Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump?
American historian Allan Lichtman, who has correctly predicted nine of the last 10 presidential election winners joined Scripps News on Thursday to reveal his pick for 2024.
"So my call is that we're going to make history here, that Kamala Harris will become the first woman president of the United States," he said.
The announcement is the latest good news for Harris, who has continued to gain momentum in the national polls following President Joe Biden's decision to drop out of the race for the White House.
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With just 60 days until the election, Real Clear Politics shows Harris with a two-point lead over Trump. But Lichtman notes that polls aren't necessarily predictive of an election. Instead, he uses a unique system of criteria named after his book, "The Keys to the White House."
"The 'Keys to the White House' have you forget the pundits who have no scientific basis. Forget the polls, which are snapshots," Lichtman said. "The keys tap into the structure of how elections really work, as votes up or down on the strength of performance of the White House party. And it takes six of the 13 keys to be negative to predict the White House party's defeat."
"In my analysis, what I found was at most — depending on what happens in the two wars — even under the worst scenario, the White House party represented by Kamala Harris would lose only five keys, one short of needed to predict their defeat," Lichtman continued.
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Lichtman added that his 13 key prediction system doesn't depend on which two candidates are in any given race. Rather, it's a system he's created that essentially grades the strength and performance of the current White House party in control.
"Only two [keys] tap into the candidates," he explained. "And they're very high threshold keys asking whether the incumbent party candidate is one of those once-in-a-generation, broadly inspirational candidates — like FDR and Ronald Reagan — and of course whether the challenger is not one of those candidates."
You can watch our full interview with Lichtman in the video player above.
