A famed prognosticator who wrongly predicted a Kamala Harris victory on Tuesday publicly ate some crow on Wednesday.
American University historian Allan Lichtman, famed for a model that has correctly predicted the popular vote in almost all recent presidential elections, took to social media to admit his mistake and take a swipe at a fellow prognosticator.
“Unlike Nate Silver, who will try to squirm out of why he didn’t see the election coming, I admit that I was wrong,” Mr. Lichtman wrote on X.
He added that he “will assess the election and the keys,” in an upcoming YouTube show.
Mr. Lichtman has predicted the winner of the presidential popular vote every November since 1984, with one ironic exception before now — his unconventional pick for Donald Trump to win in 2016.
Unlike Mr. Silver, whose continuously updated model is based on state-level polls, Mr. Lichtman bases his conclusion on 13 “big-picture” questions.
Those questions “tap into the strength and performance of the White House party” on matters such as the state of the economy, candidate charisma, the presence or absence of social unrest, the involvement of third parties and more.
On the 13 questions, Mr. Lichtman gave Ms. Harris an 8-5 advantage, though his analysis was admittedly subjective and struck some Republicans as dubious.
For example, he said there had been no “bipartisan recognition” of scandals tied to President Biden, that there have only been “sporadic protests,” and that the short-term and long-term economic performance of Mr. Biden has been good.
The other limit on Mr. Lichtman’s model is that it predicts the winner of the popular vote, which needn’t necessarily be the winner of the presidency and twice in the past quarter-century, it has not been.
Ironically, as pointed out by Lars Emerson and Michael Lovito in the Postrider, those two occasions put Mr. Lichtman on the opposite side.
In 2000, he correctly predicted that Al Gore would defeat George W. Bush by that metric. But in the only metric that counts — the Electoral College and the outcome of the individual state elections — Mr. Bush was the winner.
And his famous 2016 prediction that Mr. Trump would win, a prediction very few people made, was actually his one mistake. Mr. Trump lost the national popular vote to Hillary Clinton, though he won in the Electoral College.
• Victor Morton can be reached at vmorton@washingtontimes.com.