Professor Allan Lichtman’s method for predicting the winners of the U.S. popular votes since 1984. The 13 keys to the White House

Inhalt

1. Introduction

2. Allan J. Lichtman’s Thirteen Keys to the White House

3. Applying the thirteen keys to different candidates and elections
3.1. Ronald Reagan versus Jimmy Carter in 1980
3.1.1. Carter’s pr esidency and his sta rting position
3.1.2. Reagan’s Hollywood charisma versus Carter’s scandals
3.1.3. Third-party and Republican challengers
3.2. George W. Bush’s successful reelection in 2004
3.2.1. Bush’s militar y actions before and after 9/11
3.2.2. Torture and inertia
3.2.3. Bush claims the political keys one to four
3.2.4. John Kerry and George W. Bush – two uncharismatic candidates

4. Turning the keys to the White House 2016: Trump & Clinton
4.1. An empty office: The democratic situation post-Obama
4.2. The remaining keys
4.3. The fourth key – Lichtman’s error

5. Conclusion

Bibliography

Register of images

1. Introduction

„I’ve been wrong on everything about Trump, […] but allow me – with that caveat – to made the prediction that Donald Trump will not be the president of the United States. It just will not happen“ said New Jersey’s Democratic Senator Cory Booker on February, 16th 2016 (Tani 2016). Booker who is still in office in September 2018 still is wrong on everything he thought and said about Donald Trump, even though his statement was comprehensible and most likely supported by many people in the world. Obviously, forecasts and predictions about the future cannot be made reliably, regardless if they are about the political agenda of a party or the winning numbers for tonight’s lottery. However, American historian and political scientist Professor Allan J. Lichtman is on a personal quest to prove this assumption wrong. In an interview with the Washington Post on September 23rd, 2016 he successfully predicted Trump’s victory in the popular vote of 2016‘s presidential election (cf. Stevenson 2016). And this was not even the first or second time that Lichtman correctly predicted the victor of a presidential elections‘ popular vote. In fact, he successfully predicted the victors since the election in 1984. The question is, how did Lichtman accomplish this astonishing feed. Therefore, this paper will focus on what Lichtman calls the Thirteen Keys to the White House and how he used them to predict the outcomes of the last nine presidential elections. To do so, his book The Keys to the White House which was firstly published in 1996 is required as the main source for the following steps that will serve as the leading topics of each chapter of this paper.

The first chapter will briefly summarize and explain Lichtman’s thirteen keys and how they were determined as critical indicators for predicting the winner of a presidential election. In a second step and therefore in the second chapter the focus will lie on how Lichtman decided whether a key applied to a residing President or not, especially regarding certain keys which cannot be answered simply because of extraordinary circumstances surrounding particular candidates of the various presidential elections since 1984. As Lichtman stated that the presidential race between Republican candidate Donald J. Trump and Democratic candidate and former First Lady of the United States Hillary Clinton was the hardest election to predict, a third chapter will focus on the reasons for that. Additionally, the chapter will try to apply the keys to a new election by assuming that Donald Trump will run for office again.

2. Allan J. Lichtman ’s Thirteen Keys to the White House

To understand the distinguishing characteristics of the Thirteen Keys it is necessary to state Lichtman’s following assumption about presidential elections:

The Keys system tracks the big picture of how well the party holding the White House has governed and does not shift with events of the campaign. This model gives specificity to the idea that it is governance, not campaigning, that counts in these elections. (Lichtman 2012: 1)

Instead of focusing on polls or the campaign strategies of the party in office and the challenging party, Lichtman’s keys consider the actual results of a legislature, such as accomplishments, failures, new laws or scandals. Therefore, Lichtman can apply his keys to the actual governmental period, to policies and to ideas instead of focusing on character traits or controversies of the candidates. Lynn Vavreck states that “[t]he imbalance in coverage of the candidates’ character is striking, as is the lack of coverage about the economy compared with the controversies” (Vavreck 2016). This means that the media focuses on the candidates themselves instead of reporting on their policies. Consequently, the thirteen keys have an advantage when it comes to predicting the outcome of a presidential election, as “[t]he Keys system has correctly forecast the results of all seven presidential elections from 1984 to 2008, usually months or even years prior to Election Day and often in contradiction to the polls” (Lichtman 2012: 1). Additionally, the Keys also correctly predicted the results of the popular vote of the presidential elections in 2012 and 2016.

When Lichtman and Vladimir Kellis-Borok created the keys in 1981, they were able to apply them to all presidential elections prior to 1981 starting in 1960. Every single election confirmed Lichtman’s and Kellis-Borok’s hypothesis that “when five or fewer statements [keys] are false, the incumbent party wins [and] when six or more are false, the incumbent party loses” (Lichtman 2016: 3). Thus, the thirteen keys (refer to image 1) became valid indicators for determining the winner of upcoming elections. Every single key “asks a question that can be answered yes or no before an upcoming election” (ibid. 2), and therefore the answer does not require tedious research or statistics or polls. Instead the question for key three – is the incumbent-party candidate the sitting president – can be answered simply by affirming or denying the question. Hence, a key is turned (true) or remains unturned (false) by applying this fast and simple procedure. Lichtman states, that to avoid “double negatives, the keys are stated as threshold conditions that favor reelection of the incumbent party” (ibid.).

However, one could criticize keys twelve and thirteen for being too unspecific in comparison to the remaining keys, as deciding whether a person is charismatic or not is a subjective decision based on the opinion of each individual U.S. voter. To specify these how these questions can be answered, Lichtman mentions that the major parties have selected only seven charismatic candidates in the thirty-four elections since 1860: James G. Blaine, William Jennings Bryan, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama in 2008. (ibid. 46) Out of these seven candidates only Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama became U.S. Presidents. Therefore, these five Presidents are used as the benchmark and test cases for deciding whether a candidate is charismatic or not.

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3. Applying the thirteen keys to different candidates and elections

The following chapter will illustrate how Lichtman was able to apply his thirteen keys to different candidates or presidential elections despite certain difficulties and limitations. For the two presidential elections in question a sub-chapter will be dedicated. The candidates and their corresponding election years are Ronald Reagan in 1980 and George W. Bush in 2001.

3.1. Ronald Reagan versus Jimmy Carter in 1980

The following sub-chapter will elaborate on the reasons for the loss of the incumbent U.S. President Jimmy Carter versus the Democratic candidate Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Special interest will lie on the keys, which retroactively decided the election for the former Hollywood star Reagan.

3.1.1. Carter’s presidency and his starting position

As the election between Reagan and Carter was that of a challenger and an incumbent President and not only that of a challenging party and an incumbent party, one can regard the second half of Carter’s legislature as his starting position. Therefore, a variety of his accomplishments and failures were easier to rate and thus it was easier to decide whether certain keys were to be turned or not.

Prior to the election in 1980 Jimmy Carter had been U.S. President since 1977 and was willing to continue his presidency. However, during the first two years of his legislature “Carter won few domestic achievements” (Lichtman 2016: 371) – one of these few achievements were the successful negotiations with Panama regarding the Panama Canal and eventually handing control over to the Central American country in 2000. A decision which was finalized by a single vote in the Senate (cf. ibid.). As many Conservatives accused Carter of simply forfeiting the economically important Canal to the Panamanians, Lichtman regards this as one of the reasons among others for the Democrats losing 15 seats in the House of Representatives. This resulted in failing to turn key one to the White House.

To turn Lichtman’s fifth key the economy must not be “in recession during the election campaign” (ibid. 3). However, in 1979 when the second half of Carter’s presidency began the economy started tumbling down, partly due to the steep increase of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries’ oil prices. While analysts expected that “crude oil prices in 1979 would rise by a total of 14.5 percent” (Miller, Supel, Turner, 1980: 4), the prices actually increased by more than 100 percent. This led to a massive increase of the American fuel price, which reached “its highest levels since the end of World War II” (Lichtman, 2016: 144). Despite President Carter’s and his staff’s actions which emerged to be fruitless and even harmful to the economy, there was no recovery from the damage the risen OPEC prices had done: “The result was the worst of all economic worlds: In Carter’s last two years, real growth slowed, inflation soared to double-digit levels, and budget deficits climbed to peacetime records” (ibid.) Therefore, Carter was not able to turn the fifth key to the White House as the U.S. economy’s recession started the second half of his legislature and remained there during the election campaign.

Another one of Carter’s and his presidency’s shortcomings effected key number seven. As the turning of key seven requires the incumbent party – or in this case the incumbent President – to enact major changes in national policy, Carter failed to turn this key as well: Lichtman explains that “Carter achieved several notable legislative successes, but they had little impact on the nation’s most pressing problems and did not constitute a significant departure from past policies” (ibid.) which was partly a consequence of Carter’s “rookies that [he had] brought in to run his White House.” (Kensmind 2012: 1). This group of rookies earned the name Georgia Mafia by the media as Carter promoted many of his Georgian supporting politicians to high-ranking positions. However, according to reporter John Farrell “[they] did not have a lot in common with the national political party, they did not have a lot in common with the Congress (ibid.) which led to several conflicts between Carter and his staff and the Congress whose responsibility was and still is the confirmation of the President’s legislations. Consequently, Congress blocked certain legislatures which might had have allowed Carter to bring forth notable changes in the national policy (cf. ibid.). That way Carter was not able to turn the seventh key either and it was already lost before the election phase even began.

As the two keys number ten and eleven are both concerned with the aspect of foreign military actions both keys can be analyzed parallelly. Carter managed to turn key number eleven achieving major military success in the Middle East but simultaneously failed there on a military level. Consequently, Carter lost key ten. According to Lichtman, Carter’s greatest accomplishments and failures occurred during the military actions in the Middle East (cf. Lichtman: 2016: 147): On the one hand, Carter’s administration successfully stopped the war between Egypt and Israel which already lasted since Israel’s creation in 1948. But on the other hand, one of the greatest crises of his Presidency did bring Carter upon himself and it lasted throughout the elections:

A revolution toppled the Shah of Iran in 1979 and established in his place a fundamentalist Islamic republic under the leadership of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. In November of 1979, after President Carter allowed the deposed shah into the United States for medical treatment, Iranian radicals seized the American embassy in Tehran, taking sixty-six Americans hostage. (ibid.)

Carter and the Georgia Mafia or other members of his administration failed in resolving this crisis in the Arabic World and this “failure to resolve the crisis doomed his already shaky reelection prospects” (Hahn: 2017: 1).

In total, Carter already lost four keys to Reagan and his Democratic party while preparing for reelection: With the disadvantage of losing the keys number one, five, seven and ten the later Presidential election turned out to be difficult to win.

3.1.2. Reagan’s Hollywood charisma versus Carter’s scandals

The following sub-chapter will focus on the most subjectively judgmental keys: Number twelve and thirteen. To win key twelve the incumbent-party’s candidate must be “charismatic or a national hero” (Lichtman 2016: 3) and to win key thirteen the challenger must not be “charismatic or a national hero” (ibid.).

Considering Ronald Reagan’s charisma, who not only was a former Hollywood star but also a motivational speaker prior to his political career, Carter had the disadvantage of facing a charismatic challenger:

The temperamental contrast between the two men was at the center of what may have been the campaign's decisive moment: the Reagan-Carter debate of October 28, a week before the election […] [and] many observers thought Carter was the better of the two, but Reagan was more relaxed and confident. (Cannon 2018: 1)

While Cannon’s statement and the further reception of the described campaign clearly shows that key thirteen remained unturned, it also implies the following about Carter’s charisma and therefore about key twelve: The incumbent President seemed to behave temperamental and also uncharismatic in comparison to his challenger which was one of the reasons for not turning the incumbent-charisma key.

However, Carter was also the center of an embarrassment which hurt his political image and popularity among voters. Said embarrassment was the speech “that became known as the “malaise speech” […] [that] suggested that America’s problems stemmed from a national “crisis of confidence,” not from a lack of leadership” (Lichtman 2016: 146). The patriotic U.S. citizens took this as an insult, which is part of the reason why Lichtman decided to forfeiting key twelve for the Republicans.

Combined to the keys Carter already lost before the Presidential campaign he had lost six keys in sum which means: “When six or more are false, the incumbent party loses” (ibid. 3).

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