Did you feel blindsided by Tuesday night’s result?. You’re not the only one. Virtually every pollster, major news organization, and prognosticator predicted a comfortable victory for Hillary Clinton. All except for Allan Lichtman .
Lichtman uses an entirely different set of factors to predict election results ahead of time, which he refers to as “keys.” In his book Predicting the Next President: The Keys to the White House 2016 he predicted that Obama’s second term set the Democrats at the bottom of a tough hill to climb this election season, and that when everything was calculated Donald Trump held a slight advantage in the Presidential race.
Well, he was right. Let’s hope he’s also right about this: Lichtman has also predicted that he won’t last his entire term in office. In an interview with the Washington Post, he said:
“I’m going to make another prediction… This one is not based on a system; it’s just my gut. They don’t want Trump as president, because they can’t control him. He’s unpredictable. They’d love to have Pence — an absolutely down-the-line, conservative, controllable Republican. And I’m quite certain Trump will give someone grounds for impeachment, either by doing something that endangers national security or because it helps his pocketbook.”
“They,” of course, are the Republican establishment, with whom Trump has a less than stellar relationship. Many GOP politicians publicly lambasted Trump for his racist, sexist, Islamophobic and overall hateful rhetoric during the campaign season, and now thousands of eyes in both parties will be watching him very carefully, just waiting for a mistake. Which, considering how little the man actually knows about how our government, laws, and Constitution actually work, may happen sooner than later.
Allan Lichtman isn’t the only man to think so. New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote an editorial encouraging the American public to look forward:
“Trump’s bigotry, dishonesty and promise-breaking will have to be denounced. We can’t go morally numb. But he needs to be replaced with a program that addresses the problems that fueled his ascent.
After all, the guy will probably resign or be impeached within a year. The future is closer than you think.”
Here’s hoping, David. Here’s hoping.
Watch an interview with Mr. Lichtman here:
Image from Flickr by Gage Skidmore under the Creative Commons License 2.0.
