A career of reporting on politics and a love of history has left me illequipped for 2024.

Fully, and completely useless.

Generally, my journalism experience has given family and friends a reason to ask my opinion about what’s likely to happen in an election. It’s not that I know what will happen, but I’m viewed, rightly or wrongly, as having a sense of what could happen.

In 2016, for example, the Brexit vote in the UK in June of that year heralded better chances for Donald Trump’s candidacy than many thought possible, making his win a surprise but not a shocker.

Over the weekend, however, I realized that of it.

Think about what we’ve all just lived through. In the past two weeks, we’ve witnessed an attempted assassination of a presidential candidate, a sitting president has dropped out of the presidential race and the Democratic Party is scrambling to identify a new standard-bearer — with three and a half months to go before Election Day.

This is new territory for me. I wasn’t old enough to watch President Lyndon Johnson announce his decision not to seek re-election in March 1968 or Bobby Kennedy get assassinated a couple of months later.

The year 1968 — which included the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. — must have bewildered most Americans in its strangeness and violence.

I understand.

I can say from experience now it is one thing to read history and a completely different matter to live through it. After the last three weeks, I think I prefer reading.

Back to my newfound humility and getting into the swing of saying “I have no idea,” here are a few questions people might pose and my likely answers.

Is New Mexico still in play in the presidential race as Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham told President Biden said it would be if he stayed in the race?

I have no idea. I’m not privy to the methodology Lujan Grisham used to conclude that New Mexico might be in play after the past four presidential election cycles when New Mexicans voted for the Democrat every time. But it is 2024, so who knows?

Why did Sen. Martin Heinrich become the third Senate Democrat to call on President Biden to get out of the race? Pressure from mega-donors? (One such wealthy donor gave New Mexico’s senior senator who is up for reelection an ultimatum: call for Biden to leave the race or “you are not getting a dime from me,” according to the New York Times.)

Your guess is as good as mine.

Will Vice President Kamala Harris be the Democratic presidential nominee? Looks like, but — you know my new mantra — let’s wait and see.

If she is the Democratic nominee, will she win New Mexico? Likely, but there’s no guarantee.

Nationally, who will turn out in greater numbers — supporters of former President Trump or the Democratic presidential nominee? Don’t know.

Will Americans elect a first woman president or return another white man to the White House? I plead unable to see into the future.

Humility seems the only smart play in a moment like this when history seems silent.

I don’t mean to suggest that the times we’re experiencing are the worst America has ever seen. Historians can point to multiple periods in American history that were as crazy or crazier than ours. The Civil War. The 36-year period that saw three American presidents assassinated (Abraham Lincoln, 1865; James Garfield, 1881; William McKinley, 1901). The Great Depression? The 1960s?

But the last few weeks have been discombobulating.

Here’s one prediction I will make: Historians will write about 2024 and people who are young today will tell their grandchildren about the year that the nation lost its collective mind.

Of course, this assumes the years that follow 2024 won’t be crazier.

Maybe I should rethink making that prediction!

Better to be humble than to pretend like I know.

Since 2005, Trip Jennings has covered politics and state government for the Albuquerque Journal, The New Mexico Independent and the Santa Fe New Mexican. 2012, he co-founded New Mexico In Depth, a nonpartisan, nonprofit media outlet.