Meet the Nostradamus of American presidential politics

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Allan Lichtman, a professor of history at American University in Washington, D.C, has correctly predicted the outcome of nine out of the 10 most recent presidential elections since Ronald Reagan’s re-election in 1984.

So how does he do it? With a crystal ball? Tarot readings? Ayahuasca retreats in the desert? No, he does it with science. Specifically, by applying the science of plate tectonics to American history and politics.

Lichtman developed the metrics for his predictions with the help of an earthquake specialist from Moscow in 1981 and uses 13 historical factors or “keys” to determine presidential races—four of those factors are based on politics, seven on performance, and two on the candidate’s personality. The incumbent party would need to lose six of those factors, or “keys,” to lose the White House.

In a recent phone interview with USA Today, Lichtman shared how he developed his method and what his thoughts are on the 2024 presidential race between the two party’s presumptive nominees: President Joe Biden, and former President Donald Trump.

How did you become interested in presidential politics?

I grew up in a very political family and we’d always discuss politics at the dinner table. In 1960, when I was 13 years old, I got to go to a John F. Kennedy rally in New York City and was utterly inspired. He just blew us young people away, and since then, I have followed up on my interest in politics.

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More:Professor Allan Lichtman’s 2024 presidential pick

How did your knack for predicting presidential elections develop?

Like so many other good ideas, I came across the keys serendipitously when I was a visiting distinguished scholar at the California Institute of Technology in southern California in 1981.

There I met the world’s leading authority on earthquake prediction, Vladimir Keilis-Borok, the head of the Institute of Pattern Recognition and Earthquake Prediction in Moscow and it was his idea to collaborate. Get this: In 1963 he was a member of the Soviet Scientific Delegation that came to Washington D.C. under JFK and negotiated the most important treaty by far in the history of the world: the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

Keilis-Borok said, “In Washington, I fell in love with politics and always wanted to use the methods of earthquake prediction to predict elections.” But, he said, “I live in the Soviet Union – elections? Forget it. It’s the supreme leader or off with your head. But you, you’re an expert in American history and politics, together we can solve the problem.”

So, we became “The Odd Couple” of political research and we re-conceptualized presidential elections in earthquake terms: As stability – the party holding the White House keeps the White House, and earthquake – the party is turned out.

With that in mind, we looked at every American presidential election from the horse-and-buggy days of politics, the election of Lincoln in 1860 to the election of Reagan in 1980, using Keilis-Borok’s mathematical method of pattern recognition.

It was that retrospective investigation that led to the “13 Keys to the White House”: simple true-false questions that probe whether or not there’s going to be stability or earthquake, and our six-key decision rule, or the six keys that go against the White House party.

What did we see in 2020?

Very interesting election, where I did correctly predict Trump would lose and Biden would win.

In 2019, Trump was only down four keys. Remember, it takes six keys to count out the White House party. I hadn’t made a prediction yet, but things were looking pretty good. Then the pandemic hit.

When I predicted Trump’s victory in 2016 – which you can imagine did not make me very popular in 90% Democratic Washington D.C. where I teach – Trump actually sent me a note on the Washington Post article where I predicted his win that said, “Congrats Professor, good call.”

He appreciated my call but he didn’t understand the meaning of the keys. The keys primarily probe the strength and performance of the White House party.

The big message: It is governance, not campaigning, that counts. Trump didn’t understand that. So when the pandemic hit, instead of dealing substantively with the pandemic like the keys would have indicated, he tried to talk his way out of it. Of course, it didn’t work; the economy tanked, and he lost two additional keys: The short- and long-term economy. That put him down six keys, enough to predict his defeat.

You don’t plan to unveil your 2024 prediction until around August, but what are you thinking and seeing now?

Forget the polls, forget the pundits.

Polls six months, five months, even closer to the election have zero predictive value.

Forget all of the pundits who have said Biden’s too old. Democrat’s only chance to win is with Biden running for re-election. One of my keys is incumbency, he obviously wins that. Another key is party contest, he’s not been contested. That’s two keys off the top that Biden wins. That means six keys out of the remaining 11 would have to fall to predict his defeat.

I’ve also said while I have no final prediction, a lot would have to go wrong for Biden to lose.

Are there any upsets on the horizon that we should keep an eye out for?

Right now, Biden is only down, for sure, two keys: The mandate key, because the Democrats lost seats in the House 2022 elections; and the incumbent charisma key because Biden is no JFK. But there are four very shaky keys:

Third-party: Now, to win the third-party key, the third-party candidate has to get at least 5% of the popular vote. Very few have gotten that. There has to be a stabilization of the vote for the third-party candidate as we get closer to the election, and right now, RFK Jr. is all over the map. I’ve seen him as low as 3% and as high as 15%. That key is shaky but uncertain.
Social unrest: I thought it was pretty well locked in, in favor of the incumbent but the campus protests made it shaky.
And of course, the two foreign policy keys: Success and failure – both shaky, given that we have two very uncertain wars raging in the Middle East and in Ukraine.

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