Allan Lichtman and David Brooks agree with Vox Verax: Trump won't last the first term

‘Prediction professor’ who called Trump’s big win also made another forecast: Trump will be impeached

By Peter W. Stevenson, November 11, Washington Post

Few prognosticators predicted a Donald Trump victory ahead of Tuesday night. Polls showed Hillary Clinton comfortably ahead, and much of America (chiefly the media) failed to anticipate the wave of pro-Trump support that propelled him to victory. But a Washington, D.C.-based professor insisted that Trump was lined up for a win — based on the idea that elections are “primarily a reflection on the performance of the party in power.”

Allan Lichtman uses a historically based system of what he calls “keys” to predict election results ahead of time. The keys are explained in-depth in Lichtman’s book, “Predicting the Next President: The Keys to the White House 2016.” In our conversations in September and October, he outlined how President Obama's second term set the Democrats up for a tight race, and his keys tipped the balance in Trump's favor, even if just barely.

At the end of our September conversation, Lichtman made another call: that if elected, Trump would eventually be impeached by a Republican Congress that would prefer a President Mike Pence — someone whom establishment Republicans know and trust.

“I'm going to make another prediction,” he said. “This one is not based on a system; it's just my gut. They don't want Trump as president, because they can't control him. He's unpredictable. They'd love to have Pence — an absolutely down-the-line, conservative, controllable Republican. And I'm quite certain Trump will give someone grounds for impeachment, either by doing something that endangers national security or because it helps his pocketbook.”

So while Republican voters clearly came home before Nov. 8 — network exit polls show 90 percent of GOP voters cast ballots for Trump — it's less clear that the party leadership is on board. (Lichtman actually isn't the only person to predict a Trump impeachment; this morning, the New York Times's David Brooks suggested that a Trump impeachment or resignation was “probably” in the cards sometime within the next year.)

(Continued here.)