Bush and Howard are winners

George Osborne says that on the basis of the ‘keys’ forecasting system George W. Bush will be President next year and Michael Howard will be in No. 10

In the next few months George Bush and John Kerry are going to spend more than $1 billion trying to win the presidential election, while everyone else is going to spend millions of dollars trying to guess the result. They needn’t bother. The result is already obvious. Or so I have just been told by a man called Professor Allan Lichtman. He is a well-known American political scientist who has a simple and (almost) infallible system for forecasting the outcome of presidential elections. He devised it more than 20 years ago with a Soviet seismologist, and it uses the methodology for predicting real earthquakes to help predict political earthquakes.

It is based on 13 questions, or what Professor Lichtman theatrically calls the ‘13 keys to the White House’. If the incumbent party (i.e., the Republicans this year) can answer ‘yes’ to eight or more of the questions, then they will win the election. If they can’t, then they lose. That’s been the case for every presidential election since the Lincoln/Douglas contest of 1860 with one glaring exception — the last election. The Professor’s plausible excuse is that he predicted who was going to get most votes, not who had the fewest hanging chads in Florida.

So who’s going to win this time? Here’s how Lichtman currently scores Bush against his ‘13 keys’:

1. After the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the US House of Representatives than it did after the previous midterm elections. Bush 1; Kerry 0.2. There is no serious contest for the incumbent party nomination. Bush 2; Kerry 0.3.