Renowned Professor of History Allan Lichtman made waves when he predicted that Vice President Kamala Harris would be the 47th U.S. president.
His prediction flew in the face of recent polling, betting markets, sagging approval ratings for President Biden, and the obvious challenges of launching a new candidate three months out from the election. It was hard to believe Lichtman was right, yet he has been right so many times before, correctly predicting 9 out of 10 of the last elections.
Lichtman’s predictive system, developed alongside mathematician Vladimir Keilis-Borok in 1981, involves 13 so-called keys, including “party mandate,” “incumbency,” and “no social unrest.” According to Lichtman, if eight or more keys are present, the incumbent party candidate wins the election.
Lichtman believed that Harris had satisfied the requisite eight keys, but then she lost— and in resounding fashion. After the election results, which Lichtman described as “unfathomable,” he came to the conclusion that disinformation accounted for the epic misfire of his predictive system.
I don’t deny the enormous influence of disinformation, but we know that torrents of fake news likewise influenced the last two elections, which he rightly predicted.
With all due respect to Lichtman, I think I have found his missing key.
I believe Lichtman’s missing key is gender bias. All of the past elections he correctly predicted were won by men. He rightly predicted Trump would prevail against Hillary Clinton. This year was the first time Lichtman bet on a woman. And he was missing a deeply relevant if highly discouraging fact: that many Americans are simply not interested in voting for a woman.
Let’s take a look at the facts.
Trump doubled his share of votes from black men versus four years ago. Harris lost roughly 10 points among Latino men compared with Biden, dropping from 60 percent in 2020 to 50 percent this time around. While there’s no doubt that concerns about abortion, inflation and immigration loomed large in voters’ minds this season, this sizeable shift in male votes also suggests a shift in Trump’s relative attractiveness when running against a woman.
To better grasp this invisible yet consequential force in world politics, consider a 2020 U.N. survey that found nearly 90 percent of all people worldwide are biased against women. Half of all people believe that men make better political leaders. The most recent World Values Survey showed that 16 percent of American men agreed that “On the whole, men make better political leaders than women do.” Though this is considerably lower than the U.N.’s worldwide measure of bias, it’s important to remember that surveys like this only capture bias a respondent is aware of and willing to admit; rates of implicit or unconscious bias are likely much higher and much more difficult to track.
Regardless, 16 percent of the population would be more than enough to swing the battleground states that determine U.S. elections.
We would be naïve to think the fact that Harris is a woman, let alone a black, biracial woman, did not factor into the minds of thousands of voters, male and female, who showed up in surprising numbers for Trump this election — especially given that Trump has now won against two eminently qualified female candidates, and lost only to Joe Biden.
The pattern here is not insignificant. There is a reason, after all, that we have yet to swear in a female president in our nearly 250-year history as Americans.
I believe Lichtman’s system, which was attuned to roughly 130 years of male-dominated politics, was not adjusted to account for gender bias. He thought the old rules still applied. And the fact that he correctly predicted Trump’s victory against Clinton most likely suggested to Lichtman that his system was still working, even with a woman in the mix. But his prediction in favor of the woman candidate is totally different, because this time the 14th key of misogyny and sexism worked against him rather than for him.
If Lichtman had added a 14th key for “no female nominee” and required nine total positive keys for a predicted win, Harris would have fallen short, just as actually happened. The fact that a woman would need to satisfy one or more other keys than a man would not surprise countless women who have long experienced needing to work harder for the same promotions as their male peers.
There will be countless theories about which of the many social, political and economic forces pushed the nation to vote overwhelmingly for Trump. Many of these will likewise be helpful and relevant, and I won’t deny the sheer complexity of this or any election. Yet, at the end of the day, we must face the fact that a sitting vice president, ex-attorney general, prosecutor and genuinely decent woman lost to a twice-impeached convicted male felon who has been found liable for sexual assault and who attempted to openly subvert and deny the results of the last election.
I don’t believe economic or political considerations alone explain Harris’s loss, given Trump’s age, clear moral failings, criminal rap sheet and fascistic intentions. Many Americans simply do not like Trump, but still found him more palatable than voting for a woman. Alan Lichtman’s system was calibrated for elections with two opposing men. But this election was different, and although we might not like to admit it, it’s time to add a 14th key.
Greg Wolff is a freelance writer of essays, poetry and fiction.
