- President Joe Biden has recently faced calls to step aside for another Democratic candidate.
- Professor Allan Lichtman, who has predicted nine out of ten elections since 1984, says this might be a bad idea.
- Biden answers more questions about the 13 keys than Kamala Harris, Lichtman told the WSJ.
A professor and historian who has successfully predicted 9 out of 10 elections since 1984 says President Joe Biden is still the safest bet for Democrats.
Since Biden’s poor debate performance against Donald Trump, the president has faced calls from voters, donors and colleagues in Congress to drop out of the race for a new candidate.
Names being floated as replacements for the vice president include Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and California Gov. Gavin Newsom. However, as Business Insider previously reported, Vice President Kamala Harris may be the most obvious and viable option for Democrats, given the immediate war chest she would gain from Biden’s campaign and the support she brings from the party.
But Allan Lichtman, a presidential historian at American University, told the Wall Street Journal that even Harris can’t save the Democrats based on her famous “Keys to the White House” model. The model involves 13 true-or-false questions to determine how well the party that holds the White House is doing. If six or more of the 13 keys are false, then the party that holds the White House, in this case the Democrats, will lose.
Lichtman told the Journal that Biden has provided Democrats with seven keys so far: his incumbency, no major primaries, no recession during the election, a strong long-term economy based on real per capita economic growth compared with the average of the previous two terms, major policy changes, no major scandals directly affecting the president and an opponent with little charismatic influence.
If Harris were to become the new nominee, Democrats would risk losing two of the key things Biden won: the incumbent office and the primary.
“If Biden steps down, they obviously lose their jobs,” Lichtman told the Journal. “And it’s not at all clear that there won’t be a big fight between the parties.”
Lichtman said the only highly unlikely scenario in which Harris could retain the same keys as Biden is if Biden steps down from the presidency now, handing the White House to the vice president just months before the election.
He said Harris would get the key to the mandate and Biden could then release his delegates to his vice president to secure the key to the contest.
A Biden campaign spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Lichtman has been predicting election results since Ronald Reagan won his second term against Democratic opponent Walter Mondale in 1984. The only election he missed was in 2000, when he predicted Al Gore would win the presidency, although the historian has maintained that he correctly predicted Gore would win the popular vote.
In 2021, Lichtman told the Miami Herald that he believed Trump would not make a successful political comeback in 2024, citing some of the former president’s struggling businesses and financial problems at the time as well as the fact that Trump is not the incumbent.
