Despite recent polls giving former President Donald Trump an edge in the 2024 presidential election, American University professor Dr. Allan Lichtman is standing by his prediction that Vice President Kamala Harris will come out on top.
Lichtman, 77, has been dubbed by some the election “Nostradamus” due to his track record of predicting nine of the past 10 presidential contests. In September, he went all in on a Democratic win.
“Nothing has changed to change my prediction that I made on September 5, deliberately before the supposed ‘pivotal’ Trump-Harris debate — according to the pundits — which proved to be pivotal not one bit, if you believe the polls,” Lichtman explained during a livestream Tuesday.
The prof revealed that he’s since been peppered with questions about whether he intends to switch his prediction in light of polls showing Trump edging in front of Harris in swing states.
The RealClearPolitics average of polls showed Trump, 78, leading Harris, 60, by 0.4% nationwide as of noon Wednesday, all but ensuring a Republican Electoral College victory if it comes to pass.
But Lichtman doesn’t go by the polls. Instead, he uses his “Keys to the White House,” which entails 13 categories to assess the prospects of the two major-party candidates.
Harris had the edge in eight of those metrics, compared to Trump’s three, according to Lichtman.
Famed election data guru Nate Silver and other polling experts have voiced skepticism about Lichtman’s model. The Postrider’s Lars Emerson and Michael Lovito have also questioned Lichtman’s claims about his record.
“I think [it is] an example of kind of the replication crisis and kind of junk science,” Silver said in a recent podcast. “A lot of the variables are subjective … these are things that if you know the answer already, you can overfit and kind of p-hack your way into saying, ‘Now we can predict every election perfectly.’”
Silver wrote in a New York Times op-ed last week that his “gut says” Trump will become the 47th president, though his own model says that outcome has a 55% chance of coming to pass — essentially a coin flip.
Lichtman developed “The Keys to the White House” with academic Vladimir Keilis-Borok in 1981 and used the model to go back over past election cycles retrospectively. The one blemish on his record is the 2000 election, which he wrongly predicted Al Gore would win.
“Of course, the answer is no,” Lichtman added Tuesday in reference to questions about whether he’d change his keys, though he admitted to being nervous about his call holding up.
“I’ve been doing this for 42 years and every four years, I have butterflies in my stomach,” he said. “This year, I think I have a flock of crows in my stomach. Of course I’m anxious. Not because of the polls, but primarily because I’m worried about the future of this country.”
Lichtman, a registered Democrat, has been fiercely critical of Trump. Recently, he announced he was canceling his Washington Post subscription over the paper’s decision not to endorse a candidate this cycle or in future cycles.
“There is more election anxiety this year than I have ever seen and I go back to Kennedy-Nixon,” he reflected. “I have never seen this kind of election anxiety because a lot of people believe that the future of the country is on the line here and that democracy in this country could be a thing of the past.”
