One thing we’ve learned in the past month is that even beginning to imagine what might happen a week from now is a fool’s errand. We might have expected Joe Biden would display infirmities in the presidential debate, but we certainly didn’t know how bad it would be. We couldn’t have foreseen an assassination attempt on Donald Trump. We couldn’t have predicted that the Republican Convention would be overshadowed by what is rapidly turning into the weirdest political story of our time, the improvisatory effort to kinda sorta defenestrate/make retire/bully/coup out Joe Biden from the presidential race. Oh, and Biden got COVID and went back to his basement in Delaware.

All this happened beginning June 27—that’s 23 days ago. As of this writing, we cannot even make sense out of the effort to oust Biden and whether it will fail or succeed. And, of course, in succeeding it might fail—because it might lead to an ineffectual candidate who cannot win. Or in failing, it might succeed—in proving the coup-plotters right because Biden really can’t make it until November without causing multiple crises of confidence in his fitness.

All this should teach us humility about political outcomes. Of course, it does no such thing. Case in point: People are already talking bout the meta-meaning of the selection of J.D. Vance and how the fact that he’s 39 means he’ll be a political figure in our lives for decades to come. I wrote that myself on Monday and it could be true. But it also could not be. Dan Quayle was 41 when George H.W. Bush picked him to run as vice president and extraordinarily accomplished as a politician, having served one term in the House, having won two Senate elections, and having stewarded an important piece of job-training legislation into law. And yet by 1993, Quayle was effectively through as a political actor.

Democrats are playing the same game as they talk about the next few years. Maybe Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, should not accept Kamala Harris’s offer, were she to proffer it, to run as VP so he can keep his powder dry for 2028. Same with Gavin Newsom, who, we are told, has already informed Harris he would not join her on the ticket—which is hilarious if true and maybe even more hilarious if it’s not.

The one thing politics has taught us over the past 50 years is that we have no clue whatsoever who will emerge under which circumstances to lead the country after either Biden or Trump. None. Let’s go through our political history, shall we?

In 1972, after having received a mere 43 percent of the vote in the prior election, Richard Nixon scored the largest landside in American history, beating George McGovern by 23 points (LBJ only beat Barry Goldwater by 22.6.) Who would succeed him in 1976? Well, turn edout it wouldn’t be his vice president, Spiro Agnew, because Agnew was compelled to resign in 1973 due to a bribery scandal in Maryland dating back to his tenure as governor there. And it turned out it wouldn’t be 1976, because Nixon himself resigned in August 1974 and was replaced by Gerald Ford, the House minority leader. No one in the Republican party would ever have looked to Ford to be the party’s nominee had he run for president from the House; indeed, Ronald Reagan came awfully close to taking the Republican nomination away from Ford.

And what about on the Democratic side? After its selection of the very left-wing George McGovern, the Great Mentioner in the media mentioned just about everyone but the utterly obscure governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter. But the unprecedented concatenation of circumstances arising from Nixon’s resignation set the table for a non-Washington outsider and deeply religious man whose entire ticket to ride was personal integrity—and who began his campaign quietly and persistently in December 1974, earlier than anyone had ever run before.

“Jimmy who?” was the classic DC scoff. People stopped scoffing and began celebrating at  the Democratic convention, at the end of which the Gallup poll had Carter leading Ford by 31 points. Sure seemed like a runaway victory. It wasn’t. On election day, Carter won by 2—and if Ford had eked out another 100,000 votes in California, he would have secured the electoral votes necessary to retain his presidency.

You might think Ronald Reagan had been a shoo-in for the 1980 Republican nod, but he was not. Seven prominent Republicans ran as well, and Reagan lost the Iowa caucuses to George Bush, who proceeded to win most of the Northeast even as Reagan pulled away from the pack in the South. Reagan was so concerned about the ideological divisions in the GOP that emerged during his run that he conducted was a serious negotiation at the Republican convention with Gerald Ford, of all people, to return and serve as his vice president.

In 1988, the consensus was that Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton had bombed in his national political debut as the keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention—colorless, boring, long-winded, so much so that when he spoke the words “in conclusion,” the crowd cheered. No one…and I mean no one…thought he would be the party’s nominee in 1992. He was aided in his journey to the presidency by the out-of-nowhere surge of enthusiasm and support by a billionaire non-politician, H. Ross Perot, whose candidacy no one saw coming and whose conduct during the campaign was flighty and peculiar (he dropped out of the race on July 16 and then reentered it on October 1). By the time the election rolled around, Perot got 19 percent of the vote, most of it from people who had voted for Bush four years earlier, and Clinton became president. You know who predicted any of that? Maybe Nostradamus.

Now, in the wake of Bush’s crushing defeat, imagine a conversation in Washington, DC, in which some sage said that eight years later, a son of Bush’s would become the Republican nominee for president. You would have been laughed out of the room. Neither Jeb nor George W. Bush had made a significant run for office yet, and the Bush name was mud. But if that sage had suggested such a thing, he would certainly have said the son to run and win would be Jeb, not George. In 1994, both ran for governor. Jeb lost and George won. History was written by the voters in Florida and Texas.

In 2000, the presidency was decided by hanging chads, recounts, and the Supreme Court. Then came 9/11, which scrambled American politics for more than a decade. The Democrats were desperate to nominate someone who stood in opposition to Bush’s approach in the war on terror and were heading in the most radical of directions in the person of Vermont Gov. Howard Dean until John Kerry made a move in Iowa based largely on the idea that he had been a Vietnam war hero—even though he had thrown his medals away. Predictable? No.

Barack Obama was on no one’s dance card for 2008; indeed, I wrote a spectacularly misguided book published in 2006 about how Hillary Clinton was bound to be the Democratic nominee in 2008 and the only person that could stop her was Rudy Giuliani. I don’t think anyone disagreed with me about Hillary, and Obama’s entry into the race in early 2007 was halting until Oprah Winfrey endorsed him in South Carolina in October and he began to find his voice and his legs. Again the Democratic race was upended by Iraq, with Obama prevailing over Hillary less because of his youth or race but because he had opposed the war in 2002 and she had voted for it.

And I haven’t even gotten to Trump in 2015, or Biden coming out of retirement in 2019—the first an almost unthinkable political event and the second only unthinkable because Biden himself had ruled a run out two years earlier. Or that the fallout from Trump’s defeat in 2020 would prove to be the accelerant to get him the nomination again in 2024.

I think what all this tells us is simple. It is very likely that the nominee of at least one of the political parties in four years will be someone nobody is thinking of. And that we default to such conversations because the uncertainty of the present moment is unnerving and we take bizarre comfort in seeing a linear path to the future when the one thing we should have learned by now is that American politics has no roadmap.