The election of Donald Trump came as a shock to many Americans, but perhaps most of all to those in the business of calling elections. The pollsters on both the left and the right had confidently predicted Hillary Clinton would walk away with the race. They got it wrong. But one man did not: Allan Lichtman. On Sept. 23, Lichtman, a historian at American University, declared that Trump would win, and he stuck by that call through the tumultuous final weeks of the campaign. Lichtman's predictions are based on what he calls "keys." These are a series of 13 true-or-false questions designed, in his words, "to gauge the strength and performance of the party holding the White House." Lichtman says elections are basically a judgment on how well the government has governed. The rest of the election season hoopla he dismisses as practically meaningless. "All the twists and turns of the campaign, the ads, the speeches the campaign tricks, the debates count for little or nothing on Election Day,"
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