October 2, 2024

As we pointed out in our August 5–11 posting, the presidential election of 2024 looks a lot like the presidential election of 1964.

Theodore H. White, in The Making of the President 1964 (2010), gave a detailed account of the 1964 campaigns involving the Republican challenger Barry Goldwater and the Democratic incumbent Lyndon B. Johnson.

The 1964 Republican Party espoused radical, right-wing positions. Barry Goldwater, the Republican presidential candidate, stated “extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.” Democrats in 1964 used the slogan In Your Guts, You Know He’s Nuts, a slogan attacking Goldwater.

Today’s Republican Party is the Make America Great Again (MAGA) party. The slogan In Your Guts, You Know He’s Nuts could easily be applied to Trump or Vance.

The 2024 MAGA Republican Party is radical. It espouses undemocratic, autocratic positions in Project 2025.

Today’s MAGA Republican Party and its standard bearers (both in style and substance) are out of touch with a large segment of the American electorate. Many citizens view Trump as dangerous and extreme, just as many viewed Goldwater as dangerous and extreme in 1964.

Lyndon Johnson selected Minnesota’s Hubert Humphrey as his running mate. In 2024, Kamala Harris has selected Minnesota’s Tim Walz as her running mate.

The election of 2024 is looking more and more like 1964.

The historian Allan Lichtman (2024) has identified thirteen factors that predict the outcome of US presidential elections. He calls these the “Keys to the White House.” Many of the Keys for 1964 and 2024 have the same Democratic incumbent (blue) and Republican challenger (red) values, as shown here, updated with Lichtman’s final turnings of the keys in advance of the 2024 election:

There has been uncertainty around the turnings for Foreign/Miliary Success and Foreign/Military No Failure. Lichtman’s final turnings for 2024 have Foreign/Miliary Success in favor of the incumbent Democratic Party, due to Biden’s success with NATO in presenting a unified front against Putin’s war in Ukraine. But Lichtman set Foreign/Military No Failure in favor of the Republican challenger due to the unresolved war in the Middle East.

We fit a machine learning model to data from twenty-six presidential elections (1860 through 1960). Then we used 1964 Keys-to-the-White-House data to predict how the Democratic incumbent Johnson would fare against the Republican challenger Goldwater: In 1964, the Democratic Party had a 95.7% chance of winning in the Electoral College.

In 1964, the Democratic Party won decisively with 61.1 percent of the popular vote and 486 Electoral College votes. Goldwater, the right-wing Republican senator from Arizona, won his home state along with Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina, for a total of only 52 Electoral College votes.

Using a comparable machine learning approach, we fit a model to data from forty-one presidential elections (1860 through 2020). We used Lichtnam’s final 2024 turnings of Keys-to-the-White-House to predict how the Democratic Harris-Walz ticket will fare against the Republican Trump-Vance ticket: In 2024, the Democratic Party has a 83.3% chance of winning in the Electoral College.

Will predictions from Keys-to-the-White-House data, bolstered by machine learning, prove correct? Time will tell.

Check out the recent election analysis from Allan Lichtman in an interview with Katie Couric:

Political History #

• Lichtman, Allan J. 2024. Predicting the Next President: The Keys to the White House (2024 Edition). Lanham, Maryland: Rowland & Littlefield. [ISBN-13: 978-8881800710] Publisher Link.

• White, Theodore H. 2010. The Making of the President 1964 (Reissue Edition). New York: Harper Perennial/HarperCollins. (ISBN-13: 978-0061900617) Publisher Link. Initial edition published in 1965.

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