He has predicted (almost) every US election – and says Harris will win – News

Forget the polls, throw away the data, and stop sending journalists to restaurants in swing states to interview undecided voters: historian Allan Lichtman already knows who will win the US presidential election.

“Harris will win,” Lichtman told AFP confidently.

He spoke at his home in the leafy Washington suburb of Bethesda shortly after announcing his much-discussed quadrennial White House prediction, based on what he calls the “13 Keys Method.”

It is easy to dismiss Lichtman's signature method as just another gimmick in the endless, drawn-out, “horse race”-style coverage of the US election, in which journalists, pollsters and pundits are constantly trying to discern who is on top and who is on bottom.

But the history professor at American University has answers to his critics – and can boast a track record that is hard to beat: Since 1984, he has correctly predicted all elections with one exception.

Lichtman pays no attention to opinion polls.

Instead, his predictions are based on a series of true-or-false forecasts applied to the current presidential administration. If six or more of these “keys” are wrong, the election goes to the hopeless challenger – in this case, Republican candidate Donald Trump.

For example, one of the keys assumes that the president's party gained seats in the recent midterm elections. In fact, Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives in the 2022 midterm elections, meaning this particular key is labeled “false” and turns the tide in Trump's favor.

A few other key factors work in Trump’s favor: President Joe Biden has resigned, meaning Democrats have lost the key that determines “incumbency,” a crucial advantage.

Biden's vice president and successor, Kamala Harris, is brimming with optimism among party supporters. But Lichtman judges that she fails to fulfill another key function: a once-in-a-generation, charismatic candidate in the style of Ronald Reagan or Franklin Roosevelt.

More points for Trump, yes. But after that, the keys for Harris start breaking in rapid succession.

For example, the Biden administration’s extensive environmental and infrastructure legislation meets all the requirements for a “major policy change” in the current White House.

Another key factor for Harris is the withdrawal of fringe independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

It also fulfils the important prerequisite that there are no major scandals.

Do the math and you'll find that only three keys are in Trump's favor, but to be declared the likely winner, he would have needed six.

The only election in which Lichtman's calculations failed to predict the president was George W. Bush's victory in 2000. Lichtman can defend his record by pointing out that it was a legally complicated nail-biter in which Democrat Al Gore won the majority of the vote, but Bush prevailed thanks to a Supreme Court decision.