In case anyone missed it, there was an excellent interview in yesterday’s Grauniad with Professor Allan Lichtman, the Nostradamus of US presidential elections who has correctly predicted the result of nine of the past ten elections (the one that got away was Bush v Gore in 2000 when the SCOTUS stepped in and anointed Bush in a solo act which the Prof regards as a genuine steal).
www.theguardian.com/…
For the TLDR crowd, in 1981 the Professor of History at the American University in Washington developed his 13 Keys To The White House when he was a visiting scholar at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and where he met the world’s leading authority in earthquake prediction, the Soviet scientist Vladimir Keilis-Borok. Together, they developed a method of predicting presidential election results based on earthquake pattern recognition, i.e. as a question of stability (the party holding the White House keeps it) versus earthquake (the party holding the White House gets thrown out).
They came up with 13 true/false questions and a decision rule: if six or more keys went against the White House party, it would lose. If fewer than six went against it, it would win. The 13 Keys are summarised on AU’s website:
www.american.edu/…
Perhaps Lichtman’s most striking prophecy based on his 13 Keys, which defied polls, commentators and groupthink, was that Trump – a former reality TV star with no prior political, military or technocratic experience – would pull off a wildly improbable win over the former secretary of state and first lady Hillary Clinton in 2016.
As another election looms, he is refreshingly unimpressed by polls showing Trump leading Biden, prompting a fatalistic mood to take hold in Washington DC, foreign capitals and the national & international media. According to Lichtman, polls six or seven months before an election have zero predictive value, no matter how specific or scientific the sampling. He regards such polls as a snapshot, not as predictors.
He sums it up nicely for those of us who perhaps fret a bit too much over the data: “Polls don’t predict anything and there’s no such thing as ‘if the election were held today’. That’s a meaningless statement.”
He is likely to make his pronouncement on the 2024 presidential election in August. He notes that Biden already has the incumbency key in his favour and, having crushed token challengers in the Democratic primary, has the contest key too. “That’s two keys off the top. That means six more keys would have to fall to predict his defeat. A lot would have to go wrong for Biden to lose.”
This leaves us with the apt quote by British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan as to what he feared most in politics:
“Events, dear boy, events!”