The New York Times reports:
The story of the 2016 election is one of a stunning defeat, not just for Hillary Clinton, but also for the pollsters, pundits and data-driven journalists who overwhelmingly predicted her victory.Professor Allan J. Lichtman , looking pretty darn good this election cycle.
But at least one scholar, Allan J. Lichtman, saw both coming. Dr. Lichtman, a historian at American University in Washington, is the co-creator of a historically based model that has correctly predicted the winner of the popular vote in the last eight presidential contests — and, back in September, predicted the supposedly unthinkable election of Donald J. Trump.
The model, developed in 1981 with the Russian mathematical geophysicist Vladimir Keilis-Borok and elaborated in the book “Predicting the Next President: The Keys to the White House 2016,” is simple on the surface. It disregards complex formulas in favor of 13 true-or-false statements measuring the underlying force that Dr. Lichtman, based on analyses of elections from 1860 through 1980, believes really matters: the strength of the incumbent party.
The “keys” include statements like “After the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives than after the previous midterm elections”; “The economy is not in recession”; and “The incumbent administration suffers no major failure in foreign or military affairs.”
