26 things we think will happen in 2026 |
For the seventh year in a row, the Future Perfect staff — plus assorted other experts from around Vox — convened near the end of the year to make forecasts about major events in 2026.
Perhaps in keeping with the year we just experienced, the prognostication had grim overtones. Will the US remain an electoral democracy? Will the country fall into a recession? Will there be war in Taiwan? Will more states ban lab-cultivated meat? Will a Category 5 hurricane make landfall in the US? Will Beyoncé release a rock album? (Which is maybe just grim to me — there are so many better options!)
As always, we try to avoid random guessing. Each prediction comes with a probability attached. That’s meant to give you a sense of our confidence in our forecasts. The idea here is to exemplify epistemic honesty — being as transparent as we can about what we know we know, what we know we don’t, and what we don’t know, we don’t know.
As we have every year, we’ll check back at the end of 2026 and provide a report card on how we did, whether our accuracy ends up being Nostradamus level, or more like a band of blindfolded monkeys throwing darts at a board. You can check out how we did in 2025 here. We hope you enjoy reading — and don’t forget to update your priors. —Bryan Walsh
The United States
The US falls from the ranks of liberal democracies in the leading V-DEM index, but remains an electoral democracy (60 percent)
Entering 2026, assessing the health of American democracy is a bit of a puzzle.
There is no doubt that, in the first year of Donald Trump’s second presidency, American democracy has weakened significantly. He has smashed through constitutional constraints on his power, targeted his political opponents for repression, and run roughshod over civil liberties protections. It’s bad enough that three of the world’s top scholars of comparative democracy — Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt, and Lucan Way — have concluded that the United States has crossed the line into a form of authoritarianism.
On the other hand, there is little indication that Trump has been able to create a lock on power — or even significantly compromise the fairness of elections. Democrats dominated elections in 2025, anti-government activists operate freely, and the media is (mostly) as independent and critical as it was before Inauguration Day. When I spoke to Levitsky in December, he told me that Trump was failing “at consolidating autocratic power.”
For this reason, my own view is that the United States is still best classified as democracy, albeit a much weakened one. V-DEM, the leading academic metric of democracy, distinguishes between two classes of democracy — the stronger liberal democracy and weaker electoral democracy. When V-Dem releases its ratings for the past year, I expect the United States will fall from the former into the latter.
However, my confidence is low. What’s happening in the US is unprecedented for the world’s hegemon, and there is at least some credible evidence of bias in global democracy ratings — making the ultimate outcome a bit tricky to say for sure. —Zack Beauchamp
Democrats will take back at least one house of Congress (95 percent)
If the last one was tricky, this one is straightforward. There are at least five clear reasons to believe Democrats are headed for a midterm romp.
Point 1: In modern American politics, the president’s party almost always performs poorly in midterms.
Point 2: The Democratic Party is increasingly strong with college-educated voters, who tend to turn out more reliably in midterms than non-college voters — meaning the party has a structural leg up in those contests.
Point 3: Trump is an especially unpopular incumbent. The only 21st-century president with equivalently bad numbers at this point in his term was Trump himself, who experienced a massive electoral wipeout in the 2018 midterms. And there is real evidence Trump’s coalition is fraying from the inside.
Point 4: Democrats have dominated 2025 elections so consistently that it has become a meaningful indication of 2026 performance.
Point 5: Voter dissatisfaction is driven by a combination of affordability and concerns about his extreme policies in areas like immigration, and the White House seems either unable or unwilling to change in response to these concerns.
For all these reasons, Democrats are basically a lock to take back the House — barring hard-to-pull-off election tampering or some kind of unforeseen event that transforms the political environment. The Senate map is unfavorable, making it a much tougher fight, but they’re still competitive given the fundamentals. —ZB
At least one major function remains at the Education Department (70 percent)
The dismantling of the Education Department was one of the biggest stories in the early days of Trump’s second term, as the administration fired hundreds of staffers and Education Secretary Linda McMahon promised to lead the department on its “historic final mission.”
The president can’t actually dissolve the department without an act of Congress, but his administration has been moving bits of it to other agencies since the spring. In November, the White House announced perhaps the biggest shift yet, moving programs supporting K-12 students to the Labor Department, with other functions parceled out to the Departments of Health and Human Services, Interior, and State.
However, experts have long warned that other departments don’t have the expertise to take over Education staffers’ work, and the moves that have already occurred have reportedly been plagued with problems. Now Republican lawmakers are starting to voice concerns about what happens if the administration tries to transfer special education programs to another department, a move it has not yet made but hasn’t ruled out.
The Trump administration has already done lasting damage to the department, experts say. But getting rid of an agency is a lot harder in practice than in theory, and with Republicans starting to throw up warning signs, it’s more likely than not that at least one function of the department will remain through the end of next year. —Anna North
The Supreme Court will rule against Trump in the tariffs cases currently before the Court (70 percent)
To date, at least three federal courts have ruled that President Donald Trump exceeded his power under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), when he imposed a broad range of constantly shifting tariffs on foreign imports. The Supreme Court is likely to join these three courts before the close of its current term.
For the most part, this Supreme Court’s Republican supermajority has been extraordinarily loyal to Trump. This is, after all, the same Court that held that Trump may use the powers of the presidency to commit crimes. But the Republican justices do sometimes break with Trump on issues that divide Republicans, and especially on issues that divide conservative legal elites.
The tariffs cases are just such an issue. At least some of the lawsuits challenging the tariffs were brought by right-leaning legal shops that hew to the GOP’s more traditional, libertarian views on foreign trade. Numerous Republican luminaries have joined briefs opposing the tariffs,
Including former Sen. John Danforth (R-MO), an early mentor to Justice Clarence Thomas. Over the spring, at a conference hosted by the conservative Federalist Society, a number of speakers criticized the tariffs and questioned their legality.
At the Supreme Court argument on the tariffs in November, the Court’s Republicans did, indeed, appear divided on whether to back Trump. While some members of the Court defended the tariffs, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett — all Republicans — asked very skeptical questions of Trump’s lawyer.
It is always dangerous business to predict that this Supreme Court will break with a Republican president, which is why I still think there is a 30 percent chance that Trump prevails. And even if Trump does lose this round of litigation, he is likely to attempt to reinstate at least some of his tariffs by invoking other statutes. But my prediction will come true if the Court rules that Trump exceeded his authority under the IEEPA when he imposed his tariffs on imports. —Ian Millhiser
Trump will replace at least one member of the Supreme Court by the end of 2026 (75 percent)
Trump is unpopular — a recent Associated Press poll pegs his approval rating at 36 percent — and his party just got hosed in the 2025 elections. Republicans are still favored to hold onto the Senate after the 2026 midterms, largely because the Senate is malapportioned to favor small states that tend to vote for the GOP, but the Republican Party is in a deep enough hole that it could lose both houses of Congress.
And if the Democrats do take the Senate, they can prevent Trump from ever confirming another federal judge again. Which brings us to 75-year-old Justice Samuel Alito.
Alito is the Court’s most unapologetic partisan. If you want a full rundown of Alito’s history of rulings favoring the Republican Party, I encourage you to read my profile of him entitled “The Republican Party’s man inside the Supreme Court.” The short of it is that he’s often willing to embrace arguments that even his fellow Republican justices find embarrassing, at least when those arguments favor the GOP or its preferred policy outcomes.
If Alito retires while Republicans still control the Senate, he can be confident that his replacement will be a Republican who shares his views on the overwhelming majority of issues. He might even be replaced by one of his former law clerks.
If Alito does not retire, by contrast, he risks losing his last chance to retire under a Republican president and a Republican Senate. In the worst case scenario (from Alito’s perspective), he could die after Democrats regain both the White House and the Senate, ensuring that he will be replaced by his ideological opposite.
There’s also a chance that a different justice could either retire or die. Thomas is 77. Justice Sonia Sotomayor is 71. Roberts is 70. If any justice leaves the Court in 2026, a Republican Senate will almost certainly confirm Trump’s nominee to replace them.
That said, there is a chance that Alito and his fellow Republican justices are enjoying the power that comes with being part of a six-justice supermajority so much that they won’t want to give it up. But Alito has been such a reliable partisan during his time on the bench that it would be surprising if he denied his party its best chance to replace him with a younger version of himself. —IM
The world
Benjamin Netanyahu will not be the prime minister of Israel by the end of the year (65 percent)
Netanyahu has led the Israeli government for 15 of the last 16 years. He has weathered indictments, a criminal trial, coalition fractures, and of course the horrors of the Gaza war. Why would anyone bet against him in the 2026 elections (currently scheduled for October)?
The answer, I think, is that he has........