The Keys to the White House

Prediction system

The Keys are based on the theory that presidential election results turn primarily on the performance of the party controlling the White House and that campaigning by challenging an incumbent-party candidates will have no impact on results. According to this theory, a pragmatic American electorate chooses a president based on the performance of the party holding the White House as measured by the consequential events and episodes of a term – economic boom and bust, foreign policy successes and failures, social unrest, scandal, and policy innovation.

If the nation fares well during the term of the incumbent party, that party wins another four years in office; otherwise, the challenging party prevails. According to the Keys model, nothing that a candidate has said or done during a campaign, when the public discounts conventional electioneering as political spin, has changed his or her prospects at the polls. Debates, advertising, television appearances, news coverage, and campaign strategies count for virtually nothing on Election Day.

Through the application of pattern recognition methodology used in geophysics to data for American presidential elections from 1860 (the first election with a four-year record of competition between Republicans and Democrats) Lichtman and Keilis-Borok developed 13 diagnostic questions that are stated as propositions that favor reelection of the incumbent party. When five or fewer of these propositions are false or turned against the party holding the White House, that party wins another term in office. When six or more are false, the challenging party wins.

Unlike many alternative models, the Keys include no polling data, but are based on the big picture of how well the party in power and the country are faring prior to an upcoming election. In addition, the Keys do not presume that voters are driven by economic concerns alone. Voters are less narrow-minded and more sophisticated than that; they decide presidential elections on a wide-ranging assessment of the performance of incumbent parties, all of which are reflected in one or more Keys.

Answers to the questions posed in the Keys require the kinds of judgments that historians typically make about the past. But the judgments are constrained by explicit definitions of each Key. For example, a contested incumbent party nomination is defined as one in which the losing candidates combined secured at least one-third of the delegate votes. Judgments are also constrained by how individual keys have been turned in all 37 previous elections covered by the system. For example, to qualify as charismatic and turn key 12 or 13 – the most judgmental of all keys – an incumbent or challenging-party candidate must measure up to Ronald Reagan, John F Kennedy, Benjamin Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt. The system is also extremely robust as the same keys that predicted Abraham Lincoln’s defeat of Stephen Douglas in 1860 also predicted George W. Bush’s defeat of John Kerry in 2004, despite vast changes in American politics, society, demographic composition, and economic life.

This forecast is incorporated in the PollyVote.

Track record

The Keys retrospectively account for the popular vote winners of every presidential election from 1860 through 1980 and prospectively forecast the popular-vote winners of all eight presidential elections from 1984 through 2012. The Keys model predicted George W. Bush’s reelection in April 2003, nearly a year before any other scientific model. In the late spring of 1988, the Keys predicted George H. W. Bush’s victory when he trailed Democrat Michael Dukakis by 17 percentage points in the polls. It predicted Bill Clinton’s win in the complex three-candidate election of 1992. In six elections, the keys have predicted three Republican and three Democratic victories in the popular vote.

In the contested election of 2000, the Keys correctly forecast Democratic candidate Al Gore’s popular-vote victory. However, with five keys turned against them, the Democrats were just one key short of a predicted defeat. However, a fatal sixth key, Third Party Key 4, could conceivably have turned against the party holding the White House. Consumer advocate Ralph Nader surpassed the 5 percent threshold in some polls, However, the rule of thumb for third-party contenders is that they usually finish at about half their peak poll percentage because of the voters’ reluctance to back a nearly certain loser. Nader finished with 2.7% of the popular vote, just short of the threshold needed to topple Key 4. However, Nader won more than 97,000 votes in the state of Florida, more than enough to cost Gore a victory (and the presidency) in a state that Bush won by 537 votes.

In 2016, the Keys forecast Donald Trump would win the popular vote, if and only if the main third party candidates (Jill Stein and Gary Johnson) collectively won more than 5% of the vote. Lichtman incorrectly predicted that they would win more then the 5% of the vote. As such Lichtman incorrectly predicted that Trump would win the popular vote. Lichtman made this prediction prior to the first debate, when Gary Johnson was polling above 6% and it indeed seemed that Clinton would lose the popular vote following his model. After the first debate, when support for third party candidates plunged nationwide, Lichtman notably refused to update his prediction.

Popular Vote vs. Electoral College

Lichtman's keys are predominantly a predictor of the popular vote, however limited predictions can be made from the model about whether the electoral college outcome and popular vote might diverge. Specifically, while Lichtman's model says (accurately) that any candidate with 8 or more positive keys and 5 or fewer negative keys will win the popular vote, any candidate with EXACTLY 8 positive keys and 5 negative ones runs a serious risk of winning the popular vote but losing the electoral college. In these specific cases, campaign factors may actually matter. Candidates with exactly 5 negative keys who run stellar or at least highly competent campaigns, even when faced with the very real possibility of losing the electoral college (Truman in 1948, Bill Clinton in 1996) can seal an electoral college victory on top of their popular vote win. Candidates with exactly 5 negative keys who don't campaign, run a poor campaign, or take their win in certain states for granted (Grover Cleveland in 1888, Al Gore in 2000, and Hillary Clinton in 2016) typically lose the electoral college, even if they do win the popular vote.

The one exception to this rule is the election of 1876, where the replacement of Independent Supreme Court justice David Davis with a Republican on the Electoral Commission of 1877 (thus giving the GOP a majority on that board) and a political deal (the Compromise of 1877) put Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House in return for ending Reconstruction. This happened in spite of the fact that the Republican Party had 9 negative keys that year, that Hayes lost the popular vote by a substantial margin, and that at least three states had conflicting sets of election returns - any one of which could have thrown the electoral college to Samuel Tilden, who was declared to have lost the electoral college by a single vote by the majority-Republican Electoral Commission.

The 13 Keys to the White House

The Keys are statements that favor victory (in the popular vote count) for the incumbent party. When five or fewer statements are false, the incumbent party is predicted to win the popular vote; when six or more are false, the challenging party is predicted to win the popular vote.

1. Party Mandate: After the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives than after the previous midterm elections.
2. Contest: There is no serious contest for the incumbent party nomination.
3. Incumbency: The incumbent party candidate is the sitting president.
4. Third party: There is no significant third party or independent campaign.
5. Short term economy: The economy is not in recession during the election campaign.
6. Long term economy: Real per capita economic growth during the term equals or exceeds mean growth during the previous two terms.
7. Policy change: The incumbent administration effects major changes in national policy.
8. Social unrest: There is no sustained social unrest during the term.
9. Scandal: The incumbent administration is untainted by major scandal.
10. Foreign/military failure: The incumbent administration suffers no major failure in foreign or military affairs.
11. Foreign/military success: The incumbent administration achieves a major success in foreign or military affairs.
12. Incumbent charisma: The incumbent party candidate is charismatic or a national hero.
13. Challenger charisma: The challenging party candidate is not charismatic or a national hero.

The above 13 keys are slightly different from the 12 keys originally proposed in 1981.