Biden will beat Trump in 2020, says historian who has accurately 'predicted' every winning president since 1984
A Democrat professor who is known to have accurately predicted the winner of every presidential race since 1984 believes Joe Biden will defeat President Donald Trump in the November election. American University Professor Allan Lichtman has devised a system of 13 "keys" that he says are instrumental in determining who wins the White House, CBS News reported. Lichtman was one of the few forecasters who said Trump would win the presidency in 2016. He reportedly also predicted that the 45th POTUS would be impeached. That said, he foresees a victory for the former vice president this year.
"The keys predict that Trump will lose the White House," Lichtman declared in a New York Times video op-ed released Wednesday.
However, Lichtman does consider it a close contest and says extraordinary factors could still alter the outcome of the election. "The 13 keys in his system include factors like incumbency, long-term and short-term economic figures, social unrest, and scandals, as well as the candidates' personal charisma," according to CBS News' Jason Silverstein.
Seven of the 13 keys in Lichtman's system favor Biden, while the rest favor Trump - thereby giving the Democratic presidential hopeful a slight advantage for victory. Among the keys working out in Trump's favor are that he's "the incumbent, faces no serious third-party or Republican primary challenger, has issued major policy changes and avoided any crucial military failure abroad." Furthermore, Lichtman says Trump is running against an "uncharismatic challenger."
On the other hand, Biden may have an edge considering the coronavirus pandemic and the national protests against racial injustice and police brutality. According to Lichtman, the "social unrest, current economic collapse, and the pandemic's erasure of Mr. Trump's economic gains" all favor a Biden victory. Furthermore, the incessant scandals raised during Trump's first term may also improve Biden's chances.
Yet another indicator in Lichtman's analysis that favors Biden is that Democrats made considerable gains in the 2018 midterms when they secured the House. Also, the professor does not consider Trump as a "charismatic incumbent" and says he appeals only to a narrow voting base. Nonetheless, Lichtman notes that "there are forces at play outside the keys" such as voter suppression and so-called Russian meddling in the election. "It's up to you, the voter, to decide the future of our democracy," he says in the Times op-ed. "So, get out and vote. Vote in person. Vote by mail."
Lichtman's key system gave Trump a slight advantage over Hillary Clinton weeks before the 2016 election, while most mainstream media polls showed the latter to be holding a formidable lead. At the time, Lichtman cited factors such as "Gary Johnson's third-party run, the Democrats' failures in midterm elections and the fact that the sitting president, Barack Obama, wasn't in the running," CBS reported. These factors, Lichtman, said, made 2016 "the most difficult election to assess" since he started making such predictions.
According to the report, Lichtman has successfully used his key system to forecast the winner of every presidential race since Ronald Reagan's re-election victory in 1984. In 2000, however, Lichtman had predicted that Al Gore would win the presidency but he ultimately lost to George W. Bush despite winning the popular vote.
It's worth noting that Lichtman has more or less held anti-Trump views, and even wrote a book titled 'The Case for Impeachment' in 2017.
