Even with historically close polling going into Election Day, historian and professor Allan Lichtman stuck by his prediction that Vice President Kamala Harris would win the White House. He based that assessment on his "Keys to the White House" model, which has accurately predicted the majority of the last 11 presidential election outcomes by analyzing fundamental strengths and weaknesses of the incumbent administration.
In a live video on his YouTube channel on Thursday, Lichtman discussed his model's miss this year and explained what the election of Donald Trump could mean for the country.
"I admit I was wrong. I called a Harris win, and she didn't win. But I was far from the only forecaster to be wrong," Lichtman said.
"What went wrong? I don't think the problem was the keys themselves. You cannot change a model on the fly based on its failure in one election."
First, Lichtman said, the Democratic Party "Openly, publicly, viciously" attacked Joe Biden, the incumbent president.
"I've studied our politics from the founding to the present. This was something unique to this election. Something we've never seen before. Obviously, if you're going to trash your sitting president so badly, that is going to tank any Democratic nominee associated with that failed president."
Lichtman said this had unexpected implications for "contest" key in his model, which usually contributes to a win for the incumbent party as long as there is consensus behind the candidate coming out of the primary.
"When have we ever seen a sitting president who won the primaries step down right before the convention?" he asked. "Never. Democrats did the best they could, and had the delegates unite behind Harris, but that's the only time since we've had the modern system of primary caucuses" where a nominee participated in none of the earlier caucuses.
Lichtman said other factors this year included an unprecedented abundance of disinformation, pointing to the example of Elon Musk's ownership of X and the disinformation that spread on the platform.
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Lichtman also said Trump and his allies exploited trends of xenophobia, misogyny and racism, which have historical precedent.
"We see then the explosion of disinformation and these three dark trends from American history, and that calls into question the whole premise behind the keys of rationality and pragmatism," he said.
"I'll be monitoring developments very, very carefully over the next four years to see A) if we're going to have free and fair elections, and B) if the fundamental premises of the keys still hold."
