Keys to the White House, an Engineering Assessment

This interesting approach has links to engineering.

NOTE: Within this text, wherever gender is not key to the explanation, I am using the Elverson ey/em construction of the Spivak Pronouns.

Photo by Lukas

While writing a comment on tremr.com, I was reacquainted with the Presidential election prediction tool developed by historian Allan Lichtman and mathematical geophysicist Vladimir Keilis-Borok. They called this tool The Keys to the White House. As a part of that review I came across several pollsters who discounted its legitimacy. The pollsters would certainly be expected to dispute its underlying premise because it rejects the concept that polls provide useful information. They complain that the individual tests are made up to fit the data. They complain that there is no way to reproduce the experiment leading to the final conclusion. On these, they are all technically correct but technical is not really sufficient to engineering.

Lichtman’s latest Keys are a set of thirteen true-false questions which Lichtman himself answers for each Presidential campaign. His answers to the questions for the most recent Presidential campaigns may be found here. He reviews each campaign and produces his list of questions with his assessment of the answers. He predicts the winner as follows: if five or…