Historian Allan Lichtman has insisted that he stands by his prediction about who will win the 2024 presidential race despite recent polls – and revealed that he has “never experienced” so much “hate” in an election cycle.
Lichtman is known as the “Nostradamus” of polling due to the fact he has correctly predicted the results of nine out of 10 presidential elections since 1984.
His method for forecasting the race so accurately is known as “The Keys to the White House,” a system he devised with the Russian academic Vladimir Keilis-Borok in 1981.
And despite the polls, which show the race is now tighter than ever between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, Lichtman stands by his prediction that the Democrat will win the White House in November.
“My prediction has not changed,” Lichtman said on his YouTube channel.
“I have frequently made my prediction correctly in defiance of the polls, it’s based on 160 years of precedent.”
Lichtman conceded, however, that there is always a possibility he could be wrong.
“The keys are very robust,” he said. “But it’s always possible that something so cataclysmic and so unprecedented could change the pattern of history.”
The academic strongly defended his method, which looks at 13 factors from the president’s party’s standing in the House of Representatives to the health of the domestic economy, any record of scandal, social unrest, or foreign policy disasters during their tenure, and the comparative charisma of the two candidates to decide the victor, applying “true” or “false” designations to each category.
“My predictions have stood the test of time, my indicators have always been right,” he said. “The keys are very objective and quantitative.”
Lichtman maintained his method and predictions are “totally non-partisan,” highlighting how he correctly predicted the “two most conservative presidents of our time,” referring to Ronald Reagan when he was elected for the second time in 1984 and Trump in 2016.
But this year the historian has received an unprecedented amount of hate in calling the election for Harris, he revealed.
“I have never experienced anything close to the hate that has been reaped upon me this time,” he told NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo.
“I’ve been getting feedback that is vulgar, violent, threatening, and even beyond that, the safety and security of my family has been compromised.”
The professor said previously that eight of the 13 keys currently yield “true” answers, suggesting a Harris triumph and another four years in power for the Democrats.
“Foreign policy is tricky, and these keys could flip,” Lichtman said.
“The Biden administration is deeply invested in the war in Gaza, which is a humanitarian disaster with no end in sight. But even if both foreign policy keys flipped ‘false’, that would mean that there were only five negative keys, which would not be enough for Donald Trump to regain the White House.”
