Historian Allan Lichtman, who has guessed the winner of every presidential election correctly since 1984, predicts Joe Biden will become the next president.
The author and history professor at American University revealed his selection in an opinion video for The New York Times published Wednesday.
“The pollsters and the pundits cover elections as though they were horse races,” Lichtman states in the Times’ video. “But history tells us voters are not fooled by the tricks of the campaign. Voters vote pragmatically according to how well the party holding the White House has governed the country.”
He doesn’t use polls or swing state bean counting in coming up with his predictions.
He said polls are “snapshots in time” and don’t have “any impact whatsoever on the outcome of a presidential election.”
His prediction model looks at 13 categories he has dubbed the “Keys to the White House,” CNBC reports.
The keys focus more on the record of the incumbent party in the White House than the nominees.
The 13 different categories are posed as true-false statements. If six or more of the answers are false, the challenger is named the predicted winner.
“The keys predict that [President Donald] Trump will lose the White House,” Lichtman said.
According to his model, seven of the 13 questions favored Biden.
Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh didn’t accept the prediction.
“This is an election like no other in history and the choice couldn’t be more clear — between President Trump’s established record of accomplishment for all Americans and Joe Biden’s 47 years of failure and acquiescence to the extreme left,” Murtaugh said in a statement to CNBC. “American voters will decide this election, not academics or professors.”
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