He’s predicted every winner for 40 years.
Professor Holds Keys to White House
BY MARISA HERMAN A
llan lichtman has accurately predicted the winner of nearly every U.S. presiden- tial race since 1984, and, this year, he is sticking to his tried-
and-tested system: Ignore polls and pundits.
Instead, the American University
professor uses a method he developed known as the 13 Keys to the White House. His keys are indicating Joe Biden is going to win again this year. So Lichtman is encouraging Dem-
ocrats to stick with the President as their candidate, despite his low poll numbers and cognitive decline be- cause he doesn’t want to “turn” ad- ditional keys, including losing the incumbency, that would cause the Democrats to be defeated. As for the polls, Lichtman
calls them “mere snapshots” that can’t predict election out- comes because they have large error margins. He called them “useless” in forecasting winners because
66 NEWSMAX | AUGUST 2024
their guesses have no “scientific ba- sis.”
He says his keys provide a better
look into how presidential elections “really work” because the model is based on the strength and perfor- mance of the incumbent. Since creating the keys system, he
has made 10 predictions for U.S. presi- dential elections and all have been correct — with the small exception of the 2000 race that was so close it had to be decided by the Supreme Court. (Lichtman accurately predicted that Al Gore would win the popular vote.) Creating an election-predicting
model wasn’t something Lichtman was actively seeking when he was a distinguished visiting scholar at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena in 1981. It came about when he crossed
paths with Soviet seismologist Vladi- mir Keilis-Borok, who used his system of mathematical pat- terns to predict earthquakes to forecast election outcomes. Keilis-Borok had developed
LICHTMAN
a fascination with elections — a foreign concept for Soviets — when he visited Washing-
ton, D.C., in 1963 as part of a scientific delegation involved in negotiating the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Together, they reconceptualized
elections in “geophysical terms.” That meant in 1981, the election wasn’t “Jimmy Carter vs. Ronald Reagan,” or “Democrat vs. Republican,” or “lib- eral vs. conservative.” Rather, it was looked through the
lens of “stability,” which meant the White House party keeps power or “earthquake,” in which the White House party is defeated. They studied every presidential
election from 1860 and developed the theory that it is primarily governance — not campaigning — that counts. They crafted the 13 keys associated with “stability” and “earthquake.” The keys are phrased as questions
where an answer of “true” always fa- vors the reelection of the sitting presi- dent. Under the system, if he or she loses
six of the “keys,” they are predicted to lose the election. With the new system, Lichtman
made his first prediction in April 1982 in the Washingtonian Magazine, where he correctly forecasted Rea-
WHITE HOUSE/GLOWIMAGES/GETTY IMAGES / LICHTMAN/ TOM WILLIAMS/GETTY IMAGES
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