PREDICTING THE NEXT PRESIDENT: THE KEYS TO THE WHITE HOUSE 2012 by Allan J. Lickhtman

Allan J. Lichtman, Predicting the Next President: The Keys to the White House 2012 (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2012).

Also available on Kindle and Nook.

The title of the 2008 edition is The Keys to the White House: A Sure Fire Way of Predicting the Next President.

(NONFICTION)

Recommended by Wilda Morris

Ignore all the polls. They won’t tell you anything meaningful about the outcome of the popular vote for president. That’s the word from Allan J. Lichtman who studied all the elections from 1860 to 1992 and, with the help of statistician Vladimir Keilis-Borok, came up with 13 keys which correctly predicted the outcome of the popular vote in each of the five elections since. [Ken Decell co-wrote the first edition; the later split between Lichtman and Decell is described by Martin Gottlieb in his book, Campaigns Don’t Matter: How the Media Get American Politics All Wrong (iUniverse, 2006).]   By 2010, Lichtman was confident that Barak Obama would win the popular vote in 2012. And of course, he was correct. In 1988, when George H. W. Bush was trailing Mike Dukakis in the polls by 20%, and the pundits believed the Democrat would win, Lichtman correctly called the election for Bush. Polling data is ignored in Lichtman’s predictive system.

The keys, he says, do not predict the Electoral College vote, so he cannot be 100% sure about who will actually win the election. (This means that the title of the 2008 edition is overstated.) “The fact that the outcome of every election is predictable without reference to issues, ideology, party loyalties, or campaign events allows us reasonably to conclude that many of the factors most commonly cited in explaining election results count for very little on Election Day,” according to Lichtman (p. 5).  When five or fewer of the thirteen keys go against incumbent party, its candidate will win the popular vote. If six or more go against the incumbent party, it will lose.

Four of the keys are “political keys” gauging the strength of the incumbent party, such as the results of the previous midterm election and whether the incumbent president has serious opposition for the nomination. Keys 5-11 are “performance keys, measurements of achievements and failures of the president in power. This includes the condition of the economy, effectiveness in making policy changes, scandal of certain kinds which are recognized as serious across party lines, and success or failure in foreign policy or military affairs. The last two keys relate to the charisma of the candidates themselves.

I confess that before I read anything else, I went to the last chapter and read Lichtman’s prediction for the 2012 election. Yep, he got it right.

Lichtman is Distinguished Professor of History at American University (my alma mater). Unfortunately he was not on the faculty during my days as a student there. I heard him briefly on the radio after the 2012 election. He compared these keys to shifting in tectonic plates – which is a better predictor of earthquakes than anything visible on the surface. In other words, they have a predictive power not evident in presidential polling.