On January 20, 2025 Donald Trump will be inaugurated as America’s 47th president. One of the most important lessons about Donald Trump’s 2924 election victory is that, in foresight, it was predictable long before election day. This means that the characterization provided by most pollsters, that the contest was a dead heat, were driven by factors that were largely irrelevant.
Historian Allan Lichtman has identified key factors that are relevant, and which typically determine the outcomes of U.S. presidential elections. These factors include the state of the economy, whether or not the candidates are charismatic, whether or not the incumbent administration has experienced a scandal, the degree of social unrest, and how the nation has been faring in foreign affairs and military conflicts.
Lichtman has been forecasting the outcomes of U.S. presidential elections since 1981, and his track record is almost perfect. His method is simple. He assigns values of either true or false to 13 specific statements. If at least eight of his 13 attributions are true, he calls the election for the candidate of the incumbent party. However, if at least six are false, then he calls the election for the candidate of the challenging party.
In the academic psychology literature, Lichtman’s technique is an example of a “tally heuristic,” tally in that it amounts to tallying up a set of numbers. Because making these attributions can be done quickly, and with only a little information, the heuristic is called “fast and frugal.”
The psychologists who study fast and frugal heuristics argue that making forecast in complex situations is best done with simple techniques, not complex techniques. The evidence supporting this argument is strong, and is based on research that demonstrates that simple models, such as the tally heuristic, often outperform the judgments of most human experts. The research findings note that what experts are good at is identifying key factors. What they are less good at is putting those factors together in a consistent way. It is this lack of consistency which provides simple heuristics with their comparative power, once the key factors have been identified.
Since 1981, when Lichtman began to use his approach, his predictions have been incorrect on only three occasions. His system falsely predicted that Al Gore would beat George W. Bush in 2000. It falsely predicted that Donald Trump would win the popular vote over Hillary Clinton in 2016. Finally, it falsely predicted that Kamala Harris would defeat Donald Trump in 2024.
There were special issues associated with each of the three failures. The 2000 Bush vs. Gore contest was a close call in the electoral college vote, but not in the popular vote. Gore handily won the popular vote, as Lichtman had predicted. That said, the 2000 election was controversial, with the main source of controversy being the vote in Florida. More than a decade after that election, a group of media outlets, which included USA Today, the Miami Herald, and the Knight Ridder chain, engaged in a review of the Florida ballots. The review concluded that a more detailed ballot recount would have led to the Gore victory which Lichtman predicted.
Lichtman’s system correctly called the actual outcome of 2016 Trump vs. Clinton contest, but not the popular vote; and Lichtman now predicts the actual election winner, not the winner of the popular vote.
Lichtman would have correctly predicted a Trump victory in 2024 had he characterized Trump as being charismatic. Instead, he provided an answer of TRUE to the following question: The challenging party candidate, meaning Trump, is not charismatic or a national hero. There are many features about Donald that could be described as true, but anybody attending one of his rallies would be hard pressed to say he lacks charisma.
Lichtman might also have correctly predicted the outcome of the 2024 election had he used a slightly different statement about the short-term economy. The statement he used was the following: The economy is not in recession during the election campaign. To this statement, his response was TRUE. This is the only statement that pertains to the short-term economy, and it failed to capture how working class and Latino voters perceived the state of the economy during Biden’s presidency. These voters were pivotal in supporting Trump over Harris.
An important reason why these voters had a negative impression of the short-term economy is inflation. Their standard of living, known as their real wage, had declined during the prior four years. Had the statement instead been about how voters felt about the state of the economy, rather than whether the economy was in recession, Lichtman’s tally would have predicted the victory of Trump over Harris.
In previous posts, I made two points. First, in a post from April 2020, I cautioned out that in coming out of the pandemic, policy makers would need to be very careful about reigniting inflation in their attempts to address unemployment. Second, in a post from September 2024, I explained that most voters would judge the economy by their experience of the real wage, not the broad macroeconomic indicators that were indicating that the economy was doing well.
For psychological reasons, both points went largely unheeded. On the first point, the Biden administration exacerbated what was already a surge in global inflation, through excessive stimulus. In doing so, Biden’s judgment was biased, reflecting excessive optimism and overconfidence.
On the second point, most politicians and pundits failed to understand how voters viewed the state of the economy, short-term. Their bias reflected inaccurate stereotypes, a phenomenon related to the psychological concept known as representativeness. This is a failure to understand how voters were thinking.
Post-election analyses revealed that many voters based their presidential ballot choices by using a fast and frugal heuristic known as “take the best.” Voters who use this heuristic choose candidates on the basis of a single issue. For many working class voters, that issue was standard of living. For others it was immigration. For still others, it was support for the tech industry.
The contest between Trump and Harris was not a statistical dead heat, as so many in the media reported prior to election day. Allan Lichtman’s tally heuristic, properly implemented, was clear to predict Trump’s 2024 election victory many months before the election.
This post was originally published on here
