The Keys to the White House

The Keys to the White House

The Keys to the White House
Author	Allan Lichtman
Country	United States
Language	English
Subject	Political science
Publisher	Madison Books
Publication date	1996
Media type	Print (Hardcover)
Pages	196
ISBN

The Keys to the White House is a 1996 book about a historically based prediction system for determining the outcome of presidential elections in the United States. The system, inspired by earthquake research, was developed in 1981 by American historian Allan Lichtman and Russian scientist Vladimir Keilis-Borok, an authority on the mathematics of prediction models. The model has a record of accurate forecasts but has been criticised by some statisticians as including too many predictors to be a sound model and for forecasting only the winner of elections rather than the vote share of the winning party.

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.