
Allan J. Lichtman's election prediction system - butterm
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/10/28/professor-whos-predicted-30-years-of-presidential-elections-correctly-is-doubling-down-on-a-trump-win/
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smallnamespace
Man fits linear discriminant classifier on small, noisy set of data, finds it
has 100% accuracy on entire set. Did not do any cross-validation to figure out
robustness of fitting procedure or magnitude of generalization error.

News at 11.

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argonaut
To be fair he claims to have developed the system in 1980 and then used it
subsequently to predict elections. But you're right that the data is noisy and
small. And he did get it wrong in 2000 by predicting an Al Gore victory. So
7/8 correct on the "test set."

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klodolph
And that's why we're all worried about this thing called "overfitting".

I generally hate it when people post XKCD comics in response to more serious
posts, but this one contains a compiled list of presidents who were elected
despite some precedent saying they wouldn't:
[https://xkcd.com/1122/](https://xkcd.com/1122/)

~~~
cs702
The Washington Post should be embarrassed for publishing this silliness... I'm
tempted to flag the OP.

PS. The Washington Post's editors may want to read this Washington Post
article from 2012, titled "the problem of overfitting elections, in one
brilliant cartoon:"
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2012/10/18/the-p...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2012/10/18/the-
problem-of-overfitting-elections-in-one-brilliant-cartoon/)

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smacktoward
I have a bachelor's degree in political science* from AU, and Lichtman was my
prof for one class. Suffice it to say that prolonged exposure to him is more
than sufficient to cure a person of any notion that he is a genius who can see
into the future.

There is a tiny kernel of a good observation buried in his model, which is
that the everyday "horse race" events that the political media focus on have
very little to do with who wins and who loses in a presidential election. In
fact it's pretty safe to say that _campaigns themselves_ don't have a whole
lot to do with that.

In the modern era at least, presidential elections are generally just a
referendum on the performance of the incumbent. If the economy is at least
stable, and there are no disastrous wars going on, voters almost always re-
elect the incumbent or elect the designated successor from his party. If the
economy is in the tank, or a war we're involved in has taken a particularly
bad turn, they throw the in-party out and vote the out-party in. That's more
or less all there is to it.

Which means that the victor in presidential elections is almost never a total
surprise; by looking at the economic indicators, you can make some fairly
solid predictions which party will win months before they even get around to
choosing their candidate, no elaborate model required.

Lichtman's innovation was take that basic idea and then hang a bunch of bells
and whistles on it, the entire purpose of which is to impress credulous
reporters by taking a rule of thumb and presenting it as some kind of
mechanical fortune-teller. Which, since reporters need things to report on and
he provides a kind of pre-packaged story that requires no research and only
one interview, invariably gets picked up.

So: every four years he gets to do a round of press, applying his "method" to
the current election, which is good for his career and for the profile of the
university. And of course none of the reporters circle back after the election
to measure how well his Prediction Machine really performed; and even if they
did, he's left enough subjectivity in his "keys" to give himself an out if his
predictions turn out to have wrong.

Everybody wins, I guess? Except the people who read those stories and think
there's actually something more to them than some basic historical knowledge
and a dollop of PR razzle-dazzle.

* _Well, actually an interdisciplinary degree in "communications, legal institutions, economics and government." But the path I chose through those disciplines was heaviest on the poli sci._

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psyc
So GWB won because of the dot com crash?

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smacktoward
2000 is a fascinating case. You may recall that GWB did not win the popular
vote.

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itcrowd
An interesting article and "keys to the White House", but nowhere does he
"double down" on a Trump victory. If anything he's saying "anything is
possible" for this election.

Glad the headline here is not the same as WaPo's suggestive one.

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tunesmith
Not defending his overfitting, but it's worth pointing out that recent polls
are suggesting Johnson won't reach his 5% after all. In which case (if Clinton
wins) this professor can still claim accuracy.

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dibstern
Statistical bullshit aside, even if his stats were on point, you'd have to say
Trump is a Black Swan of a candidate, breaking models generated by past data.

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yellowapple
List of keys, for those who (like me) that the article failed to provide said
list:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Keys_to_the_White_House#Th...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Keys_to_the_White_House#The_13_Keys_to_The_White_House)

