WASHINGTON — The American University professor who has correctly predicted every election since 1984 is hedging his bets on 2016.
Allan Lichtman, a history professor at AU, told WTOP on Monday that presidential elections, for all the pundit-fueled dissection of polls, momentum and narrative, are “primarily referenda on the performance of the party holding the White House.”
He developed his 13-point system in 1981 for predicting the popular vote based on the results and analysis of presidential elections from 1860 to 1980. He started making his predictions in 1984.
The system involves asking and answering a series of true-or-false questions:
- Party Mandate: After the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives than after the previous midterm elections.
- Contest: There is no serious contest for the incumbent party nomination.
- Incumbency: The incumbent party candidate is the sitting president.
- Third party: There is no significant third party or independent campaign.
- Short-term economy: The economy is not in recession during the election campaign.
- Long-term economy: Real per capita economic growth during the term equals or exceeds mean growth during the previous two terms.
- Policy change: The incumbent administration effects major changes in national policy.
- Social unrest: There is no sustained social unrest during the term.
- Scandal: The incumbent administration is untainted by major scandal.
- Foreign/military failure: The incumbent administration suffers no major failure in foreign or military affairs.
- Foreign/military success: The incumbent administration achieves a major success in foreign or military affairs.
- Incumbent charisma: The incumbent party candidate is charismatic or a national hero.
- Challenger charisma: The challenging party candidate is not charismatic or a national hero.
Under Lichtman’s model, Democrat Hillary Clinton has six strikes against her. And that’s enough to spell doom for the incumbent party, Lichtman said.
The Democrats performed terribly in the 2014 midterm elections. Clinton is of the incumbent party but isn’t the incumbent candidate. Gary Johnson is “running way ahead of what the Libertarian Party has ever done.” There’s no policy change for the Democrats to run on, like the Affordable Care Act. Likewise, there’s no “big, smashing, foreign policy success in the second term, like getting rid of bin Laden in the first term.” And, for whatever her talents, Clinton isn’t “a once-in-a-generation, charismatic candidate” in the mold of Presidents Barack Obama, John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan, he said.
Done deal, right? Not quite, Lichtman said.
“My prediction is based on history,” he said. “We have in Donald Trump a history-smashing candidate. … We have the irresistible force of history against the immovable force of Donald Trump.”
The Republican candidate stands alone among modern candidates due to his lack of previous political experience. And Trump is the first candidate in U.S. history “to invite a foreign power … to meddle in our elections,” Lichtman said.
He also cited statements by the Trump campaign that have insulted women, members of minority groups and the disabled. “Any one of a dozen things that Donald Trump has said would have driven any other candidate out of the race” by now.
“We’ve never seen anything like this,” Lichtman said.
And for the first time in 30 years, he’s putting “a qualifier” on his prediction.
