Historian Allan Lichtman has predicted the winner of the 2024 Presidential Election in the contest between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.
Lichtman created the Keys to the White House model with Soviet seismologist Vladimir Keilis-Borok in 1981. The model uses 13 true/false criteria to predict whether the presidential candidate of the incumbent party will win or lose the next election.
Using this model, Lichtman has accurately predicted the outcome of most US presidential elections since 1984, with the exceptions of 2000, where he predicted an Al Gore victory (but did caution his model only pertained to the popular vote), and 2016, where he predicted a Donald Trump popular vote victory and afterward revised his model to note it picked the Electoral College winner.
The Democrats “finally got smart” before the Presidential election
Looking at the November elections he said that the Democrats “finally got smart” by rallying around Kamala Harris as their candidate, and that is one of the reasons why he thinks she will be November’s winner.
Speaking about his model he said: “The way it works is real simple. If six or more keys — any six — go against the White House party, they are predicted losers. Otherwise, they’re predicted winners,” Lichtman told Fox News Digital this week.
“And by the way, this also led to a prediction of Donald Trump’s win, which made me virtually alone in making that prediction in 2016.”
Lichtman says the Democrats represented by Harris could lose five keys “at most” and that is why he is predicting that “we are going to have a precedent-breaking election and Kamala Harris will become the first woman President of the United States,” he told Fox News.
“We’ve had an unprecedented situation of a sitting president dropping out on the eve of the convention, and it has affected my keys,” Lichtman continued.
“Now, with Biden dropping out, the Democrats lost one key — the incumbency key. I thought perhaps the way things were looking, if Biden dropped out, the [Democrats] would have a big party brawl and that would cost them a second key, which could lose them the election.
“But the Democrats finally got smart and united behind Harris and that preserved the contest key. That means the shift only cost them one key.”
Lichtman describes the contest key as having “no serious contest for the incumbent-party nomination.” The other keys are as follows: party mandate, incumbency, third party, short-term economy, long-term economy, policy change, social unrest, scandal, foreign/military failure, foreign/military success, incumbent charisma and challenger charisma.
“I think having Harris front and center rather than Joe Biden, the policymaker, has dampened enthusiasm for protests which helped salvage a second key, the social unrest key,” Lichtman also said. “The keys show that Kamala Harris is a predicted winner,” he predicted speaking on Fox News.
