If you follow politics, you can hardly escape Allan Lichtman, the American University history professor known for correctly forecasting the victor of all but one presidential election since 1984. In a whimsical New York Times video published over the summer, the 77-year-old competes in a Senior Olympics qualifying race—and confidently declares that Kamala Harris will win the race (get it?) for the White House. You might also have recently seen Lichtman on cable news, heard him on the radio, or read an interview with him.

In an era of statistically complex, probabilistic election models, Lichtman is a throwback. He bases his predictions not on polls, but rather on the answers to a set of 13 true-or-false questions, which he calls “keys,” and which in 2016 signaled a Trump victory when the polls said otherwise. He has little patience for data crunchers who lack his academic credentials. “The issue with @NateSilver538 is he’s a compiler of polls, a clerk,” Lichtman posted on X in July, as part of a long-running spat with the prominent election modeler. “He has no fundamental basis in history and elections.”

Lichtman’s complaint isn’t just with polls and the nerds who love them. In his view, almost everything that the media and political establishment pay attention to—such as campaigns, candidate quality, debates, and ideological positions—is irrelevant to the outcome. An election is a referendum on the incumbent party’s track record. “The study of history,” he writes in his book Predicting the Next President, “shows that 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.”

[Anne Applebaum: The danger of believing that you are powerless]

According to Lichtman, the standard account of how presidential campaigns work is a harmful fiction. “The media, the candidates, the pollsters, and the consultants,” Lichtman writes, “are complicit in the idea that elections are exercises in manipulating voters,” which stymies political reform and meaningful policy debate. That argument contains a touch of the conspiratorial, but there’s a big difference between Lichtman’s worldview and a conspiracy theory: His predictions actually come true. If Lichtman is wrong about how elections work, how can he be so good at foretelling their outcomes?

One possible answer is that, in fact, he isn’t.

Lichtman developed his method in 1981 in collaboration with Vladimir Keilis-Borok, a Russian mathematical geophysicist. Lichtman had a hunch, he told me, that “it was the performance and strength of the White House Party that turned elections.” He and Keilis-Borok analyzed every election from 1860 to 1980; the hunch bore out.

Each of the 13 keys can be defined as a true-or-false statement. If eight or more of them are true, the incumbent-party candidate will win; seven or fewer, and they will lose. Here they are, as spelled out in Predicting the Next President:

1. Incumbent-party mandate: 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.

2. Nomination contest: There is no serious contest for the incumbent-party nomination.

3. Incumbency: The incumbent-party candidate is the sitting president.

4. Third party: There is no significant third-party or independent campaign.

5. Short-term economy: The economy is not in recession during the election campaign.

6. Long-term economy: Real annual per capita economic growth during the term equals or exceeds mean growth during the two previous terms.

7. Policy change: The incumbent administration effects major changes in national policy.

8. Social unrest: There is no sustained social unrest during the term.

9. Scandal: The incumbent administration is untainted by major scandal.

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

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

12. Incumbent charisma: The incumbent-party candidate is charismatic or a national hero.

13. Challenger charisma: The challenging-party candidate is not charismatic or a national hero.

Lichtman says that keys 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 13 are true this year: just enough to assure a Harris victory.

Although some of the keys sound extremely subjective, Lichtman insists that they are not subjective at all—assessing them simply requires the kind of judgments that historians are trained to make. The charisma key, for example, doesn’t depend on your gut feeling about a candidate. “We are talking about the once-in-a-generation, across-the-board, inspirational, truly transformational candidates, like Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan,” he told me.

I can attest that applying the keys is challenging for those of us without a history Ph.D. The keys must be “turned” consistently from election to election without regard to polls, but in practice seem to be influenced by fluctuating public-opinion data. The Democratic nominee in 2008, Barack Obama, qualified as charismatic, but the 2012 nominee, who was also Barack Obama, did not, because of his diminished approval ratings. The “third-party challenger” key cuts against the incumbent if a third-party candidate is likely to get 5 percent of the vote—but this is only knowable through horse-race polling, which we’re supposed to ignore, or after the fact, in which case it’s not a prediction.

Lichtman insists that voters don’t change their minds in response to what the candidates say or do during the course of a campaign. This leads him to make some deeply counterintuitive claims. He has written that George H. W. Bush’s attacks on Michael Dukakis in 1988—which included the infamous Willie Horton ad—accomplished nothing, and actually hurt Bush’s subsequent ability to govern, because he already had enough keys to win and should have been focused on his policy agenda. He implies that JFK, who edged out Richard Nixon by less than two-tenths of a percentage point in 1960, would have won even if he had had the personality of, say, his nephew Robert, because he had eight keys in his favor in addition to charisma. And this past summer, Lichtman told anyone who would listen that Joe Biden should stay in the race, despite his difficulty completing a sentence, because replacing him on the ticket would mean the loss of the incumbency key. If Democrats persuaded Biden to drop out, he wrote in a July 3 op-ed, “they would almost surely doom their party to defeat and reelect Donald Trump.” (He changed his mind once it became clear that no one would challenge Harris for the nomination, thus handing her key 2.)

Arguments such as these are hard to accept, because they require believing that Lichtman’s “pragmatic electorate” places no stock in ideological positions or revelations about character and temperament. Lichtman is unperturbed by such objections, however. All arguments against the keys fail because they suggest that the keys are in some way wrong, which they plainly are not. Lichtman has written, for example, that the infamous “Comey letter” did not tip the 2016 election to Trump, as poll-focused analysts such as Nate Silver have “incorrectly claimed.” How does Lichtman know the claim is incorrect? Because the keys already predicted a Trump victory. The proof is in the fact that the system works. This raises the question of whether it actually does.

Going nine for 10 on presidential predictions is not as hard as it sounds. Only four of the past 10 elections were particularly close. Most campaign years, you can just look at the polls. Lichtman predicted a Biden victory in 2020, for example, but you probably did too.

To his credit, Lichtman has made many accurate calls, in some cases well before polls showed the eventual victor in the lead. Even in 2000, the election that he is generally considered to have gotten wrong, the system worked as advertised. As he explains in Predicting the Next President, the keys “predict only the national popular vote and not the vote within individual states.” (Lichtman has devoted considerable energy to proving that the election was stolen in Florida by the GOP, and that he has thus really gone 10 for 10.)

Lichtman’s most celebrated feat of foresight by far, the gutsy call that supposedly sets his keys apart from mere polls, was his 2016 prediction. Calling the race for Trump when the polls pointed the other way was reputationally risky. After Lichtman was vindicated, he was showered with praise and received a personal note of congratulations from Trump himself. “Authorities in the field recognized my nearly unique successful prediction of a Trump victory,” Lichtman told me in an email. He quoted the assessment of the political scientist Gerald M. Pomper: “In 2016, nine of eleven major studies predicted Clinton’s lead in the national popular vote. However, by neglecting the Electoral College and variations among the state votes, they generally failed to predict Trump’s victory. One scholar did continue his perfect record of election predictions, using simpler evaluations of the historical setting (Lichtman 2016).”

Oddly, no one seems to have noticed at the time what seems in hindsight like an obvious problem. By Lichtman’s own account, the keys predict the popular-vote winner, not the state-by-state results. But Trump lost the popular vote by two percentage points, eking out an Electoral College victory by fewer than 80,000 votes in three swing states.

Lichtman has subsequently addressed the apparent discrepancy. “In 2016, I made the first modification of the keys system since its inception in 1981,” he writes in the most recent edition of Predicting the Next President. In “my final forecast for 2016, I predicted the winner of the presidency, e.g., the Electoral College, rather than the popular vote winner.” He did this, he writes, because of the divergence of the Electoral College results from the popular vote: “In any close election, Democrats will win the popular vote but not necessarily the Electoral College.”

[Peter Wehner: This election is different]

But the gap that Lichtman describes did not become apparent until the results of the 2016 election were known. In 2008 and 2012, the Electoral College actually gave a slight advantage to Obama, and until 2016, the difference between the margin in the popular vote and in the Electoral College tipping state was typically small. Why would Lichtman have changed his methodology to account for a change that hadn’t happened yet?

Odder still is the fact that Lichtman waited to announce his new methodology until well after the election in which he says he deployed it. According to an investigation published this summer by the journalists Lars Emerson and Michael Lovito for their website, The Postrider, no record exists of Lichtman mentioning the modification before the fact. In their estimation, “he appears to have retroactively changed” the predictive model “as a means of preserving his dubious 10 for 10 streak.”

This is a sore subject for Lichtman. Whether he got 2016 totally right or merely sort of right might seem like a quibble; surely he was closer to the mark than most experts. But a forecaster who changes his methodology after the fact has no credibility. When I brought the matter up with Lichtman in a Zoom interview, he became angry. “Let me tell you: It steams me,” he said, his voice rising. “I dispute this, you know, When did you stop beating your wife? kind of question.”

Lichtman directed me to an interview he gave The Washington Post in September 2016. (When I tried to interject that I had read the article, he cut me off and threatened to end the interview.) There and elsewhere, Lichtman said, he clearly stated that Trump would win the election. Trump did win the election, ergo, the prediction was accurate. Nowhere did he say anything about the popular vote.

Later that evening, Lichtman sent me a follow-up email with the subject line “2016.” In it, he described Emerson and Lovito as “two unknown journalists with no qualifications in history or political science.” As for their claims, he pointed once again to the Washington Post interview, and also to an article in the October 2016 issue of the academic journal Social Education, in which he published his final prediction.

Here is what Lichtman wrote in the Social Education article: “As a national system, the Keys predict the popular vote, not the state-by-state tally of Electoral College votes. However, only once in the last 125 years has the Electoral College vote diverged from the popular vote.”

This seemed pretty cut-and-dried. I replied to Lichtman’s email asking him to explain. “Yes, I was not as clear as I could have been in that article,” he responded. “However, I could not have been clearer in my Washington Post prediction and subsequent Fox News and CBS interviews, all of which came after I wrote the article.” In those interviews, he said nothing about the popular vote or the Electoral College.

I got another email from Lichtman, with the subject line “Postriders,” later that night. “Here is more information on the two failed journalists who have tried to make a name for themselves on my back,” Lichtman wrote. Attached to the email was a Word document, a kind of opposition-research memo, laying out the case against Lovito and Emerson: “They post a blog—The Postrider—that has failed to gain any traction as documented below. They are not qualified to comment on the Keys, the polls, or any aspect of election prediction.” The document then went through some social-media numbers. Lichtman has 12,000 followers on Facebook; The Postrider has only 215, and the articles get no engagement. One hundred thousand followers for Lichtman on X; a few hundred for Emerson and Lovito.

[Gilad Edelman: The asterisk on Kamala Harris’s poll numbers]

I ran these criticisms by Emerson and Lovito, who were already familiar with Lichtman’s theory of the case. After they published their article, he emailed them, cc’ing his lawyer and American University’s general counsel, accusing them of defamation.

To the charge of being less famous than Lichtman, they pled guilty. “It’s true that a public intellectual who has been publishing books since the late 1970s and is interviewed every four years by major media outlets has a larger following than us, yes,” they wrote in an email. “But we fail to see what relevance that has to our work.” Regarding their qualifications, they pointed out that they each have a bachelor’s degree in political science from American University, where Lichtman teaches. (Emerson is a current student at American’s law school.) “As for this story on the Keys, we spent months reading and reviewing Professor Lichtman’s books, academic papers, and interviews regarding the Keys. If we are not qualified to comment at that point, he should reconsider how he publicly communicates about his work.”

In a December 2016 year-in-review article, the journalist Chris Cillizza looked back on the stories that had generated the most interest for his Washington Post politics blog, The Fix. “The answer this year? Allan Lichtman. Allan Lichtman. Allan Lichtman … Of the 10 most trafficked posts on The Fix in 2016, four involved Lichtman and his unorthodox predictions,” Cillizza wrote. “Those four posts totaled more than 10 million unique visitors alone and were four of the 37 most trafficked posts on the entire WaPo website this year.”

Americans love a prediction. We crave certainty. This makes the life of a successful predictor an attractive one, as Lichtman, who has achieved some measure of fame, can attest. But a professional forecaster is always one bad call away from irrelevance.

Give Lichtman credit for making concrete predictions to which he can be held accountable. As he always says, the probabilistic forecasts currently in vogue can’t be proved or disproved. The Nate Silvers of the world, who have unanimously labeled the upcoming election a toss-up, will be correct no matter who wins. Not so for Lichtman. A Trump restoration would not just end his winning streak. It would call into question his entire theory of politics. We are all waiting to find out how pragmatic the electorate really is.

Scott Perry seemed to be in a good mood. When I found him on a recent Saturday, the Pennsylvania representative was visiting a local Republican office, joking with volunteers as he helped them prepare campaign materials for canvassers who would be knocking doors later that day. Perry was friendly with me too, until I asked whether he regretted any of his actions leading up to January 6.

That’s when I got a taste of Perry’s pugilistic side, which has both endeared him to conservative hard-liners and convinced Democrats that they can defeat him next month.

“And what were those actions, sir?” he replied, as if testing me.

Perry, a former chair of the far-right House Freedom Caucus who was first elected in 2012, had reportedly done plenty to aid former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The FBI seized Perry’s cellphone in 2022, which led to the revelation of text messages showing his extensive attempts to install an attorney general who would help keep Trump in office. Perry’s preferred candidate was Jeffrey Clark, a now-indicted Department of Justice official whose main qualification was spreading claims of election fraud.

I started by noting that Perry was the one who’d introduced Trump and Clark. He cut me off.

“An introduction?” he said, incredulously. “Is that illegal now?” Perry accused me of repeating “a narrative that has been promoted by the left” that the mainstream media have refused to verify. “Somebody said, Can you introduce me? I said sure,” he explained, saying it was no different than if he had introduced me to one of his aides standing nearby. “So no, I’m not embarrassed.”

[David A. Graham: The real weaponization of the Department of Justice]

Whether Perry agrees with it or not, the “narrative” about his role ahead of the January 6 assault on the Capitol is part of why he’s the most vulnerable Trump loyalist in the House. “For a lot of normie, older Republicans, all that January 6 stuff was really a line of demarcation,” Christopher Nicholas, a GOP strategist who lives in Perry’s district, told me. In their hunt for a House majority, Democrats are targeting Perry like never before, and they’re running a candidate, the former local-news anchor Janelle Stelson, who can match both his regional fame and his fundraising.

The race could help determine the House majority, and in the state that could decide the presidency, Perry is once again sharing a ballot with the ally he tried to keep in office four years ago. The issues that have defined Trump’s comeback attempt—immigration, abortion, trying to overturn the 2020 election—have also figured prominently in Perry’s race. Until this year, Perry had demonstrated even more political resilience than Trump; he outran him in 2020, winning his district while Trump narrowly lost Pennsylvania. That might not be the case in November. Both of their races are toss-ups, but at the moment, the bigger underdog might be Perry.

Perry’s district, which includes Harrisburg as well as nearby suburbs and small towns, became significantly bluer after Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court redrew the state’s congressional map in 2018. Trump won the new district by just four points in 2020, and two years later, the Democrat Josh Shapiro carried it by 12 points during his victorious campaign for governor.

Perry’s district may have shifted, but he has not. He’s a small-government conservative known for opposing bipartisan deals in Washington and prodding GOP leaders to dig in against Democrats, even if it results in a government shutdown or a debt default. Perry scoffs at “so-called Republicans” who say he should moderate his stances or his approach in order to accommodate the additional Democrats he now represents. “Doing the right thing is always doing the right thing,” he told me.

So far, his stubbornness has paid off. After winning a close race in 2018, he’s padded his margins in each of the past two elections. In 2022, he defeated the Democrat Shamaine Daniels, a member of the Harrisburg city council, by more than seven points, running well ahead of the Republican candidates for Senate and governor in Pennsylvania that year. “That is a mystery to a lot of us,” State Representative Patty Kim, a Democrat running for a state-senate seat in the area, told me. “He goes further right, and he gets away with it.”

For Perry, what’s changed this year is Stelson, whose decades on television in the Harrisburg market have made her a local celebrity and the most formidable challenger he has faced. “She’s a trusted voice in the community,” Shapiro, who has campaigned for Stelson, told me in a phone interview. “She’s been in people’s living rooms for so many years.” I followed her as she canvassed a mostly Republican neighborhood that has been shifting left. People greeted her with the slightly startled look of finding a TV star at their doorstep. “Oh my goodness, Janelle Stelson,” Jeff White, a 66-year-old retired welder, told her. “You look even prettier in person than you do in the news.” Another man didn’t even wait for a knock on the door. He called out to her on the street, “Janelle, I’m voting for you!”

Stelson relishes these encounters. She tends to deviate from the list of houses that her campaign prepares for her, in search of harder targets. “My favorite words in the English language are I’m a Republican, and I’m voting for you,” she told me with a laugh. Stelson used to be a registered Republican, although she told me she hasn’t voted for a GOP presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan. She made sure her viewers knew nothing about her politics. “That makes them not hate you,” she said.

Democrats have found sufficient GOP support for Stelson to make them optimistic about her chances. Stelson told me her internal polls show her slightly ahead, and a survey released last week by a Harrisburg-based polling firm found her leading Perry by nine points. She has raised more than $4.5 million and, as of July, had more cash than Perry, who’s had to spend a considerable amount of his campaign funds on legal fees related to the 2020 election. (In 2022, by contrast, Daniels raised less than $500,000.) In an indication that Republicans are worried about Perry, the House GOP’s main super PAC began airing ads in his district.

Stelson describes herself as centrist, and although she mostly sticks to her party’s line on issues such as abortion and voting rights, she is more hawkish on immigration than even the most conservative Democrats. During a debate with Perry last week, she largely backed Trump’s call for the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants (though she conceded that she doesn’t know how that might be accomplished). As part of her bid to win over Trump voters, Stelson declined for months to endorse Kamala Harris. When I asked her if she was voting for Harris, she replied that she would “absolutely support the Democratic ticket,” and then asked to go off the record. During the debate two days later, she confirmed that she would vote for Harris.

Stelson’s lack of a voting record—or really any history of expressing political views—has made her a difficult target for Republicans, who have tried criticizing her for living a few miles outside the district. “If you had to be nitpicky, that’s a big issue. But for me, it’s not,” Kim, the Democratic state representative, told me. Although Stelson has worked in the district for decades, Kim suggested that she may have taken a risk by not moving before the election: “I think there was an easy fix, but I respect her decision.”

Stelson says she decided to run after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in 2022. She recalls being on air when the ruling came down, trying to keep her composure while describing the jubilant reactions of Republicans, particularly Perry. Abortion became a driving issue for Stelson’s campaign, and Perry has struggled to articulate a consistent position. He’s said the issue should be left to the states, and like Trump, he backs exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother. But he has co-sponsored legislation called the Life at Conception Act, which guarantees “the right to life” for all people and says that a human life begins at “the moment of fertilization.” The bill doesn’t mention abortion, but Democrats say it would effectively ban the procedure. When I asked him whether he’d support a federal abortion ban with the exceptions he’s laid out, he said, “We don’t need to have that.” But he wouldn’t rule out voting for one if it came to the House floor: “I’m not going to get into hypotheticals.”

[Helen Lewis: Did Donald Trump notice J. D. Vance’s strangest answer?]

Perry is also elusive on a question that’s tripped up other Trump loyalists, most recently the vice-presidential nominee J. D. Vance: Did Joe Biden win the 2020 election? “Biden received the electoral votes necessary to win,” he told me. “I was right there at his inauguration. I saw him put his hand on the Bible,” Perry continued. “So there is no doubt that Joe Biden is the president.” I was surprised to hear this from the man who’d suggested to the Trump administration that people in Italy might have used military satellites to manipulate the vote count. So I tried a second time: Did Biden legitimately win the election? Again, Perry pointed to Biden’s Electoral College win. He bristled when I asked whether Trump should stop telling voters that the election was stolen. “Should Donald Trump give up his First Amendment rights because you don’t like what he says?” Perry replied. Is Trump wrong? “Why don’t you ask Donald Trump that.”

I saw a different side of Perry as I accompanied him across his district. Trailed by a few aides but no TV cameras, Perry evinced a childlike enthusiasm while doing things that many candidates treat as requisite indignities of political life. At a local fair, he seemed to genuinely enjoy feeding goats and playing carnival games. (Perry drew the line at the mechanical bull: “There’s the headline: ‘Candidate Breaks Back.’”) In the newer, bluer part of his district, he attended an event at a community garden where a mural was being unveiled. He gleefully stuck his hands in paint and planted them on the mural, along with neighborhood children. Unlike almost everyone else, he made his prints upside down.

When Perry was a child, he moved to Pennsylvania with his mother, the daughter of Colombian immigrants. They were escaping his abusive father and lived for a time in a house without electricity or running water. “We often ate food that was not only day-old but expired,” Perry said during his debate with Stelson. “But we got through it.” During his 2018 campaign, he said he’d been “embarrassed and humiliated to be on public assistance.”

Few people know Perry better than Lauren Muglia. The two met in the Army in the early 1990s, and when he went into politics, she became his chief of staff. “We fight like cats and dogs, and that’s how it’s been for 30 years,” she told me as we walked through the fair. When Perry loaded up on chocolate treats at a bake sale, Muglia joked about his addiction to chocolate. “I represent Hershey!” he replied. Muglia told me that Perry enjoys arguing with his staff, especially when they encourage him to take a more moderate stance. “He’s not a person who likes yes-men,” she told me. I got the sense that Muglia wishes more voters saw the Perry she knows—a demanding boss but also a loyal friend.

The deprivation Perry experienced in his childhood was worse than what he’s shared publicly, Muglia told me. He and his brother would sometimes scrounge for food in dumpsters. His mother would post ads in newspapers in search of people who could watch them for weeks at a time while she worked as a flight attendant. As a 4-year-old, Perry would cry for hours when his mother dropped him and his brother off. One couple who was taking care of them left him in a shed used for storing corn so they wouldn’t have to hear him scream. After Perry stayed there, he told Muglia, the couple made headlines when a child died in their care. Perry recounted this story to her a few years ago without any emotion, but she was brought to tears.

Learning about another child’s suffering helped prompt Perry to change his mind on marijuana policy—the one issue on which he will admit to moderating his views over the years. Perry had been opposed to any legalization of cannabis, but he began hearing from constituents who benefitted from medical CBD. The conversation that finally flipped him, Muglia told me, was when a father told Perry about his epileptic daughter, who had 400 seizures a week and had to travel to Colorado to receive medical-CBD treatment. “I became convinced that I was in the wrong place,” Perry told me.

[Read: Congress accidentally legalized weed six years ago]

Yet for the most part, he remains as unyielding as ever, and that, more than anything, might prove to be his undoing. He usually finds a reason to vote no, and not only on Democratic proposals. For much of the campaign, Stelson has criticized Perry for opposing abortion rights and for his role leading up to January 6, but in the closing weeks, she is focusing just as much on casting him as a cause of Washington’s dysfunction.

The House Republican majority, distracted by leadership battles, has been historically unproductive, and Perry is often in the middle of the party’s infighting. Even when Congress has managed to enact significant legislation, Stelson points out, Perry has usually tried to stop it. Indeed, Democrats have found that highlighting Perry’s opposition to popular bipartisan bills, such as the 2021 infrastructure package and legislation extending health benefits to military veterans exposed to toxic burn pits, is their most effective message.

Perry justifies his “no” votes by saying that the bills he opposed spent too much money on unnecessary things. And he’s tried to appeal to voters beyond his base by pointing out that some of the proposals that he fought came from Republicans. “When the stuff that is unaffordable, unnecessary, unwanted, outweighs the stuff that we need, I’m going to vote the way I need to,” he told me. For Perry, in other words, the bad parts of legislation too often outweigh the good. His trouble is that, come November, voters in his district might make the same judgment about him.