10 Predictions for 2026

Hello and Happy New Year! This is going to be a big year. I expect 365 whole days.

What can we expect in 2026? For the past few years, I’ve been looking into the Yangstradamus crystal ball, and this is no exception. Here are some of the things I see coming down the pike in the next 12 months.

1. Healthcare Debacle

What would you do if your insurance premiums doubled? How about tripled? Some of you are trying to figure that out right now.

This is the reality for millions of Americans in January as Covid-era subsidies for health insurance expire as part of the Big Beautiful Bill, which is going to get more and more unpopular.

Most policy changes come and go without much of a lasting effect. This is going to be different. We’re talking about 22 million Americans who will be impacted, with about 4 million projected to allow their coverage to lapse. Many of the most impacted will be middle class.

Having health insurance is a mark of economic security and stability in America. If you say, “I now can’t afford health insurance” after being able to do so, it’s like getting kicked in the face. Living without health insurance makes you vulnerable and also stresses you out for the slightest injury or sickness. Stories will bubble up. People are going to be livid. And they should be.

I expect citizens to show up, film videos, confront their representatives, protest and more. It won’t go away. Under pressure, the House may pass a subsidy extension with some Republican defectors in January, at which point it will go to the Senate. Healthcare is going to dominate coverage and politics for the beginning of the year.

2. Trump the Lame Duck

It turns out there’s a thin line between being an autocrat and a lame duck. 2026 is going to be the year when Trump crosses that line.

How to be a strongman when you look weak? The health insurance debacle will pour fuel on this flame. Millions of the folks who benefit from Obamacare subsidies are in red states; a lot of Republican voters are going to say, “I voted for Trump to close the border and bring grocery prices down, NOT double the cost of my health insurance!” Many farmers and manufacturers already hate the tariffs for increasing their costs.

It used to be that defying Trump meant the end for a Republican officeholder. Not anymore. Republicans have already flouted Trump on releasing the Epstein Files. Expect this to become a pattern. There are about half-a-dozen endangered House Republican members who are going to lose their seats in November who will become increasingly vocal and strident. You’re also seeing a lot of retirements, so folks won’t have as much to lose.

The Trump coalition – and the fear factor – are both breaking down.

It’s difficult to keep people together and positive in a movement that is now over a decade old. Trump is tired. He came down that escalator 10 and a half years ago, in Summer, 2015. That’s a long time ago. Expect rumors to emerge that he’s going to step aside and let J.D. Vance take over at the end of the year after the midterms. The franchise is ending in 2026.

3. The AI Backlash Begins

What can 80% of Americans agree on? That they want there to be more regulation of AI. When Bernie Sanders and Ron DeSantis are both out there criticizing data centers, you know a broad movement is brewing.

For the average American, AI means “I may not have a job in a little while,” chatbots, cheap videos and now, perhaps higher energy costs. Are they actually going to be employed at the data center? Probably not.

The Trump administration has been hand-in-hand cheerleading for the AI industry, framing it as vital for competition with China and a boon to investment. That’s not where most people are, and politicians are noticing. Democrats haven’t figured out a real point-of-view yet, and some of their most prominent Governors, like Newsom and Shapiro, are touting AI investment as an economic driver. Most politicians are leery of being on the wrong side of the megabillions being wielded by the industry. The AI barons also control the social media platforms that politicians rely on. The AI lobby is spending money on both sides of the aisle.

But 80% is a lot, and the anti-AI sentiment is going to become a real political force in 2026. It’s going to be the new populist plank. Some of the more savvy figures in both parties are going to take on skeptical or hostile positions to AI, and attract a lot of energy as a result.

4. AI Eats Jobs in Earnest

You know one reason why people are going to be getting pissed at AI? Because it’s going to get a lot better at a lot of things.

Waymo self-driving cars will become a common sight on city streets. AI customer service bots on the phone will become commonplace. Tech companies, banks, large corporations, law firms and accounting firms will be overhauling their operations to include AI in the fabric of their operations. Writers, designers and creatives will be decimated. A lot of middle-aged middle managers will lose their jobs. Tons of young people won’t get hired.

One of the most disrupted fields: software engineers. Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5 can now complete tasks on its own that would have taken human coders hundreds of hours.

Being someone who actually writes and combs through code will not be very practical, even as a lot more products are going to be built and deployed. Expect to see multiple “I studied computer science and now I’m a gardener”-type stories.

The same thing will happen across a dozen fields. For a sense of which jobs will be most impacted and which will survive, Microsoft did a study I wrote about here.

I’m going to be doing a ton of writing about this in ’26 as the War on Normal People has truly arrived. It’s time for a sequel as the rubber hits the road this year.

5. Air Starts Coming out of the AI Bubble

You know another reason that people will become pissed at AI? When it’s not a guaranteed successful investment.

Two things can be true at the same time:

1. AI is going to disrupt a ton of jobs and livelihoods, affect most every industry, and create trillions of dollars of value over time; and

2. The current investment environment has gotten ahead of itself and some of the valuations are out of whack.

Both of these facts will become clearer in ’26.

OpenAI famously thinks it needs $1.4 trillion over the next 8 years for its data centers and infrastructure. That’s . . . a lot. OpenAI is doing maybe $20 billion in revenue now, which is also a lot, but that’s only 1.42% of $1.4 trillion. You’re going to have to see revenue double, and then double and then double again very quickly for this to make sense. It gets harder to double when you’re at this scale. Tens of billions don’t just come out of nowhere.

One danger sign for me was when DeepSeek, the Chinese AI competitor, attracted notice. You had a Chinese model that is maybe 90% cheaper than ChatGPT come out. That’s a very cheap substitute, even if the output isn’t as good. So what was the reaction? Invest more more more!!! If someone else has a cheap substitute and can replicate my stuff, the actual move might be to re-examine my projections. But that’s not permissible in an environment where people are investing hundreds of billions on the promise of future trillions.

I know people who LOVED ChatGPT who switched to Gemini or another model in the Fall. There’s not a lot of loyalty, which also suggests it’s going to be hard to jack up prices.

When will the AI bubble experience a correction? No one knows. But after something becomes conventional wisdom – the bubble-ish nature of the AI / data center industry – prices will follow. My bet is that this process starts in earnest this year.

6. Real Estate Prices Start Correcting

Speaking of bubbles, can I interest you in a house?

A young couple I know bought a house in December in the New York suburbs. They had been in the market for a long time. Generally speaking, every suitable house got snapped up and volume was low. Not this time. This time, they not only had their offer accepted, it was for less than the asking price.

Real estate prices almost went negative in Q4 nationwide – that’s not normal and a sign of the market dynamic. For years, prices have been unaffordable. Sellers didn’t want to accept less than what they thought their house ‘was worth,’ But now, the market is thawing, and what is starting as a mild willingness to take a lower price is going to become something of a downward flow.

Look, housing will continue to be grossly unaffordable for young people and the vast majority of Americans. Every housing market is local, so take this with a grain of salt. But if you’re looking to buy, I think the market is going to come your way this year. And if you’re looking to sell, you might want to get a move on.

7. The Dems win the House, and close the gap in the Senate

I referred to this earlier, but Trump and the Republicans are going to lose the midterms by a landslide.

Guys, the party not in power wins because everyone gets pissed off at whoever’s in power because shit sucks. It’s not complicated.

Trump’s approval rate is in the 38 – 41% range. He’s old and fading. Costs are stubbornly high. His team is trying to foul up the midterms by messing with some of the mechanics in various states, but it’s tougher when you’re not on the ballot.

The Democrats win the House, but not the Senate. Even in the House, gerrymandering has rendered the number of competitive seats to be lower than ever, so the Dems will win a majority but it won’t be enormous. In the Senate, the Republicans have a 53-47 advantage and are only defending a couple competitive seats, while there are at least 3 competitive seats that the Dems will have to defend (Georgia, Michigan, New Hampshire), so I expect the Republicans to wind up with a majority of 51-49. Note that even at 50-50, J.D. Vance gets the tying vote.

The Dems’ sights will then turn to ’28, with Gavin Newsom their de facto standard bearer until proven otherwise, with over two dozen challengers set to line up against him in the Democratic Primary. Kamala doesn’t run. The placeholder contest for ’28 will be Newsom vs. J.D. Vance, who may already be President by the time ’28 rolls around.

8. Someone Dies

Okay, this is grim. But one of my predictions in ’25 was that there’s a political assassination.

That, sadly, was right.

The pattern in disintegrating democracies is that political violence continues until the fever breaks. We’re still on track. This is an ornery, not an orderly, time. One thing that often happens in fragmenting societies is the death of a prominent judge. You can see it too everytime there’s a mass shooting, where people on social media comb for the motivation and blame the other side.

This is one reason why a record 55 Congressmen and women – 11 Senators and 44 Representatives - are already retiring or not running for re-election in ’26. This number is going to go up. They’re tired of death threats and harassment.

We’re still coming apart, not coming together. I wish I had better news here.

9. Universal Basic Income returns to the agenda

Ah, UBI. You’d think I would say this, but I’m saying it.

If AI eats jobs in earnest, what do we do? I’ve had multiple news interviews in the past several weeks where the journalist is clearly pressing me on the need for Universal Basic Income in a sympathetic way as one of the only paths forward. I expect more to join in.

You know one of the people who’s going to be pushing for cash? Donald Trump. $1,776 bonuses for soldiers, $1,000 Trump savings accounts for newborns, $2,000 tariff rebate checks – he senses that one way out of his political and economic malaise is putting money into people’s hands. He still gets credit in some quarters for the ‘stimmies,’ as his name was on the stimulus checks back in 2020.

Money remains one of the only things we can do in real life to ease a transition that is going to get increasingly painful. Universal Basic Income will return, like the Avengers. Indeed, it never went away.

10. Time away from screens becomes the new luxury good

Finally, I’m a parent. You know the number one issue for parents like me?

Screen time. It’s overrunning our household.

We’ve all seen it with Jonathan Haidt’s successful campaign to get social media and smartphones out of schools. But it’s just as true for adults too.

Before, being connected was a sign of status, achievement, and work as a busy professional. Now, it’s soul-sucking and proven to be bad for our mental health. It makes us shitty dinner companions.

The families with the most stringent policies around screens are the affluent ones. If you go to wealthy areas, you’ll see a higher proportion of kids in heavily scheduled physical activities or reading books. Screen time is increasingly what’s known as an economically inferior good – the poor use it more.

Plus, how did reading the list above make you feel? The antidote is going outside, taking a walk, looking at the birds and realizing that they don’t care about any of this stuff.

Unplug. Look up. Touch Grass. More Americans are going to figure out that most of their most negative experiences day-to-day are coming from their phones, what Hasan Minhaj calls ‘our rectangles of sadness.’

Of course, how will we convey the freedom from our rectangles to other people, since we all love to brag? We’re clever. We’ll find a way.

Did you know that Noble Mobile users use 15 – 20% less screentime AND typically cut their wireless bills by 50%? Go to noblemobile.com/yang for 3 months off your wireless bill, the best deal around. My new book “Hey Yang, Where’s My Thousand Bucks?” comes out in February and the tour dates are up here. Use code ‘UBIUBI’ for 25% off. I’m also celebrating my bday on Jan. 15^th at our Offline Party in NYC so come find me there! Let’s make ’26 the best it can be!