Kamala Harris vs Donald Trump race has finally ended with Harris calling up Donald Trump Wednesday afternoon and conceding the election but the rivalry between Allan Lichtman and Nate silver is not ending. Both of them were wrong in predicting the election — Allan Lichtman said Kamala Harris would win and Nate Silver forecast a Trump win but in a very close battle. Trump’s win was with a huge lead — a possibility ruled out by all polls. But as Allan Lichtman admitted that he was wrong, he said, “Unlike Nate Silver, who will try to squirm out of why he didn’t see the election coming, I admit that I was wrong. I will assess the election and the keys on my live show this Thursday at 9 PM Eastern. @allanlichtmanyoutube.”
Lichtman predicted 9 of the last 10 elections correctly and earned the moniker ‘Nostradamus’ but couldn’t predict Donald Trump’s mighty comeback. On Election Night, he hosted a nearly six-hour podcast breaking down the election results and at the end of it he was shocked at the election’s outcome.
Allan Lichtman’s forecast is not based on any polls but on 13 keys that he devised in 1981. The keys were developed based on the analysis of trends in presidential campaigns since 1860: if 8 or more keys are true for a party, it will win the election. The 13 keys are party mandate, contest, incumbency, third party, short-term economy, long-term economy, policy change, social unrest, scandal, foreign/military failure, foreign/military success, incumbent charisma, challenger charisma.
On Election Night, Nate Silver announced that he was pulling his prediction model because it wasn’t “capturing the story of this election night well.” Nate Silver washed his hands off his final prediction that it would be a close battle and re-upped his October prediction elaborating 24 reasons that Trump could win the election. “We don’t lack in explanations for why he returned to the White House,” Silver wrote.
