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By Marni Rose McFall
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Presidential historian Allan Lichtman's "Keys to the White House" model has long been hailed as a reliable predictor of U.S. election outcomes.
Developed in 1981, the model uses 13 true/false questions, known as "keys," to gauge the strength of the incumbent party's position. When six or more keys are false, the model predicts a loss for the incumbent. Despite its track record—it has correctly predicted nine of the last 10 elections—the model has come under scrutiny, with some critics calling it "superficial" and "prone to bias."
The model has come under a particularly harsh spotlight amid President Joe Biden's decision to not seek re-election in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris. Lichtman called the pressure on Biden from Democrats to drop out of the race was a "foolish, self-destructive escapade," and that the president had enough "keys" to win.
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Speaking to Newsweek for this article, Lichtman said: "The Keys became the hottest model in forecasting."
"Any successful forecasting model, especially one that challenges the approach taken by pundits and pollsters, will attract critics."
And attract them it has.
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What Critics Say About The 13 Keys
Lars Emerson and Michael Lovito are two reporters and alumni of American University, where Lichtman teaches, who earlier this year (saying that they cared about their "alma mater's reputation") wrote a detailed critique of the model for The Postrider and said Lichtman was "dishonest" when he said he correctly predicted the outcome of the 2016 election.
Lichtman's model was designed to correctly predict the winner of the popular vote, which it did, up until 2016 when former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton won the popular vote but Donald Trump won the Electoral College.
Despite that, Lichtman is one of the few people credited with predicting Trump's win. He won the Stekler Award for Courage in Predictions and was invited to present the model at the American Political Science Association Convention. Political scientist Gerald M. Pomper said in a 2016 book about that year's election that Lichtman continued "his perfect record of election predictions, using simpler evaluations of the historical setting."
Emerson and Lovito argued that Lichtman rewrote "history to obfuscate that his model only predicted the popular vote, which Trump lost."
"This defamatory claim does not withstand scrutiny," Lichtman told Newsweek. He cited a September 2016 Washington Post interview where he said, "Based on the 13 keys, it would predict a Donald Trump victory [...] But I would say, more to the point, they point to a generic Republican victory."
"Also, at the same time, I predicted that Trump would be impeached after his election--, which made no sense if I were talking about the popular vote," he added to Newsweek.
Since 2016, Lichtman has taken to predicting the election winner, not who won the popular vote.
"By claiming he's never been wrong, he's done his model a disservice," Emerson and Lovito said in an email to Newsweek. "It's totally fine to have been wrong in 2016, almost everyone was, that requires some self-reflection and transparency about what could be done better."
In response, Lichtman told Newsweek that Emerson and Lovito "have sought to make a name for themselves by gratuitously attacking me and the Keys model with misleading, ad hominem claims."
Emerson disagreed with Lichtman's assessment of their Postrider article and told Newsweek "we fully stand by all of our reporting and obviously do not feel we've engaged in any kind of defamation." Lichtman's full response to Emerson and Lovito's article can be read here.
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"One of the most consistent critiques of the 13 Keys is that they're not based on hard data," Emerson and Lovito told Newsweek.
Lichtman's model is "prone to bias and subjectivity," the two reporters said.
James E. Campbell, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Buffalo, told Newsweek in an email: "Many of the keys or indicators are highly subjective. Whether there has been social unrest or a major scandal or whether either candidate is or is not charismatic, for instance, are judged 'in eye of the beholder'."
In response to criticisms about subjectivity, Lichtman told Newsweek: "The keys in question are judgmental, not subjective; historians make judgments about human behavior all the time. These judgments are tightly constrained by the specific definition of each key and the record of how each key has been rated since 1860. For example, the charisma key is satisfied only by the once-in-a-generation candidate with extraordinarily broad appeal that transcends partisan lines."
Lichtman cited Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan as examples of candidates who fitted that description. "In the popular vote, these two candidates won six elections by landslide or near landslide margins."
He argued that Trump, who lost the popular vote twice, shouldn't secure the charisma key as "he appeals only to a narrow base, with his approval ratings since 2015 hovering in the low 40 percent range."
The Nate Silver Bet
Writing in The New York Times in 2011, election forecaster Nate Silver dubbed Lichtman's model "superficial" and said, "it's less that he has discovered the right set of keys than that he's a locksmith and can keep minting new keys until he happens to open all 38 doors."
Fast-forward to July. The day before Biden said he wasn't seeking re-election, Silver—who founded election modeling site FiveThirtyEight—got into a war of words with Lichtman on X, formerly Twitter.
Lichtman posted a quote from Biden confidant Ron Klain: "He's staying in. Here's to the 13 Keys which don't turn on fickle polling." (Lichtman has previously told Newsweek that Biden is a fan of the model.)
Silver then reposted Lichtman's post, adding his own thoughts: "None of the 13 keys is that the president is unable to reliably complete a sentence, but that seems salient to diagnosing his chances for reelection."
Silver was likely referring to Biden's disastrous debate performance on June 27, which caused widespread panic among Democrats.
Lichtman replied that Silver had "no fundamental basis in history and elections" and called him "a compiler of polls, a clerk."
"If we bounced presidents based on perceived physical ailments we would have bounced FDR, Reagan, and JFK," the historian added.
"Allan you wanna bet?" Silver shot back. "Let's say 250k at even odds?"
Lichtman did not respond publicly. The next day, Biden bounced.
In an email to Newsweek, Lichtman said that Silver was "predictably a critic of the Keys. However, his poll-driven analyses led to errors in his most recent critical predictions. He predicted that Hillary Clinton was overwhelmingly likely to win the election in 2016 and much greater Republican gains in the 2022 midterms than emerged."
Newsweek has emailed Silver for comment.
Lichtman has long argued that traditional polling methods often fail to capture the underlying dynamics that determine election results and advises against paying too much attention to polls, especially in volatile election years.
Emerson and Lovito suggested to Newsweek though that the "Keys" model was no better than polling.
"If you took whoever led in the polls from every election from 1984 to 2020 and predicted they would win, you would have predicted 9/10 elections correctly, which is the exact same record Lichtman can claim," they said.
"It at least indicates that his 9/10 record is a little less unique when placed in context," Emerson added in a follow-up email with Newsweek.
Emerson continued: "Perhaps more pointedly, it challenges his rejection of the polls. If polls have been at least as accurate as his more subjective model, then it raises questions about the reliability of his approach and whether his dismissive stance toward polls is justified."
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Lichtman disagrees. "Of course, anyone can usually cherry-pick a poll result after the fact and claim that it accurately forecasted a known election result," he told Newsweek. "However, the Keys correctly predicted election outcomes in defiance of the polls and before if ever they aligned with winners."
Lichtman said that he correctly predicted President Ronald Reagan's 1984 re-election in 1982 "when his popularity was underwater," victory in 1988 for then-Vice President George H.W. Bush when he was "down 17 points" that year, and stuck with his 2012 call for President Barack Obama "when the polls shifted sharply against him" following the first debate against former Massachusetts Gov.
"I maintained my call for Trump in 2016 despite consistently contrary polls," Lichtman said.
The 'North Star' Of Prediction Models
Lichtman has taught at American University since 1973, appeared as an election commentator on numerous television news networks and has been published in peer-reviewed periodicals such as the International Journal of Forecasting and the Harvard Data Science Review.
"The Keys stand alone among all forecasting models with a 40-year track record of successful presidential predictions," he told Newsweek. "The Keys are the North Star of prediction models. They stand unchanged despite the unique events of individual campaigns."
"The North Star of prediction models" is not what political scientist Julia Azari would call it. In fact, she told Newsweek that it was wrong to call "The Keys to the White House" a model at all.
"Like most political scientists, I find all the fuss around Lichtman's 'model' silly at best," said Azari, who is a professor at Marquette University in Wisconsin. "The 13 keys are at their most useful as starting points for questions: what makes for a damaging, divisive primary contest? What counts as a policy failure? What is charisma? These are interesting and important questions! But it is not in any real sense a 'model'."
Azari argues that in modelling elections in a useful way, a model should look at parsimony, specificity and a theory of elections. Azari added that, "We don't want a model to be too adaptable, because then we're just fitting out description to changing conditions, without actually identifying which factors have changed and how."
Azari said that "I wish journalists would ask Dr. Lichtman for his insights about how elections actually work, with the benefit of his historical perspective, instead of dwelling on this 'model'."
"The notion that I could adjust the Keys to fit the outcomes of elections is unavailing," said Lichtman. "I issued all my predictions when the election outcome was unknown and often contradicted the pollsters and pundits."
"The point of the Keys is to forecast elections through simple, integral parameters that reflect the dynamics of how presidential elections work as votes up or down on the performance and strength of the party holding the White House," Lichtman told Newsweek, adding that "the Keys have generated far more acclaim than criticism."
Lichtman added that "I do not see any future changes in the 13 Keys. It is possible that unprecedented events could change the patterns of history that have held for 160 years, but that cannot be known in advance.
"But I am always open to new possibilities and not so arrogant to assume that the Keys will hold forever."
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Update, 08/15/24/, 12:13 p.m. ET: This article was updated with additional comments from Allan Lichtman.
Update, 08/16/24, 03:45 a.m. ET: This article was updated with additional comment from Lars Emerson.
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