So the Lichtman Test so far

[Nym90]

The incumbent party needs 8 out of 13 keys in their favor in order to win, BTW. Not just 7.

[Nym90]

This article from Nate Silver in 2011 helps explain some of the flaws of the keys--most significantly that while they may have been correct in each election regarding the popular vote winner, they are poor at predicting the popular vote percentage, and thus their success rate seems based more on luck than anything.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/despite-keys-obama-is-no-lock/

Lichtman's response to this is that the keys aren't designed to predict the popular vote percentage, only the winner. OK, but how can he be so confident that the tipping point voter will always vote on the basis of the keys if other voters don't seem to swinging in proportion to them? If the keys are truly accurate predictors, than the more keys a candidate has, the better they should perform in the popular vote, and there hasn't been a very strong correlation.

Here's Lichtman's response: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/keys-to-the-white-house-historian-responds/

[Nym90]

The Lichtman test is overrated.

It's worked on all but one election in the past 100 years.

Well, sure it does great when you know what result you're aiming for when you retroactively decide the subjective ones.

It was created in the 80's and has been used to predict every election from 1984 to the present. Again, all but one time it was correct. Then it was retroactively applied to elections going all the way back to 1860 and it still worked.

Um, nope. Nope nope nope. Lichtman looked at every election from 1860 to 1980 and identified common factors in order to create the model. The model cannot predict the data points that were used to derive the model in the first place. When you plug in an election from 1860 to 1980, the model spits out the right answer because it was designed (overfitted) in the first place specifically to account for each and every one of those elections.

As for whether or not the model got 2000 right, doesn't that just kind of go to show the inherent uselessness of a model for U.S. presidential elections that doesn't even purport to tell you what percentage of the popular vote a candidate will win by?

The only reason it got 2000 wrong was because 2000 was stolen by Bush.

Lichtman says it predicts the popular vote winner. Hilariously the Republicans had only 4 of the 8 keys they need to win in 1876, but since Tilden won the popular vote, Litchtman counts that as an election predicted correctly. You'd think if you were 4 keys short you wouldn't actually end up in the White House.

Another good example is 1960, when Nixon also had only four keys in his favor yet only lost the popular vote by 0.2%, and it can be argued that he actually did win it depending upon how you choose to allocate the Democratic vote in Alabama.

Pretty hard to believe that it would have taken four more keys swinging his way to persuade the 0.1% of the electorate he would have needed to win it.

[Nym90]

The GOP actually had seven in 1992 as Iran-Contra didn't rise to the level of a major enough scandal to turn key 9. But the incumbent party needs 8 keys to win, and thus they still fell one short.

Also I think you got keys 7 and 13 backwards. No major policy change was a loss for the GOP, but Clinton didn't qualify as charismatic.

It is harder to turn some of the keys than many would assume.

[Nym90]

My understanding of key 2 is that the losing candidate has to receive at least 1/3 of the delegate votes at the convention itself (as opposed to just winning at least 1/3 of the pledged delegates in the primaries). If Sanders drops out after June 7, therefore, this key could still be turned for the Dems and give them the required 8 keys to win, if many of his delegates end up actually voting for Clinton at the convention.

Or maybe we need an additional scale for someone as unpopular as Trump....he counts as double false for key 13.