A historian dubbed the Nostradamus of US presidential elections for correctly predicting almost every outcome over four decades has revealed his pick to win the 2024 race.
American University professor Allan Lichtman, 77, dished out his forecast last month on whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump will win the election, based on his model’s 13 keys to the White House.
Lichtman’s keys turn a blind eye to polls and pundits, which are closely followed indicators as the November election nears.
Instead, his keys were developed from 120 years of presidential election results and are called based on answering true-false questions around the performance of the party currently in the White House.
His 13 keys are: Midterm gains, incumbency, primary contest, third party, short-term economy, long-term economy, policy change, social unrest, White House scandal, incumbent charisma, challenger charisma, foreign policy failure and foreign policy success.
Early last month, Lichtman had Harris losing only three keys – midterm gains, incumbency and incumbent charisma. The foreign policy failure and foreign policy success keys appeared shaky, but even if Harris lost both, she would have five false keys. Six false keys would deem her as the loser.
‘Even if both foreign policy keys flipped false, that would mean that there were only five negative keys, which would not be enough for Donald Trump to regain the White House,’ Lichtman told The New York Times.
Lichtman correctly predicted nine of the 10 latest presidential elections and was among the few who said Trump would win the 2016 election.
But prognosticator Nate Silver has cast doubt over Lichtman’s prediction.
Silver, a pollster and the founder of FiveThirtyEight, has Trump and his vice presidential running mate JD Vance with a 56.2% chance of winning the Electoral College and Harris and her vice presidential running mate Tim Walz with only a 43.5% chance.
On Friday, Silver took issue with Lichtman’s readings of his keys.
‘At least 7 of the keys, maybe 8, clearly favor Trump. Sorry brother, but that’s what the keys say,’ Silver wrote on X (formerly Twitter). ‘Unless you’re admitting they’re totally arbitrary?’
Lichtman shot back: ‘Nate Silver claims to have applied my keys to predict a Trump victory. He doesn’t have the faintest idea how to turn the keys. He’s not a historian or a political scientist. He has no academic credentials.’
On Saturday, Silver called Lichtman ‘comically overconfident’ and said he ‘doesn’t own up to the subjectivities in his method’.
With just over a month until the election, Silver’s own still-changing forecast will be heavily watched.
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