 "American historian Allan Lichtman, who is touted an the Nostradamus of presidential elections has predicted that US Vice President Kamala Harris will win against former US President Donald Trump in the 2024 Presidential Elections. AFP/ AP")
Just days before the first presidential debate between US Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, American historian dubbed as the “Nostradamus” of US presidential elections, Allan Lichtman, shared his prediction for the upcoming polls. In just the first week of September, the distinguished history professor from the American University predicted that Harris would win the November election against Trump.
“Kamala Harris will be the next president of the United States – at least that’s my prediction for the outcome of this race,” Lichtman said. His proclamation was based on a unique model that he had been using to predict the winners of presidential races since 1982. The model comprises 13 true/false propositions which he calls the “13 keys”.
What makes Lichtman’s prediction process unique is the fact that his keys don’t account for polling trends. Not only this, only 2 of the 13 keys are related to the candidates. Lichtman is called the “Nostradamus” of the presidential polls due to his stellar record when it comes to election forecasting. Over the years, Lichtman claimed to have predicted all but one, which was George W Bush’s contested triumph over Al Gore in 2000, but there’s more to that story.
In an exclusive conversation with Firstpost, Lichtman gave insights into his forecasting model, how he came about it and its past performance. He also elucidated the challenges that lie ahead for Trump and Harris as the race for the White House comes closer to an end.
13 keys ignore predictions from pundits
While speaking to Firstpost, Lichtman emphasised that his election forecasting model ignores a host of predictions made by “political pundits”. He noted that his decision to share the results before the first debate between the two candidates was deliberate to get across the message that the presidential election “is about governance and not campaigning”.
“The 13 keys ignore the pundits who have no scientific basis for their opinions or a track record of extensive prediction. They don’t look at polls which are snapshots but abused as predictors. Instead, the 13 keys to the White House reflect how American presidential elections really work as votes up or down on the strength and performance of the White House party,” Lichtman explained.
“They look at things like midterm election results, incumbency, internal party battles, third parties, short and long-term economy, policy change, social unrest, scandal, foreign slash military failures and success. Only two keys relate to the candidates at all and they’re very high threshold keys looking at whether the candidates are those once in a generation, inspirational, transformational,” he added.
Lichtman stated that if the party in the White House has six or more of the keys as “false,” then it is predicted to be a loser, otherwise, it is a predicted winner. “The keys have been right since I predicted Ronald Reagan’s reelection in April 1982, when America was in the worst recession since the Great Depression and the approval ratings for Reagan were historically low,” he told Firstpost.
From predicting earthquakes to presidencies: The origin of the 13 keys
When asked how he came up with the model, Lichtman said that the 13 keys came through serendipity. “Yes. I’d love to tell you I came up with the keys with deep contemplation and ruined my eyes in the library. But if I were to tell you that to quote the late, not-so-great Richard Nixon, that ‘would be wrong’,” Lichtman exclaimed. He went on to give a nod to his collaboration with Russian geophysicist Vladimir Keillis Borok.
“In 1981, I was a distinguished visiting scholar at the California Institute of Technology near Los Angeles in Southern California. There I met the world’s leading authority on earthquake prediction, Vladimir Kellis Borok from Moscow,” Prof. Lichtman recalled. “What he wanted to do, and what I agreed, was to collaborate on the prediction of the most important elections, the American presidential elections, using his methodology of pattern recognition. And so we reconceptualised, as the odd couple of political research.”
Lichtman told Firstpost, that in 1981, the two researchers looked at the presidential race in geophysical terms, i.e. predicting stability if the White House party remains in power or an earthquake if it is thrown out. “With that in mind, we looked at every American presidential election from the horse and buggy days of politics, the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, through the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, using Keillis Borok’s methods of pattern recognition to find the patterns associated with stability and earthquake,” he added. The research of the two great minds eventually led to the development of the 13 keys to forecast presidential elections
The Bush vs Al Gore debacle
Lichtman is touted as the ‘Nostradamus’ because he has correctly predicted all presidential elections since 1982, barring just one. It was the highly controversial presidential race between former President George W. Bush and ex-Vice President Al Gore in 2000. Lichtman predicted Gore’s victory, however, the US Supreme Court handed the win to Bush, 36 days after the elections. Multiple studies later suggested that Gore would have won the race if the court allowed Florida’s statewide recount of all undervotes and overvotes.
“Yes, I predicted Gore. It turned out that when the Supreme Court stopped the recount, George Bush won. But I was right in predicting Gore because based on the intent of voters, Gore should have won going away, as I proved in my report to the US Commission on Civil Rights,” Lichtman asserted.
“The problem was that there were many thousands of votes cast by African Americans that were disproportionately discarded by Florida officials. And most of those were so-called overvotes, where the intent was clear, where African Americans punched in Gore and then wrote in Gore, and all those votes were thrown out by Florida,” he exclaimed. “This was independently verified by a study by Professor Walter Mebane of Cornell University. In the study entitled ‘The Wrong Man is President! Overvotes in the 2000 Presidential Election in Florida,’ Mebane proved that based on the intent of voters, Al Gore should have won by more than 30,000 votes in Florida and should have been elected president,” he added.
Lichtman contended that he was right in the 2000 presidential race and therefore his records stand at 10/10 over 40 years into election forecasting.
Lichtman vs Silver: What makes his model better than numerous polls used for election forecasting
What makes Lichtman’s model of 13 keys stand out is the fact that it does not consider any opinion polls or poll aggregates to come to a conclusion. When asked if he gets nervous about his predictions, Lichtman insisted that he always has “butterflies in his stomach”. While he was explaining his process, the American University professor also called out statistician and the founder of FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver.
“I am always nervous about my predictions. Look, I’m not like that clerk Nate Silver who compiles polls and then gives you these phoney probabilities like Hillary Clinton has a 70 per cent odd chance of winning, then she loses. And he says, see, I told you she had a 20-some-odd per cent chance of losing,” he said. Lictman made it clear that “polls are snapshots and not predictors”. “Totally useless, taking polls, which are snapshots, not predictors and abusing them as predictors. So unlike Silver, I can be proven right or wrong because I tell you who’s going to win and who’s going to lose. It’s definitive,” he added.
When asked what makes his model better at election forecasting than conducting polls or “polls of polls”, Lichtman mentioned that his 40-year track record speaks for itself. He noted that polls can be misleading for two reasons, one of them being that they are just “snapshots” and the second being the fact that the error of margin is far greater.
“You’ve got to add on human error. People don’t respond to pollsters. They may lie. The pollsters have no idea who’s actually voting, so they have to guess. That introduces much greater error, which isn’t random, like statistical error, but unidirectional,” he explained.
During the conversation with Firstpost, Lichtman also recalled a heated exchange between him and Silver. What made Silver one of the most prominent election forecasters was the fact that back in 2008, Silver correctly predicted the winner of Obama vs John McCain in 49 out of 50 states, as well as the winner of all 35 Senate races.
In 2012, the “data cruncher” accurately predicted the outcome in all 50 states. However, the glory for Silver did not last long after he wrongly predicted that the former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would win against Trump in the 2016 race. Lichtman recalled that when he predicted the outcome of the 2012 polls, he was called out by Silver for releasing his prediction early.
“Out of the blue, I get a 30-page attack on my prediction by Nate Silver. He loves to attack me, saying, you can’t predict this early. And of course, being a professor, I wrote a 30-page response, the essence of which was, you can’t because you rely on polls, which are useless,” he said.
“I can, because my model reflects the structure of how elections really work, and sometimes the structure falls into place early. Well, eventually, very late, Nate Silver comes around and says I was right. So I wrote him a very nice email saying, let’s do a joint article explaining how two different authorities, using ultimately different methods, finally came around to the same conclusion. Never heard a word from him, not even a gracious decline,” Professor Lichtman averred.
Clinton vs Trump: Going against the tide
When a plethora of pollsters kept saying Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 race, Lichtman predicted that Trump would take the cake. When asked what were the factors that led him to predict Trump’s win, Lichtman insisted that a number of keys worked out for the former reality TV star.
“I paid no attention to the polls and looked at the keys. There were a number of keys out against the Democrats in 2016, unlike in 2012, such as an open seat, no incumbent, a party contest, no big policy accomplishments to follow the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare of the first term, no big foreign policy achievements to follow up the dispatch of Osama bin Laden in the first term. So things were much more negative for the Democrats in 2016 than in 2012,” he told Firstpost.
He highlighted how the tides have been against him on numerous occasions including the 2016 race. “The pollsters were terribly wrong in 2016, not just Nate Silver, but a much more eminent group of Princeton University professors headed by the great Professor Sam Wang, gave Clinton the 99% chance of winning based on the polls. Wang said ‘I’d eat a bug on national television if I’m wrong’,” Dr Lichtman noted.
“Of course, he was wrong. And to his credit, he did eat the bug. Whereas I predicted Trump virtually alone, which did not make me very popular in Washington DC. Even in 2012, after Barack Obama’s disastrous first debate in October, close to the election, the polls swung three points against Obama, and he won handily,” he added.
Wanted Biden to stay for a reason
Lichtman has previously warned Democrats about the side effects of US President Joe Biden’s exit from the 2024 presidential race. Despite growing criticisms over Biden’s age and mental acuity, Linchtman wanted Biden to continue in the race. “I was very critical of the Democrats for a couple of reasons. One, they were openly trashing their sitting president and the nominee of their party. Absolutely foolish, no reason to do that,” he exclaimed.
“Secondly, it looked like they would not only push Biden out, which would cost them the incumbency key, but that they were heading to a big party brawl, which would cost them the contest key. No White House party since 1900 has ever won re-election where they lost both the incumbency key and the contest key,” he added. However, the renowned election forecaster noted that things changed when the Democrats soon rallied behind Harris to take over as the party nominee.
“They finally grew a spine and a brain. Instead of a party brawl, as it looked like they were heading for, they united behind Harris, preserving the contest key,” he remarked.
Governance over campaign: The right ‘key’ to success
When asked about his take on the fluctuating polls, the intense debate and the overall race between Harris and Trump, Lichtman reiterated that he is not considering any of these factors while delivering his forecast and insisted that he prioritises looking at governance over how the candidates are performing in the campaign. “The polls have been wrong so many times that there’s no reason to pay attention to them. Their error margins are way larger than just 3 per cent. So they’re useless in any close election. That’s why I look at the fundamental factors as gauged by the keys,” he said.
“I quite deliberately made my prediction before the debate to get across my message that it’s governance, not campaigning that counts. No one has a predictive track record based on looking at events of the campaign,” the American historian told Firstpost. He supported his argument by noting that Clinton had a stellar campaign but she still lost in 2016.
“By events of the campaign, Hillary Clinton should have won in a landslide. She won all the debates. She raised more money. She had more ads. She was more experienced. She had a better campaign, and yet she lost. John Kerry won the debates in 2004 against Bush but he still lost. Both in those years, I correctly predicted Trump and correctly predicted Bush. My predictions are totally nonpartisan,” he emphasised. “I’ve predicted about as many Republican as Democratic wins, including the two most conservative Republicans of our time, Reagan and Trump.”
What are the challenges ahead for Trump and Harris?
When asked what lies ahead for both Trump and Harris, Lichtman emphasised that both the candidates have their share of challenges. While speaking about Harris, he said: “She’s got to introduce herself and explain why she’s ready to be president and what she’s going to do for the American people.” “The big challenge for Donald Trump is that he’s done this many times, but he’s up against a prosecutor. Is he going to lose his cool when challenged by Harris? And will he rant and rave like he’s done on Truth Search Social recently and in his campaign rallies?” he concluded with pertinent questions.
With many claiming Harris “won” her first debate against Trump, it will be interesting to see how the race will pan out and if Lichtman’s prediction comes true once again.