It’s the million-dollar question in the United States right now: Who will become our next president?

The outcome of volatile campaigns like this is difficult to predict for even the most seasoned pollsters and political commentators (Remember the shock of 2016?) However, historian Allan Lichtman has built a reputation for being an excellent forecaster. He has correctly predicted 9 of the last ten presidential elections (the only exception was Al Gore in 2000, who won the popular vote but ultimately lost to George W. Bush.)

Last month, the forecasting pioneer said he expects Vice President Kamala Harris to win the White House. In an interview with Katie on Wednesday, Lichtman detailed his prediction based on 13 “keys to the White House” — a set of true-false questions that assess the electorate without relying on pundits and polls. 

“I don’t pay attention to pundits. They’re my buddies. I love them, but they have no scientific basis for their opinions,” says Lichtman, who’s a history professor at American University. “I don’t follow the polls because polls are snapshots; they’re abused as predictors. Rather, I look at the fundamental forces that explain the results of presidential elections. And the big message of the keys that does make it unique is that it’s governing, not campaigning, that counts. The keys gauge the strength and performance of the party [currently in the White House].”

So what do these keys entail, exactly? These factors include whether an incumbent president is running, foreign policy successes (or failures), and short- and long-term economic conditions. Lichtman admits that he serendipitously came up with these predictors as a visiting distinguished scholar at the California Institute of Technology in in 1981. There, he met the world’s leading authority on earthquake prediction, Vladimir Keilis-Borok.

“We became the odd couple of political research, and the key to our breakthrough was reconceptualizing presidential elections,” he recalls. “We used Keilis-Borok’s method of pattern recognition to see what patterns in the political environment were associated with stability and earthquake.”

But how well does his model hold up to unprecedented events, like the shake-up in the Democratic ticket? Lichtman says he “fully accounted” for Harris replacing Biden as the Democratic nominee in the keys. Still, there have been other shocking developments, too, such as the two assassination attempts against Trump and intensifying unrest in the Middle East. To that end, he emphasizes that “the keys transcend these events.”

“The keys have survived enormous changes in our society, our politics, our economics, our demography,” he says. “Now, I’m not so arrogant to say nothing could ever change — there could be something so catastrophic to change the pattern of 160 years. The problem is you would never know that until afterward.”

For more, check out the rest of Katie’s interview with Lichtman in the video above, in which he shares why he thinks pollsters have been underestimating Democratic support and whether he expects any “October surprises” that could influence the election’s outcome.