Prediction professor predicts Trump’s impeachment

WASHINGTON: A noted American professor, who predicted victory of Donald Trump when almost all the exit polls and surveys were projecting Hillary as winner, has predicted impeachment of president-elect Donald Trump by his own party.

In an email interview with The News, Allan Lichtman, a professor at American University in Washington, said he could not give a timeframe for the impeachment of the newly elected president but said Republican Party which has majority in both Senate and House of Representatives will bring Trump’s downfall.

“There is no timeframe and my conjecture about impeachment is not based on any scientific analysis, just on my gut,” Professor Lichtman, who has predicted every US election correctly since 1984, told The News.

He is of the view that Republican Congress would make Mike Pence as president as he is trusted and well-known in establishment. He said Trump would soon give an opportunity for impeachment either by doing something that endangers national security or because “it helps his pocketbook.”

He said Republicans did not want Trump as president as he was unpredictable.

He was asked by The News about the timeframe for his latest prediction which he made in an interview with the Washington Post.

When asked why Hillary lost despite support of media, civil society and popular opinion, Lichtman told The News that the answer “can only be found in the study of history.”

“Using my history-based prediction system the Keys to the White House I first called the election for Donald Trump in a Washington Post interview published on September 23. I doubled down on this prediction in a subsequent Post interview published on October 28,” he said.

The professor said his second prediction was made after the release of the Trump tape bragging about sexually assaulting women and charges by a dozen women that indeed he had assaulted them as described in the tape. It came, moreover, before FBI Director James Comey released his bombshell letter and belated retraction about the discovery of new Clinton emails.

Lichtman, who has in past criticised data-based predictions, told The News that he developed the Keys model in 1981 in collaboration with Volodia Keilis-Borok, a world renowned authority on prediction methods.

“The keys are based on a retrospective analysis of elections from 1860 (the beginning of the modern Republican vs Democratic era) to 1980. They are guided by the thesis that American presidential elections are primarily judgments on the strength and performance of the party holding the White House, in this year the Democrats. The keys system has correctly forecast the outcome of all eight American presidential elections from 1984 to 2016,” he added.

He said the Keys were 13 diagnostic questions that were stated as propositions that favored re- election of the incumbent party. When five or fewer of these propositions are false or turned against the party holding the White House, that party wins another term in office. When six or more are false, the challenging party wins.

This year, professor said, the Keys disclosed the vulnerability of the incumbent Democrats on many dimensions.

“For example, the party badly lost the midterm elections of 2014. Its sitting president was not eligible to run again. It had a bruising primary struggle and faced significant third party opposition. During Obama’s second term, the administration failed to achieve a major policy accomplishment domestically or a notable foreign policy triumph. In Hillary Clinton it had a solid but not a charismatic candidate,” Lichtman said.

He has also explained his method in his book “Predicting the Next President: The Keys to the White House 2016.”

Some statisticians have criticised the structure of his system but Lichtman stresses that the system has correctly predicted every election since 1984.

His predictions have picked the next president correctly in all of those elections but 2000, when he picked Al Gore, who won the popular vote.