[ 2016-11-14 ]

‘Prediction professor’ who called Trump’s big win also said Trump will be impeac
Few prognosticators predicted a Donald Trump
victory ahead of Tuesday night. Polls showed
Hillary Clinton comfortably ahead, and much of
America (chiefly the media) failed to anticipate
the wave of pro-Trump support that propelled him
to victory.

But a Washington, D.C.-based professor insisted
that Trump was lined up for a win — based on the
idea that elections are “primarily a reflection
on the performance of the party in power.”

Allan Lichtman uses a historically based system of
what he calls “keys” to predict election
results ahead of time. The keys are explained
in-depth in Lichtman’s book, “Predicting the
Next President: The Keys to the White House
2016.” In our conversations in September and
October, he outlined how President Obama's second
term set the Democrats up for a tight race, and
his keys tipped the balance in Trump's favor, even
if just barely.

At the end of our September conversation, Lichtman
made another call: that if elected, Trump would
eventually be impeached by a Republican Congress
that would prefer a President Mike Pence —
someone whom establishment Republicans know and
trust.

“I'm going to make another prediction,” he
said. “This one is not based on a system; it's
just my gut. They don't want Trump as president,
because they can't control him. He's
unpredictable. They'd love to have Pence — an
absolutely down-the-line, conservative,
controllable Republican. And I'm quite certain
Trump will give someone grounds for impeachment,
either by doing something that endangers national
security or because it helps his pocketbook.”

So while Republican voters clearly came home
before Nov. 8 — network exit polls show 90
percent of GOP voters cast ballots for Trump —
it's less clear that the party leadership is on
board. (Lichtman actually isn't the only person to
predict a Trump impeachment; this morning, the New
York Times's David Brooks suggested that a Trump
impeachment or resignation was “probably” in
the cards sometime within the next year.)

It's worth noting that Lichtman's predictions use
very different methods than pollsters and
data-based prognosticators. Some statisticians
take issue with the structure of his system, a set
of 13 true/false questions, saying that the binary
nature of his keys leads to what's called
“overfitting,” which is basically creating a
system that fits the data but has little
statistical significance.

But Lichtman counters by saying that the system
has correctly predicted every election since 1984
(specifically, his predictions have picked the
next president correctly in all of those elections
but 2000, when he picked Al Gore, who won the
popular vote). And Lichtman has his own criticism
of data-based predictions.

“Polls are not predictors,” he said Friday in
an email. “They are snapshots that simulate an
election. They are abused and misused as
predictors. Even the analysis of polls by Nate
Silver and others which claimed a probable Clinton
victory with from more than 70 percent to 99
percent certainty are mere compilations that are
no better than the underlying polls.”

And he has particular disdain for prediction
systems that assign a likelihood of winning.

“For all his acclaim, Nate Silver is only a
clerk, not a scientific analyst,” Lichtman
said.

As for the real reason for Trump's win, Lichtman
says the blame can't be put on Hillary Clinton or
her campaign — rather, he says, it was decided
by the larger forces that shape American
politics.

“The Democrats cannot rebuild by pointing
fingers at Hillary Clinton and her campaign, which
as the Keys demonstrated, were not the root cause
of her defeat,” he said. “The Democrats can
rehabilitate themselves only by offering an
inspiring progressive alternative to Republican
policies and building a grass-roots movement.”

Source - Washington Post

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