[.ca] The Keys to the White House: A Surefire Guide to ... (ISBN 073910179X)

The Keys to the Whitehouse:
Alan Lichtman is a mediocre historian whose well-known left wing views color all his observations. It's as if he cannpt break free of the Marxist training in which he is mired. This taint makes all of his writings suspect. For those wishing to keep the faith in a totally discredited historical system, this book is for them. For those who have any historical sense at all, please avoid this book and all of Lichtman's books at all costs.

It's running the country that counts, not the campaign:
Lichtman provides, with the Keys to the White House forecasting system, a novel approach to the obscure academic exercise of predicting presidential elections. Ignoring the polls, working sometimes years in advance, it's possible to determine whether the party in the White House will hold or lose it in the coming election. Lichtman achieves this by developing his theory of governance into a set of thirteen "keys" or key factors that will determine the upcoming contest. From the ease of the governing party's primary campaign, to the pulse of the economy, to the foreign policy failures and successes, he applies an historian's eye to current events and lines up the keys. While the system is certainly open to debate, particularly on some of the more subjective keys, the more important point is what it tells us about how and why we choose our presidents. Some of the answers that the keys suggest are surprising. Certainly, the theory of governance diminishes the importance of the media blitz, the opinion poll, and the rough and tumble of everyday politics -- and some political junkies may not like that. But the message of performance is intriguing and should offer new insights to even the most jaded policy wonk.

Entertainingly written, based on solid science:
The casual reader might not realize it, but this book is a significant piece of social science. Lichtman and Soviet seismologist (!) Volodia Keilis-Borok threw about 300 variables into a computer and let it find the ones that differentiate between popular-vote winners and losers in every Presidential election from 1860 through 1980. (For those few who would know and care, they used what is known in the English-language literature as kernel discriminant function analysis.) The model produced correct calls in the elections since. This is remarkable. 1988 and 1992 were not easy, as the polls changed dramatically during the campaigns. In 2000, only two sources called Gore's popular-vote win: the last Zogby poll before the election, and the 13 Keys nearly a year in advance! Many political scientists, pundits, and commentators are unhappy with this model, since it implies that much of the ideology, campaign strategy and tactics, image polishing, etc. they care so much about don't really affect the outcome: it's about governance, not campaigning. Ignore their howls of protest. The model works, and Lichtman has explained it well, in easily readable style.