US professor who predicted Trump's presidential win says he will be impeached

Prof. Allan Lichtman was one of the few professional prognosticators to call a Donald Trump win

A Washington DC-based professor who correctly predicted in September that Trump will win the elections also believes that he will be impeached.



Allan Lichtman uses a historically based system of what he calls 'keys' to predict election results ahead of time. The keys are explained in-depth in Lichtman’s book, “Predicting the Next President: The Keys to the White House 2016.” Speaking to the Washington Post in September and October, he outlined how President Obama's second term set the Democrats up for a tight race, and his keys tipped the balance in Trump's favour, even if just barely.

Lichtman went on to make another prediction: if elected, Trump would eventually be impeached by a Republican Congress that would prefer a President Mike Pence — someone whom establishment Republicans know and trust.



“I'm going to make another prediction,” he said. “This one is not based on a system; it's just my gut. They don't want Trump as president, because they can't control him. He's unpredictable. They'd love to have Pence — an absolutely down-the-line, conservative, controllable Republican. And I'm quite certain Trump will give someone grounds for impeachment, either by doing something that endangers national security or because it helps his pocketbook.”

Lichtman's predictions use very different methods than pollsters and data-based prognosticators. Some statisticians point out issues in the structure of his system, which involves a set of 13 true/false questions, saying that the binary nature of his keys leads to what's called “overfitting.” This leads to creating a system that fits the data but has little statistical significance. Lichtman; however, argues that the system has correctly predicted every election since 1984 and instead criticises data-based predictions.



“Polls are not predictors,” he said Friday in an email. “They are snapshots that simulate an election. They are abused and misused as predictors. Even the analysis of polls by Nate Silver and others which claimed a probable Clinton victory with from more than 70 percent to 99 percent certainty are mere compilations that are no better than the underlying polls.” He added, “For all his acclaim, Nate Silver is only a clerk, not a scientific analyst.”

Lichtman is not the only one to predict a Trump impeachment. New York Times's David Brooks also suggested on Saturday that a Trump impeachment or resignation was 'probably' on the cards sometime within the next year.

This article originally appeared on The Washington Post.