Opinion: He's the 'Nostradamus' of elections. Is he wrong about Harris and Trump?
You know Allan Lichtman?
He's the venerable predictor in Washington who has predicted the election of Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and received mounds of media attention in the process because of his past successes. Newsweek calls him “the Nostradamus” of politics. Well, I'm the guy who wrote the book on him.
Well, not the book. Lichtman writes his own books. But I wrote the only book about his system that he didn't write ? "Campaigns Don't Count: How the Media Get American Politics All Wrong." It achieved sales in the high single digits.
Who will win the election? Why Allan Lichtman predicts Harris beats Trump.
Lichtman's fundamental argument – based upon systematic analysis of historical precedents back to the Civil War – is that election outcomes are not determined by campaigns.
Nor is an election all about “the economy, stupid.” Instead, the Lichtman “keys” isolate 13 factors that have each been found to be pretty good predictors even standing alone.
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They include major foreign policy successes and failures, scandal, the presence of a major third candidate and, yes, the economy. (They do not include campaign spending.)
Though my book originally came out in 2006 and was updated in 2017, I had been writing about Lichtman since 1987.
I had a column in the Dayton Daily News, and this became my signature subject.
I was enthusiastically ignored by the political professionals: journalists and practitioners alike. After all, people whose careers entail obsessing about campaigns do not want other people believing campaigns don't count.
Lichtman's record is not as close to unblemished as is often said, but it is by far the most proven predictive system around; it is brilliant in its conception; and it carries in it hugely important truths about American politics that are ignored by journalists and practitioners alike.
So let's get to 2024.
Biden dropping out complicated the presidential race
Lichtman struggled to make the call this year. In some previous elections, he made his predictions at the beginning of the election year or even sooner (the summer of 2011).
This year one big problem was the one you might expect: What about Joe Biden? Lichtman's system says a party with the presidency really needs to stick with the president. It also says any big fight over the nomination of that party is very likely to be disastrous for it.
So Lichtman insisted even after Biden's debate failure that the Democrats had to go with Biden. Being a Democrat himself, he was furious at the Democrats who were pressuring Biden out. He repeatedly called them “spineless” on his YouTube show.
He might have been wrong about that.
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After all, the Lichtman system assumes that the politicos will do whatever they can to win an election. Well, that's what they did in pushing for Biden's withdrawal. To tell them not to do it because of some stats based on history was to ignore the possibility that history had never seen anything like this.
I understand where Lichtman was coming from. In every campaign year, he is bombarded with the view that there has never been any election like this one. People have pointed to the nomination of a Black candidate (Barack Obama) and the advent of social media and the advent of unlimited campaign spending by outside groups as new phenomena that mess everything up analytically.
Lichtman has ignored those people and has kept coming up smelling like a rose, pretty much.
This time, however, there really and truly never had been anything like this in a campaign – Biden's debate collapse – that was so obviously relevant.
An intriguing question arises: Are the keys merely predictive, or should they be taken as prescriptive, too? That is, should the politicians consult the keys in deciding what to do?
The evidence is strong that the keys have played a prescriptive role for several presidents.
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The main example: One key says a president is well advised to achieve major policy change on his watch. So presidents typically go big these days. Earlier presidents didn't always.
But perhaps there is danger in being too slavishly devoted to the keys. It so happens that the 2024 prediction did not come down to whether the Democrats put up the incumbent or not.
However, if the Democrats had not united quickly around Harris, that could have flipped another key and flipped the call to the Rs.
What if it all had come down to the incumbency factor? In that case, the keys would have called a victory for Biden but a defeat for Harris.
Well, in unveiling his system decades ago, Lichtman never argued that it would be right every time.
Martin Gottlieb is retired after 27 years as an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News. This column originally appeared in The Columbus Dispatch.
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This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Opinion: Lichtman thinks Harris will win election. Could it be Trump?