Allan Lichtman Predicts 2024 - Genius or Nah?

Intro / Background today we're going to take a look at Alan lickman and he's made his official prediction for 2024 he says KLA Harris is going to defeat Donald Trump I've gotten some comments on this so today we're going to take a look at his 13 keys to the White House and we're going to see if he's an electoral Sant or if he's a political hack who's gotten lucky or maybe it's somewhere in between so first we've got this Business Insider article and it says a historian who's correctly predicted 9 out of 10 elections says kamla Harris will win in 2024 now I'm going to scroll through here a little bit but a lot of people who follow politics are already probably familiar with Alan lickman he's a presidential historian and he's developed 13 keys that can be used to predict which party is going to win the White House and his track record going back to 1984 is pretty good there's some discrepancy on how you measure it but it's not a Flawless record now we'll get to the Keys in just a moment but first of all it's pretty difficult to talk about lickman and his keys without making it overly partisan the keys themselves are theoretically nonpartisan he's made predictions in all different directions going back to the 80s that's good stuff now lickman personally has been out in the open on advocating against Donald Trump now lickman is of course going to try to separate out any of his personal opinions from his 13 Key's prediction that is going to be something people take issue with now he technically predicted Donald Trump would win the election in 2016 back then I'm sure a lot of Democrats took issue with him and they thought his system was done for it's the same thing this time since he predicted Harris Republicans are going to take a lot of issue now my comment on any kind of a system whether it's inside politics or outside politics is it's going to work until it doesn't so even though it's not perfect it is impressive that lickman has been able to develop some sort of a system that has relatively accurately predicted the winers since 1984 and before that it does retroactively go back to 1860 so I would think any kind of a historian that has some decent credibility would have their system with some relative success in other words I don't think anybody's going to come out with any kind of a system where they only have a 60% success rate that's just not good enough so there's going to be some positives about lickman obviously he studied history he knows a thing or two about elections but is there a point where he could let some personal biases get in the way yeah that's possible and How likely is his system to be accurate Keys / Retrospect going forward well let's switch over to Wikipedia we could take a look at this page on the keys to the White House this goes into more background about how he developed the keys so he developed this back in the early 80s and his first prediction was 1984 now the main thing people think of in that election is that was the Reagan Landslide it's almost impossible for him to get that prediction wrong I agree almost nobody would have gotten that one wrong however he apparently did predict that a couple of years in advance now I don't know why you would make a prediction two years in advance when so much could change but to his credit he did get that one right now he also has some downsides we'll get to those shortly but let's take a look at these 13 keys so liment is huge on not using any polling he says polls are fluid they're just a snapshot in time so these are the 13 Keys some of them are clear-cut and there's no room for any debate for example the third key incumbent seeking reelection that's defined as the incumbent Party candidate is the sitting President we know Joe Biden dropped out so that key is an easy false now some of them do have a lot more subjectivity in our judgment calls that's where it's possible ble to make some mistakes or some bias can creep in now for the most part lickman does try to clearly Define each of these keys he tries to not make it just about his gut reaction I'll leave that up to you to decide how serious he is so these keys are supposed to be a referendum on the party holding the white house right now that's the Democrats and in theory if six of these 13 keys are false then it should be a change election and the other party would win right now liman does not have six keys that are false so because of that he's saying Harris is going to win now you can get a lot more info on these Keys If you scroll down we don't have time to go through it but if we go down a little bit further we've got a retrospective table here going back to 1860 this is a great visual way to show you how the keys work over the decades the left column is the election year then the incumbent party nominee then the Challenger party nominee then he's got all the 13 keys of whether they're true or false there's also some nice helpful color shading for true and false then toward the right we've got the number of false Keys the presumed winner and the actual winner so given lickman is a historian this is where he can come out to shine even though it's a retrospective table and not a prediction this is the precedent he uses to make his predictions going forward so if it held true for all these years his theory is it's going to continue going forward now over here on the right there are a couple of notes for example in 1888 Grover Cleveland won the popular vote but Harrison won the Electoral College and was therefore elected president so there's a couple of oddities throughout all these elections now of course unless you're a historian it's almost impossible to go through all these keys and all these elections and see whether they're actually true or false or whether you agree or disagree with liman's interpretation but given there's a couple hundred Keys here I think it's safe to say that there's going to be some gray area on at least a few of them maybe they wouldn't flip the outcome but I'm sure a different historian could go through some of these and argue for making some changes so again there is some beneficial information here but now Predictions / Accuracy let's go into what happened since lickman made his official predictions beginning in 1984 now before we look at each election let's get to the one mistake that lickman made this says in November 1999 he predicted that vice president El Gore the Democratic front runner would be elected in 2000 Gore won the national popular vote but Republican nominee George W bush won the Electoral College and was elected president lickman argued that in 2000 he specifically predicted the winner of the popular vote which Gore won then it says in his 1988 book lickman defined his model as predicting the outcome of the popular vote but he did not remind readers of this Nuance in his journals wherein he made his prediction in 2000 he simply predicted Gore would win lickman further argues that Gore was the rightful winner of the 2000 election and lost because of improper ballot counting in Florida so I get it it's Wikipedia anybody can edit these sentences but there's clearly some issues here with that election but it goes on to say in 2016 lickman predicted a trump Victory using the keys however Trump lost the popular vote and lickman had previously claimed that the keys only predicted the popular vote not the Electoral College outcome lickman claims in 16 he switched to predicting the outcome of the electoral college but this claim was not supported in his books and papers from 2016 which explicitly stated that the keys predicted the popular vote lickman has inconsistently claimed that he began predicting the outcome of the Electoral College rather than the popular vote after 20 or in 2016 explaining that the discrepancies between the Electoral College and the popular vote had dramatically increased with Democrats holding a significant advantage in winning the popular vote but having no such advantage in the Electoral College so here's my biggest criticism of this system or any system and that's going to be any system is only going to be valuable when it predicts the close calls there's only been a few really close elections over the past few decades that's where everything counts and if you can't get those exactly right then I would not put too much weight on anybody's system however I would also argue that it's basically impossible to get every single close election correct if it's basically a peer toss up and you just barely happen to be wrong I don't think there's any shame in that whatsoever I don't think there's any way to have any system that's completely foolproof you could go by pulling economic data liment Keys anything you'd like there's going to be plenty of times it's going to work but sooner or later this system is just not going to pan out so the only real close elections on here I would say are going to be 2204 16 and 20 so that's four of them lickman arguably got three of them and I Confidence definitely expect to stand by his own system he's not really going to come out and say yeah I don't know if it's going to work this time he's already arguably had at least one miss sooner or later he's going to be wrong again again there's not really any shame in it but I have heard lickman say that his system holds up throughout all different time periods tons of candidates over the years tons of different Technologies social media he said that this system holds if the fundamentals of an election don't change I don't really think you should change your system it should be able to hold up however one criticism of this I have is back in 2016 when he did make his prediction that Trump is going to win he did hedge on it a little bit now there's different clips of lickman from that time period here's one where he was on Fox News let's see what he said the verdict of History which is what my keys are based on indicates that this is a year in which the White House Party the Democrats should lose but I also noted in that Washington Post piece that I've hedged my prediction for the first time in more than 30 years saying that in Donald Trump we might have a history shattering candidate who could change patterns that have held since 1860 in this country and have enabled me to correctly predict every election since 1984 so clearly he doesn't sound overly confident in that prediction he did go for Trump I'll give him that and again a lot of Democrats probably said this guy is a total hack at the time that's kind of flipped for this election if you've got a rock solid system that is held up through everything else all of a sudden Trump is going to break this system now from my point of view I think yeah that's possible but I would think from his point of view nothing should change his system so that's why I think it's most reasonable to keep your options open on making any kind of a Key Ratings hard prediction now let's get on the 13 Keys tracker and see what liman's official prediction is for each key now a couple of these are not completely set in stone just yet but he's got four false keys and Harris would need six in order to lose the White House so key number one is pretty self-explanatory the incumbent party lost seats in the US House in the midterms so that one is false key two is no primary contest the explanation is this key is true if the incumbent party wins at least 2third of the total delegate vote on the first ballot at the nominating convention Harris did Coast to that nomination so from liman's point of view this is an easy TR now that's how lickman defines that key so it should be pretty self-explanatory I know Republicans would counter and say that Harris did not actually win any primary votes and she was just installed as the nominee I think that's also true but from liman's point of view that does not actually matter during the convention there was no contest key3 is an easy false because Biden is not seeking reelection key4 is about third party and it would be false if a third party candidate is likely to get 5% or more of the popular vote at this point it does not really look likely I don't know where he gets 5% from I guess that pans out through the decades of history but I'm not sure how much of a difference there would be if it was 4.9 or 5% to me that's kind of an odd hard line to have but in this it's going to be true now the next two are about the short and the long-term economy now he basically boils this down into avoiding a recession and having some economic growth and he's got both of these Keys as easily true again the counter from the other side is going to be talking about inflation given how so many voters View infl and the economy is being a negative they would argue that those keys don't really apply in this situation so there's going to be some debate there but key7 is Major policy change this is going to be true because of the build back better plan being passed during Biden's first term it's not really about how popular it is it's whether it gets done that's enough for lickman to say true number eight is no social unrest this one is also clearly true for lickman and there were some talk about maybe some of the college protests about Israel and Gaza maybe that would turn this key false it looks like that hasn't panned out Republicans could point to it and say no there is social unrest it's just not getting covered enough and this key should be false now back in 2020 there was National unrest and writing that key was more obviously false at this time lickman is saying there's not enough it stays true ke9 is no Scandal and that's also true for lickman this requires bipartisan recognition of serious impropriety Republicans were doing investigations maybe they were going to impeach Biden it didn't end up happening anything with Hunter Biden is irrelevant that's why this key is true now the main thing Republicans are going to come back with is Biden's age and the cover up from that is a scandal now in a general sense I do think there's a lot of Merit to that for so long we kept hearing how sharp Biden is any questioning of that was met with total outrage then everything got blown wide open after that debate so in some sense it does look like that everybody was pretty much lying about Biden's mental acuity so I get it but according to lickman there's not bipartisan recognition of serious impropriety the next two are about military success and failure key1 is false that goes against Harris key 11 is true there's some potential for change here depending on what happens with the situation in Israel and I do think it's going to be highly Up For Debate what constitutes a failure or a success so those are a couple that definitely have some gray area with enough latitude that you could make a case for either side if you'd like and the last two keys are about incumbent and Challenger Charisma and that's pretty much defined as having a candidate that crosses party lines with popularity the last person that got that was Obama Harris doesn't have it that's false Trump has Charisma in a sense but it's very partisan and one-sided so that key remains true and that benefits Harris so that's nine trues of four falses so looks like it's not even borderline lickman thinks Harris is going to win and she might now Conclusion close it out by saying there's no doubt some benefit to lickman and his keys as well as almost anybody that has a credible system of predicting anything but any system is only truly going to be tested at when it's actually very difficult to predict and if he gets this one wrong and Trump wins personally I don't think there's any shame in it because it does seem very difficult to predict but according to his own system and his own Keys there's no chance Trump should win if he only has four false keys so if that happens and Trump wins then who knows what he's going to do with the system I think it pretty much collapses the whole thing but again I don't think there's any way to have any kind of a system that can predict everything when it's extremely close I just don't think it's possible especially in something like politics there's always upsets there's always something crazy that can happen lickman already hedged eight years ago with Trump being a unique candidate but the final thing I'll mention about lickman and these Keys is prior to Harris dropping out when it was just Biden in the race even after the disastrous debate lickman was still saying Biden is tracking to win the election and almost everybody including Democrats were looking at the polling they were at other metrics and they were saying there's no way Biden is going to win we got to get him out so he did get out he lost one of the keys but how many people really think that if Biden stayed in this race all the way through November that he was actually going to win it's certainly possible could have turned around because lickman does not go by the polling he doesn't go by any of the hype he sticks to the Keys and I'll give him credit on saying Biden was still going to win I would love to see what would happen if Biden stck it out and then the Fallout with these keys so lickman does have a lot of fans that's for sure he presents some good stuff but sooner or later he's going to take another loss this year Democrats are going to be a fan cuz he's predicting Harris if next time he predicts the Republican I'm sure the roles are going to reverse that is if the keys are still around and maybe he can design a new system with a couple of new keys who knows but that's a look at alen lickman and these 13 keys to the White House and what I think about him so let me know in the comments what do you think about this guy do you think he's great do you think he's terrible do you like his system or do you have a different one involving polling or economic data which of those 13 keys do you think is the most Up For Debate and do you think he's got it right or do you think sooner or later he's going to take another loss let me know down Below on your way out don't forget to like share and subscribe and join if you'd like to help support the channel thanks for watching and I'll see you next time