Simpsons predicted it - or did it? Has the formula finally failed? If you thought the Fox show called this candidate taking the White House, the answer appears to be yes.
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00:00Simpsons predicted it — or did it? Has the formula finally failed?
00:05If you thought the Fox show called this candidate taking the White House,
00:08the answer appears to be yes. People have claimed that The Simpsons has predicted everything from
00:14the NSA mass surveillance program to the novel coronavirus of 2020. It even successfully
00:19predicted the presidency of one Donald Trump. But observers have been quick to point out that
00:24the show was apparently dead wrong about one perceived prediction. In this instance,
00:28the tea leaves were pretty wilted. In the lead-up to Election Day 2024, many aspiring seers of the
00:34future used The Simpsons to predict a victory for Kamala Harris, using Lisa Simpson as her stand-in.
00:40The supposed prediction of Harris' win originates from a similar outfit. It's in the episode
00:45Bart to the Future from the year 2000, back when Harris was running the Family and Children's
00:50Services division of the San Francisco City Attorney's Office. In a vision shown to Bart,
00:55Lisa Simpson is revealed to be serving as president in the year 2030,
00:59and her administration followed one helmed by a familiar name.
01:03As you know, we've inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump."
01:06This episode, of course, was from when Trump had only just dipped his toe into politics,
01:11and even before he found reality show fame as the host of The Apprentice.
01:15Throughout the episode, Lisa is shown wearing a purple pantsuit and a string of pearls.
01:19At President Joe Biden's inauguration in January 2021, Harris wore a very similar outfit,
01:24as she was sworn in as vice president. When it became clear that Harris was set to become the
01:29Democratic nominee for president after Biden stepped away from the race in July 2024,
01:34lots of online commenters took the sartorial similarity as evidence that The Simpsons had
01:39made another one of its much-vaunted predictions of future events. But it became clear by the early
01:44morning hours after Election Day that Harris would fall short of the votes she needed to become the
01:49first woman elected president. Instead, Donald Trump would decisively achieve a second,
01:54non-consecutive term. The purple suit simply wasn't enough to make this perceived prediction
01:59come true. And to be honest, many of the other details really didn't line up anyway.
02:04If Lisa was a stand-in for Harris, then she wouldn't be talking about inheriting budget
02:08woes from President Trump. Harris wouldn't have been following Trump into office,
02:12she'd be following her former boss, Joe Biden. Many of the comments about Lisa in the episode
02:17seeming to predict a Harris win also refer to her as the first woman elected president,
02:21but that's not the case either. It's even the source of a joke.
02:25"'Yes, I am proud to be America's first straight female president.'"
02:29But who knows? Maybe in 20 years, this very episode will come off like a prediction of
02:33the defeat of Donald Trump Jr. You never know. One thing's for certain — if you're relying
02:38on cartoon comedies to make political bets, you might not want to bet it all on The Simpsons anymore.