American University historian Allan Lichtman has predicted the winner of the presidential popular vote every November since 1984, with his only failure being his unconventional pick of Donald Trump to win in 2016.
In a New York Times Opinion article and video posted Thursday and headlined “Harris or Trump? The Prophet of Presidential Elections Is Ready to Call the Race,” Mr. Lichtman put his reputation on the line again.
And he’s predicting Kamala Harris.
“The Democrats will hold on to the White House, and Kamala Harris will be the next President of the United States,” he said in the video, in which he also laid out his reasoning.
Unlike statistics guru Nate Silver, whose continuously updated model is based on state-level polls currently and gives Mr. Trump a 58% chance of winning, Mr. Lichtman bases his conclusion on 13 “big-picture” questions.
Those questions “tap into the strength and performance of the White House party” such as the state of the economy, candidate charisma, the presence or absence of social unrest, the involvement of third parties and more.
On the 13 questions, Ms. Harris has the advantage on eight to Mr. Trump’s five, he said, though his analysis was admittedly subjective and struck some Republicans as dubious.
For example, he said there had been no “bipartisan recognition” of scandals tied to President Biden, that there have only been “sporadic protests,” and that the short-term and long-term economic performance of Mr. Biden has been good.
The other limit on Mr. Lichtman’s model is that it predicts the winner of the popular vote, which needn’t necessarily be the winner of the presidency and twice in the past quarter-century, it has not been.
Ironically, as poimted out by Lars Emerson and Michael Lovito in the Postrider, those two occasions put Mr. Lichtman on the opposite side.
In 2000, he correctly predicted that Al Gore would defeat George W. Bush by that metric. But in the only metric that counts — the Electoral College and the outcome of the individual state elections — Mr. Bush was the winner.
And his famous 2016 prediction that Mr. Trump would win, a prediction very few people made, was actually his one mistake. Mr. Trump lost the national popular vote to Hillary Clinton, though he won in the Electoral College.
• Victor Morton can be reached at vmorton@washingtontimes.com.
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