Amid the avalanche of news about President Trump’s impeachment in recent days, I called Allan Lichtman, the American University political historian who has correctly predicted virtually every U.S. presidential election since 1984. I wanted to hear his forecasts about the impeachment, and about the November elections.
In 2017, Lichtman accurately predicted that Trump would be impeached. Before the 2016 elections, he correctly forecast Trump’s victory, when the polls were saying that Hillary Clinton would win.
Lichtman told me that he has not yet made his final prediction for the 2020 elections, but he offered some valuable clues. He said Trump will be acquitted by the Republican majority in the Senate — no surprise here — but added that the impeachment may cost him dearly in the November elections.
“The impeachment trial matters a great deal,” he said. “The American people are going to make up their own minds about whether there has been a real fair trial, and whether or not Trump has abused his power,” and their conclusions may not help Trump in November, he added.
Playing the devil’s advocate, I asked Lichtman about the opposite scenario: that Trump will be acquitted thanks to the Republican Senate majority, as expected, and that he will then go on the offensive and say, “You see, I told you, this entire trial was a witch hunt.”
Lichtman responded that most Americans are not likely to buy that argument. Already before the impeachment trial, 51 percent of Americans said they wanted Trump to be tried and removed from office, according to a CNN poll. Things are likely to only get worse for Trump as the trial goes on, he said.
Surprisingly, the strength of the U.S. economy will not be enough for Trump to be re-elected, Lichtman said. The professor bases his predictions on a 13-keys forecasting model he developed, in which a sitting president wins if he has fewer than six negative keys going against him.
“Right now, Trump is down in about four or five keys,” such the landslide Democratic victory in the 2018 mid-terms, he said. “Therefore, it would take one more key to count him out.”
The economy is only one of many predictors, he said. If it had been the most important one, Hillary Clinton would have won in 2016, because she had a very strong economy in her favor, he said.
What the Democrats need to win in November is a charismatic candidate, Lichtman said.
“The obsession with the ideology of the Democratic candidate is totally misleading. There is no relationship between ideology or issues in the outcome of elections,” he said. He cited the cases of proven, experienced candidates like Mike Dukakis in 1988, Al Gore in 2000, John Kerry in 2004, and Hillary Clinton in 2016, all of whom lost their elections.
“The only thing that matters, according to my keys, is if you get an inspirational Democrat, a charismatic figure like John F. Kennedy, or Barack Obama,” Lichtman said.
Right now, Lichtman doesn’t see any charismatic candidate among the current Democratic hopefuls. But one could emerge during the upcoming debates, or you could have a surprise candidacy down the road, “like Michelle Obama,” he added.
I agree with most of Lichtman’s views, especially with his tacit hint that the former first lady would be a formidable Democratic candidate if she joined the race. (Please, Michelle, jump in!)
But I’m not convinced that Trump’s impeachment trial will be a big factor in November. On the contrary, I’m afraid that — even if most Americans realize that Trump prevented key witnesses from testifying, most likely because he has something to hide — all of this may be long forgotten before the election.
Trump is a master of mass distraction and will surely come up with a side scandal, or a war, or something else to drive attention away from his record of blatant lies, abuses of power, cruelty against immigrant children, failure to show his tax returns, climate-change denials, opposition to gun-safety laws, and many other sins.
Yes, impeachment is important, but if the Democrats focus on it too much in the coming months, they will be outsmarted.
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