I just added this article from 28OCT, this was first posted on 12OCT. THIS will not post until 0030 / 12:30 AM 4 NOV 20, I do not want to risk being responsible for someone seeing this and then deciding they don't have to vote because drumpf / trump is going to loose. I pray to God he is right....
Does Allan Lichtman Stand by His “13 Keys” Prediction of a Joe Biden Win?
With just a few days left until Election Day, do Allan Lichtman’s “13 Keys” still predict a Joe Biden victory? Or have events this fall changed the way the keys turn?
Lichtman, AU Distinguished Professor of History, made headlines in 2016 when he accurately predicted that Donald J. Trump would win the race for the White House. It was considered an incredible feat, given that all other major election forecasters got it wrong.
But this time around, Lichtman’s prediction agrees with all of the other models: he says that Joe Biden will become the next President of the United States.
Lichtman bases his predictions on 13 Keys that he developed in collaboration with Vladimir Keilis-Borok, a Russian expert on earthquakes. Their 13 keys have accurately predicted every US presidential race since 1984.
To develop the keys, Lichtman and Keilis-Borok analyzed presidential elections over the past 120 years, and they based their prediction model on earthquake models. If just six of the 13 keys turned against the incumbent, they are in for a loss. Right now, Lichtman says, Trump has seven keys turned against him.
We asked Lichtman to describe how the keys are turning right now, and how the pandemic, the fight for racial justice, the economy, and other issues affect our presidential elections.
In 2016, your 13 keys correctly predicted a Trump win. In 2019, the keys pointed towards another Trump win. But that has now changed. How many keys are turned against Trump right now?
There are seven keys turned against Trump, one more than is needed to predict his defeat according to the Keys to the White House system that has correctly predicted the outcomes of presidential elections since 1984. The negative keys are:
- Key 1, Mandate Key, because of Republican losses in the midterm elections of 2018.
- Key 5, Short-Term Economic Key, because of an election-year recession.
- Key 6, Long-Term Economic Key, because of the sharply negative growth this year.
- Key 8, Social Unrest, because what is raging across the land.
- Key 9, Scandal, Trump is only the third American president to be impeached by the full US House of Representatives.
- Key 11, Foreign/Military Success, because of the lack of an acclaimed success abroad.
- Key 12, Incumbent Charisma, because Trump appeals only to a narrow base.
How have the pandemic and the protests for racial justice turned the keys?
It was not just the COVID-19 pandemic that crashed the economy, it was also Trump’s botched response to the pandemic. Rather than dealing substantively with the pandemic, Trump thought he could talk his way out of it, reverting to his 2016 playbook when he was the challenger. It didn’t work for the nation, or for his reelection, as the unchecked pandemic produced a recession, which cost him Key 5, and sharply negative economic growth, which cost him Key 6.
Along with Trump’s failure to respond to cries for social and racial justice, the failed response to the pandemic also contributed to social unrest, which cost him Key 8. Thus, Trump went from four keys down in 2019 to his current seven keys down.
Never in the history of the United States has the White House party suffered such a sudden and dramatic reversal of fortune in just a few months.
Republicans have traditionally been very good at registering voters, and this year they had a surge in voter registration in swing states like Florida and Pennsylvania. Do these affect the keys—or could they even influence who wins the presidential election?
Registration numbers ebb and flow, but do not change a key.
One of the keys is “major foreign or military successes.” Do events like the recent peace agreements in the Middle East affect this Key?
The treaty between Israel and the Gulf states and Sudan does not earn Trump Key 11. I almost never turn a key based on a treaty unless it is of great significance and broadly acclaimed in the United States. Since I began predicting elections according to the Keys prior to the 1984 election, I have turned Key 11 for the White House party only once, for the monumental arms control treaty between the US and the Soviet Union during the second term of President Ronald Reagan.
I did not turn the key for the Democrats for the 1994 treaty between Israel and Jordan, a much more important nation than the ones involved in the current treaty. The current treaty has barely made a ripple in the United States. It is hardly mentioned during the campaign even by Trump.
We’re so close to the election, but there is so much going on in our nation. Has anything else, from protests in Philadelphia to the surging pandemic numbers, alerted you to the possibility of any surprises next week?
The incumbent charisma Key 12 is a high threshold key that turns only for a once-in-a-generation broadly inspirational candidate like Franklin Roosevelt for the Democrats or Ronald Reagan for the Republicans, both of whom brought many new voters into the fold. Trump is a showman, but he only appeals to a narrow base of fervent followers. More than 60 percent of the public don’t like him personally and don’t believe that he is honest and trustworthy.
When I retrospectively developed the keys, I did not give the charisma key to Barry Goldwater in 1964 or George McGovern in 1972, both of whom, like Trump, appealed to a narrow base of passionate followers. Trump did not meet the key’s criteria as a challenger and does not as an incumbent.
The keys gauge the big picture of incumbent strength and performance, with the message that it is governing not campaigning that counts in presidential elections. They do not readily change. They have never changed in the few weeks prior to an election.
Professor who predicted every election since 1984 tells Iain Dale why Donald Trump will lose | LBC
Last night, the Los Angeles Lakers defeated the Miami Heat in Game Six of the NBA Finals, securing the franchise's 17th championship. Two days earlier, the Heat had won a nail-biter. Game 5 had all the drama you want in a big match. I'm a Lakers fan. For me it was very stressful. I never wavered that ultimately my team would win the series but I did spend the time in between those two games anticipating drama. I also did what all people do: I prepared myself for a loss. "Well, there is still Game 7," I reminded myself constantly. In the end, Game 6 was a rout. The Lakers led by more than 30 for much of it. At some point in the third quarter one of the ABC broadcasters said something like, "My hope for the Heat is not that they'll be happy with the result of the game, obviously, but that they can be proud to have not given up." There were 20 minutes left to play. It was somewhat surreal preparing myself for a game of inches that then doesn't transpire.
Sometimes getting caught up in the polls of this election can produce a similar experience. Every indication is that Joe Biden is on pace to win convincingly on November 3. Of course there's a lot of time left to play and—as Philip Bump notes in today's Washington Post—something that has only a 14 percent chance of happening still happens quite a lot. And of course in the real world it makes no difference who wins the NBA title, but it very much does matter what happens in an election. So no one, least of all me, is thinking anything like that ABC broadcaster writing the Heat off in the third quarter.
Everyone has spent every day since election night 2016 psyching themselves up and going through the emotional process of anticipating a nail-biter. But what if it isn't a nail-baiter?
In the end, the Lakers won the game by 16. The outcome wasn't ever in doubt but they did let the Heat get back in. Ultimately it doesn't matter if they'd won by 13 or 130. But elections aren't zero-sum, which is one of the many reasons this analogy is flawed, and the referees are only impartial in one of these contests. The Democrats could take the Senate; the election could be close enough that it ends up in the courts; the Democrats could win Texas and President Obama's inaccurate prediction that the GOP's "fever would break" after the 2012 election could come true; and of course, the polls could be wrong or people could change their minds. There are no election outcomes that are simple and straightforward enough to fit in a headline.
It's a cliche that every election is "the most important of our lives," but it's also true. I can't think of an election in the last 20 years that didn't have profound consequences. I don't think you can either. And when the stakes are so high, everyone wants to do something.
There's nothing Heat fans or Laker fans can do to affect the outcome of games. But that doesn't stop us from wearing our lucky jerseys as we watch. And again it doesn't ultimately matter what happens in those events, but it does in elections, and there are very real things people can do. We are not passive viewers in a democracy. That is especially true when democracy itself is under attack by authoritarianism. Too often in the United States people sit on the sideline. But not this year. Democrats and Republicans have both been donating to their parties at historic clips. They're volunteering and making phone calls, and voting early and triple-checking their ballots. Maybe one of the consequences of this awful year is that it's giving us the civic participation we should have every year. Maybe when times are better and the consequences less obviously severe, it will happen again. And then again. And people won't remember what it was like when the fate of the country was left to only the most active subsection of citizens.
"There is everything in life but hope," Katharine Hepburn says in James Goldman's The Lion in Winter. "We're both alive," Peter O'Toole responds, "and as far as I know that's what hope is."
—Ben Dreyfuss
P.S. "The chaos is the point! It's about minority rule": Those are a couple of the six truths that Mother Jones CEO Monika Bauerlein unpacks in "This Is How Authoritarians Get Defeated," and I hope you'll give it a read because, like she says, we better be prepared for the weeks and months ahead. And if you think our team's reporting can help guide us all through this historic, high-stakes moment, please consider donating during our fall fundraising drive. We're ramping up and I hope you'll join us if you can right now.
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