Historian Allan Lichtman reveals his prediction for the 2024 presidential election, including how Trump’s conviction will affect the race
Donald Trump’s 34 felony convictions are unlikely to impact the 2024 election, according to a historian who correctly predicted nine of the last 10 presidential election results.
Dr. Allan Lichtman of American University said that despite speculation that the historic trial in New York City of the former president will somehow affect his chances in November, he is not so convinced.
A lot would have to go wrong for President Joe Biden to lose to Trump as things stand now, Lichtman claims – but he does not yet make definitive forecasts.
“We don’t know what impact this might have on moderate and swing independent voters,” Lichtman said told Fox News Digital. “So basically we need to look over time and not rely on immediate, unreliable experts.”
Trump also faces three other criminal trials. And Biden has been plagued by his son Hunter’s legal troubles after he was found guilty of three felonies related to the 2018 firearm purchase.
American university historian Dr Alan Lichtman isn’t making any predictions for 2024 yet – but says a lot has to go wrong in the coming months before President Joe Biden loses re-election in November
Lichtman said the outcome of Trump’s trial and its implications for the election will not be fully known until later this summer.
“We won’t know much until the sentencing hearing on July 11, right before the Republican convention,” he said.
The jury in the Manhattan hush money trial returned a verdict on May 30 finding Trump guilty of 34 charges related to falsifying business records to keep porn star Stormy Daniels quiet ahead of the 2016 election about their affair a decade earlier.
The former president virtually completed his pre-sentencing interview this week, with sentencing set for July 11 — just days before the Republican National Convention where the Republican Party will nominate Trump as their nominee.
Lichtman has not yet made a final projection for the 2024 election, claiming the state of the race is still in flux.
The historian relies on a formula he developed together with mathematician Vladimir Keilis-Borok by analyzing elections from 1860. He has used it to correctly predict the outcome of nine presidential elections since 1984.
Using thirteen questions called “keys,” Lichtman keeps his personal preferences out of his predictions and was one of the few to correctly predict Trump would win in 2016, when polls and political commentators all favored Democrat Hillary Clinton.
He was also right when he predicted that President Barack Obama would win re-election when Republican Mitt Romeny was favored and he called the 2020 election for Biden.
“We are reconceptualizing presidential elections not as Carter versus Reagan, Republican versus Democrat, liberal versus conservative, but in geophysical terms,” Lichtman explained. “Stability: The White House party retains power. Earthquake: The White House party has turned.”
Speculating, the historian said it doesn’t appear Trump’s guilty verdict has affected his base.
Donald Trump was found guilty of 34 charges in his hush money trial in New York last month – but Lichtman says it so far doesn’t seem to be impacting his base heading into the 2024 election
Meanwhile, President Joe Biden’s son Hunter was found guilty Tuesday of three charges related to the 2018 firearm purchase
Lichtman’s keys are based on simple true or false questions related to party mandate, struggle, incumbency, third party, short-term economics, long-term economics, policy change, social unrest, scandal, foreign/military failure, foreign/military success, The incumbent’s charisma and the challenger’s charisma.
“The keys are an alternative to the polls, which are not forecasters,” he continued. ‘They are snapshots, they are misused, not used as predictors’
“And the pundits, you know, they’re a lot of fun, but they’re sports talk radio. They have no scientific basis for their predictions,” Lichtman argued.
He says that Biden has lost two of his “keys” so far: the mandate key based on midterm elections after Democrats lost two seats in 20222 and the so-called charisma key.
“He loses the charisma key because he’s not Franklin Roosevelt or John F. Kennedy,” Lichtman said of Biden.
If a candidate loses six keys to Lichtman, there is a good chance he or she will lose the presidential election, according to the algorithm.