Allan Lichtman,  professor of American history at American University in Washington DC, has been widely regarded as one of the most accurate predictors of presidential election outcomes. 

In 1984, Lichtman co-created a prediction system alongside Soviet geophysicist Vladamir Keilis Borok that could accurately predict the outcome of presidential elections based on historical data. The criteria is based on “13 keys,” or 13 different ways to win the White House. 

If the candidate of the incumbent party has at least 8 of these keys to be considered true, they win, but if they are majority false, the opposing party wins. These include the incumbent party gaining seats, having no primary contest, the incumbent president seeking reelection, no major third party candidate, the economy not being in a recession, real per capita economic growth during the term equals or exceeding mean growth during the previous two terms, the incumbent makes a major policy change, there is no social unrest, there is no major scandal, there is no foreign/military failure, there is a foreign/military success, the incumbent party candidate is charismatic, and the opposing party candidate is not charismatic.

For example, these are the keys that Barack Obama got when he ran in 2008, with blue being a key that favored Obama and red being a key that favored McCain:

Lichtman has made these predictions in every presidential election since 1984 and has gotten each one correct. However, Lichtman said that Gore would win in 2000, and therefore, many people claim that he hasn’t had all his predictions correct. But he still contends that the 2000 election was stolen and that the wrong person was inaugurated president. Lichtman was even a part of the independent investigation surrounding whether voters were disenfranchised in Florida. Most people shrugged this off; after all, the election was so close and still contentious even today that many people still regarded Lichtman as a “Nostradamus.” 

Lichtman gained national attention when he appeared on Fox News in September of 2016, saying that Trump would win. Many pundits found his claim preposterous, but they soon were proven wrong. This launched Lichtman into the spotlight, earning him a New York Times interview in 2020 to predict the Biden versus Trump election, where he correctly predicted that Joe Biden would win.

However, this year was a different story. Following the infamous June 2024 Presidential debate, Lichtman took to the media to urge the Democrats not to replace Biden because it would endanger his keys. Supposedly, the Biden Campaign and former chief of staff Ron Klain were aware of the keys system and were using it as an argument to stay in the race. This rumor is unconfirmed, however. 

With Biden dropping out of the race, the incumbency key was lost. Lichtman feared the loss of another key, the primary key, and that the Democrats would hold a “mini primary” as proposed by former House Democratic whip Jim Clyburn. Fortunately, the Democrats united behind Harris as the nominee and saved this key. With Harris as the nominee, Allan made the following prediction after the convention:

Lichtman took to the media to announce his prediction of a Harris victory. Each time he came on he would be asked if he stood by his prediction, to which he always said yes. On the day before the election, Allan reiterated his prediction, claiming “the keys will prevail.”.

Lichtman live streamed his reaction to the election, confident in his system, but as the results came in, he slowly realized that he would be wrong. In the election postmortem, Lichtman explained that there were many unprecedented factors in this election that caused it to be false, such as widespread misinformation, the late and unexpected ousting of Biden, and misogyny. 

Though some onlookers believed the model to still be right, Lichtman merely interpreted them wrongly. Jokingly dubbed “the great key schism,” some online have argued that some keys actually should have been given to Trump but were instead given to Harris. One example is the economy key as although it wasn’t true, many people believed the U.S. was in a recession, which may have affected the keys involving the economy. 

Others have argued that Lichtman is biased against Republicans, given that he is a Democrat, and he even unsuccessfully ran in the Democratic primary for Maryland Senate in 2006. Some say this has led him to falsely say that Trump doesn’t get the charisma because Luchtman himself doesn’t find him charismatic, yet Trump has broad support amongst independents according to exit polls.

Whatever the reason for the keys’ failure, Professor Lichtman has said that he will reevaluate the keys in order to figure out if he was wrong in interpreting the keys or if the model is broken altogether.