The Unpredictable But Entirely Possible Events That Could Throw 2024 Into Turmoil

A global pandemic. A siege at the Capitol. A reality TV star in the White House. In just the last few years, we’ve watched the unthinkable become real. We think we have a firm grasp on what’s to come, in politics and beyond, and then something gigantic and unexpected happens.

With that in mind, perhaps we need to deploy a tad more imagination before assuming we know what’s going to happen in 2024. It certainly looks like we’re headed toward a rematch of Donald Trump vs. Joe Biden and a bitterly contested, close general election. But, if recent history is a guide, something unexpected could be right around the corner.

We asked an array of futurists and technologists, historians and political scientists, foreign policy analysts and other savvy prognosticators whose expertise is identifying future risk: What might be the “Black Swan” event that disrupts the seeming inevitability of the 2024 campaign?

We asked them to leave aside the possibility that one of the candidates in their 70s or 80s dies during the campaign — something well within the realm of actuarial possibility and which is already on many voters’ minds. Instead, we asked them: What is the unpredictable, unlikely but entirely plausible thing that could happen this year that voters aren’t even thinking about yet, but which could have a massive impact on the outcome?

Our experts suggested an array of disruptions and disasters created by Mother Nature, humankind and, yes, even aliens. These aren’t their predictions for what will surely be a wild year, but they’re all possible. Even the aliens.

Here’s what they imagined:

A disrupted U.S. election

By Ian Bremmer

Ian Bremmer is the president and founder of Eurasia Group and GZERO Media.

We all know the 2024 U.S. presidential election is going to be enormously divisive and dysfunctional, perceived by many if not most (on the losing side) to be illegitimate. But what if it isn’t just perception? What if the world’s most powerful country can’t hold a free and fair election?

Biden supporters are worried about the end of democracy. Trump supporters are worried Democrats want to throw the former president in jail. And there are plenty of adversaries (I’m looking at you, Russia, Iran and North Korea) that would love nothing more than to see more chaos from the Americans.

That means that efforts to subvert the election could be successful and could come from a variety of actors — from cyberattacks, deep fakes and disinformation, physical attacks on the election process and oversight, and/or mass unrest, violent intervention and even terrorism to disrupt voting on Nov. 5. There’s no more geopolitically significant target than the upcoming U.S. elections, which are vulnerable due to limited experience and resources focused on election security.

I wasn’t worried about a coup back on Jan. 6, and I don’t see any way to overturn this coming year’s election either. But disrupting the 2024 U.S. election strikes me as plausible and deeply concerning.

A China surprise

By Matthew Burrows

Mathew Burrows is the program lead of the Stimson Center’s Strategic Foresight Hub. He was formerly the director of Foresight at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Strategy Initiative and the co-director of the New American Engagement Initiative.

War with China breaks out several months after Democratic Progressive Party candidate Lai Ching-te has been elected in the Taiwan presidential election on Jan. 13 with a bigger margin than expected. This encourages him to declare Taiwan’s independence from China against the advice of the Biden administration but with the backing of a number of congressional Republicans. China mounts a quarantine cutting off trade to the island. This only increases Taiwan’s determination to be independent, and just as the U.S. presidential campaign heats up in October, China starts a military operation. The Biden administration feels it has no option but to mount a military defense of the island. Biden’s strong presidential leadership shifts the momentum away from Trump among independent voters. The reigning assumption is that such a war would be so ruinous economically for China that President Xi Jinping would avoid it. However, in this scenario, he fears that China will lose Taiwan forever and is counting on the Biden administration to be wary of intervening for fear of the possible negative electoral consequences.

An alternative scenario: Under the weight of enormous debt, slow growth and a depressed property market, China suffers a financial crash similar to the 2008 economic crisis in the United States. As happened then, China’s woes aren’t confined to itself or Asia but spread, triggering a global recession. In the U.S., inflation goes away, but with a growing lack of confidence, unemployment starts to creep up just as the electoral campaign gets underway. Biden isn’t responsible, but like other U.S. presidents facing reelection, a poor economy further drags down his popularity.

Death at a Trump rally

By Julia Azari

Julia Azari is a professor of political science at Marquette University.

Political violence can be very disruptive, and it’s usually not planned. Here’s one scenario.

On Oct. 19, a fight breaks out at a Trump rally in Tampa, Florida. A group of five white men in their early 50s looked like standard rally-goers. But as they catch the attention of one of the many TV cameras in the arena, the group pulls out protest signs reading: TRUMP LIES and SAVE DEMOCRACY NOW. They had done similar protest actions together for years — anti-war protests, national political conventions and a few Trump events. Part politics, part reunion for longtime friends who had met in college protesting the first Gulf War.

What happens next is disputed. A couple attending their seventh Trump rally say that the protesters started pushing when people around them chanted insults. Other accounts say the Trump supporters initiated the fighting. However it happened, one of the five protesters suffered a heart attack. He is rushed to a local hospital but dies a few hours later.

News media scramble to cover the event, and the public can’t look away. A clear narrative proves elusive. Was the protester’s demise simply a random tragedy? Or a sign of the dangers of an increasingly violent time in American politics?

Pundits’ debates over these questions, interspersed with interviews with the deceased man’s friends, grieving widow and eloquent, angry teenaged children dominate the remaining weeks of the campaign. These stories drown out much of Biden’s messages about declining unemployment and legislative victories and distract from Trump’s slogans about immigrants and making America great again. The poignancy of the story draws in some Americans who paid little attention to politics, but for close watchers of politics, it was irresistible. Some question why the matter gets so much press when violence against people of color draws a fraction of the coverage. Others call for the suspension of Trump’s campaign, which leads to a whole new set of arguments about whether this was just a pretext to push him out of politics once again. One cable network devotes an hourlong program to a panel discussion about whether the Biden administration has done enough to curb political violence.

And so it continues, until Election Day.

Mother Nature wreaks havoc on the election

By Alec Ross

Alec Ross is the author of The Raging 2020s and a former senior State Department official during the Obama administration.

The latest-breaking event that will shape the 2024 presidential election will be a spectacularly destructive Category 5 hurricane that tears through the country just weeks before the election creating a Climate v. Christ binary in the electorate.

The Biden campaign will cite the hurricane as evidence of the extreme weather events produced by climate change that affirm his strategy to invest in next generation solutions to mitigate climate change. Trump will cite the storm as God’s wrath against Joe Biden.

Biden will spend the last weeks of the campaign visiting with victims and working from the White House and FEMA headquarters directing a response demonstrating his credentials as a competent and empathetic president. This will drive a youth vote that was withholding support back into the Democratic camp. Trump will visit a different disaster site every day and give speeches with his arms frequently spread in a crucifix pose. Millions of his evangelical Christian supporters will build a movement rooted in the belief that Trump is the resurrection of Christ to whom all worldly, secular powers must be transferred. Trump will do nothing to dissuade them. The election outcome will not be known until more than a month afterward because of the difficulty of administering an election with millions of Americans dislocated from their homes and home states due to the storm.

A message from outer space

By Avi Loeb

Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University.

At the Galileo Project Observatory at Harvard University, we spend every day searching the universe for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. Our research suggests that it’s only a matter of time before we’ll find something that signals that we’re not alone in the universe. And that will change a lot of things. There is no way to make a specific prediction on this matter. Of course, the Galileo Project could discover a technological object that arrived from interstellar space, or the U.S. government could disclose a similar finding.

Finding a package from a neighbor among familiar rocks in our backyard is an exciting event. So is the discovery of a technological object near Earth that was sent from an exoplanet. As a follow-up on such a finding, we could search for signals coming from any potential senders, starting from the nearest houses on our cosmic street. The sudden knowledge that we weren’t alone in the universe would immediately upend how humans think about themselves and their civilization, and the effects on earth would be both momentous and unpredictable.

This isn’t as speculative a scenario as you might think. The opportunity for a two-way communication with another civilization during our lifetime is limited to a distance of about 30 light years. But already we know of a dozen habitable exoplanets within 30 light years from Earth, and we are only aware of a few percent of them. But even if we identified all the nearby candidate planets for a two-way conversation, they would constitute a tiny fraction of the tens of billions of habitable planets within the Milky Way galaxy.

Most likely, any visiting probe we encounter had originated tens of thousands of light years away. In that case we will not be able to converse with the senders during our lifetime. Instead, we will need to infer their qualities from their probes, similar to the prisoners in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave who attempt to infer the nature of objects behind them based on the shadows they cast on the cave walls.

A digital apocalypse, and so much more

By Charlie Sykes

Charlie Sykes is editor-at-large at the Bulwark and host of the Bulwark Podcast.

Let’s set aside the obvious Black Swan events that could upend 2024: assassination(s), heart attack(s) or stroke(s). Let’s also stipulate that the entire year will be a Black Swan of sorts — with a leading party nominee facing trials on 91 felony counts. America might elect a convicted felon to its highest office. The swans don’t get any blacker than that.

What else could go wrong? A hell of a lot, because we live in an era of chaos and fragility. The new year is a nesting doll of unknown unknowns.

We could see 1968-like riots at the major party conventions and perhaps a humanitarian disaster at the border.

Internationally, we could see the collapse of an abandoned Ukraine and the subsequent invasion of Taiwan by an emboldened China. We could find ourselves on the brink of a nuclear confrontation amidst a global economic meltdown that would overshadow every other issue.

In 2020, no one envisioned a global pandemic, but in 2024, we might be hit by a global digital virus. What if the computers and the satellites stopped working? For even a few days? What if the virus attacked the world’s banking system, vaporizing trillions of dollars of wealth?

And since we are contemplating a Digital Apocalypse, we probably should brace ourselves for AI-generated fakes that could drop days before the election itself.

Happy New Year.

Global warming-induced havoc

By Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben is an environmentalist and author, most recently, of The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened.

Given that 2024 seems almost certain to break 2023’s global temperature record (and this year was already the hottest in 125,000 years), the physics of global warming indicate that we can expect … havoc.

The precise form it will take and spots it will strike can never be known in advance — some combination of fire, flood, storm, drought and sapping heat — but it would be a shock only if it didn’t happen. And perhaps when it does, it will be one more reminder of the folly of electing climate deniers to high office.

A coup against Putin

By Bill Scher

Bill Scher is a contributing writer to POLITICO Magazine, the politics editor for the Washington Monthly and co-host of “The DMZ,” an online show and podcast with conservative writer Matt Lewis.

Some Kremlin analysts have suggested that Russian President Vladimir Putin has “coup-proofed” his regime, using methods such as dividing military power between several agencies and outside organizations, as well as embedding the armed forces with spies, to stymie collaboration. We cannot know if coup-proofing will continue to work. The opaque nature of the Kremlin makes it difficult to see if Putin’s position is eroding. But a sudden end to Putin’s regime would change a lot of political equations around the world.

At least one figure is openly agitating for a coup: Ilya Ponomarev, a former member of the Russian Duma who voted against annexing Crimea in 2014, leading to his impeachment and exile to Ukraine. He now is a leader of a shadow parliament based in Poland, an opposition television channel and a small army called the Freedom of Russia Legion, which has claimed credit for some military operations within Russia. Ponomarev often speaks confidently; in July he told the Christian Science Monitor of the end of Putin’s rule, “We are months away. Maybe it would be the end of this year, maybe it would be the beginning of next year, but I’m absolutely convinced that it would not be like 2025 or later.”

Or Putin’s demise could come from within the Kremlin. Jack Devine, who served in the CIA for 32 years, recently predicted to The Sun, “Putin could disappear tomorrow and I wouldn’t be surprised if some element in the government had decided they were going to take executive action. ... I don’t think it’ll be an uprising. I think it’ll be what we might call a palace coup.”

Putin’s sudden disappearance would likely validate Joe Biden’s decision to stand with Ukraine and repel Russia’s invasion — unless what follows Putin is even worse.

The abortion battle gets even hotter

By Robert L. Tsai

Robert L. Tsai is professor of law at Boston University and the author of Practical Equality: Forging Justice in a Divided Nation.

For the moment, access to mifepristone to terminate pregnancy is unchanged. But imagine that the GOP-dominated Supreme Court upholds the Fifth Circuit’s ruling, rolling back access to mifepristone that’s been available for years. Since 2016, the FDA has allowed online ordering, mail delivery and receipt, and pharmacists to dispense the drug. Medication abortion now apparently accounts for nearly half of all terminated pregnancies in the U.S. — mostly in the comfort and safety of a person's home.

Additionally, what if there were five votes to go with Judge James Ho’s more strident concurring opinion where he insisted federal law already bans “mail-order abortion?” Ho asserted that shipping mifepristone across state lines violates the Comstock Act, an anti-vice law from 1873 once used to ban mail-order contraception nationwide as “obscene.” (His colleagues on the panel didn’t go that far, striking down the FDA’s actions as “arbitrary” and refusing to defer to the FDA’s views about drug safety.) Because there is no longer a federal right to terminate one’s pregnancy after Dobbs, such a ruling would seem to immediately revive that 19th century law and potentially bar federal action to protect abortion access in other ways.

Whatever rationale the Supreme Court ultimately goes with, if the justices decide to sharply restrict access to mifepristone, their decision could limit even a single state’s ability to protect access to the drug outside of in-person settings. In theory, Congress could clarify or change federal law, but in polarized times it’s extremely difficult to reach legislative consensus to undo damage wrought by the Supreme Court. 

A clash between states and the federal government could follow. Governors and state lawmakers who back abortion rights would likely enact laws that disagree with the Supreme Court’s interpretation of federal law and try to protect this availability as much as possible through state law. Anti-abortion state officials would be tempted to aggressively invoke any plausible state authority to block people from receiving such drugs in the mail.

While federal authorities are responsible for enforcing federal law, an anti-abortion state attorney general or district attorney might call federal officials derelict and perhaps overreach by engaging in a high-profile arrest of a manufacturer, shipper or mail delivery person. If that happened, you could see frustrated citizens who favor abortion rights take to the streets and the issue catapulted to the top of voters’ concerns. There could be a crackdown on protests that become unruly. Politically things would be unpredictable, with law-and-order arguments going both ways. Voters would have to figure out whether access to medication abortion is worth creative, popular efforts that pit regular people against elected officials and a hostile or indifferent Supreme Court.

A violent attack on a candidate

By Jeff Greenfield

Jeff Greenfield is a five-time Emmy-winning network television analyst and author.

If the polls and pols are right, we already know who the presidential nominees will be. What kind of Black Swan event could render this assumption inoperative?

Illness or injury: The two likely nominees will have a combined age of 160 on Election Day. The actuarial tables by themselves suggest a greater possibility of a disabling health issue than ever before. And, grim as the notion is, a violent assault on a candidate not only took the life of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, but sidelined Alabama Governor George Wallace four years later.

A grievous self-inflicted wound: Every time Joe Biden steps on a stage or off a plane, his supporters hold their breath. With most voters (including Democrats) thinking he’s too old to be president, a highly public stumble (physical or verbal) could turn that belief into a serious demand for someone else to take his place. In the case of Donald Trump, it would mean something he says or does that raises doubts among his less zealous supporters to change their assumptions about him. (Nikki Haley may have joined the League of Self-Inflicted Warriors when she failed to note that slavery was a cause of the Civil War.)

A New Hampshire surprise: If history is any guide, this is the “likeliest” of unlikely events. Time and time again the state has turned campaigns on their heads, forcing prohibitive favorites into lengthy battles, and rewarding underdog candidates whose dogged campaigning won their votes. Sometimes those campaigns produced bigger than expected results (Eugene McCarthy in 1968, Bill Clinton in 1992). Sometimes they won totally unexpected landslides (Gary Hart in 1984, John McCain in 2000 and 2008). If Haley can pull off that kind of result this year, it would undermine Trump’s “invincibility” and open the possibility of an actual contest.

A hurricane meets Jan. 6

By Jacob Soll

Jacob Soll is a professor of philosophy, history and accounting at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Free Market: The History of an Idea (Basic Books).

Not a day goes by without an unexpected climate event: fires in the Northwest, tornadoes in Tennessee and hurricanes in Los Angeles. But imagine, for a moment, that one of these events happens during the upcoming presidential election. Indeed, imagine a monster hurricane hits the Mid-Atlantic seaboard on Election Day, shutting down D.C. and moving into Pennsylvania. Such an event could, very possibly, upend our democracy.

Surviving a weather disaster depends on good management and communication from public authorities. But we live in an age where large swathes of the public not only distrust science, but also the very government agencies that work to protect them in such an emergency. If a monster storm smashed into the D.C. area and then thrashed eastern and central Pennsylvania, with life-threatening winds, tornadoes and floods, one can imagine a particular form of political chaos.

If the Biden administration had to call for a closure of voting places and for the public to take shelter, one can imagine Donald Trump immediately claiming it constitutes an attempted coup. He could simply deny the disaster was actually happening, and he could call for his heavily armed voters to intervene in the election. What would happen then is anyone’s guess as National Guard troops might have to face these voters, or rebel themselves. It’s not an outlandish scenario. It’s simply a hurricane meets Jan. 6, and given how crazy our political system has become, it’s worth considering.

Global conflict scrambles the campaign

By Joshua Zeitz

Joshua Zeitz, a Politico Magazine contributing writer, is the author of Lincoln’s God: How Faith Transformed a President and a Nation. 

“The world has never been more disorderly within memory of living man,” observed the journalist Walter Lippmann in 1968. It’s an apt observation for 2024, as well — a year in which democracy stands in a pitched global struggle against populist authoritarianism, wars are devastating parts of Europe and the Middle East, and Americans continue to absorb the economic aftershocks of the pandemic.

There was no single Black Swan event in 1968, but Vietnam dictated the terms of the political debate and largely programmed the outcome of the presidential election. In that same way, events in other parts of the world could influence the outcome of next year’s contest.

Will the conflict in the Middle East spread regionally and necessitate direct American involvement? Will Joe Biden’s Israel policy cause the Democratic Party to continue to bleed support on the left? What happens if China, emboldened by Russian and Iranian aggression, makes its long-awaited move against Taiwan? Will terrorist threats hit closer to home?

Global conflict is the most likely of Black Swans, but it’s folly to predict how such an event might reverberate at home. One could just as easily imagine Biden profiting from a “rally around the flag” effect as Donald Trump eviscerating him on the basis of saber rattling. Living in such a disorderly time, the game board can easily be scrambled, and foreign actors know it.

Look to the Middle East for “peace” — and tech

By Joel Garreau

Joel Garreau is a professional scenario planner originally with Global Business Network and is Professor of Culture, Values and Emerging Technologies Emeritus at Arizona State University and a long-time reporter and editor with The Washington Post.

Last year, my scenario-planning students in the Dubai Executive Council’s Future Experts Program came up with two well-thought-out and credible Black Swan scenarios for the near future that made even my jaw drop:

• Peace in the Middle East/North Africa of a useful sort

• Rescuing the Taiwan chip makers from the Chinese by lavishly incentivizing them to move themselves and their fabs to the United Arab Emirates

The idea behind their “peace” scenario is their strongly held evaluation that the first choice for no Arab leader is more war to eradicate Israel. The vast majority of the Arab world, in this view, is sick of that bottomless scenario. They want their people to be like the rest of the Western world — relatively prosperous and entrepreneurial and bloodshed-free. As demonstrated by the tentative prospect of relationships with Israel by Saudi Arabia, the UAE and other would-be leaders of the Middle East. In this perspective, most of the funding and arming of this region’s guerrilla violence is coming from Iran. Thus, leadership change in Iran fueled by its current deep-seated internal uprising could produce dramatic results for the world. The tipping point in this scenario would come from those in the Middle East who have a motivation for accelerating this regime change. Does everyone come together for a round of kumbaya? Hell no. This is the Middle East. But it is a scenario for — note the quotation marks — “peace.”
Will the Israel-Hamas war change that scenario? Who knows? It’s worth noting however that none of the Arab nations have yet joined the fray — in my mind confirming that economics still is a more deeply rooted part of this Black Swan.

The idea behind the China/Taiwan scenario is that it is globally unusual for chip-makers, after half a century, still to be concentrated in small portions of Europe, coastal Asia and the United States. In this view, the time is more than ripe for global diversification. Therefore, with a strong enough push, that concentration could change. China’s saber-rattling is plenty of incentive. The tipping point could come from a future-obsessed leadership seeking to punch way above their weight, fueled by a decades-long history of achieving amazing feats they were told couldn’t be done — from the world’s tallest building to the world’s busiest international passenger airport. And lots of money. All of which Dubai has.

Note: These are not predictions. They are scenarios. But scenario thinking is where the idea of Black Swans came from. Nor will these Black Swans culminate in the coming year. But it is credible to imagine them seriously starting in 2024.

In a post-American world order, Africa becomes a power player

By Reynaldo Anderson

Reynaldo Anderson is an associate professor of Africology and African American studies at Temple University. A co-founder of The Black Speculative Arts Movement, he is currently working on "The Democracy Project" as a guest curator with Carnegie Hall's "Dancing on the Precipice: Fall of The Weimar Republic.

A Black Swan event in geopolitics might arise from a new approach to governance, resource allocation or international cooperation that renders contemporary geopolitical models obsolete. For example, a state or a coalition of states could lead to a reshuffling of alliances and economic relationships — such as the recent alliance between the states of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso with Morocco for a seaport and the Russian announcement of the formation of an “Africa Corps.”

This marks the beginning of the end of France Afrique and their legacy of colonial empire. Such a shift would have a wide impact on global election outcomes in 2024 — a shift that Afrofuturists have long been predicting.

Afrofuturism is an emerging philosophy and practice whereby Africans and people of African descent locate themselves in time and space with agency. It is a framework for exploring the future of Africa and the African diaspora. In a world where traditional narratives have been dominated by Western perspectives, a Black Swan event within an Afrofuturist context could take the form of a shift in social organization, or movement that originates from Africa or the African diaspora and impacts global dynamics and challenges existing geopolitical assumptions around diverse issues like A.I., decolonization, reparations, food security, climate change and migration.

The notion of a post-American world order suggests a geopolitical landscape where the United States’ influence as the sole superpower has significantly diminished, and power is diffused among a variety of state and non-state actors. In such a world, traditional alliances, economic structures and political paradigms would be upended, creating a fluid and multipolar global stage. In this shifting world order, a Black Swan event could manifest as a sudden realignment of global power.

Revolt against Putin

By John McLaughlin

John McLaughlin was acting director and deputy director of CIA from 2000-2004 and now teaches at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

My candidate flows from Russia. As best we can tell, Putin’s approval rating is solid and high. The most reliable opinion data also suggests that the Russian public is broadly apathetic or at least chooses to not think about the war in Ukraine (except for minorities at both ends of the spectrum who actively approve or disapprove of the war). And by all accounts, Putin is feeling more comfortable than heretofore because of the static lines in Ukraine, divisions appearing in the West and turbulence in Ukrainian politics.

So, a Black Swan event that would defy expectations about Russia would be a sustained Russian mothers’ revolt over the high Russian casualty rate in Ukraine (as occurred over Russia’s occupation of Afghanistan and the Chechnya war), gathering steam around the time of Russia’s presidential election (March 15-17) and cutting into Putin’s expected large majority. If this were to occur, it could limit Putin’s ability to prosecute the war as aggressively as in recent months because this has depended to a large degree on massing troops without much regard to casualties. This, in turn, could enhance Ukrainian ability to penetrate Russian defenses while also giving Kviv a propaganda advantage. Any weakening of Putin’s position as Russian president could trigger cascading effects that would impact events around the world in unpredictable ways — including our own election in 2024.

A Katrina-level catastrophe could change the political game

By Eric Easter

Eric Easter is a writer and producer in Washington. He is a veteran of the presidential campaigns of Jesse Jackson, L Douglas Wilder and Howard Dean.

If I’m honest, I think we’re overthinking the whole election process. I think we underestimate the sense of responsibility most people feel when they step into the voting booth, and we’ve seen the evidence of that in recent elections and who’s won and lost across the country over the last four years or so. We’ll see some significant shifts in voting blocs, particularly in the 18-24 crowd, but not enough to change the outcome.

That said, I think this year might bring a major climate catastrophe to an American city — Katrina-level but much worse — that’s going to force us to see the need for having an adult in the Oval Office and a government that works and still exists. But it will have to be something naturally occurring and undeniable. I’m afraid we’re too far gone into our own silos for anything political to change the game.