TRUMP WAS PREDICTED TO WIN BY A D.C. PROFESSOR

…Professor Allan Litchman predicted that Trump would win.

 

Prior to the election, a Washington based professor had insisted that Donald Trump was already lined up for a win.  This professor said that this was based on the idea that elections are “primarily a reflection on the performance of the party in power,” and the GOP was obviously the party in power in the Senate, the House and in many US states.

 

At the time, few individuals had even thought that Trump had any kind of chance, and the polls showed Hillary Clinton comfortably ahead, while much of America, especially the media, had failed to anticipate the wave of pro-Trump support that propelled him to the victory circle.

 

The professor in question here was Mr. Allan Lichtman, who uses a historically based system of what he calls “keys” to predict election results well ahead of time.

 

The so called “keys” are explained in-depth in Lichtman’s book: “Predicting the Next President: The Keys to the White House 2016.” In his interviews held in September and October, he outlined how President Obama's second term set the Democrats up for a very tight race, and the professor’s “keys” tipped the balance in Trump's favor, but just barely.

 

But that wasn’t the end of Lichtman’s predictions.

 

As early as the end of September, Professor Lichtman made another prediction that if elected, Trump would eventually be impeached by a Republican Congress.

 

What you say?  Why would the same group that actually nominated Trump to be their standard bearer, impeach him? 

 

According to the Professor, the Republican leadership would prefer a President Mike Pence because he would be someone whom the establishment Republicans know and trust, and Trump was unpredictable and uncontrollable.

 

Lichtman went further in saying “They'd love (the GOP) to have Pence.  He’s an absolutely down-the-line, conservative, a controllable Republican.  And I'm quite certain Trump will eventually give them the grounds for impeachment, either by doing something that endangers national security or because it helps his personal pocketbook.”

 

Nobody expected it, but the Republican voters clearly came home on Nov. 8^th.  According to the network exit polls, they showed that 90% of all GOP voters held their noses as they cast ballots for Trump.   But it's less clear that the party leadership was also on board.

 

However, the professor isn’t the only person to predict a future Trump impeachment.  The New York Times's, David Brook, has also suggested that a Trump impeachment or resignation was “probably in the cards” sometime within the next year.  Most prognosticators are not as forward as the professor or Mr. Brooks, but many think that with a temperament like Trump’s and with his checkered past, there is no way that he can be under the microscope in the White House and not do something that will get him into serious trouble.

 

On top of that possibility, it is expected that more and more former statements or more examples like the Access Hollywood tapes will be uncovered from Trump’s past.  It is expected that Trump will be spending much of his time responding to the various tapes or witnesses that will be offering more and more reasons for the GOP to get rid of Donald Trump.

 

But the professor’s methods for his system of predictions does need to be studied.

 

The professor’s methods are not accepted by many of the so called "experts", but the professor says that his method has worked, consistently going back to the 1984 elections.  Lichtman’s predictions have picked the next president correctly in all of those elections but 2000, but then he had picked Al Gore, who did win the popular vote. And Lichtman has his own criticism of data-based predictions.  In fact, for all his acclaim, Nate Silver of the FiveThirtyEight blog, the professor says that, “Silver is only a clerk, not a scientific analyst.”

 

Some statisticians take issue with the structure of Lichtman’s system, which is a set of 13 true/false questions which basically has little statistical significance.  But the fact that his “system” has predicted the winner, time and time again, does cause these so called “experts” to have to admit it does still seem to always work out.

 

“Polls are not predictors,” Lichtman said recently 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% to 99% certainty are mere compilations that are no better than the underlying polls.”  The professor has total disdain for prediction systems that assign a likelihood of winning.

 

For the real reason for Trump's win, Lichtman says the blame can't be put on Hillary Clinton or her campaign.  He states that 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 highly progressive alternative to Republican policies and building a grass-roots movement.”

 

This may in fact be true, but others feel that until the Democrats start taking back their local elections, the state's elections and more state governorships, as long as the Republicans continue to be the holders of those positions, getting back into the White House will be the least of the Democrats problems.

 

There is a very big reason that the Democrats had better start understanding as to why progressives like Senator’s Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are so popular within today's highly progressive Democratic Party.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2016