The conviction of former President Trump in a historic trial in New York may or may not have thrown the 2024 presidential election into unprecedented chaos, according to Dr. Alan Lichtman.
Lichtman, the American University historian who has accurately predicted the outcome of nine of the last 10 US presidential elections, told Fox News Digital that it was pointless to immediately analyze Trump’s conviction as the nation anxiously awaits Election Day. “We won’t know much until the sentencing hearing on July 11, right before the Republican National Convention,” Lichtman said in an interview.
The proven prognosticator, venturing into speculation, said Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records doesn’t seem to fundamentally undermine the base of support he needs to rally around to defeat President Biden in November. But neither Lichtman nor the pundits he routinely outdoes know how Americans outside of Trump’s base will react to the presence of a convicted felon on the presidential ballot.
“We don’t know how this will affect moderate and independent voters, so we have to take our time and not rely on quick-fix pundits,” Lichtman said.
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Lichtman doesn’t believe former President Trump’s conviction has eroded support from his base as a whole. (Eric Thayer, The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Lichtman is a historian, not a psychic. The formula he has used to accurately predict nearly every presidential election since 1984, “The Key to the White House,” was developed in 1981 with mathematician Vladimir Kaylis-Vorok and is based on an analysis of presidential elections going back to 1860. Lichtman says the secret to his success is not to let his personal preferences influence his predictions.
“Instead of presidential elections being viewed as Carter vs. Reagan, Republican vs. Democrat, liberal vs. conservative, we reconceptualize them in geophysical terms,” he explained. “Stable: The White House party retains power. Earthquake: The White House party dissolves.”
The “Keys” consist of 13 true/false questions that, if true, are parameters favoring stability. If eight or more of the keys are false, the incumbent party is predicted to lose. With this formula, Lichtman correctly predicted Trump’s victory in 2016, when polls, debate performance, and political pundits all supported Democrat Hillary Clinton. He previously predicted President Barack Obama’s reelection when Republican Mitt Romney was favored. He also correctly predicted Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.
“The Keys are an alternative to polls, and polls are not predictors. They’re snapshots, not predictors, and they’re overused. And, you know, pundits are fun, but they’re sports talk radio. There’s no scientific basis to their predictions,” Lichtman argued.
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Lichtman believes he has the secret to predicting who will win the vote in a U.S. presidential election, and he has the records since 1984 to prove it. (Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images)
Lichtman isn’t making any final predictions for this year because the 2024 election is still in flux, but he argues a lot of bad things would have to happen for Biden to lose to Trump.
Lichtman’s keys are party confidence, competition, incumbency, third party, short-term economics, long-term economics, policy change, social unrest, scandal, diplomatic/military failure, diplomatic/military success, incumbent charisma, and challenger charisma.
As it stands, Biden has arguably lost two of Lichtman’s keys. “He lost what I call the key of credibility based on the midterm elections, because Democrats lost seats in 2022, and they needed to win seats to gain that key. And he also lost the key of charisma, because he’s not Franklin Roosevelt or John F. Kennedy,” Lichtman said.
If six key factors work against Biden, he is likely to lose. The four to watch are whether Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or another third-party candidate receives at least 10% support in national polls, civil unrest related to widespread anti-Israel protests on college campuses, and whether Biden’s foreign policy endeavors succeed or fail amid the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
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Lichtman noted that Biden currently holds two of the “keys,” but the rest appear to be in flux. (Hannah Beyer/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
With polls showing Trump leading in several key battleground states, many Democratic strategists and commentators have lost confidence in Biden’s campaign. Nate Silver, an election data expert and founder of FiveThirtyEight, suggested Monday that the president’s “lowest approval ratings in history” could be reason enough for him to withdraw from the race or for the party to nominate another candidate at the Democratic Convention in August.
Lichtman warned that replacing Biden would be a huge act of self-destruction for the Democratic Party.
“If Biden runs, he gets what I call the incumbency key, the incumbent president position, and he wins unopposed in the party race, so he basically gets the top two keys,” Lichtman explained.
Without Biden on the ballot, the Democrats would automatically lose two more keys, meaning they would only need to lose four more to predict defeat.
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If Biden does not make it onto the Democratic Party’s shortlist, the party will automatically lose two more keys. (AP Photo/Julia Nickinson and Evan Vucci)
“This nonsense about Biden quitting shows the dangers of haphazard pundits and commentary that isn’t based in a scientific understanding of how elections work,” Lichtman said.
Pessimistic commentators are part of what Lichtman calls the “political-industrial complex” — an iron triangle of pollsters and political consultants who profit from campaigns, news reporters eager to report anything negative, and politicians afraid to challenge the other two points of the triangle. The horse-race theory of elections creates drama and brings in money for those involved, but it does little to inform Americans about the direction of the country, Lichtman argues.
“The keys provide a way to break the Iron Triangle,” Lichtman said. “Candidates themselves have to run a different type of campaign,” he added. “A key campaign, a campaign about your vision. If you’re an incumbent, what have you done so far and what do you expect to do going forward? If you’re a challenger, what is your articulate vision for America?”
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No one remembers traditional campaigns. It’s the substantive campaigns that articulate a vision for the country that make history, Lichtman argues. Think Barry Goldwater in 1964, who lost by a landslide but defined conservative principles for posterity, or George McGovern, whose liberal principles have shaped the Democratic Party since his loss to Richard Nixon in 1972.
“Ronald Reagan spoke out in 1980 about cutting taxes, deregulating, building up the military, taking on the Soviet Union, and he won. He won big,” Lichtman says. “And that philosophy has influenced politicians, both liberal and conservative, to this day.”
Fox News Digital’s Aubrie Spady and Joe Schoffstall contributed to this report.
