The Keys to the White House, also known as the 13 Keys, is a prediction system for determining the outcome of presidential elections in the United States. It was developed by American historian Allan Lichtman and Russian geophysicist Vladimir Keilis-Borok in 1981, adapting prediction methods that Keilis-Borok designed for earthquake prediction.
The system is a thirteen-point checklist that uses true-or-false statements to assess the situation of the United States and its political system ahead of a presidential election: when five or fewer items on the checklist are false, the nominee of the incumbent party is predicted to win the election, but when six or more items on the checklist are false, the nominee of the challenging party is predicted to win.[1][2][3]
Some of the items on the checklist involve qualitative judgment, and therefore the system relies heavily on the knowledge and analytical skill of whoever attempts to apply it. Using the system, Lichtman has correctly predicted the popular vote outcome of each presidential election from 1984 to 2012. Though Lichtman claims that he correctly called the 2016 election by using the system, his 2016 book and paper stated that the Keys to the White House were designed to predict the outcome of the popular vote, which Donald Trump lost.[4][5][6][7] Following this, he stated that recent demographics changes give the Democratic Party an advantage over the Republican Party in the popular vote in close elections. He correctly called the outcome of the 2020 election.[8][9]
Lichtman argues that the system’s reliability proves that American voters select their next president according to how well the country was governed in the preceding four years and that election campaigns have little, if any, meaningful effect on American voters. If voters are satisfied with the governance of the country, they will re-elect the president or whoever from his party runs in his stead, but if they are dissatisfied, they will transfer the presidency to the challenging party.[10][11]
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was invoked but never defined (see the help page).:3
was invoked but never defined (see the help page).As a national system, the Keys predict the popular vote, not the state-by-state tally of Electoral College votes.