If you’re celebrating former President Donald Trump’s victory to become the 47th president-elect of these United States, pour one out for Allan Lichtman if you get a chance.
Lichtman, as you might remember, is the American University professor who spent all of 2024 telling anyone who would listen about his 13 “keys” to the election. His credentials were that these keys had been overwhelmingly correct for 40 years.
Those keys include: party mandate, contest, incumbency, third party, short-term economy, long-term economy, policy change, social unrest, scandal, foreign/military failure, foreign/military success, incumbent charisma, and challenger charisma.
Of course, he was the guy who thought that the “keys” were so key to the presidential race that he beseeched the Democrats to leave President Joe Biden in the race after the June debate, despite the fact he was obviously mentally infirm. In Lichtman’s view, this was giving away the incumbency key and the contest key.
Even after the Democrats switched out the candidate, however, the man The New York Times said had been “dubbed the Nostradamus of presidential election predictions for his near-perfect 40-year track record” thought Harris had more keys than Trump.
NEW: Allan Lichtman, who claims to have predicted every election since 1984, predicts Kamala Harris will win the election.
Lichtman has correctly predicted 9 of 10 recent elections except for 2000. He also incorrectly predicted Trump would win the popular vote in 2016.
Lichtman… pic.twitter.com/BitUgoJqte
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) September 5, 2024
As you may have heard by now, that did not work out as Lichtman had planned. And he was on a livestream during it.
“During an online stream on Tuesday night, Lichtman and his son, Sam Lichtman, provided live updates as early counts showed gains for Donald Trump, admitting several times that initial numbers for the vice president were not ideal,” the U.K. Independent noted.
Are you excited for a second Trump term?
“However, as more results came in Lichtman admitted that the data was ‘very scary’ later admitting ‘it doesn’t look good’ as they examined the race for North Carolina.”
Then came data that showed Trump winning 51 percent of the Hispanic vote in the key swing state of Pennsylvania.
“What? That’s not possible,” he said. “The world has turned upside down, that’s all I can say.”
Minutes later, he said that looking at Senate races, there was “nothing positive for Harris yet.”
The meltdown was a brutal one:
“I’ve been hopeful this entire time,” his son said.
“I know. You’ve been more hopeful than me,” Lichtman responded.
Oh — so this was more about hoping a very subjective model was right? Wow! Who could have ever thought?
“The democracy’s gone,” Lichtman said as the livestream closed.
Yes, democracy is gone all because the over 130 million people whose ballots have been counted thus far as of Wednesday morning ignored the 13 keys and made their own decision.
Let’s hope this is the last election cycle in which this pseudoscientific academic charlatan is allowed to grace our TV screens as if he were a simpler alternative to Nate Silver. This “Nostradamus,” it seems, just got very lucky for a whole lot of years.
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