The Election Prediction The Simpsons Failed To Get Right

In the lead-up to Election Day 2024, many aspiring seers of the future turned to "The Simpsons" to predict a victory for Kamala Harris — using Lisa Simpson as her stand-in. But if you thought the long-running Fox animated series called this candidate taking the White House, the show's hot streak of seeming to freakishly predict the future appears to have come to an end.

The supposed prediction of Harris' win originates from an episode called "Bart to the Future" from the year 2000, back when Harris was running the Family and Children's Services Division of the San Francisco city attorney's office. In a vision shown to Bart, Lisa Simpson is revealed to be serving as president in the year 2030. And her administration follows one helmed by a familiar name: "As you know," Lisa says at one point, "we've inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump." This episode, of course, was from when Trump had only just dipped his toe into politics, even before he found reality show fame as the host of "The Apprentice."

While there are jokes and references one can miss in "The Simpsons" all the time, people have claimed that the show has predicted everything from the NSA mass surveillance program to the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 — even successfully prophesizing Trump's own presidency years before it happened. But the accuracy of those predictions has been subject to quite a bit of online debate, and observers have been quick to point out that the show was apparently dead wrong about Harris.

Throughout the "Bart to the Future" episode, Lisa is shown wearing a purple pantsuit and a string of pearls. At President Joe Biden's inauguration in January 2021, Harris wore a very similar outfit as she was sworn in as vice president. When it became clear that Harris was set to become the Democratic nominee for president after Biden stepped away from the race in July 2024, lots of online commenters took the sartorial similarity as evidence that "The Simpsons" had made another one of its much-vaunted predictions of future events.

When it became clear by the early morning hours after Election Day that Harris would fall short of the votes she needed to become the first woman elected president, the purple suit simply wasn't enough to make this perceived prediction come true. And, to be honest, many of the other details really didn't line up anyway. If Lisa was a stand-in for Harris, then she wouldn't be talking about "inheriting" budget woes from President Trump. Harris wouldn't have been following Trump into office; instead, she'd be following her former boss, Joe Biden.

But who knows? Maybe in 20 years, "Bart to the Future" will come off like a prediction of the defeat of Donald Trump Junior by a yet-to-be-named woman candidate. You never know. It's just one of the many times that "The Simpsons" got political, but one thing's for certain — if you're relying on cartoon comedies to make political predictions, you might not want to bet it all on "The Simpsons" anymore.