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Alan Lichtman, a history professor at American University in Washington, DC, has correctly predicted the results of nine of the last 10 presidential elections since Ronald Reagan’s re-election in 1984.
So how does he do it? With a crystal ball? Tarot reading? Ayahuasca retreat 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 expert from Moscow in 1981 and uses 13 historical factors or “keys” to determine the presidential races – four of these factors are based on politics, seven on performance, and two on the candidates. personality. The incumbent party would have to lose six of these 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 presumptive nominees of both parties: 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 would always discuss politics at the dinner table. In 1960, when I was 13 years old, I happened to go to a John F. Canadian in New York City and I was totally inspired. He just blew us young ones away, and since then, I’ve followed my interest in politics.
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More:The presidential election of Professor Alan Lichtman in 2024
How did your talent for predicting presidential elections develop?
Like so many other good ideas, I came upon the keys unequivocally when I was a visiting distinguished researcher at the California Institute of Technology in Southern California in 1981.
There I met the world’s leading authority on earthquake prediction, Vladimir Keilis-Boruk, head of the Institute for 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 DC under JFK and negotiated the most important treaty in world history: the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
Keilis-Bourock said, “In Washington, I fell in love with politics and always wanted to use earthquake prediction methods to predict elections.” But, he said, “I live in the Soviet Union – elections? Forget it. It’s the supreme leader or 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 reconceptualized the presidential election in terms of an earthquake: as stability – the party holding the White House keeps the White House, and an earthquake – the party is out.
With that in mind, we looked at every American presidential election from the horse-and-buggy days of politics, from Lincoln’s election in 1860 to Reagan’s election in 1980, using the Keilis-Boruck mathematical method of pattern recognition.
It was this retrospective inquiry that led to the “13 Keys to the White House”: simple true-false questions that test whether or not there will be stability or an earthquake, and our six-key decision rule, or the six keys that go against the White House party.
What did we see in 2020?
A very interesting election, in which he correctly predicted that Trump would lose and Biden would win.
In 2019, Trump only had four keys. Remember, it takes six keys to count the White House party. I haven’t made a prediction yet, but things are looking pretty good. Then the epidemic hit.
When I predicted Trump’s victory in 2016 – as you can imagine – I was not very popular in Washington DC. At the 90% Democratic school where I teach – Trump actually sent me a note in the Washington Post article in which I predicted his victory that said, “Well done Professor, good conversation.”
He appreciated my call but he didn’t understand the meaning of the keys. The keys mainly test the strength and performance of the White House party.
The big message: it is the administration, not the campaign, that decides. Trump didn’t get it. So when the plague hit, instead of dealing with the plague as fundamentally as the keys would indicate, he tried to get out of it. Of course, it didn’t work; The economy sank, and he lost two more keys: the short- and long-term economy. This put him six keys, enough to predict his defeat.
You’re not going to reveal your 2024 forecast until around August, but what are you thinking and seeing now?
Forget the polls, forget the experts.
Polls six months, five months, even closer to the election have zero predictive value.
Forget all the experts who said that Bidan is too old. The Democrat’s only chance to win is Biden running for re-election. One of my keys is role, obviously he wins at that. Another key is the party competition, he did not run. That’s two keys from the top where Biden wins. This means that six keys out of the remaining 11 would have to fall to predict his defeat.
I also said that while I don’t have a definitive prediction, a lot would have to go wrong for Biden to lose.
Are there upheavals on the horizon that we should watch out for?
Right now, Biden is down on only, for sure, two keys: the mandate key, as Democrats have lost seats in the 2022 House elections; And the key to the incumbent charisma is that Biden is not JFK. But there are four very shaky keys:
- Third Party: Now, to win the third party key, the third party candidate must receive at least 5% of the popular votes. Very few got it. 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 have seen it as low as 3% and up to 15%. This key is shaky but not secure.
- Social unrest: I thought it was pretty much locked in, in favor of the incumbent but campus protests made it shaky.
- And of course, the two keys to foreign policy: success and failure – both are shaky, given the fact that we have two very uncertain wars raging in the Middle East and Ukraine.
Biden would have to lose all four or some other unexpected event like a sudden recession to lose.
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