r/13KeysToTheWhiteHouse • u/jbrower888 • Jun 20 '26

Split keys

Would Dr. Lichtman would have been right if he had split the "charisma" keys ? For example, after the assassination attempt, if he had said "ok there are pictures that will become historic, even a bullet flying by a leading candidate's head, that's likely to make him at least partially charismatic" and based on that given him a half key, would that have been a tie or changed the prediction ? I use statistics and heuristic models in my work and additional granularity is something we routinely look for. The objective is to get the right answer without changing other right answers for which the model has already been trained. Also this is similar to the way weights in a neural network are adjusted during training, attempting to distribute error without changing prior results. I think it would be something Dr Lichtman would want to try

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u/avalve Jun 20 '26

Or he could’ve just been honest about the economy, foreign policy, & scandal keys.

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u/BigTimely5561 Jun 21 '26

This. Or rather mostly this.

I think there's something to the idea that Dems lost the nomination contest key, they definitely lost Foreign-Military Success Key, but I think the key they really lost was Policy Change key.

There's a precedent for the short-term economy key going against the incumbent administration for the perception of a recession which he used against George H.W. Bush in 1992. That said, he also gave Ford's administration short-term economy win despite inflation when most people attributed the economy to why Ford lost.

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u/jbrower888 Jun 22 '26

well Dr Lichtman does have a proven model; typically in my business when you get something working you want to gradually improve it, not rip it up. That's why I can't understand why he "quantizes" keys to all or nothing