It’s been a busy – and very weird – last few months for us at The Postrider. Though most of our time and energy has gone into articles and models covering the 2024 election, there’s just one story we cannot seem to escape: Allan Lichtman.

After Gilad Edelman’s article about the prognosticating professor came out in The Atlantic and following Lichtman’s incorrect prediction concerning this year’s election, there’s been a resurgence of interest both in how we’ve handled his ad hominem attacks against us (we put out statement a while back but won’t be addressing his personal insults here) and, more importantly, in his 2016 prediction and our work unpacking something he put unequivocally that year: that “the Keys predict the popular vote, not the state-by-state tally of Electoral College votes.” 

Catching You Up

If you’ve missed out and don’t want to read our much more thorough cover story from the summer, we’ll give you the two minute version: in 1981, American University Professor Allan Lichtman developed a system called the “Keys to the White House,” which purports to predict who will win each presidential election. He used this system to correctly predict the winner of every presidential election from 1984 to 1996, but in 2000, he used it to predict that Al Gore would win the election. When that result did not materialize, he nonetheless took credit due to the fact that, as he put it in his books (here’s an example from 1990), the Keys were only able to predict the popular vote winner. He got both the popular vote and the Electoral College winners right from 2004 to 2012, but in 2016, he tapped Trump as the winner – a prediction that would have been impressive had Trump actually won the popular vote. If you’re reading this article, you probably know that he didn’t. However, Lichtman took credit for being one of the few prognosticators to call Trump’s victory anyway. 

The manifest (and contradictory) ways he did so include:

1. Claiming that: “Ever since 2000 you know I’ve just been picking the winner.” This is indisputably false: Lichtman wrote on numerous occasions, including in 2016, that his system only predicted the winner of the popular vote. For example, from 2012:
   
2. Claiming, but only after the fact, that he modified his system in 2016. There is no evidence he changed what the Keys predicted at any point prior to the 2016 election, but there is plenty of evidence to the contrary.
3. And claiming that because he predicted Trump would “win” (he never mentions whether he is predicting the Electoral College or popular vote, though the popular vote is mentioned in the article itself) in his Washington Post interview published September 23, he was only referring to the Electoral College. While it’s true that Lichtman never explicitly states in that interview that he’s picking the winner of the popular vote, he also never qualifies that he was no longer picking the popular vote winner, contrary to what he insisted for decades.

His own work prior to the 2016 election,1For example, his 2008 prediction makes it abundantly clear that it only predicts the popular vote (“Win indicates the popular vote outcome for the party in power”). In a 2011 rebuttal to Nate Silver, Lichtman wrote that “the keys are not designed to estimate percentages, but only popular vote winners and losers.” And in the May 2016 edition of his book, released in the run up to that year’s election, he wrote of the Keys: “they predict only the national popular vote and not the vote within individual states.” statements he made immediately after,2Notably, the day after the 2016 election, NPR asked him about this inconsistency:

SIEGEL: Now, a question about that winning streak of yours. If I understand it, you claim predicting Al Gore’s victory in 2000 as a win since he won the popular vote. But Hillary Clinton appears to also be winning the popular vote, and you don’t claim a loss for predicting Donald Trump.

LICHTMAN: Well, because I pointed out in this election while the keys certainly favor the defeat of the party holding the White House, that you also have the Donald Trump factor. First time I’ve ever qualified a prediction an out-of-the-box, history-smashing, unqualified candidate. So you had two forces colliding, which produced a win in the Electoral College, but essentially a tie, as far as I could tell, in the popular vote. We don’t know how it’s going to come out ultimately. So, in fact, the keys came as close as you can to a contradictory election.
Here, the day after the election, Lichtman makes no mention of any modification in his system, nor a reference to the Washington Post interview that he now claims as the definitive source of his 2016 prediction. In fact, he claims he was right because it’s unknown how the popular vote will ultimately come out and because he qualified his prediction, not because he changed what was being predicted, as he claims now. and the wider context of his predictions3For one, it makes no sense for the Keys to predict the Electoral College outcome! Lichtman wrote in his 2005 book that the Keys presume voters are sophisticated, making decisions about national issues, and are based on “national concerns such as economic performance, policy initiatives, social unrest, presidential scandal, and successes and failures in foreign affairs. Thus, they predict only the popular vote and not the vote within individual states.” Only the national popular vote adequately reflects how the electorate feels about these things! all support the conclusion that he’s rewritten history (Nate Silver uses the word “lied”) to suggest he changed his system before the 2016 election to protect his so-called perfect record, despite there being no actual evidence that this change took place when he said it did. If there’s a smoking gun in all of this, it’s an October 2016 article written by Lichtman for Social Education (an academic journal where he often publishes his predictions). It states not only that “the Keys predict the popular vote,” but – as if he could not be any more clear – specifies that this means they do not predict “the state-by-state tally of Electoral College votes.” In other words, despite his claims in the years since 2016 that he had moved away from predicting popular vote winners by the time he made his September 2016 prediction, he explicitly stated he was still doing exactly that in October 2016.

A New Defense

In the aftermath of our piece’s publication, and in the lead up to the publication of The Atlantic piece, Lichtman adopted some new talking points in defense of his prediction record. Many of them have to do with the 2000 prediction, where he’s pivoted away from claiming he was right because he predicted Gore would win the popular vote (he was, and Gore did – just keep the win, Professor!) to instead focusing on his theory that Gore actually should have won the Electoral College anyway. People more qualified than us can debate Lichtman’s claims about the 2000 election (and in fairness, his study on alleged vote dilution in Florida counties with large Black populations was published in 2001, so this wasn’t an explanation he made up out of thin air) but it is notable the degree to which he has escalated these claims, releasing videos on the subject which do not mention that he historically took credit for predicting the popular vote outcome correctly. Instead, our focus here is only on what Professor Lichtman has said and done regarding his 2016 prediction. 

It bears repeating that we reached out to Lichtman while working on our original piece, only for him to cancel a scheduled interview. After that cancellation, we emailed him our questions about the inconsistencies our piece brought to light, and he did not substantively address them – not in his public response (which we published), his correspondence with us, or in any other venue, for months. However, in the last few weeks, he’s adopted a new line of defense that, much like his claims of a perfect record, appears to be flawed.

In an October 1, 2024 live stream, Lichtman acknowledged the October 2016 Social Education paper after his son and co-host, Sam Lichtman, asked him if it was “possible that you wrote that before you had made” his final prediction, to which Lichtman responds, “I did write it before,” noting that it was “in a magazine” and that there was “a month-and-a-half lag” between his writing it and its publication. 

Sam then posits that because Lichtman made the “decision to change” from predicting the popular vote to the Electoral College winner “on the fly,” he may not have had time to update his 2016 book to the “sudden change.” Lichtman agrees that the article includes sections “duped in from previous articles,” but argues that because in “that same article, I talk about who is going to govern from the White House” and never says “I am only predicting the popular vote,” it still stands as proof that he was not predicting the popular vote in 2016. 

Right off the bat, this doesn’t survive any scrutiny – if you establish the rule that the Keys predict the popular vote winner, then write explicitly that they do not predict the Electoral College results as Lichtman did in both his 2016 book and in this very paper, you can’t claim that what the Keys predict is ambiguous or could go either way. Nor can you claim it doesn’t say the Keys predict the popular vote (that is literally what it says!). And you definitely can’t claim that this paper is positive proof you changed your system.

In another video, titled “Setting My Record Straight,” released the day The Atlantic article came out (October 16, 2024), Lichtman reiterates many of these points. First, Lichtman claims that the October 2016 article “was completed before I made my final prediction in The Washington Post of September 23, 2016.” He goes on to state that the October 2016 paper is being pulled out of context because of what he “went on to say in that article, which was, despite not tallying state-by-state electoral votes, the simple integral parameters that define the Keys to the White House still predict the winners and losers of the election and that I was confident in predicting Trump would be elected in 2016.” 

The Receipts

Both of these claims are demonstrably misleading, but we’ll start with the latter. The article never mentions the Electoral College or popular vote again after the first four paragraphs explaining what the Keys do (the popular vote) and do not (the Electoral College) predict. The article certainly does not project confidence either, noting the Keys “now point very slightly to a Republican victory in 2016. However, this prediction comes with two large caveats” as he notes Trump may “vitiate that prediction” given the norm-smashing nature of his candidacy.

Lichtman has also fallen back on the fact that, in the Washington Post interview, he predicted (“based on my gut, not on my system”) that Trump would be impeached. Given the explicit caveat that this was based on his gut and not the 13 Keys, this is a point without much merit. It’s also not meaningfully distinct from many other things he wrote in the past where he clearly conflated – perhaps fairly, given how infrequently they diverge – the popular vote and Electoral College outcomes with each other, despite explicitly only predicting the outcome of the popular vote. For example:

1. In his 2008 paper, he clarified the Keys predicted only the popular vote and still wrote, “Effective governing keeps incumbent parties in office.”
2. In 2012, he wrote that “the Keys point to an Obama victory,” and added, “When the answers to five or fewer of these questions are false, the incumbent party wins,” while also noting that the “Keys to the White House is a historically-based system for predicting the result of the popular vote in American presidential elections.”
3. And, in 2000, the same election he took credit for because he successfully predicted the popular vote winner, he wrote “Democrats… will win three consecutive terms in the White House.”

In other words, Lichtman consistently discussed the popular vote and Electoral College victory as occurring hand in hand – and given that his October 2016 paper both reiterates that the Keys can only predict the popular vote (while adding they do not predict the electoral vote) and never states that he has revised them to predict the electoral vote, we contend that his claims to have somehow communicated he modified his system are semantically dishonest.

That brings us to the other argument proffered by both Lichtman and his son: that the paper was completed before the September Washington Post interview, the interview he now claims as the definitive source of his 2016 prediction. Even if this were true, it wouldn’t really matter. He never mentions the Electoral College in his Washington Post article (the article does, in fact, mention his record of correctly predicting the winner of the popular vote), but does describe what the Keys portend for 2016. Having stated for the better part of two decades that a “win” with the Keys meant a win in the popular vote, and failing to mention he ever changed this until after the 2016 election, it’s not hard to see why the Washington Post interview is not exonerating.

But this isn’t just an inadequate defense, it’s also meaningfully misleading, because the claim that the Social Education article was somehow set in stone before the September 2016 Washington Post interview is conclusively false. 

It’s true that the Washington Post interview was published on September 23, 2016, a few weeks before Lichtman’s Social Education article was published in October 2016. But a review of the alt data from the article notes that the interview itself was conducted on September 21, 2016, two days before it was published:

That alone isn’t notable. But what is notable is that Jennie Bauduy, the Senior Editor we contacted at Social Education, confirmed with us via email that Lichtman’s article was submitted on September 22, 2016. That’s the day after the September 21 Washington Post interview in which Lichtman claims he just predicted Trump to win.

Bauduy also said that Lichtman further “reviewed page proofs and made final edits” on October 3, 2016. This means that Lichtman had not just one, but at least two opportunities to review his own paper and adjust or amend its language on the popular vote. Even if the nature of this review process did not afford him the opportunity to make substantial changes to the article itself, Lichtman (never one to shy away from press) could have at least noted somewhere that the paper’s language about the popular vote no longer reflects the true nature of the Keys. In either scenario, this clearly contradicts claims that he did not have adequate time to either edit the paper or bring attention to its inaccuracy.

We reached out to Lichtman for comment on this contradiction between the claims made in his videos and the true sequence of events. Instead of responding to our questions directly, he asked us how we found this information, asked for the specific credentials of the senior editor at Social Education, and suggested we have “no evidentiary basis” for our past work. Despite repeated inquiries, he did not confirm or deny the sequence of events, merely suggesting that we misunderstood the editorial process, that his paper was “completed” before it was submitted and edited, and that any reviews he would have been able to make post-submission were “non substantive.” 

Given Lichtman’s suggestion that we misunderstood the editorial process, we reached out to Bauduy again to inquire whether she wanted to further clarify her statements. After following up with Bauduy, and having heard nothing for a week, Lichtman informed us that Bauduy had been passing our latest inquiries to her on to him. We reached out to Bauduy again to note that Lichtman was disputing the notion that he would have been able to substantively change the article according to the timeline she provided us with. In her response, she deferred to Lichtman’s “records and statements regarding his own article.” She did not provide any clarification regarding the timeline, his ability to edit the article once submitted, or the dates she originally gave us. In a new email sent later that day, Lichtman asserted in his defense that Bauduy “deferred to me on my recollections as the best available information.” Again, the dates of the article’s submission and final review and edit were never affirmed or denied by Lichtman, nor denied by Bauduy, who had originally supplied them to us.

Bauduy relaying our unanswered requests for comment to Lichtman and subsequent deferral to his recollection of events is conspicuous, but does not affect her initial comment. The words “submitted,” “reviewed,” and “made edits” are unequivocal enough to cast doubt on Lichtman’s claim that he lacked the ability to correct or update the paper between its submission and publication. And – semantics aside – Lichtman never adequately addressed the discrepancy at the heart of this: that the September 21 Washington Post interview took place before the paper was submitted, and that he reviewed and edited the paper on October 3, 2016, well after the interview.

When asked about his statement that there was a “month-and-a-half” lag that prevented him from updating the article Lichtman told us that this was “an off-the-cuff statement,” and “not a precise timetable.” Though we appreciate this clarification, it is also representative of the evasive posture Lichtman has taken with regards to our inquiries in the past, and it took repeated email exchanges to get him to even acknowledge this misstatement in the first place – a misstatement he has not publicly acknowledged or corrected to his large social media following.

That leaves us with this sequence of events:

And that’s the crux of it: Lichtman had multiple chances to clarify he was changing what the Keys predicted, even if he changed it “on the fly” before or during the Washington Post interview he now points to as the definitive source of his 2016 prediction. The article was submitted the day after his Washington Post interview and he reviewed and edited it again a little under two weeks later, yet never noted in the paper that he had made a significant modification to the Keys. By our estimation, this means that one of two things happened:

1. In 2016, Lichtman made the one and only modification he has ever made to the Keys system, but somehow neglected to mention it in a paper that he submitted, edited, and reviewed after the time he now claims to have made this change, and that this important modification was never mentioned in his Washington Post interview or in any other source before the election occurred.4We would submit that, even if this is true, it completely fails the standards of a purportedly academic system and we would encourage a system that is dependent on this complete lack of transparency to receive far higher scrutiny than it currently does. 
2. Lichtman did not in fact modify what his system predicted until after the results of the 2016 election were known, dishonestly claiming he predicted the outcome correctly ever since. This is consistent with our original reporting.

Neither are particularly flattering, and either way we’re now left with an explanation from Lichtman that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. The timeline, the facts, and the paper all speak for themselves, and the fact that Lichtman is only just now revealing a story to address the October 2016 paper that claims it was completed in advance of the modification and without opportunity for correction – a claim that’s now been proven false – is telling. 

Rather than owning up to these manifest inconsistencies, Lichtman has once again attempted to rewrite the history of his 2016 prediction with the aim of preserving an otherwise imperfect record. In our original reporting, we lamented that a “professor of history should know better.” Months later, after debunking yet another one of his claims, we’d amend that to add: “and know that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”