The Chris Cuomo Project - Who Will Win In 2024? Allan Lichtman’s 13 Keys For Predicting The Next President

Episode Date: August 6, 2024

Allan Lichtman (Distinguished Professor of History, American University, and author, “Predicting the Next President: The Keys to the White House, 2024”) joins Chris Cuomo to discuss how his historically accurate 13 Keys system applies to the 2024 election and what they might reveal about the Trump-Harris race. Discover how these keys, which have accurately predicted nearly every presidential winner since 1984 and can be applied to every election dating back to 1860, were inspired by earthquake predictions and offer a unique perspective on the factors that could determine the outcome of the next election. Follow and subscribe to The Chris Cuomo Project on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube for new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday: https://linktr.ee/cuomoproject Join Chris Ad-Free On Substack: http://thechriscuomoproject.substack.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Benefits vary by card, other conditions apply. You wanna know who's gonna win the Trump-Harris election? Well, if I only knew, I'd go to Vegas. I know somebody who knows. I'm Chris Cuomo, welcome to the Chris Cuomo Project. Professor Alan Lichtman. He is the developer of the famous 13 keys, 10 for 10 in the last 10 presidential cycles.

He picked them all. He picked Trump. More importantly, more impressive to me, he picked Reagan in the second term. He's the guy who gave us the whole boogie man about Joe Biden and what he could be if he keeps diminishing because of what he said wouldn't happen with Reagan. But he is some predictor and he has a take. He has a prediction to make about what he thinks is going to happen in this election. But everyone's talking about Lichtman and his 13 keys. What are they? Where do they come from?

talking about Lichtman and his 13 keys. What are they? Where do they come from? How did he develop them? Why have they worked since 1860? And yet we all keep looking at polls. WTF. Alan Lichtman joins us to tell us why. So thank you for subscribing and following here

at the Chris Cuomo Project. Here is Professor Lichtman with the answers. Support for the Chris Cuomo Project comes from Cozy Earth. Is your house a home? Is it a sanctuary? Is it where you can feel and be your best? Well, if not, check out Cozy Earth and their products because they have helped me and my wife do exactly that.

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them I sent you when you go there. If you do that and you fill out the post purchase survey you get free socks and you hook me up. Let's get after it. Professor, always good to see you. For the uninitiated, let's lay out the 13 keys. And is that their full name, by the way? Are they called the Lichtman keys? Are they called the candidacy keys? Are they called any kind of keys? Or are they just the keys? Just the 13 keys to the White House. I'm not so arrogant as to call them the Lichtman keys, but you can call them anything you want. Are there 13 by design or that's just the way it came out?

That's the way it empirically came out. I actually developed the keys in 1981 as a result of the most unusual collaboration, really in American political research. Between myself, this is 1981, I was a distinguished visitor at Caltech, and there I met another distinguished visitor, the world's leading authority in earthquake prediction,

Mollegja Kylis Borah. And it was his idea to collaborate and to use the methods of earthquake prediction to predict elections. Imagine that. So we became an odd couple. Tell us the story. Why, what does an earthquake have to do with an election?

What did he lend to the science part of political science? It's a great story. So he says, we're gonna collaborate, his idea. And being brilliant and for sightful, Chris, of course I said, no, we're not. You know, earthquakes may be a big deal here at Caltech in Southern California. I have to go back to Washington DC,

where I teach at American University. No one cares about earthquakes there. He says, oh no, I already solved earthquakes. Right. He said, get no, I already solved earthquakes. Right. He said, get this. In 1963, he was a member of the Soviet scientific delegation that came to DC and negotiated the most important treaty in the history of the world, the nuclear test ban treaty that kept us from poisoning our oceans, our soil and our atmosphere.

And he said in Washington, he fell in love with politics and always wanted to use the methods of earthquake prediction to predict elections. But he said, look, I live in the Soviet Union, elections, forget it. Or if it's supreme leader, or off with your heads. So he convinced me. But wait, how did he convince you, professor,

that what he used to predict when and how strong and where earthquakes would be had any transferability to politics? He convinced me in two ways, but it had nothing to do with actually predicting earthquakes. It had to do with reconceptualizing American presidential elections in geophysical terms and then using the methods of earthquake prediction to come up with a set of keys. So we reconceptualize presidential elections in earthquake terms, not as Carter

versus Reagan. Remember, this is 81, not as liberal versus conservative, not as Carter versus Reagan, remember this is 81, not as liberal versus conservative, not as Republican versus Democrat, but as stability, the White House party stays in power, and earthquake, they're booted out. And with that reconceptualization, we looked at every American presidential election from the horse and buggy days of politics Chris 1860 when Abe Lincoln was elected all the way to the election of Reagan in

1980 why did you start at 1860? That's the first year of Republican versus Democratic political competition before that it gets pretty chaotic Okay, okay. Gotta start somewhere. And that was, we thought, a good starting point. And here's where the methodology of earthquake prediction comes into play. Kyla's forock developed a form of pattern recognition,

where you could see what patterns in the physical environment are associated with physical stability and earthquake. So we looked at patterns in the political environment from 1860 to 1980 to see what patterns were associated with political stability and political earthquake. Did you believe, by the way, going into it, did you believe that it could be that objective, that mores and signature issues and predilections and media and all of the stuff that has changed from 1860 until modern era, let alone when you were doing it, that you'd never be able

to find uniformity. We didn't know, but I had great faith that there was a certain core to the American electorate that held steady through enormous change. Right from 1860, we had an agricultural economy. Women didn't vote, African Americans were enslaved, no jet planes, no automobiles, no radio, no television. But we didn't troll through history randomly, Chris,

and that was the other secret. I had been studying presidential elections for decades, not systematically in this way, but more qualitatively like historians do. And I was convinced that American presidential elections essentially rode on the strength and performance of the White House party, with voters voting up or down on whether the White House party deserves four more years.

So we didn't randomly troll through 120 years of history. That would be impossible. We were guided by this insight and by Kylos Blorat's pattern recognition method. And that led to the 13 keys. 13 true-false questions were an answer of true, always favored the reelection of the White House party, and a simple decision rule. You don't even have to take your shoes off to use the keys. If six or more keys are false,

the White House parties is a predicted loser, otherwise they are a predicted winner. And this key system better differentiated between stability and earthquake than any other set of factors. When you used the keys set against the elections from 1860 until 1976, how on point were they? They were very much on point, really. We went through 1980 with truly minimal error, which led us, when you make a huge discovery that a common set of factors accounts for enormous changes in American politics,

you're a couple of academics, what do you do? You publish this in an academic journal where you expect at least four or five people to actually read it. Well, six people read it. And the sixth person was the science reporter for the Associated Press. And I'm back in my office at American University in the winter of 1981. I opened the newspaper and there's the there it is odd couple discovers keys to the White House. Typical media.

They didn't even call you. Typical media. Typical media didn't even call you before reporting on it. Hell no. I was totally shocked. So wait, wait, Alan, let's make sure that the everybody gets it. So the 13 keys were how accurate in predicting the outcomes from 1860 to 1980? Essentially a hundred percent. Really? You know, maybe a little

bit of error because you know maybe some adjustment costs retrospectively, but close to a hundred percent. So you believe that when you went back to Washington you didn't think about like using the keys to like bet money with people in the upcoming elections and make some scratch? No, I thought I had done my duty as an academician and we published it in what is arguably the world's leading scientific journal, the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, very rare for a politics article to get into a science journal. So I thought I was done until I saw this article that opened my eyes to what I call going pop.

That is going out in public and using the system to predict. That's so funny that, you know, it's so often that way that the true scientists, the true seekers aren't developing understanding for a reason, they're developing it for the truth and to know not to exploit it. And you obviously fall into that.

So what are the 13 keys? Yes, there are four keys that I call the political keys. Remember the keys primarily measure the strength and performance of the White House party. And as you can see, only two keys pertain to the candidates and only one to the challenger. So the political keys are mandate, based on US House election results,

incumbency, internal party contest, only for the White House party, third party, short and long term economy, policy change, social unrest, scandal, foreign slash military failure, foreign slash military success. And then we get to key 12 and 13 key 12 asks whether the incumbent party candidate is one of those once in a generation broadly inspirational candidates who converts a lot of the opposition like FDR did creating the Roosevelt coalition or Ronald Reagan did with the Reagan Democrats. And then the last key, the only one pertaining to the challenges at all, asks whether the challenging party candidate does not fall into this once in an inspirational,

once in a generation inspirational candidate. It says not because remember the keys are always phrased. So an answer of true favors stability for the White House party. So there are objective criteria that are imbued with an inherent subjectivity because you and I may disagree. Like let's take Key 13. Trump is technically out party now, right, because he's former president, he was in party, he's out party. He is not a once in a generation charismatic figure.

You will definitely find people who disagree on true, false, all that. I would say true, I would say false. And many people would say, no, true. He's not an unusually charismatic person. This is just about him being the spirit animal of a movement. Can I give you a long answer to that question? Please. That's why it's a podcast.

Yes, it's a great question. And it goes to the heart of prediction for anything, not just politics. When I first developed the keys, remember, this was way back in 1981, and my first prediction was in April 1982 when I predicted Ronald Reagan's re-election during what was then the worst recession since the Great Depression, when 60% said he was too old to run again and his approval ratings were down on the gutter. But I got blasted by the professional forecasting community. I had committed the cardinal sin of forecasting, subjectivity.

My indicators, as you discovered, are not cut and dry. And I had a couple of answers. Number one, it's not subjective. It's judgmental. We're dealing with human beings, not celestial planets. Historians engage in judgments all the time. Two, they're not random judgments.

And when you read my book, Predicting the Next President, Keys to the White House 2024, you'll see an extensive definition of each key, which constrains how you answer it. And the keys have been answered since 1860, and the next answer has to be consistent. So whatever you may think of Trump, he's got to fit the criteria that I set. If you want to develop your own prediction system, go right ahead. But if you're gonna use the keys,

you've got to stick to the model. So what is the, so for example, to explain your answer, a little bit more of an explication, I guess. For the 13th key, what are the parameters that condition the response? Yes, it has to be recognized as someone extraordinary once in a generation. And I make very clear, you can't just appeal to a narrow base.

You've got to be broadly appealing and converting members of the opposition. That's why I use the primary examples of Franklin Roosevelt, who was elected following the 1920s, in the era of total Republican domination, won by almost 60%, won four elections by a landslide, or Ronald Reagan, who really introduced, in many ways, the modern conservative era.

Between them, they won six elections by landslides. Donald Trump has been in two elections and he lost the vote of the American people by a combined 10 million. Right, so he is, so 13 by those criteria, it's an easy true. Easy call, whatever you may think of him is irrelevant. He's got to fit the criteria.

That's important. What about Obama? Obama in 2008 fit the criteria. He was fresh, young, following two consecutive Republican administrations, but I didn't give it to him in 2012 because he got caught in the Washington bubble. One of my favorite books by the press secretary, Reedy Fleur Lyndon Johnson, Twilight of the Presidency, and it's an insider account. He talks about how you get caught once you're president in the Washington bubble of the consultants, the handlers, the pollsters, you lose your freshness. You get pulled down to the lowest common denominator. If I may take one minute to finish my story about

the professional forecasters. Oh, go ahead, Alan, please. You're just too interesting. You beg tangents because everything you say is too interesting. Finish your story. So it took about 15 years, and suddenly the professional forecasters realized

the follow of trying to make predictions for human systems on solely, you know, quote unquote, objective measures. Those big fancy models didn't work. And they realized that the best models were like the keys, which had some cut and dried indicators like estimate, like measures of economic growth, and then some judgmental indicators like charisma. And all of a sudden, the keys to the White House were the hottest thing in professional forecasting.

I twice keynoted the International Forecasting Summit. I presented at the American Political Science Association as a classic model of forecasting. I published in the International Journal of Forecasting. And then after my 2016 prediction of Donald Trump, which you can imagine did not make me very popular at 90% plus Democratic Washington, DC, where I teach at American University.

I won the Stechler Award for Courage in Forecasting. So all of a sudden the keys became mainstream, but it took 15 to 20 years. So save your bell buttons. You never know what might come back into style again. So I always say on the show, we have an inside joke where I say people will will say that Lichtman has been right nine of the last 10, he'll say 10 out of the last 10.

Yes. And he's got a whole policy paper you can read that has been archived about the 2000 election, why he says he's 10 for 10 because the outcome was wrong. When did you realize that, holy shit, this really works. Like, you know, by the time the conventions are over, and then you have to explain why is it so important for the conventions to be over, that these work. Why does it have to be when the conventions are over?

And when did you realize this is gonna work a lot more than it isn't? I realized this, I'll tell you another quick story. After I published my prediction in April, 1982, I get this call. And it's a gentleman who you have certainly heard of the late Lee Outwater. Says, this is Lee Outwater, political director

of the Ronald Reagan White House. We want you to come to the White House. I said, I think maybe you've got the wrong, no, he says, we know who you are. So I go to the White House. I spend the whole day in the White House. He introduces me to everybody, including this tall, skinny guy that I didn't recognize.

And he says, Mr. Vice President, of course you know, Professor Lichtman, that's so obscure H.W. Bush was. But he didn't bring me to the White House to introduce me to everyone. The end of the day, Lee Atwater, who you know was the original hardball political operative, he makes Karl Rove look like a kindergarten teacher. So Lee looks me in the eye and he says, Professor Lichtman, what would happen if Ronald Reagan didn't run again? And I said, look, you're down three keys right now. You're a sure winner.

Remember, six and you're out. Look what happens if Reagan doesn't run again. It's much apropos of what's going on today. You lose the incumbency key, obviously. You lose the contest key because Bush and Kemp and Robertson are gonna fight like crazy. That's fine. Incumbent charisma without the gipper?

Forget it. You know, George Bush is about as charismatic as a Psyche shopping center on Sunday morning. You're now down six and you're a sure loser. Lee looks me in the eye, breathes a huge sigh of relief and says, thank you so much, Professor Lichtman, and the rest is history. After that, I knew I was onto something. So yeah, you were onto something. You convinced Lee Atwater to put a guy who was in mental decline into another election where

he would win and wind up being the boogeyman that made Biden have to get out because of what we saw with Reagan's decline. It's all your fault, Lickman. You can blame me for anything. You can also blame me for Bill Clinton. You want to hear that story? Sure. So remember, after the Gulf War, you remember where George H.W. Bush was 90%. Every Democrat worth their salt, including your dad, right,

didn't want to go up against George H.W. Bush. You know, not just your dad, but also Gephardt and Gore and Jackson. None of them wanted any part of a guy with a 90% approval rating. But I wrote, that was the first of my eight editions of my book that not only was Bush gonna lose, but was a shoe in to lose based on the keys. Nobody believed me, none of the big shots listened, but I get this call from a woman with a likely out water, a strong Southern accent, KGOTS calling

Special assistant to governor Bill Clinton down here. Are you serious Lickman that Bush can be beaten in? 1992 I said, yes, I am I sent Bill Clinton a copy of my book at a memo and the rest is history Do you think my father would have won or lost and why? Or you can't know because he was never gonna win? I think your father would have won. I think he would have turned the charisma key and everything else would have stayed the same. An Italian Catholic?

Remember, you know, people think I'm joking when I say this, but you know, your ethnic identity and your generation, you'll know that I'm telling the truth. My father was not considered a white guy. My father was considered an ethnic and he was always described Gap Tooth Grin, swarthy, Mercurial Mario, hot blooded Italian. It was a big part of his internal calculus.

We haven't talked about this before and I don't know that I've talked about it with the audience actually, the podcast audience, but I can tell you why my father didn't run. Most people to this day, when they ask me why he didn't run, answer the question for me by saying mob connections. I shit you not, Professor. They're not trying to hurt my feelings.

They're not trying to hurt my feelings. They say, you know, was it something about the mafia? Was he worried? Because, you know, until very recently, I would argue you can still make fun of Italians because we have graduated to whiteness in American, you know, kind of sociology. Like us Jews, same thing. We thought that until what happened on October 7th and how it was responded to in America. Now, as a proud member of the mishpoka of the extended family of the Jews, I don't think that we can consider even, you know,

complexions like yours to be white guys, because when they go bad on the Jews, they go bad on you too. But anyway. Anyway, that's what- My father was considered an ethnic. I am considered a white guy. And at the end of- Sure.

And my father had a lot of concern about that. He didn't run for president for three reasons. a white guy. And at the end, and my father had a lot of concern about that. He didn't run for president for three reasons. One, he had pathological humility. He did not believe he was worthy of being president. And we would say, versus this guy, versus this guy, you don't think you're better. And he would say, that's their problem.

We can do better than me as president. That was number one. People will say, well, he said he had to stay governor. He had to stay governor because he had made a promise to them. But it was really because he didn't think he was good enough to be president. He felt that he was overly privileged being governor. One. Two, is that second reason about he felt he had to do it. Three is ethnic identity. A Catholic, Italian from New York, when he had played pro ball in the farm leagues in Georgia, people looked at him like he had two heads,

often asked him about whether or not he was black and that the bias that he believed that extended across the country would have made it too much of a headwind. I'm not good enough. I said I would stay as governor, which was always the weakest to me. And three was ethnic identity. Why do you

think he had a chance to win? Because the keys transcend all that. Every four years, someone comes to me and says, got to change your keys because of the candidate. We have an African American running. Never had that. America is not ready to elect an African American. We have a woman running. We've got Donald Trump, a guy who bragged openly about grabbing women by their private parts, got to change your keys. And my answer is you can't change a model on the fly like that. That's a recipe for error.

And the keys are incredibly robust, going all the way back to 1860. And they are based on the proposition that elections don't firm primarily on the characteristics of the candidate. That's why I've stuck to all my predictions, stuck to the keys. And I do believe, you know, I have my live show, by the way, like, can I talk, can I plug that? Of course, plug away. Yeah. Yeah. I have my live show every Tuesday and Thursday

at 9pm Eastern at Alan Lichtman YouTube, A-L-L-A-N-L-I-C-H-T-M-A-N. We now have almost 75,000 subscribers starting from scratch. And, you know, I always make clear that I don't like answering hypotheticals. Cause you know, if you change one thing, you know, if your dad had run, who knows what else might have changed. But because it's you, I will answer the hypothetical. Yes, I would have stopped to the keys. And I believe your dad would have won. He was, you know, one of the most inspirational figures in my time, I have to say.

Boy, I would love for him to hear that he would have cut up your keys like a like a paper snowflake to keep himself from having to run. So 10 for 10 in the last 10 cycles, doesn't matter what kind of cataclysm will kind of change because it's bigger than the candidate. I would argue having read the most recent edition of the book that the keys can't change for the election, but they wouldn't work as well for the nominating process

of within a party who's going to ascend because personalities can prevail there and optics and things that may not matter to everyone, but they do to that select group in that moment might, which is why Lichtman waits until the conventions are over. Does that hold even if you know like now that the nominee for the Democrats will be Kamala Harris? Why isn't that good enough for you to trigger your prediction?

Yeah, let me say I totally agree with you. The keys do not work for nomination contest for the reasons that you outlined and because of a mathematical difficulty. That is, unlike the presidential election, which is binary, the primary contests are dependent. That is, the results of a past primary influence the next primary and so on and so forth. That's why in advance mathematically, it's virtually impossible to predict primaries.

That said though, sometimes the keys fall into place before the convention because keys 12 and 13 don't matter if things are good enough or bad enough. So for example, you heard me predict Ronald Reagan in April 1982. I predicted that the Democrats would take over the White House in 2008. In 2006, in fact, I became notorious for saying,

things are going so badly for the second Bush term that the Democrats could pick a name out of the phone book and elect that person president. And that's kind of what they did, who had heard Barack Obama before he burst on the scene. The reason, you know, but sometimes the keys fall into place late, particularly in recent elections, which are so tight, you know, they can turn on a single key. And the reason I'm waiting till after the convention is some of the keys are still up in the air, like third party. Will RFK Jr. stabilize at 10%? I don't think so, but I'm willing to wait. Will there be a new outburst of social unrest like we saw in 1968? I don't think so, but I am willing to wait.

So it's just in an abundance of caution. But as you know, because I've said this on your show, my preliminary analysis is that a lot would have to go wrong for the Democrats to lose. By the way, you know I'm not a poll follower, but I have to say I saw an eye popping poll just in the last couple of hours. Remember Pennsylvania, which is the most important swing state.

Right, Biden was down seven at one point there recently. Yeah, she's up four. Four! Going from down, that's an 11 point swing. Yeah, I think that, look, we both know and the audience must recognize, the media leans on polls because they drive cycles. They give you the new in news. They are used by campaigns. And I know this.

I've been in too many campaigns. That they are always used not predictive. They are snapshots. They use focus groups as predictive tools and campaigns because you get an understanding of the why for people and You can then shape message and you can shape it to region and you know or county or whatever but their snapshots and This snapshot is there were so many people who were so worried

And this snapshot is there were so many people who were so worried about Trump, and that Biden was basically going to die, that Harris has alleviated that for a big part of the ABT vote, the anyone but Trump. Now, here's what I don't understand that, please explain, not as a key author, but just your head as a political expert. If Harris wasn't enough to give comfort to a Biden-Harris ticket for those voters who were worried about Biden, why are they enthusiastic about Harris at the top of the ticket? Because the idea of Biden dying and, you know, Harris then ascending to the presidency or Biden, you know, being so smitten by health issues that he has to step down. That's a kind of cataclysmic situation that people really didn't want to contemplate with

Harris now at the top of the ticket, it's a whole different way of looking at things. Plus, finally, the Democrats did something smart. As you know, it's very critical of them for trashing their incumbent president right out in public. I thought that was shameful. But they finally did something smart, Chris, and that was to unite around Harris

and not to have a big brawl. That preserves the contest key. They've of course lost the incumbency key. That preserves a critical second key. Moreover, forget the keys. Since 1900, no White House party has ever been reelected when it's an open seat with no incumbent and a big party contest.

That's the kiss of death. But if it's an open seat and no contest, then there's a decent chance for the White House party to win, as we saw with Herbert Hoover in 1928 or George H.W. Bush in 1988, a very different situation historically. The other thing that I've now come to realize just recently about Harris is she could indirectly help the Democrats in two other keys. That is, if you kind of reduce doubts about Biden's capacity, that might diminish support for RFK Jr. and preserve the third party key. With Biden not front and center,

it might also reduce incentives for major protests and social unrest. So I think conceivably the Harris acclamation not only preserves the contest key, but indirectly could trigger things positively for the Democrats on two other keys. And being a black female, which are a couple of third rails in political analysis, in terms of playing to implicit or explicit bias

in the electorate, you're saying it doesn't matter because any way you look at it, it only goes to one key. Assuming that the candidate's race or sex doesn't create riots, that it only goes to the charisma effect of that particular person. Correct. And remember, I was told in 2008, you know, my God, an African-American impossible. You know, America's not ready for that. And it wasn't just, you know, random critics.

A lot of serious analysts thought America was not ready for a black president, but I stuck to the keys. Right. I mean, look, I didn't think Obama was ready. I mean, interviewing him. But you know, sometimes, sometimes there's a blessing in what you don't know. Sometimes, you know, you bring in less institutional think, less conventional think, it can actually be an asset. So right now, the polls are showing it's a dead heat, basically, but the problem for the Democrats is

that they almost never win presidential elections unless they win the popular vote significantly. And she is certainly not doing that right now. And it leads people to believe that this is Trump's race to lose, even though it's about the electoral college, not the popular vote. But if he's even close in the popular vote,

it portends that he'll kill it in the electoral college. What do you think of that thinking? Yeah, I think that's, you know, change thinking to the past. Things are shifting. And in particular, the analysis of the polls, this is my own analysis, has shifted. Remember, and the, because the air amazement in the polls is vastly greater than they tell you, and it's not random. You heard, you know this. Our error is plus and minus 3%, right? That's pure statistical error. That's the error you would get if you had a huge jar of green and red balls and you took a sample to estimate the percentage of green and red balls. But human beings are not green and red balls.

They may lie to pollsters. Most people don't even respond. They may not have focused. They may change their minds. Moreover, no one's voted yet. So you've got to guess at who the likely voters are. This introduces a whole new level of error above and beyond the 3% and it's unidirectional, not random. So in 2016, the pollsters underestimated Republican voting

strength, which is why there were so many errors. So like the generals fighting the last war, they tried to correct for that. And now if you follow elections in the midterms, the off year in 2023, and the specials in 2024, they are underestimating democratic voting strength by five points or more. A classic example is, as you know, the most publicized special election for the Congressional New York State.

Yeah, what a shot. That shocked people, yeah. Yeah, and the pollsters just before the elections, few days had a dead heat. Democrat ahead by one point, he won by eight points. Yeah. Performing by seven, and that's typical. Tom Swazee, his team didn't even think

he was gonna win by that much. They thought it was gonna be tight. So, let me ask you this. In terms of why Harris wins, you look at the Keys and she counts basically as the end party and you ascribe to her those characteristics. You do not ascribe to her those characteristics. You do not ascribe to her though,

incumbency even though she is part of the incumbent office right now. No, incumbency is a binary call. So it's president versus president. Where you're not, again, if you wanna develop a different system, you can. That's different. But if you're gonna use the keys,

you gotta stick with it. So H.W. Bush, for can, but if you're going to use the keys, you got to stick with it. So H.W. Bush, for example, did not get the incumbency key. Does it matter whom she picks for vice president? No, there is no vice presidential key or any real recent historical evidence that vice presidents have any impact. Remember, when H.W. Bush picked Dan Quayle, people said, oh my God, he's going to sink his ticket. And Dan Quayle had the worst debate in history when he

compared himself to JFK and Lloyd Benson. The Democrats said, sir, I knew JFK. He was a friend of mine. And you, sir, I know John F. Kennedy didn't matter, Bush 1 going away. After being down 17 points in the polls in June. Why isn't it different when it's a woman candidate who she picks as vice president, given the gender bias of the American electorate? Again, I don't take any of that into account.

I didn't take Barack Obama's race into account. I didn't take Barack Obama's race into account. I didn't take Hillary Clinton's gender into account. And you can't predict based upon, you know, factors like that, because there are so many factors that you could look at if you're gonna try to break it down into its components. I always use the analogy of your cup of tea. You pour sugar into your tea.

You can't understand anything by trying to follow the individual sugar models. But like with the keys, simple integral parameters can tell you a lot about your tea, like sweetness and density. What are you looking for that will make you change potentially from, so which keys are you sensitive to right now in determining who wins, Harris or Trump?

Yes. Right now, Harris is down three keys. Mandate because of US House election losses for the Democrats in 2022. Incumbency and incumbent charisma, because she hasn't proven to be an FDR. So that means three more keys would have to fall. And here are the four keys I'm looking at. Three of them would have to fall to predict their defeat. Two, though, lean towards the Democrats and two lean against them. The two that lean towards the Democrats that are still undecided are third party.

I think RFK Jr. is not going to stabilize at 10% or more. Social unrest, we saw some sporadic social unrest, but to turn the key, it has to be massive social unrest sufficient to threaten the stability of the has to be massive social unrest, sufficient to threaten the stability of the country, like we saw in the 1960s. So I think those two keys are not likely to fall. The weakest keys, of course, are foreign slash military failure and foreign slash military success. But even if those two keys fell, one of the other two undecided keys would have to fall, which

is why I've said a lot would have to go wrong for the Democrats to lose this race. Why isn't Bobby Perot? Do you think Bobby Kennedy takes more from Trump than Harris? And why is the number 10%? Yeah, there's no way to tell. He's polling too low to actually parse out his vote. The error margin is extreme. And what I've seen attempts to parse out his vote,

it's been all over the map. Some of the polls have him taken from Trump. Some of them have him taken from Harris, I guess, Biden back then. But here's the thing. Again, you've got to stick to the system. And the definition of the third party key is not trying to parse out who the third party takes from, but rather third party, if it's a serious, significant third party, always counts against the White House party, because it is a sign of discont always counts against the White House party

because it is a sign of discontent with how the White House party is governed. The only exception, which we haven't seen yet, because it doesn't happen would be an open slit within the Republican party. Like if Nikki Haley ran as an independent, but you never see that. Not yet. I hope we do because I hate the party system. And I think it is what's poisoning our dialogue. And I think a binary system is fundamentally zero sum.

And there has been a steady devolution throughout our political history to the point we're at now where I would argue Trump and Biden were two of the most inadequate choices for president I've seen in my lifetime. And I think that's because this is the only place a two-party system can bring you, is in a battle to the bottom, which is where the quality control is just slipping because all they need to do is for the other side to be worse.

Nobody has to be better anymore. I don't beat Lickman because I'm better. I beat Lickman because he's worse than I am. And I find a way- Oh, much worse. But I find a way of demonstrating that. That sure, Lickman's smart and this and that, but you know, there was that one car accident that he drove away from and Lickman's like, I've never had a car accident, but enough people believe what I just said and you lose. So I'm very down on the two party system. I'd like to see more parties. I'd like to see open

primaries at the state level so we can get more moderate candidates like they did in New York City and other places with ranked choice voting. But that doesn't fall into the keys because that's in the multicontest of the party phase. Why 10% for a third party? Just historically, third parties have mattered when they win at least 5% of the vote.

But I don't know that in advance. So this is the one time I have to use the polls, but I don't take the polls at face value. We have the Lickman wasted vote syndrome. I love you, RFK Jr., but I actually have to vote. I know you can't win, so I'm not gonna vote for you. So typically, when you actually have the vote, third party or independent candidates get about half of their poll numbers.

That's why I take 10%. I cut it in half to anticipate at least 5%. So from 1860 to 2020, how did the 13 keys hold up in terms of how many elections did it get wrong? I would, you know, we can argue there were some very controversial elections like 2000 or 1876 when we really don't know exactly who won. Although I think I proved who won in 2000. Those are the only ones that are problematic. Just two out of all those elections. Can I give you another kind of in-depth insight from the Keys?

Sure. You know, you're familiar with Dwight Eisenhower's 1961 farewell address, the most famous in Washington, when he warned against the grip of the military industrial complex, which was based on an iron triangle, the defense contractors who made a lot of money, the military who got their hardware, and the politicians who wanted military contracts

in their states and districts. I've developed uniquely the idea of the political industrial complex, which explains why we're so tied to these horse race polls and why we have these trivially oriented negative campaigns. So on the one hand, you have the pollsters, the consultants, the handlers who make huge people don't realize how much money these people make. It's a lot in the election cycle. Then you have all my buddies in the media and you know, I love you, but you got to cover the story every single day.

So you're tied to the pollsters and the pundits. And then there are the politicians who are afraid to go against the media, the pollsters and the pundits. So that's the political industrial complex with its own iron triangle. And I've been screaming for years that if you believe the keys that conventional campaigning doesn't matter,

polling is irrelevant, we could break out of this and have real substantive campaigns. But as you know, I'm crying in the wilderness here. Well, you are because that's harder. You know, yes, I think whatever geometry, you know, you pick for it, no matter how many factors you want to put into it as criteria. The rationale at the end of the day is just convenience.

It is it is easier. We can't underestimate the money. Money necessarily militates in favor of messaging. That's the best use. Without the ability to buy votes, the best use of money in elections is ads. That's the best.

It beats field organization, it beats anything because it doesn't matter how many people you have knocking on the doors, if the minds inside the home have already been changed. So messaging. But the easiest way is to shit talk the other side. That is the easiest. The media likes it the best,

because people watch news for self protection more than anything else. Even if you look at sensation, it's still things that scare them, things that make them aware of self-protection. So plays to negativity. Human nature plays to negativity and it's just easier to do. It's so much easier to convince somebody that your plan might work better than it is to prove them that the other person's a danger to them or their family.

And that's why we're stuck in this. And it works for the media too. So why would we try to change it? Every time you try to do something differently, you don't rate as well. And you know, and that's why the iron triangle is so strong. The military industrial, you know, he won against it, what 60 some odd years ago. Here we are. Hasn't changed. No way. No way. The political industrial complex hasn't changed. My screaming about it hasn't mattered. But let me give you one other little insight. You know, if you actually campaign on vision and substance, you can leave your mark on

the country. Who remembers anything Hillary Clinton or John Kerry or John Mc, or any conventional candidate said, but there have been some candidates, including big losing ones who've made their mark. Barry Goldwater, you know, lost huge to Lyndon Johnson, but his conservatism inspired generations of conservatives. Same thing with George McGovern, who lost big to Richard Nixon, but inspired generations of conservatives. Same thing with George McGovern, who lost big to Richard Nixon,

but inspired generations of liberals. Conventional candidates win or lose, never do that. They're footnotes to history. That is true. It's a question. Do you wanna be remembered or do you wanna win? You know, and then you'll definitely be remembered. And here's where the keys give the escape hatch,

that conventional campaigning doesn't matter. And you can in fact campaign on vision and substance and still win, but we have the political industrial complex, keeping that out. You follow the keys, it's actually easier to win by going big and by going bold and playing to the cards on the table. But in an electorate where it's getting more and more disparate because of all the negativity, it gets to be such small gradations, maybe 30, 35 counties in the country wind up

determining your electoral college, that people start to play scared and tight and they go to what's easiest, which is the negativity. But I hold out because I am a romantic and I love the 13 Keys. Alan Lichtman's, the professor's book has been updated for this election. It is an easy read for political science. And it's one of those books where you feel

like you're getting smarter, like every other page that you read in it. You're like, oh, oh, that makes sense. Oh, that's good. I'm gonna use that. And it's a gift to you if you care about politics. Professor Lichtman, thank you very much for being part of the Chris Cuomo project,

for being on my show. You're always welcome anywhere I am. Same here. Let me remind people of my live show every Tuesday and Thursday at 9 p.m. Eastern at Alan Lichtman YouTube. I do it with my son and we have a lot of fun. Chris, I love you. Take care. Professor, time spent with you is time well spent. I'll talk to you soon. Absolutely. Bye-bye. I'll talk to you soon. Absolutely. Bye bye.

Boy oh boy, will the keys fall. Will the keys fall? I love all the fingers he puts out there as he's explaining it. Alan Lichtman, think what you want, but rarely if ever wrong. Will this race be the first? Will he change after the convention? We'll have to watch and see. I'm Chris Cuomo.

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