Like 2020, 2016 was also the year of a Presidential election. I had a new blog designed to bring in readers for my upcoming novel Cyan and I had no intention of writing on politics. I was planning to share some of the things I had learned in decades of writing while drumming up customers. The last thing I wanted to do was make half of my readers mad at me.

Not that I had any readers yet, so early in my blogging career, but I hoped to soon.

Life has a way of changing our plans. My neutrality lasted about a month, from mid-August until mid-September. Then I had to interrupt my sequence of blogs between 10 and 11 to say:

This is not normally a political blog, but as I am a citizen, there are times to speak out. The post originally scheduled to be here will appear tomorrow.

Have you ever asked yourself, “How could Germany have been fooled into following Adolph Hitler?” The answer is on your television this morning, and it is Donald Trump.

I called him out for his fear-mongering, but added that I didn’t see him as evil, just foolish. I subsequently changed my mind about that.

Still I couldn’t see spending much time on someone who had no chance of winning. That was another error in judgment, both about how effective Trump would be and about how much time I would spend yelling at him.

On February 29th I celebrated the end of Black History Month with a bit of whimsy that would grow into a long series of posts about an imaginary Presidential candidate. I’ll remind you about that on Wednesday.

By Election Day things looked pretty well settled on a Hillary win. I had never been impressed by her either, so on September third I wrote a post to be placed election day, making these predictions:

By now you know who won this time around . . . As of today, Hillary’s win seems certain if she doesn’t stumble, but she stumbles a lot. It could still be Donald. You know the outcome. So do I, but I didn’t when I wrote this.

Here is what I do know, now, September third. Whoever was elected yesterday will be a one-term president.

You’ve heard every talking head for the last year say that no two candidates in history have been so hated and feared as Donald and Hillary. Almost everyone dislikes one or the other; a sad majority dislikes them both.

So the question arises:  who will win the Presidency in 2020? You can be sure it won’t be Donald or Hillary, no matter who won yesterday.

If your candidate lost yesterday, take heart. Whoever your party chooses in 2020 will win – barring another match-up of turkeys, and what are the chances of that happening again?

If your candidate won yesterday, tough luck.

Well, that is what it looked like in September of 2016. I’m not so sure that prediction was any better than the others I made during the campaign. I just hope I got that one right.