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The Keys to the White House is a prediction system for determining the outcome of presidential elections in the United States. The system, inspired by earthquake research, was developed in 1981 by American historian Allan Lichtman and Russian seismologist Vladimir Keilis-Borok. Allan Lichtman has used this system to correctly predict the outcomes of all the American presidential elections from 1984 to 2020, with the exception of 2000.

Prediction system

The Keys are based on the theory that presidential election results turn primarily on the performance of the party controlling the White House and that campaigning by challenging or incumbent-party candidates will have no impact on results. According to this theory, a pragmatic American electorate chooses a president based on the performance of the party holding the White House as measured by the consequential events and episodes of a term – economic boom and bust, foreign policy successes and failures, social unrest, scandal, and policy innovation.

According to the theory, if the nation fares well during the term of the incumbent party, that party wins another four years in office; otherwise, the challenging party prevails. According to the Keys model, nothing that a candidate has said or done during a campaign, when the public discounts conventional electioneering as political spin, has changed their prospects at the polls. Debates, advertising, television appearances, news coverage, and campaign strategies count for virtually nothing on Election Day.

Through the application of pattern recognition methodology used in geophysics to data for American presidential elections from 1860 (the first election with a four-year record of competition between Republicans and Democrats) onwards, Lichtman and Keilis-Borok developed 13 diagnostic questions that are stated as propositions that favor reelection of the incumbent party. When five or fewer statements are false, the incumbent party is predicted to win the popular vote; when six or more are false, the challenging party is predicted to win the popular vote.

Unlike many alternative models, the Keys include no polling data. In addition, the Keys do not presume that voters are driven by economic concerns alone.

Answers to the questions posed in the Keys require judgments. But the judgments are constrained by explicit definitions of each Key. For example, a contested incumbent party nomination is defined as one in which the losing candidates combined secured at least one-third of the delegate votes. Judgments are also constrained by how individual keys have been turned in all previous elections covered by the system. For example, to qualify as charismatic and turn key 12 or 13 – the most judgmental of all keys – an incumbent or challenging-party candidate must measure up to Ronald Reagan, John F. Kennedy, Benjamin Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt.

This forecast is incorporated in the PollyVote.

Popular vote versus electoral college

Lichtman's keys are predominantly a predictor of the popular vote.

The one exception to this rule is the 1876 election, where the replacement of independent Supreme Court justice David Davis (who had resigned to take a Senate seat) with a Republican on the Electoral Commission of 1877, giving the GOP a majority on that board, and a political deal put Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House in return for ending Reconstruction.

This happened in spite of three major circumstances: firstly, the Republican Party had nine negative keys that year; secondly, Hayes lost the popular vote by three percent; and thirdly, four states had conflicting sets of election returns, any one of which could have thrown the electoral college to Samuel Tilden (who the Electoral Commission declared to have lost the electoral college by a single vote).

Theoretical implications

Lichtman concludes from the content of his 13 Keys that it is governance, not campaigning, that determines who will win a presidential election. If voters feel that the country has been governed well for the preceding four years, then they will re-elect the incumbent President (or elect the candidate from the incumbent's party). If the voters feel that the country has been poorly governed, they will transfer control of the Presidency to the challenger. This is not to say that a candidate need not bother with campaigning: perhaps the rival campaigns cancel each other out, and if a candidate did not campaign at all, that may count against him.

The 13 Keys to the White House

The Keys are statements that favor victory (in the popular vote count, but Lichtman started predicting the winner of the Presidency in 2004) for the incumbent party. When five or fewer statements are false, the incumbent party is predicted to win the election; when six or more are false, the challenging party is predicted to win the election.

1. Midterm gains: After the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives than after the previous midterm elections.
2. No primary contest: There is no serious contest for the incumbent party nomination.
3. Incumbent seeking re-election: The incumbent party candidate is the sitting president.
4. No third party: There is no significant third party or independent campaign.
5. Strong short-term economy: The economy is not in recession during the election campaign.
6. Strong long-term economy: Real per capita economic growth during the term equals or exceeds mean growth during the previous two terms.
7. Major policy change: The incumbent administration effects major changes in national policy.
8. No social unrest: There is no sustained social unrest during the term.
9. No scandal: The incumbent administration is untainted by major scandal.
10. No foreign/military failure: The incumbent administration suffers no major failure in foreign or military affairs.
11. Major foreign/military success: The incumbent administration achieves a major success in foreign or military affairs.
12. Charismatic incumbent: The incumbent party candidate is charismatic or a national hero.
13. Uncharismatic challenger: The challenging party candidate is not charismatic or a national hero.

The above 13 keys are slightly different from the 12 keys originally proposed in 1981.

Track record

Lichtman has successfully predicted the winner of every American presidential election since 1984 with the exception of the election of 2000. In 2000, he predicted that Al Gore would win the popular vote and therefore become President. Usually but not necessarily, the winner of the popular also wins the vote of the Electoral College (in the United States, the President is not directly elected by the people). As it turned out, Gore won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College and therefore did not become President. The 2016 election was a second anomaly: Lichtman correctly predicted that Donald Trump would become President, but Trump lost the popular vote.

Allan Lichtman correctly predicted that Al Gore would win the popular vote, but Gore lost in the Electoral College, something which hadn't happened since 1888.

Criticism

The model has been criticised by statisticians as including too many predictors to be a sound model, and for forecasting only the winner of elections — a binary outcome — rather than the vote share of the winning party, which Lichtman acknowledges.

Bibliography

• Cuzan, Alfred G.; Armstrong, J. Scott (June 30, 2014). "Index Methods for Forecasting: An Application to the American Presidential Elections". Foresight: The International Journal of Applied Forecasting. SSRN 913015.
• Jones, Randall J. (2002). Who Will be in the White House?: Predicting Presidential Elections. ISBN 9780321087294.
• Lichtman, Allan J. (February 15, 2008). The Keys to the White House: A Surefire Guide to Predicting the Next President. ISBN 9781461644576.
• Lichtman, A. J. (April–June 2008). "The Keys to the White House: An index Forecast for 2008". International Journal of Forecasting. 24 (2): 301–09. doi:10.1016/j.ijforecast.2008.02.004.
• Allan Lichtman (2016). Predicting the Next President. Roman & Littlefield. ISBN 9781442269217.
• Allan J. Lichtman (October 2012). "The Keys to the White House" (PDF). Social Education. 76 (5): 233–235.
• A. J. Lichtman; V. I. Keilis-Borok (November 1981). "Pattern recognition applied to presidential elections in the United States, 1860-1980: Role of integral social, economic, and political traits" (PDF). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 78 (11): 7230–7234. doi:10.1073/pnas.78.11.7230.
• Allan J. Lichtman (2000). "ELECTION 2000: The Keys Point to Gore". Social Education. 64 (6): 376–377.

References

1. Reagan enacted major cuts in taxes and social spending
2. The Affordable Care Act
3. The Charlottesville car attack, the 2020 nationwide protests sparked by George Floyd's death
4. Clinton was impeached
5. Trump was impeached, among many other scandals
6. Bush failed to prevent the 9/11 attacks and to resolve the military quagmire in Iraq
7. The unresolved military quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan
8. Detente with the Soviet Union with a bilateral nuclear disarmament treaty
9. The Gulf War
10. The defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq
11. The killing of Osama bin Laden

1. "What Earthquakes Can Teach Us About Elections". VPR News. November 9, 2012.
2. ^ Keilis-Borok, V. I. & Lichtman, A. J. (1981). "Pattern Recognition Applied to Presidential Elections in the United States, 1860–1980: The Role of Integral Social, Economic, and Political Traits". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 78 (11): 7230–34. Bibcode:1981PNAS...78.7230L. doi:10.1073/pnas.78.11.7230. PMC 349231. PMID 16593125.
3. "Who Will Win in 2020? | Voice of America - English". www.voanews.com. Retrieved September 18, 2020.
4. "Gore Wins! (At least that's what the model says)". Informs. 2000.
5. Lichtman, Allan. "He Predicted Trump's Win in 2016. Now He's Ready to Call 2020". nytimes.com. New York Times. Retrieved October 14, 2020.
6. Lichtman (2000): "Thus, on balance, barring a most improbable turn of events, the American people will ratify the record of the current Democratic administration this year and elect Al Gore president of the United States."
7. Lichtman, Allan J. (October 2000). "Election 2000: The Keys Point to Gore". Social Education. Retrieved May 14, 2019 – via Valley View High School, Hidalgo, TX.
8. ^ Lichtman (2016). Predicting the Next President
9. Lichtman (2012)
10. Peter W. Stevenson (September 23, 2016). "Trump is headed for a win, says professor who has predicted 30 years of presidential outcomes correctly". Washington Post.
11. He Predicted a Trump Win in 2016. What's His Forecast For 2020? (streaming video). New York Times. August 5, 2020.
12. "Keys to the White House – PollyVote".
13. Silver, Nate (August 31, 2011). "Despite Keys, Obama Is No Lock". FiveThirtyEight. Archived from the original on October 7, 2020.

• 1996 non-fiction books
• Books about politics of the United States
• Presidential elections in the United States
• Books by Allan Lichtman