Despite national polls suggesting Biden is struggling and trailing in several key swing states, Lichtman remains confident in Biden’s chances, citing that the president has already secured two of his “13 Keys”: no serious primary challenges and the advantage of incumbency. “That’s two keys off the top,” Lichtman explained, “That means six more keys would have to fall to predict his defeat. A lot would have to go wrong for Biden to lose.”
Lichtman, who accurately foresaw Trump’s victory in 2016 and Biden’s in 2020, expressed skepticism about current polling, emphasizing that “polls six, seven months before an election have zero predictive value.” He also warned that while Biden’s campaign shouldn’t be overly confident, unforeseeable major events could still impact the election. “It’s always possible there could be a cataclysmic enough event outside the scope of the keys that could affect the election,” he noted.
As per a Daily Mail report, the historian also pointed to the Covid-19 pandemic as a decisive factor in his correct prediction of Biden’s 2020 victory, saying, “The pandemic is what did him in. He congratulated me for predicting him but he didn’t understand the keys. The message of the keys is it’s governance not campaigning that counts and instead of dealing substantively with the pandemic, as we know, he thought he could talk his way out of it and that sank him.”
While some of Lichtman’s keys could potentially favor Trump, including the presence of a significant third-party challenger and aspects of social unrest, Lichtman still sees the 2024 election trending towards Biden. He candidly acknowledges the limits of his system, expressing the personal pressure he faces: “It’s nerve-racking because there are a lot of people who’d love to see me fail.” He added, “I’m human. It doesn’t mean my system’s wrong. Nothing is perfect in the human world.”
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