Right keys, wrong notes: Lichtman’s 13 Keys to the White House

Professor Lichtman has called it for Harris/Walz over Trump/Vance. Has the big-brained, big-haired political Nostradamus wigged out? Through his own lens are the 13 Keys more of a Rorschach test than the objective paragon of forecasting he has claimed them to be?

Allan Lichtman and his 13 “Keys to the White House” has successfully forecast every US Presidential race since 1984 (except for the George W Bush upset of Al Gore due to the Supreme Court intervention over the Florida vote in 2000 – for which Lichtman must be forgiven) and using the keys retrospectively would account for the winner of every race back to Lincoln. An impressive record that no-one else can touch from what I can tell. His much anticipated call for 2024 was first published in the New York Times on Thursday (05/09/2024) – and he did a comprehensive podcast on it the following day live on his Youtube channel. Here’s the short version:

Wikipedia describes The Keys:

The system is a thirteen-point checklist that assesses the situation of the United States and political system ahead of a presidential election: when five or fewer items on the checklist are false, the incumbent party nominee is predicted to win the election, but when six or more items on the checklist are false, the challenging party nominee is predicted to win.

[…]

Lichtman argues that the system’s reliability proves that American voters select their next president according to how well the country was governed in the preceding four years and that election campaigns have little, if any, meaningful effect on American voters. If American voters are satisfied with the governance of the country, they will re-elect the president or elect their party’s nominee, but if they are dissatisfied, they will transfer the presidency to the challenging party.

The Keys in general are fine, but this time round Lichtman has applied them inaccurately I believe, and the result, for the first time might be wrong. Just as he revised the Keys from predicting the popular vote to predicting the actual outcome because the weighting of Democrat votes (primarily in California and New York) affected the former but could not affect the latter, it is time to revise how some of the Keys are to be assessed.

I love the Keys, but Lichtman is a 77 year old Dem who cannot interpret the more qualitative keys in an objective light. He has not updated how he determines matters within the Keys. His leaking arguments are marginal at best. The answer to improving his system would be to have objective measures explicitly in each of his keys to gauge things like “No scandal” rather than leave it up to Lichtman to limbo under the data bar. He will always talk about the “facts” not being open to interpretation, however some of the “facts” are matters of public perception – and how does he form an opinion on what they are?

My instinct is that social media has advanced (or degenerated if that’s how you feel) in the last 20 years so that the subjective elements connected with public opinion are no longer properly garnered through editorial leaders run in the New York Times and the Washington Post and metrics of favourable/unfavourable coverage on the TV networks – they are to be found in the swirling tea leaves in Twitter and Facebook. Opinion polling in the last 20 years too has suffered from the wholesale abandonment of telephone landlines and the dismissal of unknown calls by the phobic younger demographics.

The consequence of the facts becoming more difficult to ascertain from conventional surveys and polling is that Lichtman’s system (as interpreted by him) is less a mechanical, rules-based game on a chess board as it is a Ouija board for him to move objects around to the whim of his partisan inclinations.

Lichtman’s formula is based on the performance of the incumbent President and their party as the determining factor, and interestingly his formula does not include opinion polling per se in any of the 13 keys. This is a solid approach (New Zealand elections could equally be assessed on the same incumbency axis). His refusal to believe that electoral campaigning has any effect whatsoever though is mistaken when it comes to close elections. In close elections – intuitively – campaign ups and downs must make a difference. The debate between Trump and Biden, where Biden performed so poorly there was a palace coup against him, is clear evidence of how important a candidate’s campaign performance is.

The first seven Keys are not in dispute (with the caveat around the short-term economy being subject to a stock market collapse, bank run or war-induced energy shock), the last six however are what I want to focus on. Here are the 13 Keys as below and how Lichtman has marked them:

Lichtman has marked 8 of the 13 as true, and one as likely true, so that the incumbent, Harris, will prevail. 3 are marked false and one likely false so they go to Trump – but far short of what’s necessary. But things are not as clear cut as he makes out and his conclusion is doubtful for the reasons below.

8. Social unrest. I agree no mass protests and riots have taken place, however if we think about how Lichtman defines these things as “millions on the street” as a visibility issue then the unrest becomes moot and the millions become the substance. Just as there were millions of people on the street in the depression – sleeping on the streets and in parks, dispossessed without any rioting – then what of the estimated 11 million migrants over the last four years who have streamed across the southern border and now fill hotels in every major city? The homeless situation? Are these dispossessed, homeless millions, visible to every urban dweller not a social calamity? No unrest, but is not the crime spectre and extreme social deprivation enough to mark this a likely false or even likely true?
9. No Scandal. Lichtman has rejected the notion that Biden’s ouster was a scandal, or indeed that the cause of his ouster – his obvious dementia – was scandalous. His crack-head son, Hunter, and his antics similarly dismissed as a scandal. Surely a “likely” on this, please.
10. No foreign or military failure. To Lichtman’s credit he does concede a likely false on this. The fall of Afghanistan was worse than Vietnam – they were in there for longer (20 v. 13 years) and the chaotic withdrawal had worse optics than the last chopper out of Saigon. There isn’t anything “likely” about it.
11. Major foreign or military success. Laughably Lichtman counts Ukraine as an American success! A totally unnecessary, craven war that destabilises Europe and pits Russia against the US with no way out – and Lichtman rates this as “likely true”.  Ukraine is Vietnam and Afghanistan with white people. Maybe Lichtman thinks as long as US military contractors are making money out of Biden’s belligerence that it’s a success – he is woefully mistaken.
12. Charismatic incumbent. Can’t fault Lichtman for thinking Kamala Harris is uncharismatic and discounting the female factor. I must agree. Harris’s performance in that awkward CNN interview with her running mate was hopeless and you see why she hasn’t done any one-on-ones. In that interview whenever they cut to the three shot Walz looked like the President. Her answers to very straight forward questions were word salads tossed high. Her answer to what she will do on day one was like a skipping record far worse than Trump because she never answered the question at all: she started off vaguely about the middle class, went into a hypocritical attack on Trump claiming he was divisive and drifted off into platitudes and when the interviewer brought her back to the question she reeled off things that she could not do as President (things that needed to go through congress) and ended by saying she’d do all that on day one (!?) What a hot mess. She is an airhead. Trump’s answer is: energy and the border – simple. The debate with Trump on Tuesday (Wednesday NZ time) will be enthralling.
13. Uncharismatic challenger. A guy who takes a bullet to the head in an assassination attempt at a rally on live TV and emerges with blood streaming down his face and puts his fist in the air saying “Fght! Fight! Fight!”… is uncharismatic? You might not like him but a non-politician who can do what he has done… and he’s… uncharismatic? If it was a Dem Lichtman would have marked it a False.

If we re-calculate the Keys we get a different result: 6 False and another two likely False: that’s a Trump win.