A notable forecaster of presidential elections said in a recent interview that “a lot would have to go wrong for [President Biden] to lose” in November.
In an interview with The Guardian released Friday, American University professor Allan Lichtman pointed to his method to predict presidential elections using 13 “keys” including whether “the incumbent party candidate is the sitting president” and “there is no serious contest for the incumbent party nomination.” Lichtman noted that Biden is the incumbent and handily defeated others in the Democratic Party in the primary.
“That’s two keys off the top,” Lichtman said, according to The Guardian. “That means six more keys would have to fall to predict his defeat. A lot would have to go wrong for Biden to lose.”
Biden has been gaining on former President Trump in recent polls, tying with him in a recent Quinnipiac poll.
They are tied at 41.3 percent in The Hill/Decision Desk HQ’s national polling average in a three-way race with Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Lichtman has a history of correctly picking the winner of presidential elections since the mid-’80s. He predicted Biden would win the 2020 election over Trump, and he said in The Guardian interview that the COVID-19 pandemic “is what did him in.”
“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,” Lichtman said, per The Guardian.