The Keys to the White House is a system that uses 13 true/false criteria to predict whether the presidential candidate of the incumbent party will win or lose the next election.[2] The system and Lichtman's predictions based on it have received extensive media coverage.[3][4] Lichtman has accurately predicted the outcomes of many presidential elections from 1984 through 2020 using his interpretations of the system.[5][6][7][8]
As a track and field athlete, Lichtman won the 1979 3000 metres steeplechase championship at the USATF Masters Outdoor Championships in the age 30-35 category, running 11:06.1 as the only listed competitor in his age group. He also finished 6th in the 1500 m that year, running 4:17.48.[15] In 2024, he produced a video with The New York Times reenacting running at a masters athletics meet while explaining his U.S. presidential prediction methodology.[16]
Career
Teaching
Lichtman in 2010
Lichtman began teaching at American University in 1973 and became a full professor by 1980. He was awarded the Scholar/Teacher of the year award for the 1992-93 academic year.[17]
In the early 1980s, while living in California as a visiting professor at the California Institute of Technology, Lichtman had a 17-episode stint on the game show Tic Tac Dough. He won $100,000 on the show.[18]
Lichtman announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for United States Senate from Maryland in the 2006 election to replace Senator Paul Sarbanes; in a playful opening television ad, he pledged not to be a "conventional politician" and jumped into the C&O Canal in a business suit.[19] Lichtman was seen as a long-shot candidate with little support.[20] He criticized front-runner U.S. Representative Ben Cardin for his votes to fund the Iraq War.[20] When the League of Women Voters did not invite Lichtman to the Maryland Public Television debate, he and two other excluded candidates, Josh Rales and Dennis F. Rasmussen, protested outside the Baltimore County television studio; Lichtman and his wife were arrested after a confrontation with a security guard.[21] In 2006, both were acquitted on all charges.[22]
Lichtman lost the primary election to Cardin, receiving 6,919 votes (1.2%) and finishing sixth in a field of 18. In October 2012, The Washington Post reported that he was still paying off a mortgage he took out to help fund his campaign.[23]
In 2013, Lichtman and Richard Breitman wrote FDR and the Jews, which portrays Franklin D. Roosevelt as a pragmatic leader who, despite political constraints, made significant effort to aid Jews during World War II, balancing domestic priorities and the fear of antisemitic backlash.[29] Lichtman and Breitman received the 2013 National Jewish Book Award for the book.[30]
In 2017, Lichtman wrote The Case for Impeachment, laying out multiple arguments for the impeachment of Donald Trump.[9][10][11][31] The Financial Times gave it a favorable review, writing: "Lichtman's powerful book is a reminder that we are only at the start of the Trump investigations."[9]The Washington Post called it "striking to see the full argument unfold".[10]New York Journal of Books recommended it as a resource "if you are a member of Congress trying to grapple with all that this administration has wrought".[32]The Hill wrote: "Lichtman has written what may be the most important book of the year."[33]CBC News consulted law scholars who said Lichtman's prediction of impeachment was unlikely with a Republican-controlled House of Representatives.[31] The House impeached Trump on December 18, 2019, and the Senate acquitted him on February 5, 2020.
In 2020, Lichtman published Repeal the Second Amendment, in which he argued that the only way to solve the U.S. gun violence epidemic is to repeal the Second Amendment.[34][35]
As of 2023, Lichtman hosts weekly live streams, called Lichtman Live, on his YouTube channel.[36][37]
The Thirteen Keys
Lichtman is best known for the election forecasting system presented in his books The Thirteen Keys to the Presidency and The Keys to the White House. He has correctly predicted nine of the eleven presidential elections held since 1984 by using his keys.
The system uses 13 historical factors ("keys") to predict whether the election for president of the United States will be won by the nominee of the party holding the presidency. The keys were selected based on their correlations with the presidential election results from 1860 through 1980, using statistical methods adapted from the work of geophysicistVladimir Keilis-Borok, unproven methods[38] for predicting earthquakes.[39] Lichtman originally defined his model as predicting the outcome of the popular vote.[40]
In 2000, Lichtman predicted a win for the Democratic front-runner, Vice President Al Gore.[41] Gore won the popular vote, but Republican nominee George W. Bush won the Electoral College and was elected president. After the 2000 election, Lichtman argued that as his keys predicted the winner of the popular vote (which Gore won), they were successful.[42] But in journal articles containing his prediction for 2000 written beforehand, Lichtman wrote that the American people would "elect Al Gore president of the United States".[43][44] Media outlets widely considered this his only incorrect prediction until 2024.[45]
In September 2016, Lichtman predicted a win for Republican nominee Donald Trump. Trump lost the popular vote, but won the Electoral College and was therefore elected president. Lichtman claimed (after the 2016 election) that since the contested result in 2000, he began predicting the outcome of the Electoral College rather than the popular vote.[46][47] The media widely credited Lichtman with a correct 2016 prediction.[5][48][6] But Lichtman also wrote in 2016, in both a book and a separate academic paper, that the keys predict only the national popular vote, not the votes of individual states.[49][50] He also wrote in 2016 that in the only three elections since 1860 when the popular vote diverged from the Electoral College tally, his keys predicted the popular vote winner.[49]
2024 presidential election
In the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, amid widening calls by Democratic Party representatives, members, voters, and supporters of President Joe Biden to withdraw from the race in favor of another candidate with "better chances",[51][52] Lichtman called that demand a "foolish, destructive escapade", accusing "pundits and the media" of "pushing" Democrats into a losing choice. He added that those calling for Biden's resignation had "zero track record" of predicting election outcomes.[53]
On July 21, 2024, Biden announced he was withdrawing from the race but would serve the remainder of his term.[54] Vice President Kamala Harris was given the Democratic presidential nomination the next month. On September 5, 2024, Lichtman predicted that Harris would win the election.[55]
On November 6, 2024, contrary to Lichtman's prediction, Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election.[8] This was the first time Lichtman inaccurately predicted both the popular vote and the Electoral College outcome. He acknowledged his error; he said he would address his theory's failure the next day on his YouTube channel.[56] That day, he said he had not foreseen the fall in support from Harris after her debate performance, and also blamed poor planning by the Democratic Party and "disinformation spread on social media" for Harris's loss. He still defended his method, saying that the most recent election was an anomaly because the incumbent president withdrew a few months before the election and Trump's aggressive 11th-hour campaign stretch was much more effective with the working class and young voters than Harris's more subdued approach. Lichtman said the keys would be more accurate for more conventional elections in the future that included primaries and newer candidates.[57]
Lichtman later claimed that several unprecedented features affected the 2024 election, including the "Democrats... openly and viciously trashing their sitting president right out in public".[58] He said the keys depend on "a rational, pragmatic electorate", which he argued was compromised by widespread disinformation. He cited Elon Musk as a figure who damaged the electorate's ability to vote "rationally".[59]
Awards and honors
Lichtman has received numerous awards from American University. Most notably, he was named Distinguished Professor of History in 2011 and Outstanding Scholar/Teacher for 1992–93, the highest faculty award at the school. Honors include:
Historians and the Living Past: The Theory and Practice of Historical Study (Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1978; with Valerie French)
Ecological Inference (With Laura Irwin Langbein, Sage Series In Quantitative Applications In The Social Sciences, 1978)
Your Family History: How to Use Oral History, Personal Family Archives, and Public Documents to Discover Your Heritage (New York: Random House, 1978)
Prejudice and the Old Politics: The Presidential Election of 1928 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979; Lexington Books, 2000)
The Thirteen Keys to the Presidency: Prediction Without Polls (The Revolutionary System That Reveals How Presidential Elections Really Work From The Civil War To The 21st Century) (Lanham: Madison Books, 1990, With Ken DeCell) ISBN978-0-8191-7008-8
White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement, (Finalist for National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction, 2008[60]) Grove/Atlantic Press. ISBN978-0-87113-984-9
^Allan J. Lichtman (2000). "ELECTION 2000: The Keys Point to Gore". Social Education. 64 (6): 376–377. Archived from the original on October 7, 2020. Retrieved November 7, 2024.
"Thus, on balance, barring a most improbable turn of events, the American people will ratify the record of the current Democratic administration this year and elect Al Gore president of the United States."
^Allan J. Lichtman (2000). "ELECTION 2000: The Keys Point to Gore". Social Education. 64 (6): 376–377. Archived from the original on October 7, 2020. Retrieved November 7, 2024.
"Thus, on balance, barring a most improbable turn of events, the American people will ratify the record of the current Democratic administration this year and elect Al Gore president of the United States."
^ abAllan J. Lichtman (2016). Predicting the Next President: The Keys to the White House. p. Introduction xi. The keys to the White House focus on national concerns such as economic performance, policy initiatives, social unrest, presidential scandal, and successes and failures in foreign affairs. Thus, they predict only the national popular vote and not the vote within individual states. Indeed, no system could have predicted the 537 vote margin for George W. Bush in Florida that decided the 2000 election. In three elections since 1860, where the popular vote diverged from the electoral college tally—1876 (when Democrat Samuel J. Tilden won the popular vote, but lost in the electoral college to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes), 1888, and 2000—the keys accurately predicted the popular vote winner..
^Allan J. Lichtman (October 2016). "The Keys to the White House"(PDF). Social Education. 80 (5): 256–258. As a national system, the Keys predict the popular vote, not the state-by-state tally of Electoral College votes.
