Allan Lichtman tries to explain away his failure to call the 2024 POTUS elections in a conversation with liberal media personality Chris Cuomo. Lichtman is the co-inventor of the "13 keys", which supposedly predicted the last 10 presidential elections correctly. But this time, they completely failed. Yes, Lichtman read the "keys" (or the tea leaves?) as indicating a win for Harris. So what went wrong?
In the clip above, Lichtman sounds like any basic liberal pundit, claiming that "misinformation" and "racism" reached such stunning new levels that his "keys" went off the grid. Yeah, whatever. But note that Lichtman rather notoriously called the 2016 elections for Trump! What was different this time?
Lichtman´s 13 keys are based on the idea that the voters, at least as a collective, make a rational choice based on the actual track record of the incumbent president´s administration. So presumably the rational choice this year would have been to vote Harris. But why? Can´t the rational voters see the economic crisis that stares them right in their faces? According to his own keys, the voters in such a situation should give the challenger a shot at it.
Instead, we get the tired old claim that everything is sunshine, and that voters who don´t see this are simply irrational. Let them eat official optimism! I assume Lichtman can´t stand Trump and was carried away. That being said, he probably has some kind of point when saying that the current situation is very different from the previous 44 years. The rules have changed. Perhaps very fundamentally.
But have they changed in the way the pundits assume? Somehow I doubt it...
