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Seminar paper from the year 2020 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Region: USA, University of Bonn, language: English, abstract: This paper will focus on what Lichtman calls the "Thirteen Keys to the White House" and how he used them to predict the outcomes of the last nine presidential elections. To do so, his book "The Keys to the White House" which was firstly published in 1996 is required as the main source for the following steps that will serve as the leading topics of each chapter of this paper.

The first chapter will briefly summarize and explain Lichtman’s thirteen keys and how they were determined as critical indicators for predicting the winner of a presidential election. In a second step and therefore in the second chapter the focus will lie on how Lichtman decided whether a key applied to a residing President or not, especially regarding certain keys which cannot be answered simply because of extraordinary circumstances surrounding particular candidates of the various presidential elections since 1984. As Lichtman stated that the presidential race between Republican candidate Donald J. Trump and Democratic candidate and former First Lady of the United States Hillary Clinton was the hardest election to predict, a third chapter will focus on the reasons for that. Additionally, the chapter will try to apply the keys to a new election by assuming that Donald Trump will run for office again.