Kamala Harris Will Win--At Least in the Popular Vote

Allan Lichtman has predicted (in a video produced by the New York Times) that Kamala Harris will win the presidential election.  As I said in a previous post in 2020, Lichtman (a historian at American University) has persuaded me that he has the best model for predicting presidential elections based on his study of all the presidential elections since 1860.  But there is one flaw in his model: although it almost perfectly predicts the popular vote winner, it cannot predict those cases where the loser in the popular vote wins in the Electoral College.

In 2000, he predicted that Al Gore would win, and indeed he did win the popular election by about 544,000 votes.  But Gore lost the Electoral College by a narrow margin (271 for Bush, 266 for Gore).  The Electoral College vote was decided when Florida's 25 electoral votes went to Bush.  The U.S. Supreme Court halted the recount of votes in Florida with Bush leading Gore by 537 votes out of almost 6 million votes cast.

Lichtman tried to argue that his prediction was not a failure because he had correctly predicted Gore's popular vote victory.  So, he seemed to concede that his model predicts the popular vote but not the Electoral College vote.

But then, in 2016, Lichtman became famous for predicting Trump's win, even though most people had predicted a Clinton win.  Of course, Trump actually lost the popular vote by almost 3 million votes.  So, in claiming that he had correctly predicted the election in 2016, Lichtman was contradicting what he had said in 2000--that his model only predicted the popular vote winner.  Lichtman should have admitted that in 2016 his model failed to predict Clinton's popular vote win.

In 2020, Lichtman correctly predicted Biden's win, who won both the popular vote and the Electoral College.

In 2020, I argued that Lichtman needed to add a 14th Key to his "13 Keys to the White House" that would say "The likely voters for the incumbent party are evenly distributed across the states so as to minimize wasted votes in the Electoral College system."  Answering yes to this statement would favor the incumbent party.

But now I see that this doesn't work as a modification of his model.  Instead of that, I would suggest that he needs to add a qualifying statement to the model:  This model predicts the popular vote winner in almost every case (except for elections like 2016), but it cannot predict when the popular vote winner is the loser in the Electoral College.

Lichtman is wrong, therefore, when he says: "Kamala Harris will be the next President of the United States."  What he should say is: I predict that Kamala Harris will win the popular vote for President, but it is possible that Trump could still win the Electoral College.

The reason for this weakness in his model is that the Electoral College allows presidential elections to be decided by a few votes in a few key states in ways that are not predictable by any model of presidential elections.  For example, in 2016, Trump won all 16 of the electoral votes for Michigan, even though he won by only 10,704 popular votes out of a total of 4,548, 382 votes.  In 2020, Biden won all 16 of the electoral votes for Georgia, even though he won by only 11,779 votes out of a total of 4,935, 487 votes.  The problem here is that the "winner-take-all" system of the Electoral College in most states (except for Nebraska and Maine) gives all of a state's electoral votes to the popular vote winner in the state, even when only a few thousand votes have made the difference, and thus the votes cast on the losing side have been wasted.

This obvious unfairness could be eliminated by either abolishing the Electoral College or by having state legislatures abolish the "winner-take-all" process for allocating electoral votes.

Let's turn now to Lichtman's model as applied to the 2024 presidential race.

Lichtman's fundamental insight--based on his study of presidential elections--is that voters in a presidential election are mostly judging the past performance of the incumbent party, and that what happens in the presidential campaign--campaign tactics, fluctuating polling, presidential debates, campaign fundraising, campaign advertising, and so on--don't really matter all that much, because all that matters for the voters--the past performance of the incumbent party--has been determined long before the campaign began.  Of course, this contradicts what most political commentators assume, which is that the outcome depends upon the day-to-day events of the presidential campaign.

From his study of the history, as laid out in his book Predicting the Next President: The Keys to the White House (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020 edition), Lichtman decided that there were 13 conditions that favor reelection of the incumbent party.  These 13 conditions could be framed as 13 statements, so that when six or more of these statements are false, the incumbent party loses.  Here I will state each of the keys followed by Lichtman's answer for 2024.

KEY 1  Incumbent party mandate:  After the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives than it did after the previous midterm elections.

False.  Although the Democrats did better than expected in the 2022 midterms, they experienced a net loss in House seats.

KEY 2  Nomination contest:  There is no serious contest for the incumbent-party nomination.

True.  Harris won her nomination without any contest for the nomination.

KEY 3  Incumbency:  The incumbent-party candidate is the sitting president.

False.  The Democrats lost this key when Biden withdrew his candidacy for a second term.

KEY 4  Third party:  There is no significant third-party or independent campaign.

True.  With RFK Jr.'s withdrawal from third-party candidacy, this key goes to the Democrats.

KEY 5  Short-term economy:  The economy is not in recession during the election campaign.

True.  Despite the fact that some people have complained about the economy, there is no clear evidence of a recession.

KEY 6  Long-term economy:  Real annual per capita economic growth during the term equals or exceeds mean growth during the two previous terms.

True.  Growth during Biden's term has exceeded the growth over the two previous terms.

KEY 7  Policy change:  The incumbent administration effects major changes in national policy.

True.  Biden has made some major changes in policy--such as rejoining the Paris Accords on Climate Change, the CHIPS Bill, the Inflation Reduction and Climate Change Bill, and the Infrastructure Bill.

KEY 8  Social unrest:  There is no sustained social unrest during the term.

True.  Although there has been some social unrest associated with the pro-Palestine student protests, this has not been sustained over a long period.

KEY 9  Scandal:  The incumbent administration is untainted by major scandal.

True.  The attempts of the Republicans to find Biden guilty of some great scandal have failed.  Hunter Biden's legal problems have not created a personal scandal for the President.

KEY 10  Foreign or military failure:  The incumbent administration suffers no major failure in foreign or military affairs.

Undecided.  It's not clear right now whether the Biden Administration's policy for a cease-fire in Gaza will fail.

KEY 11  Foreign or military success:  The incumbent administration achieves a major success in foreign or military affairs.

Undecided.  For the reason just indicated for foreign or military success.

KEY 12  Incumbent charisma:  The incumbent-party candidate is charismatic or a national hero.

False.  Kamala Harris does not have a broadly bipartisan charismatic appeal (comparable to someone like Ronald Reagan).

KEY 13  Challenger charisma:  The challenging-party candidate is not charismatic or a national hero.

True.  Although the cult of Trump treat him like a God, this is a narrow base in the electorate.  Most voters find Trump repulsive rather than charismatic.  This makes an interesting point about Trump's "populism"--contrary to his claim to speak for all or at least most of the people (the "true Americans"), he speaks only for a minority.  That's the fundamental weakness in most populist movements.

This gives Harris and the Democrats eight true keys, and that's enough to win.  Even if the two foreign policy keys were to flip to false, that would constitute only five false keys, not enough for the Republicans to win.

                             Lichtman Applies His 13 Keys to Harris, 1 Hour and 14 Minutes

Are Most of Us Going to Hell? Is Don Giovanni Already There?

J. D. Vance has said that Kamala Harris "can go to Hell" for her failure to investigate the killing of 13 U.S. military service people during the evacuation from Afghanistan in August of 2021.  When he was asked whether he should apologize for using such language, he said that he would not apologize for using "a colloquial phrase" to express his moral disgust with Harris.  Of course, he is right that most of us today use the words "go to Hell" as a "colloquial" expression of our emotional disgust with someone.  

This suggests that we have forgotten that for most of Christian history, orthodox Christians spoke of "going to Hell" as a literally true Christian doctrine--that most human beings after they die will go to Hell where they will be eternally tormented by God as punishment for their wickedness.  As I have indicated in my recent posts on Vance and his association with Catholic Integralism, Vance professes to be a traditionalist Catholic who believes in the truth of Christian orthodoxy, who also believes that the identity of America as a Christian nation depends on enforcing belief in that Christian orthodoxy.  

For the Catholic Integralists, the highest end of man is to avoid eternal torment in Hell and enjoy eternal beatitude in Heaven.  And achieving that end requires a Catholic theocracy: the temporal power of the state must serve the spiritual power of the Catholic Church, the only true Church that can lead human beings to eternal salvation and away from eternal punishment.  But as I have argued previously, the Catholic Integralists don't really believe this, because they are still liberals who accept the liberal principles of religious liberty and toleration.

Moreover, people like Vance and the Catholic Integralists--and most Christians generally today--believe that the truth of Christian orthodoxy has been divinely revealed by the Holy Spirit through scripture and tradition.  But that belief is denied by the fact of religious pluralism--by the fact that devout Christians cannot reach agreement on fundamental Christian doctrines such as the doctrine of Hell as eternal torment for most human beings.  This confirms Locke's claim that "everyone is orthodox to himself," and for that reason we need to secure the religious liberty and toleration that will allow a free debate over religious doctrines without any coercive enforcement of one church's orthodoxy over another's.

Last year, the Gallup polling organization reported that the proportion of Americans professing to believe in God, Heaven, and Hell has declined over the past 24 years.  In 2001, 90% believed in God, 83% believed in Heaven, and 71% believed in Hell.  In 2023, that had gone down to 74% (God), 67% (Heaven), and 59% (Hell).  In some other countries, the percentages are lower.  In Great Britain, for example, it's 49% for God, 41% for Heaven, and 26% for Hell.  Hell is always less popular than Heaven.  Nevertheless, the international surveys report that in a few countries--like Egypt and Morocco--almost 100% of people report believing in Hell.

Over the years, I have written many posts on the evolutionary history of Heaven and Hell.  And in the last four hundred years of that evolutionary history, particularly in Europe and North America, there has been a notable decline in belief in the Christian orthodox doctrine of Hell as the place for the eternal torment of most human beings.

DID DON GIOVANNI GO TO HELL?

Recently, I had to think more about this when my wife and I attended performances of Verdi's La Traviata and Mozart's Don Giovanni at the Santa Fe Opera.  Don Giovanni was a legendary libertine who was reputed to have seduced (or raped) over 2,000 women.  The Italian libretto for Mozart's opera, written by Lorenzo Da Ponte, is based on this old story.

At the beginning of the opera, in seventeenth-century Seville, we see the Don struggling with Donna Anna, who is resisting his sexual assault.  Donna Anna's father, the Commendatore, comes out of his palace, and he challenges Don Giovanni with a sword.  At first, the Don is reluctant to fight with an old man, but finally he draws his sword and easily kills him.  Leporello, the Don's servant, is horrified by what he has seen.  The Don and Leporello leave together.  

Meanwhile, Donna Anna and Don Ottavio, her betrothed, come out of the palace and are shocked by the dead body of the Commendatore.  Together, they sing about their "oath to the gods . . . to avenge that blood."  That sets the recurrent theme in the opera of "vengeance" as indicated by the many appearances of the Italian word vendetta in the libretto.  Every woman who is assaulted or betrayed by Don Giovanni seeks vengeance against him.  And as they warn other women about his predatory ways, the Don fails in all his attempts at new conquests because he cannot escape his bad reputation.

Near the end of the opera, the Don and Leporello are walking through a graveyard with monuments and statues, including one of the Commendatore.  The Commendatore's marble statue speaks: "You will cease laughing before dawn!"  Mozart uses three trombones here for the first time in the opera.  In the eighteenth century, trombones were used mainly for religious music and for supernatural scenes in operas.  This sudden entrance of trombones in what is a comic opera must have awed Mozart's audiences.

Don Giovanni is surprised, and he asks Leporello to read the inscription on the statue: "Here I await vengeance [vendetta] on the wicked man who brought me to my death."  Leporello is frightened.  But the Don is amused.  He invites the statue to come to dinner.  The statue agrees.

Later, Don Giovanni is having a grand party in the banquet-hall of his palace.  The statue arrives and enters the room.  He invites the Don to have dinner with him.  The Don agrees.  He gives his hand to the statue as his pledge.  The statue's hand is freezing cold.  He orders the Don:  "Repent, change your life, it is your last moment!"  Giovanni refuses to repent.

Roaring flames begin to surround Giovanni, and demon voices are heard from below: "All is as nothing compared to your crimes! Come!  Worse is in store for your!"

Giovanni cries: "Who tears my spirit?  Who shakes my innards?  What twisting, alas, what frenzy!  What hell.  What terror."

With the demon voices screaming, Giovanni cries "Ah!" as he is enveloped by flames and sinks to hell.

A few minutes later, all of the main characters appear in the room.  Leporello explains what happened: "right over there the devil swallowed him up."  Don Ottavio says: "we all have been avenged by heaven."  The opera ends with all singing the "very ancient song"--"And the death of wicked men is always just like their life."

Don Giovanni has always been one of the most popular of all operas.  And some opera critics have said that it is the greatest of all operas.  And yet many people have found the end of the opera with the Don's descent into Hell unsatisfying.  This ending just does not feel right.

                     Don Giovanni, the Commendatore Scene, from the Movie Amadeus

Or perhaps it does not feel right only for modern secular audiences and opera directors who have no understanding of Mozart's Catholic Christian conception of Hell as the place where evil men like Don Giovanni will be eternally tormented for their sins.  

But that's not a good answer, because the religious language in Don Giovanni sounds more like a vaguely pagan polytheistic view of the Underworld rather than a Christian view of Hell.  The characters invoke "the gods" without any reference to the God of the Bible or to Jesus.  In explaining what has happened to the Don, they say that he has gone to be with "Proserpina and Pluto"--the ancient Roman gods of the Underworld.  This is very strange for people supposedly living in the Catholic Spanish world of 17th century Seville!

Furthermore, whenever the characters appeal to a "just heaven" to punish Giovanni, they seem to be projecting their own personal vendetta onto "heaven."  For example, Donna Elvira tells Giovanni: "A just heaven willed that I would find you, in order to accomplish its own vendetta and mine."

What I see here is confirmation of Judge Morris Hoffman's claim that evolution has built our brains to punish cheaters.  Our brains incline us to three kinds of punishment.  As first-party punishment, most human beings punish themselves for cheating through conscience and guilt.  As second-party punishment, wrongdoers are punished by retaliation and revenge (delayed retaliation) from their victims.  As third-party punishment, we punish wrongdoers for harming others with retribution.

It's clear to me that Don Giovanni has no moral conscience or sense of guilt, and so he doesn't punish himself for his wrongdoing.  He's a psychopath or what I have called a "moral stranger"--someone who does not feel the moral sentiments that most of us feel.

Nevertheless, Giovanni is punished by the second-party retaliation and revenge coming from his victims and by the third-party retribution coming from those who observed his wrongdoing.  If he really was sent to Hell by the gods of a "just heaven," that would be a supernatural form of third-party punishment.

Stephen Barlow--the Director of the Santa Fe Opera's production of Don Giovanni--disagrees with my claim that Giovanni has no conscience, and he even designed his production of the opera to show that Giovanni's guilty conscience drove him to kill himself at the end, and this self-inflicted punishment takes the place of his being thrown into Hell.

Barlow's idea was to alter the staging of Don Giovanni to make the story similar to Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.  Dorian Gray is a young man in Victorian England whose beauty is admired by both men and women.  When an artist paints a portrait of Dorian, he realizes that while he will always be beautiful in the painting, he will lose his beauty as he ages.  So, he wishes that the face in the portrait would age, while he remains young and beautiful.  His wish is fulfilled.  He devotes his life to beauty and sensuous pleasures, and he experiments with every vice, even murder.  Reflecting the increasing degradation of his soul over the years, his portrait becomes ever more hideously ugly, while he still looks beautiful.

Struggling with his guilt, he decides that he must destroy the only evidence of his vicious conduct--the portrait.  He takes a knife and stabs the picture.  Doing that, he actually stabs himself in the heart and dies.  The next day, when people find his body, they see a withered and ugly corpse, while the portrait beside him is young and beautiful again.

To mimic this story, Barlow staged his Don Giovanni in Santa Fe as set in Victorian England.  At the opening of the opera, the audience sees a young and beautiful Giovanni having his portrait painted.  Then, at the end of the opera, the statue of the Commendatore is replaced by a portrait of the Commendatore, who looks like an aged and ugly Giovanni.  The Commendatore steps out of the portrait to challenge Giovanni.  Refusing to repent, Giovanni rushes toward the painting and stabs it with a knife.  But then Giovanni falls back and collapses.  He has actually stabbed himself and dies.  His guilty conscience has driven him to kill himself.

I do not see any evidence in the music or the libretto of Don Giovanni to justify Barlow's claim that Giovanni is punished and finally killed by his own guilty conscience.  The Don as depicted in this opera acts like a psychopathic libertine who has no conscience, whose punishment comes not from himself but from those provoked by his wrongdoing into a vendetta of retaliation and retribution.

I suspect, however, that many people in the Santa Fe audience found Barlow's clever alteration of the opera's ending more satisfying than Mozart's staging of the Don's descent into the eternal torment of Hell.  This is because in recent centuries, beginning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, belief in the Christian doctrine of Hell as a place of eternal torment has been in decline, particularly in Europe and North America.

In my next post, I will say more about this cultural evolutionary history of the symbolic reality of Hell, so that increasingly many people today, even devout Christians, can no longer believe in that traditional doctrine of Hell.