Campaigns Don’T Count

How the Media Get American Politics All Wrong

In the early 1980s, Allan Lichtman, a history professor at American University in Washington, D.C., developed a system for predicting the outcomes of presidential elections. Studying all elections back to the Civil War (the birth of the current two-party system), he isolated circumstances that are typically associated with victory for the incumbent party. Applying them forward, he has had an unmatched record of predictive success. In the elections of 2004, 2008 and 2012, among others, he called the outcomes correctly before the election year even began. His successes have been widely noted. Hes now, for example, the Election forecasting guru (RealClearPolitics), no ordinary soothsayer, (Agence France Press), and the presidential champion in the realm of predictions (MarylandReporter.com). A Washington Post writer even said Lichtmans system is fool proof, a claim pondered in Chapter 16. Martin Gottlieb, as an editorial writer and political columnist for the Dayton Daily News in Ohio, was floored and fascinated by Lichtmans unparalled successes in the 1986 senatorial elections. Gottlieb began what became career-long coverage of the record of the Lichtman keys. That resulted in a 2006 book with this title. This version is an update, with new chapters on the three subsequent presidential elections. What emerges from Campaigns Dont Count is not merely a way to win at the game of political predictions, but a new understanding of how American politics works, of what drives presidential election outcomes. Hint: It is not campaigns, media manipulation, money, political organization, ideology or any of the other forces that the mediaand the experts who advise themfocus on.