Elections & earthquakes

There is a man who has correctly predicted the outcome of the last 8 presidential elections. He said Obama would win a second term a year before Mitt Romney was chosen to be his opponent! This man is Allan Lichtman, a professor at American University. Now you are probably thinking he's using some complicated method based on political strategies. That is not the case. Lichtman based his predictive method on geophysics! Listen to the NPR article HERE.

Who win the next presidential election? Ask Allan Lichtman!

More specifically Lichtman thinks of election as geophysicists think of earthquakes. Lichtman says:

"Everything we know about elections, we've already stolen from geophysics.Tremors of political change, seismic movements of the voters, volcanic elections, political earthquakes. It's all geophysics anyway."

The basics of Lichtman's method is decide if the election will be stable or if there will be upheaval. This is a principle of earthquakes. For elections, Lichtman defines stability as the incumbent party stays in the White House. Upheaval is when the incumbent loses.

After reviewing past elections, Lichtman defined 13 key questions (which he wrote about in his book The Keys to the White House). If the six or more questions went against the incumbent party then he predicted upheaval. Obama only had three strikes with the economy, low approval ratings, and the poor  results for his party in the midterm elections.

Now you might wonder why we can't predict earthquakes with as much accuracy as Lichtman with elections. Well, it is a simple fact that earthquakes are much more complex than political elections. We can characterize the forces and geologic structure but the exact time it will occur is impossible. The USGS (US Geological Survey) is in charge of monitoring seismic activity over the whole nation. The best warning system we have right now is the Earthquake Early Warning system. It works by detecting the first rumbles of the earthquake and sending a message to the city before the destructive energy arrives. The waves travel at 2 miles per second so if the earthquake is 20 miles away it gives a 10 second warning. Not much but maybe enough for people to run to a safe location.

Example of the Early Earthquake Warning system.

It is interesting that principles of geophysics which characterize movements of the earth can be used to so accurately predict election outcomes. I guess it shows that laws of nature rule even at the human level!