WASHINGTON – Allan Lichtman, an American University professor who has accurately predicted the winner of nearly every U.S. presidential election since 1984, is expected to announce who he believes will take the White House in November within a week.
Lichtman has been relying on his “13 Keys to the White House” to determine the winners of these races for decades. He will release his final prediction within a week of Labor Day — “give or take a day or two” — Lichtman said in a video posted to his YouTube channel.
FOX 5 has spoken with Lichtman multiple times throughout the tumultuous election season.
After President Joe Biden dropped out of the race in July and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, Lichtman had strong words for Democrats amid the shake-up, telling the party to “get smart and unite.”
Since then, Lichtman says they have done just that, effectively saving the “party contest key.”
“The Democrats finally grew a spine and got smart after publicly trashing their incumbent president,” he told FOX 5. “They united behind Harris and therefore avoided losing the party contest key.”
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At the beginning of August, Lichtman said a lot would have to go wrong for the Democrats to lose the White House.
According to his system, the Democratic party needs to lose six keys for him to predict their loss. At the time, he said they were down three — Party Mandate, Incumbency and Incumbent Charisma.
“Three more keys would have to fall to predict their defeat,” Lichtman said. “And only two keys right now look really shaky.”
Those keys are foreign policy and social unrest.
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This was prior to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago where Harris formally accepted the party’s nomination. It was a high-energy convention where Democrats showed resounding support for the vice president. It led to a slight bump for Harris in the national polls, where she still holds a slim margin over former President Donald Trump.
Even though the event solidified Harris’ party support, Lichtman says foreign policy and social unrest could still play a big role with two wars raging in Gaza and Ukraine. Lichtman says he is taking this into account and will go further into detail when he releases his final decision.
“Wars are always unpredictable,” Lichtman said. “There are some unpredictable factors out there but I will explain to you just how I’ve made adjustments for the fluidity of what’s going on abroad.”
As for Trump and the Republican Party, Lichtman took a swing at statistician Nate Silver, who recently came out saying that there is a 52.4% probability that Trump will win the election.
“Just a few days ago, he said the probability is that Kamala Harris is going to win the election. Now, just a few days later he switched,” Lichtman said. “That’s not a real probability. That’s a made-up probability.”
In what may also be a show of hand, Lichtman said he is taking Trump’s incident at Arlington Cemetery last week into account.
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The Trump campaign says the former president was invited to the cemetery to honor the lives of military members killed during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan three years ago.
Despite being warned not to take photographs or video during a wreath-laying ceremony, Trump staffers did so and later posted the footage on social media in “flagrant violation” of the law, officials said.
“The other thing that’s on my mind is the incident at Arlington Cemetery,” Lichtman said. “Trump was warned that it was illegal to use the graves of our departed heroes for political purposes. Not just inappropriate but flatly against federal law.”
Lichtman says with military members and families being a key sector of the GOP voter base, incidents like this can have a negative impact for Trump.
