Historian Who Predicted 9 of Last 10 Presidential Elections Picks His Winner as November Gets Closer
When a historian claims to have predicted nine of the last ten presidential election winners, one’s ears perk up immediately.
On the other hand, when one examines the method by which said historian made his 2024 prediction, the perked-up ears relax themselves and give way to a prompt roll of the eyes.
In a video produced for The New York Times and published on Thursday, American University historian and prominent election forecaster Allan Lichtman predicted that Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris would win the 2024 election.
At first glance, this seems like big news.
After all, the Times noted that Lichtman has been “dubbed the Nostradamus of presidential election predictions for his near-perfect 40-year track record.”
A closer look at his 2024 prediction, however, reveals nothing more than subjective and comically absurd conclusions about the state of country — the kind that could only come from a low-information liberal who trusts the establishment media.
Lichtman’s model, which has some surface-level merit, relies on 13 keys. And each key boils down to a true-or-false question.
Thus, when dealing with pure, unassailable facts, the method should bear some fruit.
For instance, the first key — “White House party gained seats in the House in midterm elections” — constitutes a verifiable fact.
“The Democrats did better than expected in 2022. But they still lost House seats. So the key is false,” Lichtman said in the video.
“False” keys benefit the challenger, in this case former President Donald Trump.
The second key — “the incumbent president is running” — is also false and therefore also benefits Trump.
Thus, two keys into the prediction model, Trump holds a 2-0 edge over Harris.
If the model continued along those lines by using indisputable facts, then perhaps Lichtman’s prediction would have some validity.
Alas, the problems began with the third key: “White House party avoided a primary contest.”
“The Democrats finally got smart and united overwhelmingly behind Vice President Harris. So the key is true,” Lichtman said.
Huh? Did he seriously say that?
Democrat elites pulled off a coup against Biden. They did this after lying about the president’s cognitive impairment and shielding him from competition in the party’s actual primaries, when they changed rules in order to disenfranchise New Hampshire voters, for instance, and when they used such reprehensible tactics against former Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that they actually drove the lifelong Democrat out of the party.
In other words, the third key, which measures party unity and gauges general political stability, looks true only to someone who can pretend those events never happened and that the Democratic Party has not morphed into a crime syndicate bent on authoritarian rule.
Speaking of which, Lichtman also rated the fourth key — “no third-party challenger” — as true.
“RFK Jr. has dropped out of the race. And no other third-party candidate is anywhere close to the ten percent polling threshold needed to turn this key,” the historian said.
Does Lichtman’s model account for what might happen after Kennedy endorsed Trump? He did not say. In fact, he did not even acknowledge the endorsement.
In light of those primary- and third party-related questions, readers undoubtedly have begun to detect a problem. Namely, Lichtman’s prediction model depends, in large part, on his own subjective answers to the allegedly true-or-false questions.
Indeed, the subjective nature of Lichtman’s answers grew more obvious and hilarious with each successive key.
For instance, the fifth key — a strong short-term economy — he rated as true!
Once a person has said that, how does one justify attending to anything else he might say? Pick your metric — inflation, job creation, etc. — and no one outside the proverbial ivory tower could give an answer like Lichtman’s.
Furthermore, Lichtman’s sixth key — long-term economic growth as strong as the previous two terms — also produced an unbelievable answer.
“Growth during the Biden term is far ahead of growth during the previous two terms, so this key is clearly true,” Lichtman said.
Clearly, Lichtman does not live in the same country as the rest of us. After all, even Harris has tried to distance herself from Bidenomics.
Lichtman might still insist that his true-or-false answers suffice in a world filled with nuance, but surely he cannot believe that voters will credit Biden with growing the economy when any statistical surge in economic activity after 2020 happened because the COVID-era lockdowns ended.
To recap, Lichtman’s answers gave Harris the advantage based on the state of the economy. If that does not call into question the historian’s prediction, then one cannot imagine what would.
Subsequent keys revealed similar problems of subjectivity.
For instance, Lichtman claimed in the eighth and ninth keys that Americans have seen no serious social unrest during Biden’s term and that the White House has avoided scandal. Tell that to the pro-Palestinian protesters and Hunter Biden.
Lichtman did rate Harris as lacking charisma, but he said the same of Trump. Never mind that the former president attracts rally crowds by the tens of thousands.
His final two keys — foreign policy successes and failures — Lichtman somehow rated as incomplete. The families of the 13 Americans killed during the 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal might beg to differ. So might the people of Ukraine and the Middle East.
As journalist Collin Rugg noted on the social media platform X, “Lichtman has also been accused of ‘changing the rules’ to help his win record and has faced strong criticism from forecasters like Nate Silver.”
In other words, there are problems and doubters abound.
Readers may watch Lichtman’s full video below and decide for themselves whether his subjective answers have merit.
NEW: Allan Lichtman, who claims to have predicted every election since 1984, predicts Kamala Harris will win the election.
Lichtman has correctly predicted 9 of 10 recent elections except for 2000. He also incorrectly predicted Trump would win the popular vote in 2016.
Lichtman… pic.twitter.com/BitUgoJqte
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) September 5, 2024
Whatever past success Lichtman might have had with his model, it seems obvious that his prediction depends on factual answers to simple yes-or-no questions.
With a few exceptions, however, his questions do not allow for that kind of simplicity.
Furthermore, not many people who have lived in the country for the last four years would give the answers Lichtman gave. Strong economy? No social unrest or scandal?
Does an open border qualify as a scandal? What about 325,000 missing migrant children?
In short, Lichtman’s model might have merit. But he needs to come down from his ivory tower and experience the country in order to provide more truthful answers for his subjective keys.
If he does that, he will quickly discover that those keys project a Trump landslide.
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