Party Mandate: After the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the House than it did after the previous midterm elections. Here's where Trump and Biden stand in Lichtman's model, along with Lichtman's responses from the video:ġ. 'There are forces at play outside the keys,' he said, such as voter suppression and potential Russian election meddling. Lichtman himself offers a note of caution in his video for the Times. Bush and now writes for The Atlantic, referred to Licthman's method Wednesday as a 'super-dodgy election-prediction 'model.'' Nate Silver, the writer and analyst at FiveThirtyEight who was famously correct in predicting every state outcome in the 2012 election, wrote in 2011 that Lichtman's results 'should be taken with a grain of salt.' Commentator David Frum, who was a speechwriter for George W. 'The pandemic has pushed the economy into recession,' Lichtman said in the video.ĭespite his impressive track record, Lichtman's simple-seeming model has its skeptics. They touch on issues such as which party has a mandate – Republicans lost House seats in the 2018 midterms – and the short-term and long-term economy under Trump. The model favors Biden on seven of the 13 prompts. The Biden campaign did not immediately respond to CNBC's requests for comment. 'American voters will decide this election, not academics or professors.' 'This is an election like no other in history and the choice couldn't be more clear – between President Trump's established record of accomplishment for all Americans and Joe Biden's 47 years of failure and acquiescence to the extreme left,' Murtaugh said. Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh pushed back on that prediction in a statement to CNBC. But if six or more of the statements are false, the challenger – in this case, Biden – is predicted to win the election. The keys are presented as true-false statements, framed to favor a win for the incumbent party if true. Lichtman's prediction model looks at 13 different categories, dubbed the 'Keys to the White House,' which have more to do with the record of the incumbent party occupying the White House than the nominees themselves.

'None of this in the end has any impact whatsoever on the outcome of a presidential election.' Polls are 'snapshots in time,' Lichtman said.

Voters vote pragmatically according to how well the party holding the White House has governed the country.' 'But history tells us voters are not fooled by the tricks of the campaign. 'The pollsters and the pundits cover elections as though they were horse races,' Lichtman said in the Times' video. Lichtman's predictive method – which puts him squarely in the minority of analysts who were right in calling Trump's win – largely ignores the detailed cross-tab polling analyses and swing state bean counting that are often prioritized in modern political punditry.

Time for change prediction