...Allan Litchman has called it - in favour of Kamala Harris....

...Allan Litchman has called it - in favour of Kamala Harris.

...Gold investors should look forward to a Harris win if they want to see a new strong bull market for Gold.

...Trump's economy will see higher inflation, higher rates and higher USD, stronger equity market and less attention to Gold.

...either way, neither would be able to save the global economy; rather the question of which does more damage.
Kamala Harris will win, says man with near-perfect record of predicting U.S. elections

Historian Allan Litchman has been right 9 out of 10 times. But critics say his model is flawed

Sheena Goodyear · CBC Radio · Posted: Sep 10, 2024 6:00 PM EDT |

The man who accurately predicted the outcome of nine of the last 10 U.S. presidential elections says this is going to be one for the history books.

Allan Lichtman, a U.S. presidential historian at American University in Washington, D.C., says Democratic Vice-President Kamala Harris will defeat her Republican rival, former president Donald Trump.

"Kamala Harris will become the first woman president of the United States, at least putting a big crack in the glass ceiling, if not shattering it entirely," Lichtman told As It Happens host Nil Köksal.

Using a formula he developed with late geophysicist Vladimir Keilis-Borok, Lichtman has accurately predicted the winner of every U.S. presidential election since 1984, except George W. Bush in 2000. He even predicted Republican Donald Trump's victory 2016 in the face of widespread polling that suggested his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, would win.

Despite his track record, Lichtman's methods have repeatedly come under scrutiny from pollsters, political scientists and other historians, who say his model is unscientific and subjective.

"I'm used to the whips and scorns of criticism," Lichtman said. "Show me your 40-year track record before you throw stones at mine."


American historian Allan Lichtman has accurately predicted the outcome of 9 out of the 10 last U.S. elections. And now he's predicting Democratic nominee Kamala Harris will win the 2024 contest. Lichtman explains his prediction on Power & Politics.

He justified those decisions in a recent TV interview with Power & Politics host Dave Cochrane. He said Harris's successful fundraising efforts and large crowd sizes aren't enough to net her a "charisma" key.

"Nothing against her. I think she is appealing. But that's not the definition of the key," he said. "You have to be one of those once-in-a-generation, truly inspirational, transformational candidates who broadly appeals across party lines."

Lichtman says the widespread protests over the Israel-Gaza war aren't enough for Harris to lose the "social unrest" key.

"To turn that key, it has to be massive sustained social unrest that calls into question the stability of the country," he said.
Despite being a Democrat, she doesn't get the incumbent key because she took over for President Joe Biden — something Lichtman warned against at the time.

"I was worried they would push him out, which would cost one key, the incumbency key, but that they would make a big mistake and have a big party brawl … which would cost them a second key, the contest key," he said.

"Well, it turned out they did somehow grow a brain and a spine. They united behind Harris, which saved the contest key."
Two keys, foreign military success and foreign military failure, he says, remain undecided, but they aren't enough to flip the table.
Eschewing polls and punditry

Lichtman says his formula works because it eschews polls and punditry for a deeper historical analysis.
"The keys tap into the structure of how American presidential elections really work," he told Köksal. "They're fundamentally different, which is another reason why I get criticized."

And he does, indeed, get criticized.


Julia Azari, a political scientist at Marquette University in Wisconsin, says the "fuss" around Lichtman formula is "silly at best."

"The 13 keys are at their most useful as starting points for questions: what makes for a damaging, divisive primary contest? What counts as a policy failure? What is charisma? These are interesting and important questions. But it is not in any real sense a 'model,'" Azari told CBC in an email, echoing a statement she provided to Newsweek.

In that same Newsweek article, James E. Campbell, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Buffalo, said:

"Many of the keys or indicators are highly subjective. Whether there has been social unrest or a major scandal or whether either candidate is or is not charismatic, for instance, are judged 'in eye of the beholder.'"