The professor and historian, who has correctly predicted nine of 10 elections since 1984, believes President Joe Biden remains the safest option for Democrats.
Since Biden’s poor performance in a debate with President Donald Trump, the president has been fielding calls from voters, donors and lawmakers to step back from choosing a new candidate.
Names that have been floated as possible successors include Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and California Governor Gavin Newsom, but as Business Insider previously reported, Vice President Kamala Harris may be Democrats’ most obvious and viable choice, given the benefit of ready funding and intraparty support from the Biden campaign.
But Alan Lichtman, a presidential historian at American University, told The Wall Street Journal that not even Harris can save the Democrats, based on his famous “Keys to the White House” model, which includes 13 true-or-false questions to gauge the performance of the party in control of the White House. If six or more of the 13 keys are false, the party in control of the White House — in this case the Democrats — will lose.
Lichtman told The Wall Street Journal that Biden has provided seven keys to the Democratic Party so far: incumbency, no notable primaries, no recession during the election cycle, long-term economic strength based on real per capita economic growth compared to the average of the past two terms, major policy changes, no major scandals directly linked to the president and no uncharismatic challenger.
If Harris becomes the new nominee, Democrats risk losing two of the keys Biden has secured: incumbency and primary elections.
“If Biden steps down, they’re clearly going to lose their incumbency,” Lichtman told The Wall Street Journal, “and it’s not at all clear that there won’t be a big partisan fight.”
Lichtman said the only scenario in which it’s highly unlikely Harris would be able to keep the same keys Biden does is if Biden were to leave office now and hand the White House over to his vice president just months before the election.
He said Harris would get the keys to the incumbency, and then Biden would hand the delegates to his vice president and secure the keys to the contest.
A Biden campaign spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Lichtman has been predicting election outcomes since Ronald Reagan defeated Democratic challenger Walter Mondale to win a second term in 1984. His only mistake was in 2000, when he predicted Al Gore would win the presidency, but he maintained that he was right in predicting Gore would win the popular vote.
In 2021, Lichtman told the Miami Herald that he didn’t think Trump would return to politics in 2024, citing Trump’s then-current business failures, financial difficulties and the fact that he was not a sitting president.
