Forget the polls, ignore the data, and stop sending journalists to diners in swing states to interview undecided voters: historian Allan Lichtman already knows who will win the US presidential election. "Harris will win," Lichtman confidently told AFP. He made this prediction at his home in the leafy Washington suburb of Bethesda, shortly after unveiling his much-discussed, once-every-four-years White House forecast, based on his "13 keys" method.
It's easy to dismiss Lichtman's methodology as just another gimmick in the endless, drawn-out "horse race" coverage of US elections—where journalists, pollsters, and pundits constantly try to determine who is ahead and who is behind. But the American University history professor has responses for his critics—and a track record that's hard to beat, having correctly predicted all but one election since 1984. Lichtman disregards opinion polls. Instead, his predictions are based on a series of true-or-false propositions applied to the current presidential administration. If six or more of these "keys" are false, the election will go to the out-of-power challenger—in this case, Republican candidate Donald Trump.
One of the keys, for example, states that the president's party won seats in the most recent midterm elections. The Democrats actually lost control of the House in the 2022 midterms, making this key "false," tipping the scales toward Trump. A few more keys also favor Trump: President Joe Biden stepped down, meaning Democrats lost the key which determines the "incumbency," a vital advantage. Biden's vice-president and replacement as nominee, Kamala Harris, is gaining momentum among party faithful. But Lichtman rules that she does not qualify for another key, which is being a charismatic, "once-in-a-generation" candidate in the style of Ronald Reagan or Franklin Roosevelt.
More points go to Trump, yes. But after that, the keys start breaking rapidly in Harris's favor. For example, the Biden administration's massive environment and infrastructure legislation satisfies the key requiring a "major policy change" by the current White House. Another key for Harris is the exit of fringe independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. She also meets the key demanding lack of major scandal. Do the math and it turns out that only three keys are in Trump's favor. But to be declared the presumptive winner, he would have needed six.
There's another key that could go Harris's way, if the administration reaches a ceasefire and hostage release in Gaza. This move would likely require Democrats to push harder against the Israeli government—sure to cause strain among poll-obsessed advisers in a party trying to straddle a base that is heavily divided over the issue. Yet, a ceasefire would mean the Democrats actually delivered a policy achievement, Lichtman argues, and deliver one of the keys on foreign policy. "I don't like to speculate, because the devil is in the details, but that could be seen as a big success," he said.
Critics of the "13 keys" focus on the speculative nature of some of the true-false propositions. What is a charismatic leader, for example? Yet the sage of Bethesda, as some have dubbed him, is well-versed in arguing his case. "I've been doing this for 40 years. I think I've heard every conceivable question," he said. "'Aren't your keys subjective?' I obviously have an answer to that—they're not subjective, they're judgmental." We're dealing with human beings. Historians make judgments all the time, and the judgments are very tightly constrained.
Amid the "noise" of national political punditry, Lichtman argues, presidential elections are a simple "vote up or down on the strength and performance of the White House party." In that way, his method is anti-horse race—focused on good governance rather than campaigns, since in reality "we forget virtually anything a candidate has to say." The one election where Lichtman's calculations did not predict the president was the 2000 victory of George W. Bush. Lichtman can defend his record by pointing out that this was a legally complicated nail-biter in which Democrat Al Gore won the popular vote but Bush took victory courtesy of a Supreme Court decision.
