means by "mass."Still other risks involve events outside a president's control.
24% : We know, for example, that in 2020, the Latino voters most likely to switch to Trump were politically conservative Latinos, many of whom had cast ballots for Hillary Clinton in 2016 after a Trump campaign that explicitly targeted "Mexicans," but whose values were a difficult fit in the Democratic Party.
16% : Nonetheless, the Gaetz nomination was an early test of strength, and Trump lost.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.