So basically he's fudging his model into the direction of what he expects to happen. Key 2 is actually true by his standard (Sanders won over a third of delegates) but he's finding excuses otherwise because he doesn't think Trump can win.
Both key 2 and key 4 are false for the incumbent by Lichtman's traditional standards. That would make six keys against Clinton and point to a Trump popular vote win (he doesn't predict EC wins).
Can't find the link, but about six months ago Lichtman was arguing that the only ambiguous key was 'major foreign policy success'. He was unsure how major the deal with Iran was going to be. If that had been False, he would have been forced to predict a Trump victory (at the time, he seemed quite sure Key 2 counted as False). Obviously he figured predicting a Trump win, in the face of all other evidence, would open him up to humiliation.
I agree with many of the above comments, the '13 Keys' model is ridiculously subjective and suffers from the same flaw as many fundamentals-based models: just because you can find a set of factors common to all past elections does not mean the same factors will be valid for all future elections. Those familiar with the xkcd 'Electoral Precedent' cartoon will already know this...
He also had the contest key as ambiguous then. He was fudging his traditional standards in that article to say that if Bernie was supportive at the convention his delegate total wouldn't count against the Dems holding the WH.
At that time he didn't see any traction for Johnson, so he had the third party key as True for Clinton. I don't see how he could make that call without some serious fudging of that key, too.
As noted he was ambiguous about the foreign policy success. In
the article he even said that the best strategy for Clinton was to have Obama sell the Iran deal to the public at large. Clearly that hasn't happened, so if he were consistent he should be calling that key False for Clinton raising the False total to 7.
Here was his
interview a year ago. In that one he thought the Climate Change agreement would turn the foreign policy success key. By
May of this year he had discarded Climate Change as the vehicle and moved to Iran.
The real difference you can see is that he was toying with adding a new key. This one is for a challenging party fracture. In this election it would turn True, and if Johnson is interpreted as a challenger fracture instead of a true third party then Hillary gets 8 keys True even if contest and foreign policy success are ruled False.
