I'm joined by Professor Allan lickman and for all the mest mighty out there you know that I am a data geek I don't like bogus narratives unless it is backed by data in which case it would be a true narrative let me just give you Professor liman's background before we get into it I know you've seen Professor lickman on a lot of shows lately he's got a PhD from Harvard University specializing in modern American history and quantitative methods he became an assistant professor of history at American University in 1973 and a distinguished professor in 2011 and addition to publishing 13 books and several hundred popular and scholarly articles he's been an expert witness in some 100 civil cases and voting right cases and Professor liman's prediction system the keys to the White House has correctly predicted the outcomes of all US presidential elections since 1984 Professor lickman thanks for joining us my great pleasure thanks for that very kind introduction I want to get right into the breaking news Jen om Ali Dylan the Biden campaign chair says President Biden is absolutely staying in the race quote he's more committed than ever to beating Donald Trump I want to get your response Professor I'm glad that they're saying that I'm not sure if it mean means that he is necessarily not going to be pushed out by the feckless Democrats he's really got to say that you know I have to say I'm 77 I've been following politics for 65 years I've studied it since the founding and I have never seen such a spineless political party as the Democrats committing self destruction right out in the open at the first sign of adversity crashing their sitting president the nominee not of Adam Schiff and Jamie Rasin or any member of Congress or James Carville or the New York Times editorial board but the voters and theyve spent weeks trashing him and lo and behold his poll ratings have slipped talk about a self-defeating prophecy we're going to push down his poll numbers and then we're going to say see he can't win because his poll numbers are down so we're going to push him out uh it's an astoundingly spineless ex exhibition by the Democrats I've summarized American politics in one sentence Republicans have no principles Democrats have no spine Professor you talk about the polls you're quoted as saying it terrifies me that we have democracy by the polls that is the worst way to run our democracy um you've been a strong critic of the polls when and the PO and you've been shown to be right over and over again that the polls are wrong how dangerous is democracy by polling it could not be more dangerous you know the polls are snapshots they are abused as predictors and as snapshots they shift all the time and sometimes massively in 1988 George HW Bush was 17 points down to Mike dakus in the late spring you know the posters and the pundits all wrote him off I wrote at that very time that he's a shoeing to win based on my keys to the White House course he's running on the record of the Reagan Administration he won by nearly eight points at 25o shift after Obama's disastrous debate with Mitt Romney he went from points up in the polls to Four Points down and again a lot of the pundits were writing him off and he won very handily if you believe the polls Donald Trump should have withdrawn in 2016 and of course he won worse than that the pollsters deceive you they claim the error margin is plus and minus 3% but that's pure statistical era from sampling that's the era you would get if you had a huge huge jaw of green and red balls and you took a sample to estimate the percentage of green and red balls in the jar but human beings are not green and red walls most people don't respond to the pollsters so they get a skewed sample people may lie they may not have focused on the election and they may change their mind moreover no one's voted yet so they have to guess at who the likely voters are this introduces a whole range of era above and beyond the plus and minus 3% making the polls useless in any close election plus that additional era is not random its uni Direction in 2016 the polls underestimated Republican voting strength so like generals fighting the last war they corrected for that and what have we learned from the midterms the offe elections in 2023 the special elections in 2024 the polls now substant Al underestimate Democratic voting strength look at the most prominent special election for the seat in New York in Congress previously held by the disgrace George Santos a poll taken right at the eve of the election had it as a dead heat Democrat up by one point the Democrat won by eight points outperforming the polls by seven points I hope I've given you enough reasons for you to reject firm the notion that we should govern according to polls well look your keys and and indicators were accurate unfortunately when it came to Donald Trump right I mean I saw your interviews back then you were on Fox and you know you weren't pushing agendas you were just saying hey I'm looking at the polling data and you're looking at this the whole wrong way with your polling data I'm looking at my keys and I'm looking at these factors so I think your polling data is trash and you said in 2016 you were one of the lone voices then you said that I thought that Trump was you said that Trump was going to win so it's not a matter I want to be clear to everybody of you picking Democratic candidates you're picking based on a set of uh quantitative methodical factors versus kind of the skewed polling debt let me comment on that as you can imagine predicting Donald Trump in 2016 did not make me very popular in 90% plus Democratic Washington DC right teach at American University but I did get a note which said congrats Professor good call and a big Sharpie letter signed Donald J Trump also remember my first prediction was in April 1982 in which I predicted the reelection of Ronald Reagan at a time when America was mired then in the worst depression since the Great Depression his poll numbers were down in the gutter and the majority of Americans thought he was too old to run again again you can imagine predicting Ronald Reagan did not make me very popular in Washington DC these are predictions not endorsements and I've predicted about as many republican as Democrat IC wins and I'll give you the secret to being a successful forecaster again you can't do it by polls you got to have a model that works and it's not knowing history they got no history it's not knowing politics so they got no politics it's not knowing math or they got to know math it's keeping your own personal political views out of it and you may think that's easy but it's not I trained for years as an asarian to learn how to do that if I simply predict it according to my own political views I'd be useless as a forecaster I'd be wrong about half the time you know one of the key indicators that you look to is incumbency and the power of incumbency and then when you look at other factors relating to is the incumbent president successful in other metrics where's the economy right now when people go into the voting booth are they going to say you know what my 401ks are up are there foreign wars being fought so incumbency you often emphasize I think is one of the more important if not the most important key but then is the incumbent president successful in these other areas and when you look at the objective data and you take away all of this media spin whether it's kind of the outright propaganda media that exists right now on the rightwing or this kind of corporate media that both sides it all of the objective data that we always use to judge presidencies show that President Biden is a successful incumbent president is is that what your analysis shows exactly unlike the polls and the pundits who have no scientific basis for advanced prediction the keys to the White House tap into the structure of how American presidential elections really work as votes up or down on the strength and performance of The White House party and you correctly indicate most of the keys have to do with assessing how well the incumbent Administration has performed and the keys are very robust in development I went all the way back to 1860 the horse and buggy days of politics when we elected Abraham Lincoln thus the keys have survived enormous changes in our Society in our economy in our politics in our demography and incumbency is certainly one of my keys no one key outweighs the other that's one of the secrets to the keys if you stop waiting your predictors you got to wait them on past elections and those weights unpredictably change and the keys show how foolish not just spineless but foolish the Democrats are in trying to push Biden out and then who knows what might happen at the convention Biden ticks off the incumbency key he ticks off the party contest key that means of the remaining 11 keys six would have to fall to predict the Democrats defeat because that's the threshold for predicting the incumbent party's defeat so Biden gets pushed out you have a convention brawl you lose both of those keys only four more keys would have to fall but if you don't like the keys just look at straight history since 1900 the party holding the White House has never I repeat never won reelection when it's an open seat with no incumbent running and an internal party contest now I think it's possible that the pressure could be so great despite what the White House is saying that Biden could be forced out by these spineless Democrats I have a plan B if that happens and I have an article today in the New York daily news explaining that and not bad and as you I think mentioned I have a live show every Tuesday and Thursday at 900 PM Eastern at Allan lickman YouTube in which I also discuss Plan B which is if he's pushed out resign the presidency for the good of the country which pushed you in contrast with Trump who's only in it for yourself Harris becomes president perfectly qualified a long-term vice president a former Senator former Attorney General and you then tick off the incumbency key and you make sure your delegates unite behind her so you tick off the contest key and six Keys would still have to fall the worst situation for Democrats would be to recreate the situation in 2016 that led to the election of Donald Trump in the first place a big internal party battle an ununified party and an open seat with no incumbent running well and as you see this kind of chaos that is being you know spewed by some of these Democrats or as you call them these kind of spineless Democrats it seems when they don't articulate the plan that's databased and driven the way you are they're talking in terms of what has lost before whether that is 2016 or or whether there were contested conventions in the past which have been utter disasters so you say are you like looking and learning any of these lessons of history or are you just leading with kind of these emotions and threats devoid of any type of quantitative analysis which is why I think it's so important your platform your YouTube channel and I and I'll leave with this before the sunlight fully enraptures your face Professor which is I think you channels like yours are really important because I think the media landscape is changing dramatically I think this moment has been a major fail of the media they've let people down in some of the biggest Ways by just not reporting the data and by focused on these narratives and fascist tropes and one of the things that you've said recently is the media has relentlessly pursued the issue of Joe Biden dropping out of the race if Donald Trump actually wins the media will be complicit in their own demise because Trump will destroy the Free Press how big of a problem do you think it is the way this corporate media has been dealing with with all of this but frankly not reporting on the facts of the success of Biden's presidency not reporting on things like when Donald Trump's been found liable for sexual assault not describing what it really means to be a convicted felon and then just running with the polls for year after year after year I mean it's been systemic I completely agree with you you know folks in the media they're my buddies they're smart I love them but they're caught up as you point out in this awful both Sidis and I thought the role of the media would be the guardian of the truth not to treat both sides equally even though as you say one side is uh committed to inveterate dishonesty to trashing the rule of law and openly trashing our democracy you know the media has done us an enormous disservice and I can't overstate that and Donald Trump has made no secret that he is going to govern on the model of his buddy Victor Orban in Hungary and JD Vance his vice presidential candidate even is even more enthralled with the Orban model and that model has two key points one you use your power to destroy your political opposition two you use your power to destroy the Free Press and so the whole apparatus of government becomes nothing but a cheering section for you as does the media no Free Press no real Civil Service no opportunity for a real political opposition to function because you're wiping them out and he can do this All now under the cover of immunity that the Supreme Court has given him you know if that Supreme Court decision had been in effect in the 1970s Richard Nixon would have gotten away Scott free with Watergate and our democracy might have died 50 years ago so I my last message is you know to all my buddies in the press this is a hinge moment in the history of American democracy perhaps as perilous as we've seen since the Civil War do your job as the guardian of truth and the guardian of America's Peerless traditions of democracy and freedom Professor using your keys to the White House President Biden stays in still think he's going to win I have not made a final prediction I want to make that clear I've been misinterpreted I will after the Democratic Convention but a lot would have to go wrong on my keys for Biden to lose he's down definitively two keys take six to count him out and there are four shaky keys that your audience should keep their eye on third party social unrest foreign slm military failure and foreign slm military success now let me say something kind of a bit modestly you know I'm not so arrogant to say that even though the keys go all the way back to 1860 that there can't be something that's so cataclysmic and so unprecedented that it shakes up the race outside the context of history and uh we'll see how it plays out but the Democrats seem to be absolutely intent on Breaking the pattern of histories to the detriment and the detriment of the country well learn the lessons of History focus on the data that's what we do here on the midest touch Network and I want to remind everybody about your YouTube page as a place where they can go and get the data it's Allen lickman YouTube they're almost at 40,000 subscribers I think you'll hit 100,000 subscribers fairly soon everybody check it out and Allan does a great live show with his son I really enjoy watching that show as you know I'm very data driven here in the minus Dutch Network thanks Professor thank you it's seven it's Thursday and Tuesday 9900 PM Eastern just to remind everyone thank you so much for having me on uh some of the best questions I've had thanks Professor have a good one everybody hit subscribe we're close to 3 million subscribers let's get there love this video make sure you stay up toate on the latest breaking news and all things midest by signing up to the midest touch newsletter at mest touch.com / newsletter