By STEVE BRAWNER | Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

It turns out it’s a lot easier to predict the movements of celestial bodies than human ones. 

Monday’s total solar eclipse arrived exactly when it was supposed to. The hordes of tourists expected to accompany the eclipse? Not so much. 

State officials were planning for big numbers. The Arkansas Department of Transportation’s travel plan anticipated the possibility of 1.5 million visitors. That agency shut down construction and work zones and made other plans to deal with traffic. Meanwhile, 103 school districts planned to close classes for the day. 

Personally, the eclipse was a wondrous experience. Our family settled into our lawn chairs in the back yard and watched the sun disappear using the protective ISO 12312-2 lenses provided for free by the state of Arkansas. Neighbors beside us and behind us also were enjoying the awesome sight. 

But as far as being a major event in Arkansas tourism history – well, it wasn’t. There weren’t nearly as many visitors as expected. For some restaurants and communities prepared for a big weekend, it was a bust. Business was slow in places. Perhaps last week’s predictions of bad weather had scared visitors away – meteorology not being as exact a science as astronomy. Meanwhile, the locals must have stayed home, fearful of the anticipated crowds.

Perhaps the weekend can provide some lessons as we enter this upcoming presidential election. Politics has become less and less suspenseful as the country has divided into red and blue states and the political marketers have learned how to divide us into our various tribes. 

But things don’t always work out exactly as anticipated. Political polls, once seeming to be so predictive, have been less than accurate in recent elections. Political prognosticators likewise have proven to be less than prophetic. I hardly imagined Donald Trump would become president when he rode down that escalator to start his 2016 race. The day of the election, it seemed certain Hillary Clinton would be the next president. But Trump just kept winning states. Four years later, Joe Biden’s campaign looked dead in the water after he lost in Iowa and New Hampshire. Then he won South Carolina and the dominoes fell. 

Now we come to another election, with Biden and Trump heading the tickets once again. But some interesting things have happened with those less-than-accurate but still pretty good polls. They’re showing that Trump may have made significant inroads among African American and Latino voters. Those two groups have long reliably voted for Democrats and, in the case of African Americans, overwhelmingly so. Some polls are showing Trump with surprising strength among younger voters, who tend to vote for Democrats. Biden, meanwhile, is doing better than Democrats typically do among older voters, who tend to vote in greater percentages than younger ones do.

Maybe there will be some suspense and unpredictability this election season after all. 

It’s not just in politics that people might surprise you. It wasn’t a shock when former Arkansas Razorbacks men’s basketball coach Eric Musselman announced he was going home to Southern California last week. But I doubt many Hog fans predicted John Calipari would leave the University of Kentucky, one of college basketball’s most storied programs, to come to Fayetteville. If numerous press reports as of Tuesday morning are to be believed, he is.

It’s times like these that I can understand as a word guy why some people are drawn to numbers. They’re predictable. They told us many years ago that the moon would come between the earth and the sun on April 8, 2024. And it did.

But there’s only one moon, and most of us don’t spend much time responding to it. It’s people we must live with – a lot of them, actually – and they come unpredictably into and out of our orbits every day.

They can make us crazy, and they can fill us with joy. We just have to look through the right lenses. 

Steve Brawner is a syndicated columnist published in 16 outlets in Arkansas. Email him at brawnersteve@mac.com. Follow him on X at @stevebrawner.