The MeidasTouch Podcast - Professor Allan Lichtman on the Trump-Biden Election and 'Spineless' Dems

Episode Date: July 20, 2024

MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas interviews Professor Allan Lichtman on the 2024 election between President Biden and Donald Trump. Remember to subscribe to ALL the MeidasTouch Network Podcasts: MeidasTouch: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/meidastouch-podcast Legal AF: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/legal-af MissTrial: https://meidasnews.com/tag/miss-trial The PoliticsGirl Podcast: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-politicsgirl-podcast The Influence Continuum: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-influence-continuum-with-dr-steven-hassan Mea Culpa with Michael Cohen: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/mea-culpa-with-michael-cohen The Weekend Show: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-weekend-show Burn the Boats: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/burn-the-boats Majority 54: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/majority-54 Political Beatdown: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/political-beatdown Lights On with Jessica Denson: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/lights-on-with-jessica-denson On Democracy with FP Wellman: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/on-democracy-with-fpwellman Uncovered: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/maga-uncovered Coalition of the Sane: https://meidasnews.com/tag/coalition-of-the-sane  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. I'm joined by Professor Alan Lichtman. And for all the Midas Mighty out there, you know that I am a data geek. I don't like bogus narratives unless it is backed by data, in which case it would be a true narrative. Let me just give you Professor Lichtman's background before we get into it. I know you've seen Professor Lichtman on a lot of shows lately. He's got a PhD from Harvard University specializing in modern American history and quantitative methods. He became an assistant professor of history at American University in 1973 and a distinguished professor

in 2011. In addition to publishing 13 books and several hundred popular and scholarly articles, he's been an expert witness in some 100 civil cases and voting right cases, and Professor Lichtman's prediction system, the keys to the White House has correctly predicted the outcomes of all US presidential elections since 1984. Professor Lichtman, thanks for joining us.

My great pleasure. Thanks for that very kind introduction. I want to get right into the breaking news. Jen O'Malley Dillon, the Biden campaign chair, says President Biden is absolutely staying in the race. Quote, he's more committed than ever to beating Donald Trump. I want to get your response, Professor. I'm glad that they're saying that. I'm not sure if it means that he is necessarily not going to be pushed out by the feckless Democrats. He's really got to say that.

You know, I have to say I'm 77. I've been following politics for 65 years. I've studied it since the founding, and I have never seen such a spineless political party as the Democrats committing self-destruction right out in the open at the first sign of adversity, trashing their sitting president, the nominee not of Adam at the first sign of adversity, trashing their sitting president, the nominee not of Adam Schiff and Jamie Raskin or any member of Congress or James Carville or the New York Times editorial board, but the voters.

And they spent weeks trashing him. And lo and behold, his poll ratings have slipped. Talk about a self-defeating prophecy. We're going to push down his poll numbers, and then we're going to say, see, he can't win because his poll numbers are down, so we're going to push him out. It's an astoundingly spineless exhibition by the Democrats. I've summarized American politics in one sentence. Republicans have no principles. Democrats have no spine. Professor, you talk about the polls. You're quoted as saying, it terrifies me that we have democracy by the polls. That is the worst way to run our democracy. You've been a strong critic of the polls,

and you've been shown to be right over and over again that the polls are wrong. How dangerous is democracy by polling? It could not be more dangerous. You know, the polls are snapshots. They are abused as predictors. And as snapshots, they shift all the time, and sometimes massively. In 1988, George H.W. Bush was 17 points down to Mike Dukakis in the late spring. You know, the pollsters and the pundits all wrote him off. I wrote at that very time that he's a shoo-in to win based on my keys to the White House, because he's running on the record of the Reagan administration. He won by nearly eight points, a 25-point shift. After Obama's disastrous debate with Mitt Romney, he went from eight points up in the polls to four points down. And again, a lot of the pundits were writing him off, and he won very handily.

If you believe the polls, Donald Trump should have withdrawn in 2016. And, of course, he won. Worse than that, the pollsters deceive you. They claim the error margin is plus and minus 3%. But that's pure statistical error from sampling. 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 in the jar. But human beings are not green and red balls.

Most people don't respond to the pollsters, so they get a skewed sample. People may lie. They may not have focused on the election, and they may change their mind. Moreover, no one's voted yet, so they have to guess at who the likely voters are. This introduces a whole range of error above and beyond the plus and minus 3%, making the polls useless in any close election. Plus, that additional error is not random, it's unidirectional. In 2016, the polls underestimated Republican voting strength. So like generals fighting the last war, they corrected for that. And what have

we learned from the midterms, the off-year elections in 2023, the special elections in 2024, the polls now substantially underestimate Democratic voting strength. Look at the most prominent special election for the seat in New York in Congress previously held by the disgraced George Santos. A poll taken right at the eve of the election, had it as a dead heat. Democrat up by one point. The Democrat won by eight points, outperforming the polls by seven points. I hope I've given you enough reasons for you to reject firmly the notion that we should govern according to polls. Well, look, your keys and indicators were accurate, unfortunately, when it came to Donald Trump. Right. I mean, I saw your interviews back then.

You were on Fox and, you know, you weren't pushing agendas. You were just saying, hey, I'm looking at the polling data and you're looking at this the whole wrong way with your polling data. I'm looking at my keys and I'm looking at these factors. So I think your polling data is trash. And you said in 2016, you were one of the lone voices then. You said that I thought that Trump was, you said that Trump was going to win. So it's not a matter. I want to be clear to everybody of you picking democratic candidates. You're picking based on a set of quantitative

methodical factors versus kind of these skewed polling data. Let me comment on that. As you can imagine, predicting Donald Trump in 2016 did not make me very popular in 90% plus Democratic Washington, D.C., where I teach at American University. But I did get a note which said, congrats, professor, good call, and in big sharpie letter signed Donald J. Trump. Also remember, my first prediction was in April 1982, in which I predicted the re-election of Ronald Reagan at a time when America was mired, then in the worst depression since the

Great Depression. His poll numbers were down in the gutter, and the majority of Americans thought he was too old to run again. Again, you can imagine predicting Ronald Reagan did not make me very popular in Washington, D.C. These are predictions, not endorsements, and I've predicted about as many Republican as Democratic wins. And I'll give you the secret to being a successful forecaster. Again, you can't do it by polls. You got to have a model that works. And it's not knowing history.

They've got no history. It's not knowing politics or they've got no politics. It's not knowing math or they've got no math. It's keeping your own personal political views out of it. And you may think that's easy, but it's not. I trained for years as a historian to learn how to do that. If I simply predicted according to my own political views, I'd be useless as a forecaster. I'd be wrong about half the time. You know, one of the key indicators that you look to is incumbency and the power of incumbency. And then when you look at other factors relating to, is the incumbent president successful in other

metrics? Where's the economy right now? When people go into the voting booth are they going to say you know what my 401ks are up are there foreign wars being fought so incumbency you often emphasize i think is one of the more important if not the most important key but then is the incumbent president successful in these other areas and when you look at the objective data and you take away all of this media spin, whether it's kind of the outright propaganda media that exists right now on the right wing or this kind of corporate media that both sides that all of the objective data that we always use to judge presidencies show that President Biden is a successful incumbent president. Is that what your analysis shows? Exactly. Unlike the polls and the pundits who have no

scientific basis for advanced prediction, the keys to the White House tap into the structure of how American presidential elections really work as votes up or down on the strength and performance of the White House party and you correctly indicate most of the keys have to do with assessing how well the incumbent administration has performed and the keys are very robust in development I went all the way back to 1860, the horse and buggy days of politics when we elected Abraham Lincoln, lest the keys have survived. Enormous changes in our society, in our economy, in our politics, in our demography. And incumbency is certainly one of my keys.

No one key outweighs the other. That's one of the secrets to the keys. If you stop weighting your predictors, you've got to weight them on past elections, and those weights unpredictably change. And the keys show how foolish, not just finalists, but foolish the Democrats are in trying to push Biden out and then who knows what might happen at the convention. Biden ticks off the incumbency key. He ticks off the party contest

key. That means of the remaining 11 keys, six would have to fall to predict the Democrats' defeat because that's the threshold for predicting the incumbent party's defeat. So Biden gets pushed out, you have a convention brawl, you lose both of those keys, only four more keys would have to fall. But if you don't like the keys, just look at straight history. Since 1900, the party holding the White House has never, I repeat, never won re-election when it's an open seat with no incumbent running at an internal party contest. Now, I think it's possible that the pressure could be so great, despite what the White House is saying, that Biden could be forced out by these finalist Democrats. I have a plan B if that happens. And I have an article today

in the New York Daily News explaining that, an op-ed. And as you, I think, mentioned, I have a live show every Tuesday and Thursday at 9 p.m. Eastern at Alan Lichtman YouTube, in which I also discuss plan B, which is, if he's pushed out, resign the presidency for the good of the country, which pushed you in contrast with Trump, who's only in it for yourself. Harris becomes president, perfectly qualified, a long-term vice president, a former senator, former attorney general, and you then tick off the incumbency key, and you make sure your delegates unite behind her, so you tick off the contest key, and six keys would still have to fall. The worst situation for Democrats would be to recreate the situation in 2016 that led to the

election of Donald Trump in the first place, a big internal party battle, an ununified party, and an open seat with no incumbent running. Well, and as you see this kind of chaos that is being spewed by some of these Democrats, or as you call them, these kind of spineless Democrats, it seems when they don't articulate the plan that's data-based and driven the way you are, they're talking in terms of what has lost before, whether that is 2016 or whether there were contested conventions in the past, which have been utter disasters. So you say, are you like looking and learning any of these lessons of history or are you just leading with kind of these emotions and threats devoid of any type of quantitative Professor, which is I think YouTube channels like yours are really important because I think the media landscape is changing dramatically.

I think this moment has been a major fail of the media. They've let people down in some of the biggest ways by just not reporting the data and by focused on these narratives and fascist tropes. And one of the things that you've said recently is the media has relentlessly pursued the issue of Joe Biden dropping out of the race. If Donald Trump actually wins, the media will be complicit in their own demise because Trump will destroy the free press. How big of a problem do you think it is the way this corporate media has been dealing with all of this, but frankly, not reporting on the facts of the success of Biden's presidency, not reporting on things like when Donald Trump's been found liable for sexual assault, not describing what it really means to be a convicted

felon, and then just running with the polls for year after year after year. I mean, it's been systemic. I completely agree with you. You know, folks in the media, they're my buddies. They're smart. I love them. But they're caught up, as you point out, in this awful both-siders i thought the role of the media would be the guardian of the truth not to treat both sides equally even though as you say one side is uh committed to inveterate dishonesty to trashing the rule of law and openly trashing our democracy. You know, the media has done us an enormous disservice, and I can't overstate that. And Donald Trump has made no secret that he is going to govern on the model of his buddy Viktor Orban in Hungary, and J.D. Vance, his vice presidential candidate, is even more enthralled with the Orban model Hungary and J.D. Vance, his vice presidential candidate, is even more

enthralled with the Orban model. And that model has two key points. One, you use your power to destroy your political opposition. Two, you use your power to destroy the free press. And so the whole apparatus of government becomes nothing but a cheering section for you, as does the media. No free press, no real civil service, no opportunity for a real political opposition to function because you're wiping them out. And he can do this all now under the cover of immunity that the Supreme Court has given him.

You know, if that Supreme Court decision had been in effect in the 1970s, Richard Nixon would have gotten away scot-free with Watergate and our democracy might have died 50 years ago. So my last message is, you know, to all my buddies in the press, this is a hinge moment in the history of American democracy, perhaps as perilous as we've seen since the Civil War. Do your job as the guardian of truth

and the guardian of America's peerless traditions of democracy and freedom. Professor, using your keys to the White House, President Biden stays in, is peerless traditions of democracy and freedom. Professor, using your keys to the White House, President Biden stays in, still think he's going to win? I have not made a final prediction. I want to make that clear. I've been misinterpreted. I will after the Democratic convention,

but a lot would have to go wrong on my keys for Biden to lose. He's down definitively two keys. It takes six to count him out. And there are four shaky keys that your audience should keep their eye on. Third party, social unrest, foreign slash military failure, and foreign slash military success. Now, let me say something kind of a bit modestly. You know, I'm not so arrogant to say that even though the keys go all the way back to 1860, that there can't be something that's so cataclysmic and so unprecedented that it shakes up the race outside the context of history. And we'll see how it plays out. But the Democrats seem to be absolutely intent on breaking the pattern of histories to their detriment and the detriment of the country.

Well, learn the lessons of history. Focus on the data. That's what we do here on the Midas Touch Network. And I want to remind everybody about your YouTube page as a place where they can go and get the data that's what we do here on the Midas Touch Network and I want to remind everybody about your YouTube page as a place where they can go and get the data it's at Alan Lichtman YouTube they're almost at 40,000 subscribers I think you'll hit 100,000 subscribers fairly soon everybody check it out and Alan does a great live show with his son. I really enjoy watching that show. As you know, I'm very data-driven here on the Mindest Touch Network.

Thanks, Professor. Thank you. It's Thursday and Tuesday, 9 p.m. Eastern, just to remind everyone. Thank you so much for having me on some of the best questions I've had. Thanks, Professor. Have a good one, everybody. Hit subscribe. We're close to 3 million subscribers. Let's get there.