'A lot would have to go wrong for Biden to lose': can Allan Lichtman predict the 2024 election?

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‘A lot would have to go wrong for Biden to lose’: can Allan Lichtman predict the 2024 election?
David Smith in Washington
The professor on his famous 13 ‘keys’ to the White House, a method for predicting election results that’s been right nine times out of 10
David Smith
Fri 26 Apr 2024 08.00 EDT
Last modified on Fri 26 Apr 2024 08.41 EDT

He has been called the Nostradamus of US presidential elections. Allan Lichtman has correctly predicted the result of nine of the past 10 (and even the one that got away, in 2000, he insists was stolen from Al Gore). But now he is gearing up for perhaps his greatest challenge: Joe Biden v Donald Trump II.

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After the election, Lichtman received a copy of the Washington Post interview in which he made the prediction. On it was written in a Sharpie pen: “Congrats, professor. Good call. Donald J Trump.” But in the same call, Lichtman had also prophesied – again accurately – that Trump would one day be impeached.

He was right about 2020, too, as Trump struggled to handle the coronavirus pandemic. “The pandemic is what did him in. He congratulated me for predicting him but he didn’t understand the keys. The message of the keys is it’s governance not campaigning that counts and instead of dealing substantively with the pandemic, as we know, he thought he could talk his way out of it and that sank him.”

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“They’re mesmerised by the wrong things, which is the polls. First of all, polls six, seven months before an election have zero predictive value. They would have predicted President Michael Dukakis. They would have predicted President Jimmy Carter would have defeated Ronald Reagan, who won in a landslide; Carter was way ahead in some of the early polls.

“Not only are polls a snapshot but they are not predictors. They don’t predict anything and there’s no such thing as, ‘if the election were held today’. That’s a meaningless statement.”

He is likely to make his pronouncement on the 2024 presidential election in early August. He notes that Biden already has the incumbency key in his favour and, having crushed token challengers in the Democratic primary, has the contest key too. “That’s two keys off the top. That means six more keys would have to fall to predict his defeat. A lot would have to go wrong for Biden to lose.”

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/26/allan-lichtman-prediction-presidential-election