The Keys to the White House: A Preliminary Forecast for 2012

The Keys To The White House

Every four years the media worldwide spends more than a billion dollars covering the American presidential campaign. In the general election campaign, every gesture, word, and deed of the Republican and Democratic candidates is scrutinized for its purported effect on the outcome of the fall election. As in a horserace, candidates are viewed as spurting ahead or slipping behind day by day, with the superior campaigner ultimately triumphing at the polls. The only problem with this “horserace” model that dominates the coverage of presidential elections is that it is false and misleading.

The historical record of presidential elections shows that a pragmatic electorate chooses a president, not according to events on the campaign trail, but according to the performance of the party holding the White House as measured by the consequential events and episodes of a term - economic boom and bust, foreign policy successes and failures, social unrest, scandal, and policy innovation. This new vision of American politics is based on The Keys to the White House, a prediction system based on the study of every presidential election from 1860 to 2008. I first developed the Keys system in 1981, in collaboration with Vladimir Keilis-Borok, founder of the International Institute of Earthquake Prediction Theory and Mathematical Geophysics. Retrospectively, the keys model accounts for the popular vote winner of every American presidential election since 1860, much longer than any other prediction system. Prospectively, the Keys to the White House has correctly forecast the popular vote winner of all seven presidential elections from 1984 to 2008, usually months or even years prior to Election Day. For example, the keys called Vice President George H. W. Bush's victory in the spring of 1988 when he trailed Mike Dukakis by double-digits in the polls and was being written off by the pollsters and the pundits (Lichtman, 1988, May). The Keys forecast George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election in April 2003, nearly a year before any other academic model (Jones, 2007). In February 2006, more than two and a half years ahead of time, the Keys predicted that the Democrats would recapture the White House in the 2008 election (Lichtman, 2006, 5).

As indicated in Table 1, each of the thirteen keys is stated as a threshold condition that always favors the re-election of the party holding the White House. For example, Key 5 is phrased as “The economy is not in recession during the election campaign.” Each key can then be assessed as true or false prior to an upcoming election and the winner predicted according to a simple decision rule. When five or fewer keys are false, the incumbent party wins; when any six or more are false, the challenging party wins.