This man has nailed 90% of presidential elections. He thinks Joe Biden will win.

Meet Professor Allan Lichtman.

Allan Lichtman almost always gets it right.

In fact, the American University professor has correctly predicted 9 of the last 10 presidential elections — including Donald Trump’s massive 2016 upset.

How does he do it?

Lichtman has a system — built around 13 true/false keys — that he believe is far more accurate than any poll in telling you who is going to win.

The math is simple: If 6 or more of Lichtman’s keys are “false” for the the party that holds the White House, they will lose. If less than 6 keys are “false,” the incumbent party wins.

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So, what are the keys?

1. Party mandate: After the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the US House of Representatives than after the previous midterm elections. 

2. Contest: There is no serious contest for the incumbent party nomination. 

3. Incumbency: The incumbent party candidate is the sitting president. 

4. Third party: There is no significant third party or independent campaign. 

5. Short term economy: The economy is not in recession during the election campaign. 

6. Long term economy: Real per capita economic growth during the term equals or exceeds mean growth during the previous two terms. 

7. Policy change: The incumbent administration effects major changes in national policy. 

8. Social unrest: There is no sustained social unrest during the term. 

9. Scandal: The incumbent administration is untainted by major scandal. 

10. Foreign/military failure: The incumbent administration suffers no major failure in foreign or military affairs. 

11. Foreign/military success: The incumbent administration achieves a major success in foreign or military affairs.

12. Incumbent charisma: The incumbent party candidate is charismatic or a national hero. 

13. Challenger charisma: The challenging party candidate is not charismatic or a national hero. 

And, while Lichtman won’t make his final prediction on the race until August, right now he likes President Joe Biden’s chances of winning a 2nd term.

Lichtman notes that Biden already has the incumbency “key” (#3) and the contest “key” (#2) — meaning he needs just four more keys to be “true” in order to win. “A lot would have to go wrong for Biden to lose,” he told the Guardian.

I have long been fascinated with Lichtman’s keys. So I reached out to him to talk more about them.

Our conversation, conducted via email and lightly edited for flow, is below.

Chris: Let’s talk about the origins of your 13 keys. How did you develop them? How long did it take?  And have you added, subtracted or deleted any over the years?

Lichtman: I wish I could tell you that I developed the keys by ruining my eyes in the archives or getting headaches from deep contemplation. But if I were to say that, to quote the late not-so-great Richard Nixon, “That would be wrong!”

I developed the keys through serendipity in 1981 when I was a visiting distinguished scholar at Cal Tech in Pasadena. There, I met Vladimir Keilis-Borok, the world’s leading authority in earthquake prediction. It was his idea to collaborate, and being brilliant and foresightful, I said, “absolutely not.” I said, “Earthquakes may be a big deal here in Southern California, but I had to go back to DC, where no one cared about earthquakes.”

He said, that he had already solved earthquakes (right!) and wanted to collaborate on elections. Get this. Keilis-Borok was a member of the Soviet scientific delegation that came to Washington under JFK in 1963 and negotiated the most important treaty in the history of the world. That was the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty that stopped us from poisoning our atmosphere, oceans, and soil. He said, “I  fell in love with politics in Washington and always wanted to use the methods of earthquake prediction to predict elections.” But he added “I live in the Soviet Union. Elections, forget it. It was supreme leader or off with your head.” But he said that with my expertise in the presidency and US political history we could team up to predict the world’s most important elections: American presidential elections. So we became the odd couple of political research.

To break out of conventional models and polling, we re-conceptualized American presidential elections, not as Carter v. Reagan, Republican v. Democrat, or liberal v. conservative but in geophysical terms as stability (the White House party retains power) and earthquake (the White House party loses). Following this approach, we applied Keilis-Borok’s method of pattern recognition to determine patterns in the political environment associated with stability and earthquake elections from 1860 to 1980. This analysis, spanning enormous changes in American politics, society, demography, and economics, yielded the 13 key questions and the simple-decision rule that an earthquake occurs if six or more are turned against the White House party. Otherwise, stability prevails.

Every four years, people say to me: “You must change the keys.” We have an African American running for the first time. We have a woman running. We have new social media.”

My answer is two-fold. First, you can’t change a model on the fly without creating errors. Second, the system is highly robust, extending retrospectively to 1860 and prospectively to 1984. I made my first prediction of Ronald Reagan’s reelection in the April 1982 Washingtonian Magazine, when the nation was suffering from its worst recession since the Great Depression and Reagan’s approval was in the dumps. I have since used the same 13 keys for my predictions.

Chris: There’s nothing in the keys about polling. I assume that’s intentional. Why?

Lichtman: I eschew the polls for several reasons.

First, unlike the keys, polls say nothing about the underlying structure of elections. The keys demonstrate that American presidential elections are primarily votes up or down on the performance and strength of the White House party. In other words, it is governance, not campaigning, that matters.

Second, the polls are not predictors. They are snapshots that are abused as predictors. The polls serve the useful, if misleading, purpose of creating the day-to-day drama of the so-called horserace that the media covers each day.

Third, polling errors are far greater than pollsters would have us believe. Typically, pollsters say their error margin is about plus and minus three percent. However, that margin represents only statistical error. It is the margin of error you would get if you drew a sample of red and green balls from a huge jar and estimated the percentage of each color ball in the jar. Human beings are not inert objects. They may lie to pollsters or may not have focused on the election, thus providing a misleading answer. Also, pollsters must guess at which respondents are likely to vote. These considerations introduce additional errors, which are directional, not random, unlike statistical errors. Thus, in 2016, the polls underestimated Republican strength. Based on off-year and special elections, the polls now underestimate Democratic strength.  

Chris: Some of the keys seem somewhat subjective to me. Like, whether the candidate is charismatic. Or whether they have achieved a major foreign policy success. Isn’t some of that in the eye of the beholder? How do you make tough calls on stuff like that?

Lichtman: When I first developed the keys, professional forecasters blasted me for committing the cardinal sin of subjectivity. It took about 15 years, but eventually, the forecasting community came to realize that attempts to use just cut-and-dry indicators for prediction did not work. They discovered that the most successful models combined such indicators with what I call judgmental indicators. Suddenly, the keys were the hottest item in forecasting. I twice keynoted The International Forecasting Summit, published in Foresight: The International Journal Of Applied Forecasting and the International Journal Of Forecasting, and presented by work to the convention of the American Political Science Association.

As I have explained, my indicators are judgmental and not subjective. We are dealing with human beings, and historians make judgments about human behavior all the time. The judgments required for keys like charisma and foreign policy success and failure are systematic, not random. The criteria for each key are carefully explained in my book: Predicting the Next President, The Keys to the White House (8^thedition, forthcoming July 2024). In addition, all questions have already been answered for elections since 1860. All subsequent answers must be consistent with this record.

Chris: You have said you won’t release your final prediction until late this summer — but that Biden is in the pole position. What could change that between now and when you make your final prediction?

Lichtman: I have said that much would have to go wrong in the next several months for Biden to lose reelection. Currently, Biden is down two keys: Mandate Key 1 based on midterm US House losses in 2022 and Incumbent Charisma Key 12.

However, there are four shaky, if still undecided keys:  Third Party Key 4, Social Unrest Key 8, Foreign/Military Failure Key 10, and Foreign/Military Success Key 11. Barring some unforeseen event, all four of the keys would have to fall to predict Biden’s defeat.

Chris: Finish this sentence: The biggest mistake political prognosticators make is ___________________." Now, explain.

Lichtman: The biggest mistake political prognosticators make is “relying on the polls.”

I already explained the problems with polls and how the pundits rely on the polls because they lack a model of how elections work. 2016 is not the only example where the polls have led the pundits astray. In 1988, George H. W. Bush trailed Mike Dukakis by some 17 points in the polls in the late spring, yet Bush went on to win handily. The last Gallup poll in 2012 had Mitt Romney ahead of Barack Obama by one point, yet Obama went on to win handily.