If you follow politics, you can hardly escape Allan Lichtman, the American University history professor known for correctly forecasting the victor of all but one presidential election since 1984. In a whimsical New York Times video published over the summer, the 77-year-old competes in a Senior Olympics qualifying race—and confidently declares that Kamala Harris will win the race (get it?) for the White House. You might also have recently seen Lichtman on cable news, heard him on the radio, or read an interview with him.
In an era of statistically complex, probabilistic election models, Lichtman is a throwback. He bases his predictions not on polls, but rather on the answers to a set of 13 true-or-false questions, which he calls “keys,” and which in 2016 signaled a Trump victory when the polls said otherwise. He has little patience for data crunchers who lack his academic credentials. “The issue with @NateSilver538 is he’s a compiler of polls, a clerk,” Lichtman posted on X in July, as part of a long-running spat with the prominent election modeler. “He has no fundamental basis in history and elections.”
Lichtman’s complaint isn’t just with polls and the nerds who love them. In his view, almost everything that the media and political establishment pay attention to—such as campaigns, candidate quality, debates, and ideological positions—is irrelevant to the outcome. An election is a referendum on the incumbent party’s track record. “The study of history,” he writes in his book Predicting the Next President, “shows that a pragmatic American electorate chooses a president according to the performance of the party holding the White House, as measured by the consequential events and episodes of a term.”
[Anne Applebaum: The danger of believing that you are powerless]
According to Lichtman, the standard account of how presidential campaigns work is a harmful fiction. “The media, the candidates, the pollsters, and the consultants,” Lichtman writes, “are complicit in the idea that elections are exercises in manipulating voters,” which stymies political reform and meaningful policy debate. That argument contains a touch of the conspiratorial, but there’s a big difference between Lichtman’s worldview and a conspiracy theory: His predictions actually come true. If Lichtman is wrong about how elections work, how can he be so good at foretelling their outcomes?
One possible answer is that, in fact, he isn’t.
Lichtman developed his method in 1981 in collaboration with Vladimir Keilis-Borok, a Russian mathematical geophysicist. Lichtman had a hunch, he told me, that “it was the performance and strength of the White House Party that turned elections.” He and Keilis-Borok analyzed every election from 1860 to 1980; the hunch bore out.
Each of the 13 keys can be defined as a true-or-false statement. If eight or more of them are true, the incumbent-party candidate will win; seven or fewer, and they will lose. Here they are, as spelled out in Predicting the Next President:
1. Incumbent-party mandate: After the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives than it did after the previous midterm elections.
2. Nomination contest: There is no serious contest for the incumbent-party nomination.
3. Incumbency: The incumbent-party candidate is the sitting president.
4. Third party: There is no significant third-party or independent campaign.
5. Short-term economy: The economy is not in recession during the election campaign.
6. Long-term economy: Real annual per capita economic growth during the term equals or exceeds mean growth during the two previous terms.
7. Policy change: The incumbent administration effects major changes in national policy.
8. Social unrest: There is no sustained social unrest during the term.
9. Scandal: The incumbent administration is untainted by major scandal.
10. Foreign or military failure: The incumbent administration suffers no major failure in foreign or military affairs.
11. Foreign or military success: The incumbent administration achieves a major success in foreign or military affairs.
12. Incumbent charisma: The incumbent-party candidate is charismatic or a national hero.
13. Challenger charisma: The challenging-party candidate is not charismatic or a national hero.
Lichtman says that keys 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 13 are true this year: just enough to assure a Harris victory.
Although some of the keys sound extremely subjective, Lichtman insists that they are not subjective at all—assessing them simply requires the kind of judgments that historians are trained to make. The charisma key, for example, doesn’t depend on your gut feeling about a candidate. “We are talking about the once-in-a-generation, across-the-board, inspirational, truly transformational candidates, like Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan,” he told me.
I can attest that applying the keys is challenging for those of us without a history Ph.D. The keys must be “turned” consistently from election to election without regard to polls, but in practice seem to be influenced by fluctuating public-opinion data. The Democratic nominee in 2008, Barack Obama, qualified as charismatic, but the 2012 nominee, who was also Barack Obama, did not, because of his diminished approval ratings. The “third-party challenger” key cuts against the incumbent if a third-party candidate is likely to get 5 percent of the vote—but this is only knowable through horse-race polling, which we’re supposed to ignore, or after the fact, in which case it’s not a prediction.
Lichtman insists that voters don’t change their minds in response to what the candidates say or do during the course of a campaign. This leads him to make some deeply counterintuitive claims. He has written that George H. W. Bush’s attacks on Michael Dukakis in 1988—which included the infamous Willie Horton ad—accomplished nothing, and actually hurt Bush’s subsequent ability to govern, because he already had enough keys to win and should have been focused on his policy agenda. He implies that JFK, who edged out Richard Nixon by less than two-tenths of a percentage point in 1960, would have won even if he had had the personality of, say, his nephew Robert, because he had eight keys in his favor in addition to charisma. And this past summer, Lichtman told anyone who would listen that Joe Biden should stay in the race, despite his difficulty completing a sentence, because replacing him on the ticket would mean the loss of the incumbency key. If Democrats persuaded Biden to drop out, he wrote in a July 3 op-ed, “they would almost surely doom their party to defeat and reelect Donald Trump.” (He changed his mind once it became clear that no one would challenge Harris for the nomination, thus handing her key 2.)
Arguments such as these are hard to accept, because they require believing that Lichtman’s “pragmatic electorate” places no stock in ideological positions or revelations about character and temperament. Lichtman is unperturbed by such objections, however. All arguments against the keys fail because they suggest that the keys are in some way wrong, which they plainly are not. Lichtman has written, for example, that the infamous “Comey letter” did not tip the 2016 election to Trump, as poll-focused analysts such as Nate Silver have “incorrectly claimed.” How does Lichtman know the claim is incorrect? Because the keys already predicted a Trump victory. The proof is in the fact that the system works. This raises the question of whether it actually does.
Going nine for 10 on presidential predictions is not as hard as it sounds. Only four of the past 10 elections were particularly close. Most campaign years, you can just look at the polls. Lichtman predicted a Biden victory in 2020, for example, but you probably did too.
To his credit, Lichtman has made many accurate calls, in some cases well before polls showed the eventual victor in the lead. Even in 2000, the election that he is generally considered to have gotten wrong, the system worked as advertised. As he explains in Predicting the Next President, the keys “predict only the national popular vote and not the vote within individual states.” (Lichtman has devoted considerable energy to proving that the election was stolen in Florida by the GOP, and that he has thus really gone 10 for 10.)
Lichtman’s most celebrated feat of foresight by far, the gutsy call that supposedly sets his keys apart from mere polls, was his 2016 prediction. Calling the race for Trump when the polls pointed the other way was reputationally risky. After Lichtman was vindicated, he was showered with praise and received a personal note of congratulations from Trump himself. “Authorities in the field recognized my nearly unique successful prediction of a Trump victory,” Lichtman told me in an email. He quoted the assessment of the political scientist Gerald M. Pomper: “In 2016, nine of eleven major studies predicted Clinton’s lead in the national popular vote. However, by neglecting the Electoral College and variations among the state votes, they generally failed to predict Trump’s victory. One scholar did continue his perfect record of election predictions, using simpler evaluations of the historical setting (Lichtman 2016).”
Oddly, no one seems to have noticed at the time what seems in hindsight like an obvious problem. By Lichtman’s own account, the keys predict the popular-vote winner, not the state-by-state results. But Trump lost the popular vote by two percentage points, eking out an Electoral College victory by fewer than 80,000 votes in three swing states.
Lichtman has subsequently addressed the apparent discrepancy. “In 2016, I made the first modification of the keys system since its inception in 1981,” he writes in the most recent edition of Predicting the Next President. In “my final forecast for 2016, I predicted the winner of the presidency, e.g., the Electoral College, rather than the popular vote winner.” He did this, he writes, because of the divergence of the Electoral College results from the popular vote: “In any close election, Democrats will win the popular vote but not necessarily the Electoral College.”
[Peter Wehner: This election is different]
But the gap that Lichtman describes did not become apparent until the results of the 2016 election were known. In 2008 and 2012, the Electoral College actually gave a slight advantage to Obama, and until 2016, the difference between the margin in the popular vote and in the Electoral College tipping state was typically small. Why would Lichtman have changed his methodology to account for a change that hadn’t happened yet?
Odder still is the fact that Lichtman waited to announce his new methodology until well after the election in which he says he deployed it. According to an investigation published this summer by the journalists Lars Emerson and Michael Lovito for their website, The Postrider, no record exists of Lichtman mentioning the modification before the fact. In their estimation, “he appears to have retroactively changed” the predictive model “as a means of preserving his dubious 10 for 10 streak.”
This is a sore subject for Lichtman. Whether he got 2016 totally right or merely sort of right might seem like a quibble; surely he was closer to the mark than most experts. But a forecaster who changes his methodology after the fact has no credibility. When I brought the matter up with Lichtman in a Zoom interview, he became angry. “Let me tell you: It steams me,” he said, his voice rising. “I dispute this, you know, When did you stop beating your wife? kind of question.”
Lichtman directed me to an interview he gave The Washington Post in September 2016. (When I tried to interject that I had read the article, he cut me off and threatened to end the interview.) There and elsewhere, Lichtman said, he clearly stated that Trump would win the election. Trump did win the election, ergo, the prediction was accurate. Nowhere did he say anything about the popular vote.
Later that evening, Lichtman sent me a follow-up email with the subject line “2016.” In it, he described Emerson and Lovito as “two unknown journalists with no qualifications in history or political science.” As for their claims, he pointed once again to the Washington Post interview, and also to an article in the October 2016 issue of the academic journal Social Education, in which he published his final prediction.
Here is what Lichtman wrote in the Social Education article: “As a national system, the Keys predict the popular vote, not the state-by-state tally of Electoral College votes. However, only once in the last 125 years has the Electoral College vote diverged from the popular vote.”
This seemed pretty cut-and-dried. I replied to Lichtman’s email asking him to explain. “Yes, I was not as clear as I could have been in that article,” he responded. “However, I could not have been clearer in my Washington Post prediction and subsequent Fox News and CBS interviews, all of which came after I wrote the article.” In those interviews, he said nothing about the popular vote or the Electoral College.
I got another email from Lichtman, with the subject line “Postriders,” later that night. “Here is more information on the two failed journalists who have tried to make a name for themselves on my back,” Lichtman wrote. Attached to the email was a Word document, a kind of opposition-research memo, laying out the case against Lovito and Emerson: “They post a blog—The Postrider—that has failed to gain any traction as documented below. They are not qualified to comment on the Keys, the polls, or any aspect of election prediction.” The document then went through some social-media numbers. Lichtman has 12,000 followers on Facebook; The Postrider has only 215, and the articles get no engagement. One hundred thousand followers for Lichtman on X; a few hundred for Emerson and Lovito.
[Gilad Edelman: The asterisk on Kamala Harris’s poll numbers]
I ran these criticisms by Emerson and Lovito, who were already familiar with Lichtman’s theory of the case. After they published their article, he emailed them, cc’ing his lawyer and American University’s general counsel, accusing them of defamation.
To the charge of being less famous than Lichtman, they pled guilty. “It’s true that a public intellectual who has been publishing books since the late 1970s and is interviewed every four years by major media outlets has a larger following than us, yes,” they wrote in an email. “But we fail to see what relevance that has to our work.” Regarding their qualifications, they pointed out that they each have a bachelor’s degree in political science from American University, where Lichtman teaches. (Emerson is a current student at American’s law school.) “As for this story on the Keys, we spent months reading and reviewing Professor Lichtman’s books, academic papers, and interviews regarding the Keys. If we are not qualified to comment at that point, he should reconsider how he publicly communicates about his work.”
In a December 2016 year-in-review article, the journalist Chris Cillizza looked back on the stories that had generated the most interest for his Washington Post politics blog, The Fix. “The answer this year? Allan Lichtman. Allan Lichtman. Allan Lichtman … Of the 10 most trafficked posts on The Fix in 2016, four involved Lichtman and his unorthodox predictions,” Cillizza wrote. “Those four posts totaled more than 10 million unique visitors alone and were four of the 37 most trafficked posts on the entire WaPo website this year.”
Americans love a prediction. We crave certainty. This makes the life of a successful predictor an attractive one, as Lichtman, who has achieved some measure of fame, can attest. But a professional forecaster is always one bad call away from irrelevance.
Give Lichtman credit for making concrete predictions to which he can be held accountable. As he always says, the probabilistic forecasts currently in vogue can’t be proved or disproved. The Nate Silvers of the world, who have unanimously labeled the upcoming election a toss-up, will be correct no matter who wins. Not so for Lichtman. A Trump restoration would not just end his winning streak. It would call into question his entire theory of politics. We are all waiting to find out how pragmatic the electorate really is.
theatlantic.com