Polling 'Nostradamus' tells voters to ignore polls and have faith in his prediction for 2024 winner

With just days to go until election day, presidential historian dubbed the 'Nostradamus' of polling experts Allan Lichtman has remained staunch on his prediction that Democratic nominee Kamala Harris will become the next US president.

The American University professor, 77, is known for fashioning his own election model that has correctly forecast every presidential winner since 1984. 

Last month, he garnered a wave of criticism when he revealed that Harris had met what he believed to be the critical objectives for victory. 

Now, speaking to CTV News, Lichtman said that his prediction 'does not change with respect to the ephemeral events of the campaign'.

He also explained that his prediction is 'based on a fundamental understanding of how American presidential elections really work, as votes up or down on the strength and performance of the White House party'.

He relies on an unorthodox system of ignoring the polls, based on what he calls '13 keys' to the White House, a model he developed in 1981 alongside his geophysicist friend Vladimir Keilis-Borok. 

The model is based on 120 years of presidential election outcomes and even enabled Lichtman to call Trump's unexpected 2016 victory a month before the election.

He then used his tactic to correctly predict the outcome in the 2020 elections.

As a result, he told CTV: 'I certainly do not change my prediction based on polls.

'If I had done that I would have been wrong in my prediction of Trump in 2016 when all the polls said something else'.  

Explaining the mysterious 13 keys to the New York Times, Lichtman said: 'They are 13 big picture, true-false questions that tap into the strength and performance of the White House party.

The 13 keys include: Midterm gains, incumbency, primary contest, third party, short-term economy, long-term economy, policy change, social unrest, White House scandal, incumbent charisma, challenger charisma, foreign policy failure, and foreign policy success.

The historian also told CTV about the 'vulgar, scurrilous, violent' hate he received after making his prediction about Harris last month. 

'I have never, ever had the kind of hate heaped upon me that I've seen this time,' Lichtman expressed.  

'This is the toxic politics that Donald Trump has introduced in our society,' Lichtman said. 'It never happened before the advent of Trump.'

It comes after Lichtman recently discussed on his YouTube channel of the 'election anxiety' Americans are experiencing ahead of election day. 

'A lot of people believe the future of the country is on the line here, and the democracy of America could be a thing of the past. I don't think that's an illegitimate fear.

'I'm so worried about the future of our election, you know, I think I've said this before – democracy is precious but like all precious things, it can be destroyed,' he said.

Last month, another election forecaster who correctly called the 2020 result also anticipated a landslide win for Harris.

Northwestern University data scientist Thomas Miller said that Harris will knock Trump in a landslide election, telling Fortune Magazine: 'It's gone from a drastic landslide in Trump's direction to a drastic landslide for Harris'. 

Miller first gained attention after he accurately predicted the 2020 presidential election by unconventionally using betting markets rather than traditional polls to forecast the outcome. 

He achieved this by developing a model, which is based on 16 presidential elections, that converted betting prices into the popular vote and Electoral College projections. 

This model shows a narrow correlation between betting odds and the anticipated popular vote.