Shohei Ohtani es el mejor jugador de los Dodgers, y necesitan que juegue como tal

University of Chicago professor Friedrich Hayek. | Getty Images There are few more influential right-wing scholars than the economist Friedrich Hayek — and few whose work is less compatible with the right’s ascendant Trumpian strain. Born in Austria in 1899, Hayek spent his career developing a wide-ranging libertarian social theory. Societies, for Hayek, emerge from the interplay of countless different systems and logics — creating an order so complex that no single entity, not even a government, can fully understand how it all operates. He believed that any attempt to transform such a thing by policy would invariably break part of this system, leading to unintended and often disastrous consequences. This isn’t a good argument against all government interference in the marketplace (as a shallow read of Hayek might suggest). But it is a powerful insight into how societies work, one that provides an especially clear explanation for why planned economies failed so badly during Hayek’s lifetime. It also helps us understand why there’s an authentic strain of right-wing resistance to Trump’s “tariffs and deportations” economic agenda — one that attentive liberals could learn from. Hayek’s “spontaneous order” and the case against regulation For Hayek, there were basically two different types of system or order. The first is an organization, meaning a top-down planned effort where one person or entity lays out the rules for everyone to follow. The second is a “spontaneous order,” a bottom-up system in which the rules are determined over time by enormous numbers of micro-interactions. Take, for example, the ecosystem of the American West. No one person set the rules by which bison, wolves, moose, prairie dogs, and the like breed and interact; in fact, no one dictated that this particular place needed to have those particular species at all. Instead, a system emerged out of thousands of years of interactions between flora and fauna, prey and predator. It has predictable rules and outcomes, but no hand at the tiller. Hayek believed that humanity operated in a similar, but even more complex, fashion.  Our own social order, according to Hayek, reflects centuries of interactions between hundreds of millions of different people and an impossibly diverse set of institutions, ranging from organized religion to different economic sectors to artist collectives. What we call “society” is the spontaneous order that emerges from individuals and organizations interacting and developing oft-unwritten rules that govern those interactions.  “The structure of human activities constantly adapts itself, and functions through adapting itself, to millions of facts which in their entirety are not known to anybody,” he wrote in Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Volume 1. Government, Hayek argued, plays a special role in spontaneous order: It “becomes indispensable in order to assure that [social] rules are obeyed.” The state both protects people’s rights to participate in their corner of the spontaneous order and, at times, can even guide the order toward adopting a different (and perhaps better) set of rules. What the state cannot do well, in Hayek’s eyes, is interfere with discrete and specific interactions inside the spontaneous order.  When the government issues “commands” telling people where and for how much they can sell their goods, for example, it is engaging in an enterprise that bureaucrats and politicians cannot and never will have sufficient knowledge to do adequately. Most economic regulation, for Hayek, is akin to the mass slaughter of wolves in the American West — a shortsighted move with destabilizing long-term consequences. (Recent efforts to reintroduce wolves have been an extraordinary success.)  “The spontaneous order arises from each element balancing all the various factors operating on it and by adjusting all its various actions to each other, a balance which will be destroyed if some of the actions are determined by another agency on the basis of different knowledge and in the service of different ends,” Hayek wrote. Hayek versus Trump It is very easy to take this pro-market line of thinking too far.  We know that certain elements of the economy, like the money supply, can in fact be effectively managed by governments. Hayek’s skepticism of government could bleed over into paranoia, as with his argument in The Road to Serfdom asserting that social democracy would invariably bleed into authoritarianism. In fact, he even went so far as to endorse Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile on grounds that its free-market policies were worth the loss of political liberty. Yet Hayek’s argument is essential to understanding why some government projects, like Soviet-style command economies, tend to fail so spectacularly. When an economic policy aims at fundamental transformation, one in which humans are put in charge of managing a vast swath of ordinary economic activity, the potential for the state to exceed the bounds of its knowledge is obvious.  Hayek did not believe that this was only a problem for socialists. In The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek argued that conservatives’ emphasis on preserving tradition and the nation inclined them toward dangerous forms of state control over society. “It is this nationalistic bias which frequently provides the bridge from conservatism to collectivism: to think in terms of ‘our’ industry or resource is only a short step away from demanding that these national assets be directed in the national interest,” he wrote. So despite unquestionably being a man of the right, Hayek rejected the label “conservative” for his politics (he preferred “liberal” on grounds that “libertarian” was too clunky). Conservatives, he argued, were dogmatic and nationalistic — useful allies against the left, but skeptical enough of liberty that they posed their own set of collectivist dangers. Were Hayek still alive, he would see the vindication of his concerns in the person of Donald Trump. The former president’s two most consistent policy proposals — deporting millions of migrants and imposing a 10-percent tariff on all foreign-made goods — are far more aggressive efforts at reshaping America’s spontaneous order than any tax-and-spend proposals offered by the Harris campaign. Each, in its own way, amounts to a fundamental revision of how the American state and economy operate. Indeed, there’s a reason that some of the most effective critics of Trump’s trade and immigration policies work for the libertarian Cato Institute. Hayek’s heirs, at least those who take his ideas seriously, understand that Trump represents something anathema to their tradition. This story was adapted from the On the Right newsletter. New editions drop every Wednesday. Sign up here.

Anna Moneymaker/Getty ImagesMAGA billionaire Elon Musk gave roughly $75 million to his pro-Donald Trump political action committee in just three months, making him one of the Republican movement's biggest bankrollers, filings with the Federal Election Commission showed Tuesday.Musk’s America PAC spent about $72 million in the same July to September reporting period, the filings said.The cash infusion from the out-and-proud MAGA loving Musk puts him in league with GOP megadonors like Miriam Adelson, who gave $95 million to her own pro-Trump super PAC in the same period.Read more at The Daily Beast.

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Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris speaks to the media before boarding Air Force Two after assessing the Hurricane Helene recovery response in North Carolina on October 5, 2024, in Charlotte, North Carolina. | Mario Tama/Getty Images Over the course of its last few terms, the Supreme Court has effectively placed itself in charge of the executive branch.  It’s given itself an extra-constitutional veto power over virtually any policy decision made by a federal agency. Even when it ultimately rules in favor of President Joe Biden’s policies, it often sits on those cases for months, allowing a lower court order to suspend Biden’s programs for as much as a year.  Meanwhile, the Court has done extraordinary favors for America’s only recent Republican president. Just look at the Republican justices’ decision to immunize former President Donald Trump from prosecution for criminal actions he committed while in office. The president, in other words, is increasingly subordinate to the courts. Yet, as the judiciary seizes more and more power, the battle over who gets to shape it grows increasingly lopsided.  Republicans enjoy an advantage in the Electoral College. Just how much is up for debate, but that advantage does mean that even if the American people hand Vice President Kamala Harris a modest victory in the popular vote this November, Donald Trump could still become president. He’d then get to nominate loyal Republican judges eager to implement his party’s agenda from the bench, much as he did during his first term. Even if Harris wins by a large enough margin to overcome the Electoral College’s Republican bias, she still may not get to have much of an impact on the judiciary. Her presidency — and specifically her ability to name judges — is likely to be restricted by a Republican Senate. For Democrats to control even a tied 50-50 Senate, one in which Vice President Tim Walz would hold the deciding vote if Harris prevails, they must not just win in every single blue and swing state Senate race this year, but also Senate races in at least two of the red states of Ohio, Florida, Montana, and Texas.  That could happen, but it would require the kind of unusually triumphant Democratic election year that the party hasn’t seen since at least 2008 and possibly not since President Bill Clinton’s landslide reelection victory in 1996. And that seems quite unlikely. A Harris victory could halt America’s slide into a MAGA-dominated future but it is unlikely to give her the power to reshape the judiciary in the way Trump was able to during his first term. The Electoral College and Senate malapportionment has completely warped the judiciary  During the Biden administration, the Republican Supreme Court wielded its power aggressively. It greenlit abortion bans in numerous red states. It abolished affirmative action at nearly all universities. It has turned itself into a printing press for court orders benefiting the Christian right. It’s given itself sweeping veto power over literally anything done by a federal agency that should be controlled by the president. And then there was that whole affair where the Republican justices said that Donald Trump was allowed to commit crimes while he was in office. Along the way, the Court has pulled new legal rules out of thin air, then used these newly invented rules to nullify many of Biden’s most ambitious programs. If the American people had voted for this agenda then it would be difficult to criticize the Republican Party for pushing it. But the electorate did nothing of the sort. After 2016, Trump was in a position to nominate three Supreme Court justices not because most Americans wanted him to be president but because enough Americans in the right places did. The Electoral College system means each American’s vote is not equal: Hillary Clinton, after all, won nearly 3 million more votes than Trump in 2016, but still lost the presidency. Trump had a Republican Senate willing to put his choices on the bench because Republicans have an enduring advantage in the upper chamber, one that makes it more difficult for Democrats to control the Senate. Each state, regardless of population, gets two senators.  These antidemocratic features of the US Constitution have been with the United States almost from the beginning, but they have an increasingly pronounced effect today, largely because the parties have sorted based on population density. People in cities and other densely populated areas tend to vote for Democrats, while outlying areas become more and more Republican as they become less dense.  That means that a system that effectively gives extra representation to the most sparsely populated states will unfairly favor the Republican Party. In 2021, for example, when the Senate split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, the Democratic “half” represented nearly 42 million more people than the Republican “half.”  Though the trend appears to be accelerating, this antidemocratic skew long predates the Trump presidency. Senate malapportionment has been one of the most consequential factors shaping US politics for decades. By some counts, if senators were distributed equally according to how the majority of Americans voted, Democrats would have controlled the Senate in every single year since the late 1990s. In that world, Democrats not only may have enacted more significant legislation, they would also almost certainly control the courts. Obama would have confirmed a justice to fill the vacancy created when Justice Antonin Scalia died in Obama’s last year in office, and none of Trump’s nominees would have likely been confirmed. Similarly, while Republicans probably would have still filled some Supreme Court seats during the 1990s and 2000s, it’s unlikely that they would have successfully confirmed an ideologue like Justice Clarence Thomas or an unapologetic GOP partisan like Justice Samuel Alito if Senate seats were distributed fairly by population. In a fair Senate, Republican presidents would have to negotiate with Democrats to choose moderate nominees in the vein of, say, Justices Lewis Powell and Sandra Day O’Connor. That is to say, the impact of recent population sorting is felt acutely in the courts. In all of US history, only three justices were nominated by a president who lost the popular vote and confirmed by a bloc of senators who represent less than half of the nation’s populace. All three of them currently sit on the Supreme Court; they are Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s three appointees to the Court. What a broken Senate means for a potential Harris administration  In the event that Harris wins the presidency but Republicans capture the Senate, we only need to turn the clock back less than a decade to predict what is likely to happen. Obama’s final two years in office were the only two when Republicans controlled the Senate. And shortly after Scalia’s death in February 2016, Senate Republicans announced that they would confirm no one Obama nominated to fill that seat.  “This vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president,” then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced at the time. (Four years later, when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death allowed Trump to fill a vacancy in the final months of his presidency, Republicans abandoned the position they adopted in 2016 and swiftly confirmed Trump’s nominee.) The GOP’s blockade on Supreme Court confirmations should have surprised no one who watched the Senate closely because Senate Republicans had already imposed a near-total halt on all confirmations to federal appellate courts, powerful bodies that hand down precedential decisions that determine what the law is in multiple states at a time. In Obama’s last two years in office, he successfully appointed only two judges to the appellate bench, and one of these judges was confirmed to a highly specialized, relatively nonpolitical court that primarily deals with patent law. By contrast, President George W. Bush confirmed 10 appellate judges during his last two terms in office, during a period when Democrats controlled the Senate. Similarly, during Obama’s last two years in office, he appointed only 18 judges to federal district courts, the lowest rank of federal judge who enjoys a lifetime appointment. That compares to 58 judges during Bush’s final two years in office, according to data from the Federal Judicial Center. In Trump’s final two years in office, when Republicans controlled both the White House and the Senate, an astonishing 121 district judges were confirmed, including some infamously partisan judges like Aileen Cannon and Matthew Kacsmaryk.  President Biden, for what it’s worth, has confirmed more than 200 judges thanks to Democrats’ narrow majority in the Senate, including a total of 116 since the current Congress took office. Over his entire presidency, he’s filled 44 appellate seats. Without the power to confirm judges, Harris will have no way to dilute the influence of judges like Cannon or Kacsmaryk, and Republicans could easily refuse to confirm anyone to any judicial vacancy that comes open until the GOP regains the White House. Alternatively, Harris may be able to strike deals with Republicans to confirm a few of her preferred judges, but the GOP has a history of demanding a very high price to confirm even a single Democratic judge.  In 2014, for example, thanks in part to a now-weakened Senate process that allowed senators to veto anyone nominated to a federal judgeship in their state, Georgia’s Republican senators convinced Obama to nominate four Republican judicial choices — including a Republican appellate judge — in return for confirming only two Democrats. One of the Republican nominees was eventually dropped because his views on abortion, marriage equality, and the Confederate Flag offended Democrats, but Republicans still walked away with more confirmed judges than Obama did. Harris could very well find herself in a similar situation.  The problems for Harris likely wouldn’t stop there. Because Republicans continue to dominate the judiciary, Harris would likely spend her presidency watching her policies get struck down on dubious legal theories invented by GOP judges, much as the Supreme Court struck down President Biden’s student loan forgiveness policy despite the fact that it was unambiguously authorized by an act of Congress. Democrats are starting to awaken to the threat of a Republican judiciary, but they haven’t yet found a solution to their constitutional problem Absent constitutional reform, Democrats have good reason to fear a Republican judiciary for decades to come. A malapportioned Senate means that Democrats are increasingly defenseless against the GOP’s efforts to control the bench. In recent years, however, Democrats have become more aware of a GOP judiciary’s power to thwart their agenda and have started to try to explore ways around it.  Historically, elected Republicans have viewed the courts as a favorable issue that rallies their base, while Democrats have behaved much more cautiously. Many Republicans credit Trump’s decision to delegate judicial selection to the Federalist Society, a bar association for right-wing lawyers, and to release a list of potential Supreme Court nominees during his 2016 candidacy, for giving him enough support to prevail in that year’s election. Biden, by contrast, began his presidency very reluctant to take on the courts. After many Democrats called for Supreme Court reform in the wake of the Senate’s disparate treatment of the Scalia and Ginsburg vacancies, Biden tried to take the wind out of the sails of reform by promising to appoint a commission to study the issue — and then filling the commission with Republicans and scholars who historically have not supported reform. But, as the Supreme Court’s polling numbers collapsed and as the Court outraged elected Democrats with opinions like its Trump immunity decision, Democrats have grown more aggressive. Biden proposed term-limiting the justices and imposing a binding ethics code on the Court, proposals also supported by Harris. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has a bill that would strip the Court of jurisdiction to enforce its immunity decision. One of the most ambitious recent Supreme Court reform proposals, from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), includes a number of very aggressive reforms. Wyden’s proposal would make every justice submit to a tax audit each year, require a two-thirds supermajority for the Court to overrule an act of Congress, and gradually expand the size of the Court to 15 seats. Yet, while these proposals show that Democrats are moving in a more court-skeptical direction than they were four years ago, they would not solve the structural problems with US democracy that gave us the courts we have today. And they have virtually no chance of passing, especially in a world where it is increasingly difficult for Democrats to win the Senate even when they convincingly win the national popular vote. Realistically, turning the United States into a nation where every vote counts equally — and where each voter is actually able to shape the judiciary — would require rewriting its Constitution. Until that happens, Democrats like Harris will struggle to win elections even when most Americans support them. And Democratic presidents will increasingly be at the mercy of Republicans in both the Senate and the courts.

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.

Letter writer wonders whether it’s really necessary for so many kids to be in therapy.