So, Allen Lichtman went on CNN and finally had an interview discussing what went wrong with his prediction. And...he finally admits his model is wrong, and that if ahistorical factors occur, that the keys become useless. I don't think he realized the full extent of that statement, but no crap shirlock. Still, let's go into what he said.
He mentioned the incumbency key and how he never saw people openly trash their nominee like they did. Same with the no primary challenge key. And again, I have answers to that. We aren't in normal times. His model relies on assumptions about how people will act and while it might be right most of the time, 2024 was a very weird year. And people acted atypically. And here's the thing people miss.
We ARE undergoing a party realignment. I'm convinced of it. 2016 was a realigning election. We had both parties have a schism. Both parties had anti establishment elements arise from within, and take a portion of their voter bases with them. On the right, this was Donald Trump, who openly trashed the rest of the party, and won over the voter base, since making it his party and running out the opposition. The democrats? They had Bernie Sanders. But because the democrats are....significantly less fair, and operate more like a top down oligarchy, they basically were able to push clinton down everyone's throats, and suppressed criticism within their party. This has led to, ever since, low enthusiasm and morale among democratic voters, which has lost them elections.
And this is what lichtman misses. The democrats have a culture of suppressing dissent. This doesn't make dissent go away. It just makes it foment and rot the party from within while the party keeps carrying on like everything is good, everything is fine. The keys turned artificially. There was no primary challenge because the democrats suppress any challengers. They squashed dissent within their party, but outside of it, voters had been dissenting for years, only to be told to stfu and vote for them anyway, or else. And then once the debate happened and biden blew it, the facade of unity cracked and everything broke down. Then they pushed harris which, while putting a new coat of paint on the party, didn't actually solve their internal structural issues or coailitional issues.
And from there, the story writes itself. Harris ran as 4 more years of biden, the democrats lost their enthusiasm by october, and harris lost.
And before I go further, I wanna address my own (informal) prediction being wrong. While the stats are what they are, I misjudged the harris campaign's lack of enthusiasm, believing that she managed to get a second wind in the last minute with latino voters and possibly the white working class, but that didn't materialize. I mean, until elections are called, all possible outcomes are in superposition like schrodingers cat, and you dont know until the election happens which exact multiverse you happen to be in, so to speak. Are we in the one where the latino vote carries PA to victory or the one where harris deflates and trump underperforms? We found out tuesday, and my personal prediction went the wrong way. My official data driven one was pretty accurate, despite poll still underestimating trump (again).
But yeah. Back to the keys. Again, the democrats "teach to the test" so to speak. They tend to artificially turn the keys like they're a checklist and ignore the massive dissent and dissatisfaction from within.
And I dont think lichtman even realizes how wrong his forecast was. Like, he doesnt seem to understand that what's driving a lot of trends since 2016 is the economy and how neoliberal centrism isnt materially making peoples' lives better. TO be frank, biden, despite whatever mildly progressive policy he failed to pass, still governed like a moderate republican in some ways. He was the "nothing will fundamentally change" guy. And that....went over like a wet fart. I knew this would happen. i was antagonizing libs when they were arrogant after winning 2020 about how in 2024, biden would be insanely unpopular and lose. And even replacing him with harris, they did. It's not rocket science. because they cant understand that people arent happy with the entire paradigm. This is the kind of disillusionment that existed in the soviet union in the 1980s. Where the system is operating as designed, but people kinda realize that its just not working. So what happened when gorbachev liberalized? The entire thing collapsed.
Here in the US, things arent operating quite the same. We are experiencing a generational shift in a realignment toward populist politics. And the democrats have resisted this change. And they're reaping what they sowed. The left couldn't embraced this. They could've embraced big solutions. but they artificially suppressed the energy within their party and pushed the exact same thing no one wanted every 4 years, and with the exception of 2020, which biden barely won, the democrats are losing. Their coalition is only able to win in years where people are fired up to vote AGAINST the GOP. No one actually LIKES their stuff. THeir entire party at this point is merely an apparatus to oppose trump, and it's failing miserably at that.
Which, to go back to my point i was gonna make....the economy key. People are backlashing against the economy. it isnt working for people. The metrics are good yes, but much like the USSR in the 1980s, it isnt a matter of the system operating as intended, people are questioning the system itself. And we have two ways we can approach this. Well, 3 actually, but the third being communist revolution so thats off the table. We can either have a new deal on the left that changes what the economy is and makes it work for people, or we can descend into fascism. Because the democrats have refused to embrace populism and their own modern FDRs, we're getting the fascist outcome. We're facing a collapsing democratic party, and yeah, i'll say it, the democratic party is collapsing. It banked its money on being able to turn out the moderate republican and minority vote, and they're underperforming on all metrics. Their "for every working class voter we lose we'll pick up two moderate republicans" strategy is failing MISERABLY.
Part of me is glad to see it. Really. I HATE the democrats. The only reason I spent so much time defending them was because I believe trump is fundamentally dangerous and a threat to democracy itself. Also, because a democratic party collapse at this time may actually backfire against the left as biden has embraced mild elements of progressive policy into his party.
But it seems clear thats one of the reasons they had an axe to grind against biden. They wanted to push him back and get rid of the tiny modicum of power he gave progressives and go back to 1992. And the dems arrogantly started going on when harris took over that her path to victory was different from biden and went thorugh the sun belt. Polling never really supported this assertion. Polling was consistently better in the rust belt and come election day, harris's best path to 270 was still WI/MI/PA. The thing is, she underperformed so badly, she lost all those states. She was struggling in her 2024 "blue wall" states of VA, NH, MN, etc., and was even massively underperforming in fricking NEW YORK, ILLINOIS, and NEW JERSEY!
Seriously, if these trends continue, the democratic party is DONE. It's COLLAPSING. We're on the bad side of a realignment. And again, what's driving this is the economy. Lichtman's model didnt even account for fricking inflation. Like holy crap. It doesnt account for the fact that people dont have faith in the economy. We do have a great economy...on paper. But the metrics never actually meant anything for normal people. And they're losing faith in them.
So yeah. We're realigning. During realignments, a model like lichtman's isn't gonna work, because it assumes people think "normally", and they're not. The democratic party is collapsing before our very eyes, people are losing faith in the economy. And the metrics the model predicts mean nothing.
Allen Lichtman was a cope peddler for liberals who wanted to ignore realities and arrogantly assert that everything was fine and polls were wrong. And Lichtman, in his interview, STILL wouldnt acknowledge silver was more correct than him, citing that he was a competitor of his and had a vested interest against the keys. As a polls guy myself who does my own predictions, well, polls are accurate. And the polls were accurate enough this time. Anyone could look at the state of the race and know the dems were the underdog. Harris fought valiantly for what it's worth. She brought the race to a functional tossup by election day, but she wasn't able to get across the finish line.
The polls indicated this. My own model had Harris as a 46% chance she could win. She wasnt favored to win. i thought she would win because it was close enough to 50-50, and polling error could go either way, but my polling model had harris losing. And honestly? Even a single point overperformance for trump would've led to 226-312. She underperformed by around 2-3 on average I'd say. It varies, trends arent uniform across the country, but applying different national levels of over/under performance, i came to the conclusion 2.5 is about where we'd end up. Let's look at that again.
I always said, we could either end up with 2016, or 2022. 2016 and 2020 both had systematic underperformances by democrats. 2022 had the republicans underperforming. Which kind of year 2024 would be was a coin flip. I leaned into a 2022 year in my informal personal prediction, but i kind of understood all along that a scenario like the above was possible. I wish i articulated this before the eleciton, but i wanted to wait until i got the final data, and by then i was too busy doing other prediction stuff and too tired to post about it in time. But given statistics, yeah. I've always discussed over/underperformances to polling going back to 2016. So that was always assumed.
The fact is, lichtman's keys were wrong, and he was selling copium to resist libs. Polling was largely correct, and the results were mostly within the margin of error. Some extreme outcomes happened in safe states, like NJ being D+5 instead of D+16 or so, but going back to biden's numbers, even the signs of that stuff was there all along, people just had hope that harris would actually outperform biden's map.
And yeah. That's my opinion on lichtman, his keys, and polling. Polling, good, keys, bad, and if anything, for better or for worse, i as vindicated all along as i knew his model didn't necessarily apply in a weird year like 2024 where all of the metrics were going against it. And the polling was right. The one solace i have about trump getting reelected, is that the resist libs were fricking wrong all along. And tbqh, even if i also fear a trump outcome, part of me likes seeing their crap eating grin wiped off their smug faces. It's the one silver lining of this whole mess. Maybe they'll fricking listen when we tell them their candidates suck. I kinda get the impression democrats won't learn from this, just as they didn't learn in 2016, but one can hope.
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