Allan Lichtman: The Science of Political Prediction

0:00From October 7th to 9th in San Francisco, the Masters of Scale Summit returns. It's where the boldest minds in business, tech, and beyond gather to build the future. And we want you to join us. Hear from the CEO of the New York Times, scientists using cutting-edge technology to find cures, the leader of crypto powerhouse Coinbase, a retired four-star general, and many, many more. They're all on the same stage, and it's not just another conference. It is the gathering for remarkable people. Apply to attend at mastersofscale.com slash remarkable. That's mastersofscale.com slash remarkable.

0:49I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is the Remarkable People podcast. We're on a mission to make you remarkable. Today, we have a distinguished guest. His name is Alan Lickman. Allen is an acclaimed American historian who has taught at American University in Washington, D.C. since 1973. Allen is renowned for creating the keys to the White House model with Soviet seismologist Vladimir Kyles Borok in 1981. This model uses 13 true-false criteria to predict whether the presidential candidate of the incumbent party will win or lose. Alan has successfully predicted the outcome in approximately 90 % of the presidential election since 1984.

1:39If you've been following the Biden is too old and should step aside hysteria, you may have seen Alan expressing quite the opposite opinion on various talk shows. This episode provides insight into who and what you should listen to as everybody loses their minds. Join us as we explore Alan's groundbreaking work, his perspectives on the political landscape, and his remarkable journey as a historian and political analyst. I'm Guy Kawasaki, this is Remarkable People, and now here's a remarkable Alan Lickman. Please walk me through how working with a Russian seismologist, an earthquake predictor, leads to you becoming this great.

2:26Election predictor. Very good. So the keys to the White House are the alternative to the conventional wisdom of the polls and the pundits that lead us down the primrose path of error, as we saw, for example, in 2016. The keys tap into the structure of how elections really work by gauging the strength and performance of the White House party. And I'd love to tell you I came across the Keys by ruining my eyes in the archives of deep conflation. But if I were to tell you that, to quote the late not-so-great Ritchie Nixon, that would be wrong. I came across the Keys kind of serendipitously when I was a visiting distinguished scholar at CalTago in Southern California, and there I met the world's leading authority in earthquake prediction, the Legia Kylas Bora.

3:21And it was his idea that we should collaborate. And being brilliant and foresightful, of course, I said, whoa, you know, earthquakes may be a big deal here in Southern California. I have to go back to Washington, D.C., where I teach at American University, and no one cares about earthquakes there. He said, oh, no, I already solved earthquakes. Right. He said, get this. In 1963, he was a member of the Soviet scientific delegation that came to Washington and negotiated the most important treaty in the history of the world. It's the treaty while we're still here, the nuclear test ban treaty that stopped us from poisoning our atmosphere, our oceans, and our soil.

4:05And he said in Washington, he fell in love with politics and always wanted to use his methods of earthquake prediction to predict. But he said, look, we live in a Soviet Union. Forget it. Elections, its supreme leader are off with your head. But you, he said to me, are an expert in the presidency and you exist. So we became the odd couple of political research. And indeed, we reconceptualized elections in earthquake terms. Now, remember, this is 1981, not as Carter versus Reagan, liberal versus conservative, Republican versus Democrat, but at stability, the White House pardon stays in power, earthquake, the White House pardon is turned out of power.

4:55And with that in mind, we looked at every American presidential election, from the hoarse and buggy days of politics, the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1908. And we used the methods of earthquake prediction, a pattern recognition, to see what patterns are associated with stability and earthquake, guided by my insight that elections are basically votes up or down on the strength and performance of the White House party. And we found the best separation between stability and earthquake with 13 key questions of 13 keys to the White House, which are true-false statements about the strength and performance of the White House party, where an answer of truth always favors stability.

5:45And we came up with a simple decision. You don't even have to take your shoes off. To use the system, if six keys are false, you have earthquake. If fewer than six are false, you have to be.

6:05Before we continue with this interview, I thought I would give you more information about these 13 keys. Number one, 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. Number two, no primary contest. There is no serious contest for the incumbent party nomination. Number three, incumbent seeking re-election. The incumbent party candidate is the sitting president. Number four, no third party. There is no significant third party or independent campaign. Five, strong short-term economy. The economy is not in recession during the election campaign.

6:526. Strong long-term economy. Real per capita economic growth during the term equals or exceeds mean growth during the previous two terms. 7. Major policy change. The incumbent administration affects major changes in national policy. 8. No social unrest. There is no sustained social unrest during the term. Number nine, no scandal. The incumbent administration is untainted by major scandal. Number ten, no foreign slash military failure. The incumbent administration suffers no major failure in foreign or military affairs. Number eleven, major foreign slash military success. The incumbent administration achieves a major success in foreign or military affairs.

7:44Number 12, charismatic incumbent. The incumbent party candidate is charismatic or a national hero. Number 13, uncharismatic challenger. The challenging party candidate is not charismatic or a national hero. These are the 13 factors in what Alan Lickman calls the keys to the White House. Now let's continue with the interview.

8:15So then, in this world, what function do polls serve? They serve to mislead us. A couple of things about polls. First of all, they're snapshots. They're not predictors. They're abused as predictors. But the media's got to cover elections every single day. And the easiest thing, now that we have multiple polls a day, is to write a story about the polls. You don't have to take your shoes off to do that. But look at how often the snapshot polls give you inaccurate prediction. Of course, they led us to falsely predict, not us, because I correctly predicted Donald Trump in 2016, which you'd imagine had not made me very popular in 90 % plus Democratic Washington, D.C., where I teach at American university.

9:09But the polls, of course, led all the conventional forecasters down the path of error. Or look at 1988. In the late spring of 1988, George H.W. Bush trailed Mike Dukakis, the Democrat, by 17 points. Again, all the pundits wrote off Bush. And I wrote at the time that based on the keys, Bush is going to win because he is running on the record of the Reagan administration. Peace, prosperity, domestic tranquility. The other thing about the polls is that the error is vastly greater than they would have you believe. You've heard, right, the error margins plus and minus 3 % about. That's pure statistical error.

9:55That's the error you would get if you had a huge jar of green and red balls and you took a sample and you estimated the percentage of red and green balls in the jar. But human beings are not red and green ball. Most people don't respond to polls. They may lie. They may have not focused on the election, and they may change their mind. Plus, no one's voted yet. So the pollsters have to guess who the likely voters are. This introduces significant error above and beyond plus and minus three, and it's not random. It's unidirectional. In 2016, the polls underestimated Republican votings. And so like generals fighting the last war, they overcorrected.

10:39And based on the midterms of 2022, the off-year elections of 2023, and the special elections of 2024, the polls are significantly underestimating Democratic voting strength. Best example is the most highly publicized special election for the New York congressional seat previously held by the disgraced and booted out George Santos. The polls taken just a couple of days before the election had it as a dead eight. Democrat ahead Biden significant one point. Well, the Democrat won my eight points outperforming the polls by... Well, when people tell me about polls, I ask myself, if my iPhone rang and I saw number one, 877-666-5432.

11:31And I would look at that number and say, I don't know who the hell that is, 877 or 888 or 800. That's not a good number to answer. Now, let's say I was stupid enough to actually answer that. And then somebody comes on and says, I'm from Seneca College or something, I'm conducting a political poll. I would hang up right there. So what kind of people are picking up a phone call from a number they don't recognize, and then they hear somebody saying, I'm calling for the American Polling Institute, and then actually spend time. I mean, how can that be statistically and scientifically relevant? It's not.

12:11Most people don't respond to polls, only a very small percentage. And while they try to make it representative, it can't be, because it's biased by response. Well, then, I mean, how do they get anybody to respond is my question, but I mean, we don't need to go down that. And now we're betting the future of the country on this completely flawed method? What am I missing, Alan? You're missing the fact that, look, all of these critics who are trying to balance Joe Biden from the Democratic nomination to a significant extent based on phony polls have zero, zero track record to predicting elections.

13:00and yet they claim they know what the Democrats ought to do to win the election. And why are they dependent on polls? Because they have no scientific system, unlike the keys to the White House. So they're forced to turn to the polls. And yes, at the time, you know, that they were starting, Democrats commit Harry Carey, slit their own throats by trashing their incumbent president, and their duly elected nominee, not the political operators and the daughters and the congressmen and the senators nominated Joe Biden. It's the Democratic voters, 87 % of them. So because they have no method for predicting elections, the only thing they have is the polls.

13:45And guess what? Because they're snapshots, they've shifted. The most recent polls from Ipsos and Washington Post ABC showed Donald Trump and Joe Biden well after the debate in a dead heat. There were some new swing state polls, which show swing states moving towards Biden. A recent poll showed Biden ahead in Wisconsin and Michigan and in striking distance in Arizona. Plus, of course, different polls view different answers. So you could pick any poll you want to prove anything that you believe. Sounds a little bit like the Vietnam War or the Bible, but yeah, I digress. So, yes, go. With your 13 keys, can't someone make the case that because of the sole binary, it's true or false, but aren't they also subjective?

14:45Yes. When I first developed the keys, the professional forecasting profession blasted me. I've committed the ultimate sin of forecasting, the sin of subjectivity. And I had a couple of answers. One, the after-human beings are not riding green balls, and you have to make judgments. It's not subjectivity. it's judgments, and historians make judgments all the time. Two, it's not random judgments. When you read my book, Predicting the Next President, 2024, which is the eighth edition of the book, you'll see every key, including the so-called subjective ones, is carefully defined. Plus, I have answered each question from 1860 to the present, so the next answer has to be consistent.

15:40Well, it took about 15 to 20 years, and the professional forecasting community totally changed their minds about the keys. They realized these big, fancy mathematical models that tried to eliminate judgments didn't work, and that the best forecasting models were like the keys, which had some judgmental keys and some cut-and-dried keys like measurements of economic growth or wins and losses in midterm elections. And all of a sudden, the keys were the hottest thing in professional forecasting. I twice keynoted the International Forecasting Summit. I publish in the Journal of Applied Forecasting, in the scholarly International Journal of Forecasting.

16:24The keys were presented by the American Political Science Association as a classic model of forecasting. I won the Steckler Award for courage in forecasting. The dean of American political science, Gerald Popper, called the Keys the most successful prediction model of our time, the only one that was right about 2016 and right going all the way back to the 1980s. Despite all of this, I get a lot of unformed commentary about the alleged subjectivity of the keys. So, when I see these talking heads on CNN or MSNBC, I don't watch Fox, so I'm predisposed towards one kind of talking head. But aren't these people who are opining basically just hacks who were in the political system somehow and they can't get a real job now, so they're just paid to, like, spout off?

17:21Yeah, I don't want to disparage my buddies, the pundits, but I have suggested, no one's listened, of course, that for the entire election season, we should take all the pundits and the pollsters and send them to a very nice vacation on a far-off Pacific island. Because you're right, they have no scientific basis to pundits, and you talk about that, for their opinions. They're just talking about off the top of their ads. Remember, they all thought Hillary Clinton would win in 2016. And by the way, Joe Biden's debate, based on, if you want to talk about the only data core we have, a CNN poll, was not the worst Democratic performance.

18:0333 % thought Biden won in a sample that was skewed Republican. But to listen to the media, you would think nobody thought Biden won. Much worse debate was Obama versus Romney. The first debate, early 20 % thought Obama won. The polls swung 12 points. Romney went from down eight to up four. And again, all the pundits were writing off Obama. Remember that? And he's going to win. And Obama won an electoral college landslide with 332 electoral college votes. So you turn on the TV and you see some heretofore unknown congressman from New Hampshire that is calling for Biden to step aside and, you know, based on his knowledge of neurology or statistics and like what goes through your brain?

18:54How do you even react to something like this random congressman calling for the president of the United States to give it up? doubly appalled. I have summarized American politics in one sentence. Republicans have no principles. Democrats have no spy. Republicans united behind a convicted fellow or civilly convicted sexual assaulter, someone who has promised to govern like an authoritarian, like his buddy Orban in Hungary. And on the other hand, the first side of adversity, The Spinalist Democrats are ready to trash their president trying to bounce the newly elected nominee from the ticket. And they're doing it all out in public.

19:38I've never seen and I've studied elections from the founding to the present. A party so willing to slit its own throat right out there in public. Plus, they have no basis for their opinion. They have no scientific way of knowing who's going to win and who's going to lose, yet they claim they know what Democrats should do to be electable. You know, Democrats for a long time have said, we're going to nominate really electable candidates, experienced, knowledgeable candidates with great records, like former Vice President Walter Mondale in 1984, the great Massachusetts governor Mike Dukakis in 1988.

20:22the awesome Senator John Kerry in 2004, the former First Lady, U.S. Senator, Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton in 2016. And we know what happened. All lost. That's how much Democrats know about who's electable. Are you saying the Republicans know more about who's electable? No, I'm saying none of the politicians know who's electable and who isn't. But what I am saying is, no matter what kind of threat Donald Trump poses to our freedoms and our democracy, the Republicans who have no principles will just stick to him. Whereas the Democrats who have no spine run for the hills publicly at the first sign of adversity.

21:10Pick your poison. Well, what if somebody says to you that this election is unlike any other election in the history of our country? It's such a fractured country and we have social media exaggerating things and making up lies and we have Russians influencing our election. So we got to throw your 13 keys out of the window because that was then and this is now. Every four years, some critic comes to me and says, Lickman, you've got to change your keys. We have an African-American running. Never had that before. Nation's not ready to elect an African-American. We have a woman running. We've never had that before.

21:50We have social media. We've never had that before. We have a fractured country. Never had that focus we have. We were vastly more fractured in the 1850s? Believe all that, two answers. One, you cannot change a model on the fly. That is a recipe for error. Two, the keys are very robust. Remember, in development, they go all the way back to 1860, when women couldn't vote, right? When most African Americans were enslaved, when my ancestors from Eastern Europe, Latinos, Asians hadn't even arrived here yet. We had an agricultural economy, no coal, no affordables, no jet planes. People almost never saw their candidates.

22:36So these have survived to vastly greater change, greater changes in our society, our economy, our politics, our communications than other critics have suggested. Now, let me make one more mistake. I'm not so arrogant as to say that the patterns of history can never change. I'm not psychic Gene Dixon with a crystal ball. I'm not speaker Mike Johnson who claims the Almighty talks to him, tells him what he... I'm an historian, and it is always possible, not so arrogant to say it isn't, that something outside the keys could be so unprecedented and so cataclysmic as to shape things up but I can't randomly change the keys.

23:22What if you were Biden's chief marketing officer? What would you do? I will tell you exactly what I would. First of all, I would say, govern well, continue to have a successful president. It's true. Biden has a slight disability. He's always had it, even in his prime of the 80s. He does confuse names. He does stutter. He's not always quick on his feet, and he is old, and it is the worst ageism and ableism to trash him for this. Nobody but nobody who tried to trash Biden for these factors, these ableism and ageism, has shown it has any effect on his presidency. These issues are way down when it comes to being a successful president.

24:08What's vastly more important is experience, knowledge, value, tolerance, respect for democracy, and institutions. And like tens of millions of other persons in America who have slight disabilities, Biden has performed his job admiring. And in terms of governing well, the most important thing he can do in the short term, it's very tough, because he's got to deal with this crazy Netanyahu in Israel, his brokerage ceasefire and hostage release in the Middle East. Second thing I tell him is to follow the model of Franklin Roosevelt. Franklin Roosevelt was also blasted for his disability. Remember, he had polio, which was our lives were washed out.

24:52But it wasn't called a disability in those days. He was called a cripple. And lots of people said, by God, you're a cripple, you're sick, you won't even live through a first term. And even his advisors said, you know, don't campaign, hey, you know, you might collapse. And FDR said nuts and ran a vigorous, open campaign. And that's exactly what Joe Biden should do. And by the way, this poor cripple couldn't survive one turn, one fall landslide away.

25:38You're still the CMO, so what would your slogan for Biden be? My slogan for Biden would be that success counts and we have vision for the future counts, not bombast. Yeah, I'm afraid most Americans don't know what the word bombast means, though. Just watch Donald Trump and he's the poster child for bomb ads. If I were CMO of the Democratic Party, my slogan for Biden would be vote for Trump and lose your vagina. But that's different. That's not going to be it. You know, the media has been incredibly complicit. I get news feed and the vast majority of the coverage of the debate is Biden fault. legitimate.

26:34But Trump had actually a vastly worse debate in terms of the future of the country. He's lying his way to the presidency. One lie in the debate for every one minute and 20 to 30 seconds, and huge lies about January 6th, about the 2020 election, about Roe versus Wade. And he made it clear in the debate that he was going to be an authoritarian. Why wasn't that at least equally covered. Plus, in terms of this abler, the media is nitpicking everything Biden has to say. Again, I open my news feed. Biden answered for one hour difficult, hostile questions. He didn't falter. He was knowledgeable. He was competent.

27:22He answered in a way that was good for the world and the country. Why wasn't that the headline? Instead, the headline was, you know, Biden mistakes, Zelensky, for a small gaffe that has nothing to do with anything. Biden's doing these gaffes for 40 years, and that's the headline story. Now, the media is ultimately complicit with Donald Trump. And let me tell you, the media will rue the day if Donald Trump gets elected, because what's one of the first things he's going to do is shut down. When I was listening last night, I was saying to myself, there is no way Donald Trump could have answered these questions with as much authority and insight as what Biden did.

28:06There's not even close. He would have just said, I'll end the war in Ukraine in a week, right? Right. He couldn't have answered one of those questions, much less all of them with the same competence and ability and knowledge as Joe Biden. And that should have been the story. said the story is these minor gaps which mean nothing and feed into this horrible discriminatory ableism myth about Joe Biden. By the way, what about Donald Trump's gaps? You know, he mistook Marla Maples, his own wife, for E. Jean Carroll. He confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi. He talked about protecting airports during the Revolutionary War.

28:46He called his wife Mercedes. He ranted incoherently about, you know, would you rather be killed by a shark or electrocution? Things as bad or worse than Joe Biden, and he's got that almost complete pass on this. It's just awful. As a historian, do you see parallels between Trump and Hitler, or are we just making shit up here? Yeah, I never use Hitler comparison. You know, Hitler reads a unique key. The real comparison is Orban in Hungary, and he's openly embraced Orban, who's destroyed the free press, destroyed his opposition. That's the model we need to follow for Trump. And in terms of the media complicity, it is not just the evil people who wreak havoc on this world.

29:40It is the good people who don't do enough to stop them. Did not Elie Weisel teach us that? Right. Absolutely. And that is the burden of history. And we need to pay real attention to the danger that Donald Trump poses to our freedoms and democracy. And he's absolutely open about it. It's not some secret. Oh, it's when his apologists say, he's not serious. He's just joking. That's what they said about the Access Hollywood tape. He's not serious. It's just locker room talk. He doesn't assault women. Guess what? A jury unanimously found he had done to Agent Carroll exactly the kind of sexual assault he talked about in the Access Hollywood tape.

30:26Okay, let's suppose Trump wins and he does all this stuff and now you can't have an abortion, you can't have birth control, you can't have IVF, LGBTQ plus people are being reprogrammed, immigrants are deported or in prison. Just everything happens. Project 2025 happens. Do you see this as four years of just dystopia and then people are going to get disgusted and throw them all out or this is just going to continue and get worse and worse and Ivanka is the next president and off we go and the total deterioration of America or is this going to be an aberration we're going to bounce back from? Democracy is precious, but like all precious things that can be destroyed.