MAN WHO CALLS EVERY US ELECTION RIGHT
FEW PUNDITS or pollsters emerged with much credit from the 2016 US presidential election having universally failed to predict Donald Trump’s victory.
But for the veteran Jewish historian Allan Lichtman, that election night had a distinctly bittersweet taste. A staunch Democrat, he had nonetheless forecast Mr Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton.
Mr Lichtman did not, however, simply get the 2016 contest right — he has correctly called the winner of all nine presidential elections for the past 40 years.
Dubbed the “Nostradamus of presidential elections”, the historian last week had less welcome news for Mr Trump. In a New York Times video oped, he forecast that the Democrat candidate, Joe Biden, will win the White House in November.
While current opinion polls show the former Vice President heading for victory, Mr Lichtman isn’t a big fan of such surveys. “The pollsters and the pundits cover elections as though they were horse races,” the professor told the Times, “but history tells us voters are not fooled by the tricks of the campaign.” Instead, he believes, voters make their choice “pragmatically according to how well the party holding the White House has governed the country”.
Mr Lichtman has instead developed a predictive tool – “the 13 keys to the White House” – which he uses to make his forecasts. Built in the early 1980s with the help of a leading Russian expert in predicting earthquakes, Mr Lichtman successfully tested it against the results of presidential elections going back to Abraham Lincoln’s victory in 1860.
The only slight blip in Mr Lichtman’s winning predictive streak came in 2000. He forecast that Bill Clinton’s Vice President, Al Gore, would defeat George W. Bush. But the professor had a valid excuse: Mr Bush was the first president since 1888 to win the electoral college, while losing the popular vote.
The model is easily comprehensible to those not well versed in the intricacies of American political science and voting behaviour. It rests on a simple binary choice — true or false — in answer to 13 questions about the performance of the party which holds the White House. If six or more of the “keys” prove false, then voters are likely to show the incumbent party the door.
Looking at this year’s contest, Mr Lichtman believes the president has six of the “keys” to the White House in his favour: the unity of the Republican party which meant he did not face an internal primary challenge; the uncharismatic nature of the opposition candidate; the fact that he’s the incumbent president; the absence of a third-party candidate; and the major policy changes introduced by the Trump administration and the lack of a significant foreign policy or military failure on its watch.
But seven “keys” point in Mr Biden’s favour, including the Democrats’ strong performance in the 2018 mid-term elections; the myriad of scandals surrounding Mr Trump; the absence of a major foreign or military success; and the president’s own lack of charisma. Three keys have turned in the Democrats’ favour in recent months: major social unrest; the coronavirus-related weakness of the short-term economy; and the fact that the economy has plunged so precipitously this year as to wipe out the longer-term strength of the economy which Mr Trump had been banking on to secure his second term.
Despite its seeming accuracy, not all commentators are impressed by Mr Lichtman’s model. Harry Enten, CNN’s political analyst, tweeted after the professor’s forecast this year was released: “The fact that folks look to Lichtman’s model for anything other than laughter is one of the big signs that many lack any form of numerical aptitude.” “Heck, it’s not even a model. It’s a bunch of subjective judgements,” he added. But, while he may not have been feeling particularly jolly about the outcome, it was Mr Lichtman — not the pundit class — who had the last laugh four years ago.