Allan Lichtman, the American political historian who correctly predicted eight of the past nine winners of the U.S. presidency since 1984, including Donald Trump, says Joe Biden will be the country's next U.S. leader.
The famous "presidential forecaster" revealed his prediction of a Biden win in an opinion video for The New York Times published Wednesday. The video details Lichtman's history of correct presidential predictions based on a model called "The Keys to the White House."
Lichtman devised the model along with the late Vladimir Keilis-Borok, a Russian mathematical geophysicist and seismologist who died in 2013. Lichtman and Keilis-Borok created model to predict the result of U.S. presidential elections. The Keys used the mathematics of pattern recognition to predict the actual winner in eight of the nine U.S. presidential elections from 1984 to 2016. The sole failure was the 2000 election where the model predicted a victory for Democratic Party presidential candidate Al Gore.
The Keys, however, doesn't make separate predictions for the popular-vote winner and the Electoral College vote winner. It looks at 13 different categories, which it says are the Keys to the White House.
As a mathematical model, the Keys concentrate more on the record of the incumbent rather than the presidential candidates themselves. The Keys are true-or-false statements. If six or more of the statements are false the challenger - in this case Joe Biden - will win. The Keys favor Biden on seven of the 13 statements.
"The Keys predict that Trump will lose the White House," said Lichtman.
"The pollsters and the pundits cover elections as though they were horse races," said Lichtman in the video. "But history tells us voters are not fooled by the tricks of the campaign. Voters vote pragmatically according to how well the party holding the White House has governed the country."
Lichtman called polls "snapshots in time." He said none of the polls in the end had any effect whatsoever on the outcome of a presidential election. Lichtman, however, said there were forces that may sway the Keys outside its predicted path. Among these are voter suppression efforts by the Republican Party and renewed Russian election interference in Trump's favor.
