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Tag: allan lichtman
Historian Who Predicts Presidents Says Biden Can 'Absolutely' Win In 2024

Historian Who Predicts Presidents Says Biden Can 'Absolutely' Win In 2024

On the eve of Joe Biden's State of the Union address, amid a chorus of Democratic bedwetters, the historian who has accurately predicted every presidential race over the past 40 years says that the president "absolutely" can win in November.

Indeed, Allan Lichtman, the distinguished professor of history at American University whose methods of election analysis have proved successful for decades, went even further in a British Times Radio interview on Super Tuesday. While acknowledging that "it's way too early to make a final prediction," he said, "a lot would have to go wrong for Joe Biden to lose this election. I absolutely think Joe Biden can win a second term."

Biden can ‘absolutely’ win the US election | Professor Allan Lichtmanyoutu.be

Lichtman dismissed recent polls, several of which have shown Trump leading Biden. "Take the early polls and do with them what the great British philosopher David Hughes said you should do with works of superstition – consign them to the flames," said the erudite professor. "They have absolutely no predictive value. There is so much yet to come."

In 2016, he was among a tiny minority of analysts who predicted that the Republican would win, and received a signed photo from Trump after the election. He told The Sun newspaper that he doesn't expect any such appreciative gesture from Trump in November 2024. (The prospective GOP nominee may also recall that Lichtman wrote a book calling for his impeachment in 2017.)

As outlined in a Newsmax article on Lichtman, his keys to victory include"

  • Party mandate: After the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives than after the previous midterm elections. (Not so in 2024, but Democrats beat the "red wave" in 2022 and are near parity.)
  • Contest: There is no serious contest for the incumbent party nomination.
  • Incumbency: The incumbent party candidate is the sitting president.
  • Third party: There is no significant third-party or independent campaign.
  • Short-term economy: The economy is not in recession during the election campaign.
  • Long-term economy: Real per capita economic growth during the term equals or exceeds mean growth during the previous two terms.
  • Policy change: The incumbent administration affects major changes in national policy.
  • Social unrest: There is no sustained social unrest during the term.
  • Scandal: The incumbent administration is untainted by major scandal.
  • Foreign/military failure: The incumbent administration suffers no major failure in foreign or military affairs.
  • Foreign/military success: The incumbent administration achieves a major success in foreign or military affairs.
  • Incumbent charisma: The incumbent party candidate is charismatic or a national hero.
  • Challenger charisma: The challenging party candidate is not charismatic or a national hero.

"Based upon the keys, a lot of keys would have to turn, over the next few months, against Joe Biden to predict his defeat," as Lichtman explained to Times Radio.

"By running, Joe Biden wins the incumbency key, one of my keys, he wins the party contest key because there's no battle. That's two off the top. Six more would have to go against him to predict his defeat.

"[If] Joe Biden doesn't run, they lose incumbency, they lose the party contest because there's no heir apparent and only four keys would have to fall to predict a Democrat defeat."

Lichtman is a serious scholar and acclaimed author who has written books on many topics, including an important 2008 history of the right, White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement.

Historian Who Predicted Trump 2016 Victory Says Impeachment Could Defeat Him

Historian Who Predicted Trump 2016 Victory Says Impeachment Could Defeat Him

Allan Lichtman, a political historian who won plaudits for predicting President Donald Trump’s 2016 victory when most commentators disagreed, has a new warning for Democrats: Don’t write off impeachment.

Lichtman has developed a system for predicting the presidential winner of elections that disregards polls or the country’s demographics.  Instead, he makes a prediction based on 13 true/false questions about the party that holds the presidency, which he calls the “Keys to the White House.”

“[T]he keys are phrased to reflect the basic theory that elections are primarily judgments on the performance of the party holding the White House,” he told the Washington Post in September 2016, while predicting a Trump win. “And if six or more of the 13 keys are false — that is, they go against the party in power — they lose. If fewer than six are false, the party in power gets four more years.”

His system, he says, is based on patterns observed since 1860, and he claims it let him accurately predict nine presidential elections correctly in a row since 1984. For what it’s worth, despite its apparent success, in my view the metric is too binary — it doesn’t give percentages of who is likely to win but simply an either/or determination. Nothing about presidential elections actually seems to work that way, and since we’ve seen close races in both 2000 and 2016, it’s plausible to believe that factors entirely outside Lichtman’s model — like extreme weather in key states — could have produced a different result. And indeed, even while he predicted Trump’s win in 2016, he also hedged at the time, saying, ” Donald Trump may well break patterns of history that have held since 1860.”

Nevertheless, the predictive success of his model is noteworthy, and he plausibly has latched on to key factors that contribute to or detract from a party’s ability to hold the White House. So his views are worth taking seriously.

And just as he went against the conventional wisdom that Democrats were primed to win in 2016, he’s going against the conventional wisdom now. In a new interview with CNN’s Chris Cillizza on Tuesday, he suggested that the idea — widely advocated by Democratic leadership, moderate pundits, as well as on the right wing — that impeachment would benefit Trump is completely off base.

In fact, he argued that foregoing impeachment could likely doom Democrats in 2020.

“Democrats are fundamentally wrong about the politics of impeachment and their prospects for victory in 2020,” Lichtman told Cillizza. “An impeachment and subsequent trial would cost the president a crucial fourth key — the scandal key — just as it cost Democrats that key in 2000. The indictment and trial would also expose him to dropping another key by encouraging a serious challenge to his re-nomination.”

He added: “Other potential negative keys include the emergence of a charismatic Democratic challenger, a significant third-party challenge, a foreign policy disaster, or an election-year recession. Without impeachment, however, Democratic prospects are grim.”

This is similar to an argument that I have been making, which is that the assessment of impeachment as a risky move by the Democrats underplays the extent to which not impeaching Trump is itself a risk. But Lichtman went even further and suggested that, at least as things look now, impeachment may be necessary to defeat Trump in 2020.

IMAGE: American University historian Allan Lichtman.

History Professor Who Predicted Trump’s Election Victory Says He’ll Be Impeached

History Professor Who Predicted Trump’s Election Victory Says He’ll Be Impeached

Allan Lichtman, an American University history professor, has correctly predicted the outcome of every presidential election since President Ronald Reagan was elected in 1984. Yes, he even predicted President Donald Trump’s win in 2016.

Now, he’s doubling down on another prediction: Trump will be impeached following the results of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

“I think Mueller — and this is my prediction — is going to come up with findings that are going to shock the country, not only involve conspiracy with Russia but could involve serious financial crimes,” Lichtman said on MSNBC’s MorningJoe.

Lichtman also believes the Russia investigation could turn out to be worse than many expect for the president.

“[T]aking things of value from foreign nationals is a crime, aiding and abetting illegal computer hacking is a crime, negotiating as a private citizen with a hostile foreign power with which there is disputes is a crime. If this is serious enough—and I’ve taken a lot of flak for that—I think there even could be charges of treason,” Lichtman said. “After all, Russia was waging war against us—not a war with bombs and bullets, but a cyber attack, an online attack designed to destroy democracy.”

This is to say nothing of possible obstruction of justice charges that could also result in Trump being impeached. “There’s as strong a case of obstruction of justice as there was against Bill Clinton on a vastly more important matter than a blue dress,” Lichtman observed.

The historian expects that Republicans will be forced to act by a furious public after Mueller’s findings are released.

Watch the segment below.