The man they call “Polling Nostradamus” has had a particularly ugly month of November. In fact, he’s had a wretched 2024. But then, he probably should have predicted that, if he were so good.
In case you’ve missed it: Allan Lichtman, a professor at American University, had spent years as a minor electoral celebrity due to his method of predicting presidential elections that got him called the “Nostradamus” of U.S. politics. This incredibly rudimentary system, which he credits with allowing him to predict nine of the previous 10 presidential races before 2024 — and which the media played along with — involves 13 “keys” to the presidency.
All of these “keys,” while subjective, are straight yes-or-no binary things; no weight is given to one over the other. If you have seven of them, according to Lichtman, you win the presidency. That simple, basically:
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
This all began with Lichtman getting tons of airtime, letting everyone know that Joe Biden was cruising to another four years. It ended with him suffering an election night meltdown on a livestream and then getting schooled by Cenk Uygur — yes, seriously, that “Young Turks” guy — because he was “preposterously, stupidly wrong” and needed “a tall glass of shut up juice,” in a viral clip from Piers Morgan’s show on Tuesday.
The video itself is hilarious — but to do it justice, bear with me, because the backstory makes it exponentially funnier.
First, the “13 keys,” which he’s written whole books about and has spent a countless amount of time refining, despite the fact the theory is unusually simplistic post hoc reasoning: 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, challenger charisma. If you have most of them, bingo, you win.
Lichtman first began showing up on a ton of TV screens in the wake of President Joe Biden’s June 27 debate performance, which was a political dumpster fire in the same way Hiroshima and Nagasaki were fires.
Did you think Trump would beat Kamala Harris?
Needless to say, the drugs didn’t work. pic.twitter.com/3lYHnU476w
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) June 28, 2024
So how did this affect the presidential race? It didn’t, Lichtman said, telling CNN that presidential debates had “zero” effect on the outcome of elections.
“Debates are not predictive of outcomes,” Lichtman said. “Hillary Clinton won all three debates, still lost. John Kerry won all the debates, still lost. Barack Obama got trounced 72 to 20 percent in the poll, worse than Biden, and went on to win.”
“It’s a huge mistake,” he added, regarding talk of replacing Biden. “They’re not doctors. They don’t know whether Biden is physically capable of carrying out a second term or not. Remember, a lot of folks were saying the same thing about Ronald Reagan, who was, you know, 73, and age was very different then. And they said, ‘You know, he’s not capable of carrying out another term.’ He won 49 states.”
Neither polling data nor Biden’s cognitive capacities apparently listened to the 13 keys, so the Democrats were forced to replace Biden. No matter, Lichtman said: Kamala still had more than enough keys to win — and he was going to livestream himself with his son on election night, presumably to gloat.
Americans, however, didn’t vote the way Lichtman’s keys told them to, and he was Very Unhappy™.
Watching Allen Lichtman completely unravel as he realizes Kamala is going to lose Pennsylvania is priceless comedy. 🤣 pic.twitter.com/KdsCk0mpG7
— Vince Langman (@LangmanVince) November 8, 2024
After this, Lichtman seemed to magically find four new keys that explained why he didn’t get it right: disinformation, racism, misogyny and xenophobia!
After his hilariously wrong prediction, Allan Lichtman maintains that his keys were correct, but this election was altered by Elon Musk being the “Director of Misinformation” and the electorate being consumed by misogyny, racism, and xenophobia. https://t.co/NgfmaeyrF9 pic.twitter.com/plXBjJQ0Fm
— Lucky (@TheMagaHulk) November 9, 2024
Right. Enter Tuesday, where Lichtman and Uygur were guests on Morgan’s show, along three other lefties: intolerably smarmy social media glibness-spigot Harry Sisson; pugnacious, facile YouTuber Kyle Kulinski; and Juan Williams, who held actual jobs at NPR and Fox News once upon a time, so it’s anyone’s guess why he was there.
In any other context, you’d think Piers was playing the devil’s valet in a modern remake of Jean-Paul Sartre’s “No Exit” — but this actually turned out to be entertaining and elucidating, as Uygur was willing to do what most of the liberal media won’t: call Lichtman an obvious charlatan.
“You’re blaming the voters, I think that’s a terrible idea,” Uygur said. “I debated Professor Lichtman before. I told him his theories about ‘the keys’ were absurd. I was right, he was wrong. I said he’d lose his keys.”
“No, you were not right, and I was not wrong!” Lichtman shot back. “And that’s a cheap shot, and I won’t stand for it!”
“Well, who won, brother?” Cenk asked. “You live in a total world of denial.”
“I read your own followers’ comments and they all trashed you,” Lichtman shot back as Uygur twirled his finger around his head, indicating just how cuckoo this was getting. “Every one of them supporting me.”
“Yeah right! You don’t know anything. You don’t know anything. You’re just so deluded,” a cheerful Uygur responded.
But Lichtman has books! And teaching credentials! “I’ve only been a professor for 51 years, published 13 books. How many books have you published? … You’re personally attacking me. Again, say whatever you want, but I’m not going to stand for it!”
Yes, 51 years, 13 books, 13 keys … and several predictions about this election, each one more wrong than the next and each one more or less proving what the problems with the “keys” are.
NEW: Allan Lichtman, who completely botched the 2024 election, has a total meltdown after Cenk Uygur called him out, says he is smart because he wrote 13 books.
Lichtman suggested the voters were wrong, not his keys.
Uygur: You don’t know anything.
Lichtman: I’ve only been a… pic.twitter.com/jGa6W8UgfU
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) November 19, 2024
Finally, Cenk had enough of being talked over — which is pot, kettle, black stuff, but he wasn’t wrong this time: “Hey Allan, shh! Hey Allan, you deserve a tall glass of shut up juice, so can you just shut up for a second and let someone who knows what they’re doing talk?”
But, no, you don’t shut up “Political Nostradamus” — nobody puts “13 keys” Baby in a corner! “I will not sit here and stand for personal attacks, for blasphemy against me! You don’t need to do that,” an angry Lichtman responded.
“Blasphemy against you?” a disbelieving Cenk replied. “Who the hell are you? Are you Jesus Christ? You loser!”
Cenk is joking here — but, as is so often the case with Uygur, he gets this frustratingly close to a breakthrough morsel of truth, and then abandons it as mere trivia or a punchline.
If anyone called me an electoral “Nostradamus” because I got, say, even 40 out of 40 presidential elections right, I’d laugh and tell them to slow their roll.
Maybe I’d get a bit of a puffed-up ego, but a delusion that I was a legitimate predictor of futures? At best, I’d have came up with a series of criteria that allowed me to get those specific races right. Perhaps some of those criteria could be extrapolated to other races, too. That doesn’t mean I’d continue to get those races right, that doesn’t mean new trends and new information would interject that would throw my predictions off, that doesn’t mean some of my criteria were subjective or would become antiquated, and that certainly wouldn’t mean that — should any of that make my 41st prediction incorrect — the voters were the ones who got it wrong, not me.
Lichtman has done the exact opposite of this — and has somehow built a career on feigning a preposterous veneer of infallibility and then faking it until he made it.
In the early 1980s, he formulated his “13 keys” based on what can be reduced to — if you so desired to spend a small chunk of your remaining hours on earth to pick those “keys” apart — a mish-mash of simplistic, subjective and fallacious post hoc logic disguised as groundbreaking scholarly work.
In the intervening years, he’s built something of a political and personal worldview around these “keys.” You heard him: He’s written 13 books to go along with those 13 keys! We might as well go ahead and call those tomes scripture, the way he defends his corpus.
He’s also in the closest thing to a monastery the secular left has in 2024: an academic institution. Thus, this makes these keys magical and infallible — so much so that he spent most of 2024 going on any news outlet that would listen telling the world everyone else didn’t know what they were talking about.
When it turned out he didn’t know what he was talking about, instead, he actually wasn’t wrong: The voters were! Seventy-six-point-eight million Judases, as of Wednesday morning. (To think the Savior only needed one get His point across.)
And while it would have been bit much for him to channel Christ on Calvary during his vainglorious rant to Cenk on Tuesday, you could almost see Lichtman on the verge of repurposing some 1896 William Jennings Bryan bombast: “You shall not press down upon the brow of academia this crown of representative democracy! You shall not crucify the ’13 keys’ upon a cross of MAGA!”
Well, get your laughs while you can. If this guy doesn’t get confined to Shady Oaks Sanatarium for the rest of his natural life — which, judging by the pace of his unraveling, is the direction this seems to be heading — nobody’s going to be listening to his swellheaded key-predicting prattling in 2028, not after he got it this wrong and then defended himself by blaming 76 million other people for not following one pointy-headed crank’s inane electoral model.
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