2024 Election Crushes FDR Revisionist

2024 Election Crushes FDR Revisionist

By: Ariella Haviv

A leftwing historian who gained national fame by claiming he could predict the winner of any U.S. presidential election, instead became one of the casualties of last week’s race.

Allan Lichtman, a member of the history faculty at American University, had correctly forecast the victor in many presidential races in recent years. But he was left with plenty of egg on his face after his prediction that Kamala Harris would win this year’s race turned out to be dead wrong.

The result not only crushed Lichtman’s reputation for picking the right candidate, but appears to have left him personally crushed as well. In the weeks leading up to Election Day, Lichtman claimed “democracy is on the line” if Harris lost, and when the results became clear, he declared on his YouTube channel, “Democracy is gone.” In the aftermath of the election, an automatic response on Lichtman’s email announced that he is “taking time off” in the aftermath of Harris’s defeat.

Jumping in a Lake

Lichtman, 77, has been an eccentric figure in American life for many years. In 1981, he announced he had invented a system for predicting presidential winners, which he called “The 13 Keys to the White House.” Oddly, the co-creator of his system was not a political scientist, but rather a Soviet expert on earthquakes, Vladimir Keilis-Borok.

Lichtman has never been shy about his political beliefs and associations. He served as a consultant to several liberal Democratic senators, and himself ran for a U.S. senate seat in Maryland in 2006 on a far-left platform.

During his senate campaign, Lichtman aired a television commercial in which he promised to “make a big splash in Washington,” and then proceeded to jump, fully clothed, into a lake. Lichtman’s website announced that the commercial was “humorous and edgy.” Evidently voters did not agree; he finished sixth in the Democratic primary, with just over 1% of the vote.

Revising FDR on the Holocaust

Lichtman has authored several books about American politics. In 2013, his career took a brief and surprising detour. Although he had never written any books or articles about the Holocaust or other Jewish subjects, Lichtman suddenly appeared as the coauthor of a book with a fellow American University professor, Richard Breitman, about President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s response to the Nazi genocide.

The book, FDR and the Jews, offered a revisionist perspective on a topic that many other historians had previously researched. Breitman himself had written a book in 1987 criticizing FDR’s response to the Holocaust. But in the new book, he and Lichtman argued that President Roosevelt actually did the best he could to rescue Jews from the Nazis. Breitman never explained why he reversed his position.

FDR and the Jews was strongly criticized by many historians of the topic. Dr. Bat-Ami Zucker of Bar Ilan University, writing on H-Judaic, reported that the book “sounds more like a defense attorney’s plea than an objective analysis” and “the authors go out of their way to present Roosevelt favorably.” Breitman and Lichtman even denied the well-documented fact that U.S. coast guard cutters trailed the infamous refugee ship St. Louis to make sure it did not approach America’s shore in 1939.

Prof. Zucker expressed surprise at the argument made by Breitman and Lichtman that FDR “saved the Jews of Palestine” from the Holocaust, because if the Allies had not defeated the Germans in North Africa, the Germans might have been able to capture the Holy Land. The fallacy in that argument, Zucker noted, is that the Allied war effort in North Africa was not prompted by any concern about the Jews in Palestine; it was just part of their war strategy.

Even more embarrassing for Breitman and Lichtman was Zucker’s revelation that some of the language they used about North Africa was identical to language that appeared in an article written by two other authors, in The Forward, several years earlier. Using others’ language without attribution is regraded as extremely serious misconduct by the academic community.

I was assigned to cover an awards ceremony in 2014 at which Breitman and Lichtman were present. I asked them to explain how they had reached conclusions so different from those of mainstream historians such as David Wyman, Monty Penkower, Rafael Medoff, and Laurel Leff. Lichtman dismissed my question, snapping that scholars who were critical of FDR’s Holocaust record are “not serious scholars.”

A Crushing Election

Although many media reports gave the impression that Lichtman’s “13 keys” prediction system was consistently successful, he wrongly forecast that Vice President Al Gore would win the presidency in 2000. He also was mistaken in his predictions regarding the popular vote in both 2016 and 2024.

Nonetheless, on the eve of this year’s election, Lichtman insisted that even if his prediction of a Harris victory turned out to be mistaken, that did not mean his “13 keys” system was faulty.

Internet commentators were biting in their criticism of Lichtman. Some took issue with the way Lichtman composed himself in pre-election public discussions. “He was incredibly smug and condescending to anyone that questioned his conclusions,” one wrote.

Lichtman’s “13 keys” system turned out wrong this time “because he didn’t look at was being done to more than half the country just because they had different opinions,” one observer wrote. “He made predictions based on emotions not data.”

“You cooked yourself with your clearly biased polling,” another commented. “You are now officially irrelevant.”