A history professor whose formula has successfully predicted the outcome of all but one presidential election since 1984 has indicated that President Joe Biden is tracking to win in 2024.
Allan Lichtman, who has been teaching at American University for five decades, uses a system of 13 “keys” to the White House to make his call.
In a recent interview with the Guardian, Lichtman noted that Biden has already got two keys under his belt: the incumbency key, and the contest key, after he faced no serious contenders for the incumbent party nomination.
“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,” Lichtman said.
He will likely make his final prediction in August, according to the Guardian.
The other keys, which are structured as true or false questions, include whether or not the incumbent candidate has been tainted by a major scandal, whether there has been social unrest during the term, whether the incumbent has achieved major military successes or failures, and whether or not the challenging candidate is charismatic or a national hero.
The only blemish on Lichtman’s record is in 2000, when he predicted that Al Gore would defeat George W. Bush.
But Lichtman claims that call was nonetheless correct, since Gore won the popular vote. He contends that Gore would have won the election was he not wronged in Florida, which Bush won by a razor thin margin, prompting a recount dispute and highly controversial Supreme Court decision.
He was among a select few who predicted former President Donald Trump’s win in 2016.
He noted, in his Guardian interview, that his system is “robust” because it is based on history — and unprecedented events are currently taking place.
“But it’s always possible there could be a cataclysmic enough event outside the scope of the keys that could affect the election and here we do have, for the first time, not just a former president but a major party candidate sitting in a trial and who knows if he’s convicted – and there’s a good chance he will be – how that might scramble things,” he said.
A national poll shared by CNN on Sunday shows Trump leading Biden by six percentage points, despite currently being on criminal trial and facing felony charges in three other indictments.
