Elections forecaster Allan Lichtman took a swipe at fellow prognosticator Nate Silver on Wednesday while admitting he was wrong in predicting Vice President Harris would win the presidency.
“Unlike Nate Silver, who will try to squirm out of why he didn’t see the election coming, I admit that I was wrong,” Lichtman wrote on the social platform X, adding that he “will assess the election and the keys,” in an upcoming online live show.
His comments come after former President Trump was declared the winner early Wednesday.
A historian and American University professor, who has correctly predicted nearly every presidential race since 1984 using a formula of 13 true-or-false questions, Lichtman predicted Harris would win, saying only a major event overseas could still flip the race Trump’s favor.
Silver’s analysis had the race as a statistical toss-up, though he hedged that “close polls don’t necessarily predict a close result.”
“How there could be another systematic polling error favoring either Trump or Harris that turns Ann Selzer into a hero or a goat — and about how other gutless pollsters have basically just given up and decided to copy off the students who did their homework,” Silver added.
Silver had previously written his gut sense was that Trump would win.
Lichtman has taken shots at the FiveThirtyEight founder in the past, and the pair feuded online in September when Silver argued that Lichtman’s method in fact predicted a Trump win.
“Nate. you don’t have the faintest idea about how to apply my keys. You are neither a historian or a political scientist or have any academic credentials of any kind,” Lichtman wrote at the time.
Though Silver has publicly questioned Lichtman’s methods, he has also complimented his work.
“Lichtman is comically overconfident and doesn’t own up to the subjectivities in his method, but you’ll legit learn a lot about presidential elections by reading his work, and he’s at least putting himself out there making testable predictions,” he wrote on X.
