Top US predictor of Presidents sees Trump win
Prof Allan Lichtman has correctly predicted all US Presidents since 1980. He says his keys support Trump victory.
WASHINGTON: Since he began tracking U.S. elections in 1980, Allan Lichtman, a distinguished professor of history at American University, has gained the admiration of his peers for correctly predicting every presidential race since 1984. He does it not with the kind of “big data” analysis that has made media stars out of the likes of Nate Silver. Rather, he uses a relatively simple, 13-point system - derived, believe it or not, from the same inexact science that predicts earthquakes. And according to his system (which is outlined in his book Predicting the Next President: The Keys to the White House), the election has long belonged to Donald Trump. With three days left to Decision 2016, a reporter caught up with Prof. Lichtman to see if he was standing by his results. If you’re expecting a gleeful prophet of doom, think again. As this conversation will make abundantly clear, no one is unhappier about his findings than Lichtman himself.
How did you come up with this system?
I’d love to tell you I did it by a lot of brilliant thinking, but I did it by accident. In 1981, I was a visiting scholar at CalTech and I came across another visiting scholar — a renowned mathematician and world’s leading authority of earthquake predictions from Moscow. He suggested we use the methods of earthquake prediction to predict elections.
I was very skeptical. So I started to think about it: Everything we know about elections is stolen from geophysics anyway, right? “Landslides.” “Political earthquakes.” “Volcanic change.”
And so we conceptualised elections in geophysical terms. As stability, the party in power keeps the White House.
Earthquake, the party in power is tossed out.
We looked at the political environment, elections from 1860 to 1980, guided by the thesis the presidential elections are primarily judgments on the strength and performance of the party heading the White House. That’s how we divide the 13 key factors. Then we arrived at the decision rule that 6 or more keys going against the party in power predicts their defeat. And that system has correctly forecast every American presidential election since then. Eight in a row, from 1984 to 2012.
And the keys are saying Trump will win! How, uh, sure are we about that?
I’m not confident at all. I’m not a hedger. I have never hedged a prediction. I have stuck by predictions contrary to the polls and pundits many times in the past. I predicted a George H. W. Bush victory in May of 1998 when he was trailing Michael Dukakis by 17 points in the polls and every pundit had written him off. I predicted the very-hardto-call 2012 election back in 2010, and stuck with my prediction even after Obama’s disastrous first debate the polls turned against him.
But for the first time I have qualified my prediction. My prediction is based on history and for the first time in Donald Trump we have a history-smashing candidate: We never had a candidate before who has no record in public service; a record of enriching himself through- out his life at the expense of others, whether through bankruptcies, his Trump Foundation or Trump University; we’ve never had a candidate who has called into question the integrity of democracy and threatened not to accept the result of the election; we’ve never had a candidate who openly brags about sexually assaulting women and then 12 women come forward saying he did that. Back in 2012, a guy named Herman Cain was the favourite for the Republican nomination. Then three or four women accused him of sexual harassment and he was driven out the of the race. Unlike Cain, Trump brags about sexual harassing women.