Alan Lichtman, a history professor at American University in Washington, D.C., has accurately predicted the outcome of nine of the last 10 presidential elections since Ronald Reagan’s reelection in 1984.
So how does he do it? With a crystal ball? Tarot reading? Is Ayahuasca retreating to the desert? No, he uses science to do it. Specifically, by applying the science of plate tectonics to American history and politics.
Lichtman developed a predictive index in 1981 with the help of earthquake experts in Moscow and used 13 historical factors or “keys” to determine presidential elections. Four of those factors are based on politics, seven are based on performance, and two are based on the candidate’s election. personality. For an incumbent party to lose the White House, it must lose six of these elements, or “keys.”
In a recent phone interview with USA Today, Lichtman talked about how he developed his method and how it compares to two leading candidates from both parties in the 2024 presidential election: President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. I talked about my thoughts on it.
How did you become interested in presidential politics?
I grew up in a very political family and we always talked about politics at the dinner table. In 1960, when I was 13 years old, I had the opportunity to go to a John F. Kennedy rally in New York City and was completely inspired. He shocked us young people. Since then, I have continued to follow my interest in politics.
Preparing to vote: See who’s running for president and compare their positions on important issues with our voter guide
more:Professor Alan Lichtman’s 2024 Presidential Candidate
How did you learn to predict presidential elections?
Like many great ideas, I stumbled upon the key in 1981 when I was a visiting distinguished scholar at the California Institute of Technology in Southern California.
There I met Vladimir Kaylis Volokh, director of the Institute of Pattern Recognition and Earthquake Prediction in Moscow, a world authority on earthquake prediction, and it was his idea to collaborate. Understand this: In 1963, he was a member of the Soviet scientific delegation that came to Washington DC under his JFK and negotiated the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the most important treaty in the history of the world. Did.
“I fell in love with politics in Washington and always wanted to use earthquake prediction methods to predict elections,” said Kaylis Bolock. But he said, “I live in the Soviet Union, elections? Forget it. It’s either the Supreme Leader or you’re crazy. But you know American history and politics. We can solve the problem together.”
So we became the “odd couple” of political research, reconceptualizing presidential elections in seismic terms. As stability, the party holding the White House retains the White House, and as earthquake, the party collapses.
With that in mind, we used Kaylis Bollock’s mathematical methods of pattern recognition to explore all of America’s horse and buggy era of politics, from the election of President Lincoln in 1860 to President Reagan’s election in 1980. I looked into the presidential election.
This retrospective investigation led to “13 Keys to the White House.” That is, a simple true/false question that explores whether stability will occur or an earthquake will occur, and six key decision rules, or six keys. Opposed to the White House Party.
What did we see in 2020?
A very interesting election, I correctly predicted that Trump would lose and Biden would win.
In 2019, Trump held just four keys. Remember that you need 6 keys to count the White House party. I wasn’t expecting it yet, but it turned out to be pretty good. Then the pandemic hit.
When I predicted Trump’s victory in 2016 – as you can imagine I was not very popular in the 90% Democratic Washington DC where I teach – Trump actually predicted that I He sent me this note about a Washington Post article predicting his victory: , that’s a good call. ”
He thanked me for my call but didn’t understand what the key meant. The key is primarily to examine the strength and performance of the White House party.
The big message: Governance, not campaigning, matters. Trump didn’t understand that. So when the pandemic hit, instead of addressing it substantively as Key had indicated, he tried to talk a way out of it. Of course it didn’t work. The economy tanked and he lost two more keys: the short-term economy and the long-term economy. This caused him to press his six keys. This was enough to predict his defeat.
We won’t be releasing our predictions for 2024 until around August, so what are you thinking and watching right now?
Forget about polls and pundits.
Polls 6 months, 5 months, and even closer to the election have a predictive value of zero.
Forget the pundits who have said Biden is too old. The only chance for Democrats to win is for Biden to run for re-election. One of my keys is the incumbent, and he’s clearly won it. Another key is party contestation, but he has never been contested. This is two keys away from the top where Biden would win. This means that 6 of his remaining 11 keys would have to fall to predict his defeat.
I’ve also said that, although I don’t have a final prediction, a lot could go wrong for Biden to lose.
Any notable upsets?
There are certainly only two keys missing for Biden at this point. One is key to delegation, as Democrats lost seats in the 2022 House elections. And since Biden is no JFK, the incumbent’s charisma will be key. However, he has 4 keys that are very unstable.
- Third Party: To win a third party key, a third party candidate must receive at least 5% of the popular vote. Very few people got it. As the election approaches, there is a need to stabilize the vote for third-party candidates, and RFK Jr. is currently in the spotlight. I’ve seen him as low as 3% and as high as 15%. The key is shaking, but uncertain.
- Social unrest: I thought I was pretty well entrenched in favor of incumbency, but protests on campus destabilized it.
- And, of course, the two keys to foreign policy, success and failure, both of which are unstable given the two highly uncertain wars brewing in the Middle East and Ukraine.
For Biden to lose, he would need to lose all four or have an unforeseen event such as a sudden recession.
