(The following information is taken from The 13 Keys to the Presidency by Allan J. Lichtman and Ken DeCell, Madison Books, 1990.)

A Russian scientist and an American historian have developed a method to predict who will win the popular vote in a U.S. presidential election. In the last six elections, the method has never failed.

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The statements below favor re-election of the incumbent party.

When five or fewer statements are false, the incumbent party wins the popular vote. When six or more are false, the challenging party wins. Historian Allan J. Lichtman’s answers for the 2008 presidential election are in bold.

1. After the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives than it did after the previous midterm elections. FALSE

2. There is no serious contest for the incumbent party nomination. TRUE
(Lichtman defines a serious contest as one that is not decided before the party’s convention.)

3. The incumbent party candidate is the sitting president. FALSE

4. There is no significant third-party or independent campaign. TRUE
(A significant third-party candidate is one with a realistic chance of getting 5 percent or more of the popular vote.)

5. The economy is not in recession during the election campaign. TRUE
(Economists define recession as two consecutive quarters of falling gross national product (GNP), a condition that has not occurred in the United States in 2008.) NOTE: This article was written just before the Sept. 2008 stock market crash.

6. Real per-capita economic growth during the term equals or exceeds mean growth during the previous two terms. FALSE

7. The incumbent administration effects major changes in national policy. FALSE

8. There is no sustained social unrest during the term. TRUE

9. The incumbent administration is untainted by major scandal. TRUE
(A major scandal is one in which the president is personally implicated, for example Watergate or the Clinton impeachment.)

10. The incumbent administration suffers no major failure in foreign or military affairs. FALSE

11. The incumbent administration achieves a major success in foreign or military affairs. FALSE

12. The incumbent party candidate is charismatic or a national hero. FALSE
(National hero is defined as an individual who successfully leads a nation through war)

13. The challenging party candidate is not charismatic or a national hero. FALSE

The number of false statements above equals eight, according to Lichtman, so the challenging party should win.

The Keys retrospectively accurately account for the popular vote winners of every presidential election from 1860 through 1980 and prospectively forecast the winners of every presidential election from 1984 through 2004. The keys model predicted George W. Bush’s reelection in April 2003.

The Keys show that elections are not horse races in which candidates surge ahead or fall behind on the campaign trail, with pollsters keeping score. Rather, a pragmatic American electorate chooses a president 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. Nothing that a candidate has said or done during a campaign, when the public discounts everything as political, has changed his prospects at the polls. Debates, advertising, television appearances, news coverage, and campaign strategies — the usual grist for the punditry mills — count for virtually nothing on Election Day.

Veeeely interesting! - Ed.

I think the last statement confuses correlation with causation. It may be, for example, that enough of these being false, motivates people to work harder for the challenger.

If said challenger did nothing, there would be no effort to multiply, meaning the stuff does count in that it has to be done, but maybe it only has to be done in earnest for it to work.

Anyway, interesting stuff. Wonder how they derived those rules?

If the rules work for elections back to the early 1800's, then we can probably discount modern election methods and tactics as a factor, since the 20th century campaign didn't start until the '50s, and campaigning as we know it today didn't even exist in the 1800's.

Many campaigns have done little or nothing; these are commonly known as front porch campaigns. But I'd have to check to see if any of these front-porch campaigns were challengers...