Hack American University historian Allan Lichtman could have chosen to enlighten his audience with genuine perspective on why the 2024 election didn’t fit in his little election-predicting formula. Instead, as I’ve written about here, here and here, he chose to parrot partisan talking points and excuses because, sadly, he is a biased, publicity-seeking hack. Thus I’m forced into doing his work for him. Well, that’s okay. I’m qualified, and unlike him, I have integrity.

Let’s begin with this fact nobody has mentioned: only three men before Trump were elected President after losing a Presidential election. Three. Andrew Jackson was the first, but he gets an asterisk: Andy won the popular vote when he ran the first time but lost to John Quincy Adams in the House of Representatives. Like Trump, he said the election had been stolen from him. The second time a defeated Presidential candidate came back to win was in 1892, when Grover Cleveland, like Trump, ran again after losing his first bid for re-election to win the White House back, thus becoming the 22nd and 24th President. He has the same asterisk as Jackson, however. Grover the Good (in truth, he wasn’t all that good) never lost the popular vote: Benjamin Harrison defeated him with the first fluke Electoral College victory (Rutherford B. Hayes doesn’t count, but that’s another story.) So Cleveland won the popular vote in all three of his Presidential elections.

Richard Nixon is the third member of this odd club. He lost a squeaker to JFK in 1960 ( or maybe he didn’t, but unlike Trump, Nixon refused to challenge the result “for the good of the nation.” If Trump had only followed Nixon’s example, he would have won a real landslide this week), and then came back eight years later to defeat Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace to finally win the Presidency.

But Trump wasn’t like any of his club members. He had lost the popular vote in two previous Presidential races. Only Henry Clay, William Jennings Bryan and Tom Dewey had that distinction before Trump, and none of them ever got out of the loser’s column. If Lichtman had wanted a legitimate excuse for him proving to be a false Nostradamus for the 2024 election, he could have said that no one had ever won the Presidency after losing the popular vote in two previous elections. Or that the only time before Trump a former President, running for a non-consecutive term was victim of an assassination attempt, he lost. That was Teddy Roosevelt, who topped Trump’s bravado after being shot by actually giving his planned speech with the bullet in his chest. Instead, Lichtman attributed his failed prediction to gullible, racist voters.

There were also a surfeit of clues that should have told Lichtman that Harris would lose. The only time a previously defeated POTUS ever ran for another term, Grover Cleveland again, he won. How many Vice-Presidents who took over for a President as the candidate after the campaign had begun won the election? Why, none. How many Vice-Presidents were elected President while still serving as VP? Only two since 1800, Martin Van Buren and George H.W. Bush, and both were cases of “anointment.” Two transformational and popular Presidents, Andrew Jackson and Ronald Reagan, designated these Veeps as their chosen successors, as the equivalent of their third terms. (Both failed miserably.) President Biden is neither popular nor transformational, and he endorsed Harris grudgingly. It also didn’t help that Harris could never decide whether her message was that she would continue what Biden started, or that she would be an agent of change.

No Vice-President in our history ever ran for President while Vice-President and defeated a former President. That’s because no Vice Presidents have been in that position before, but still, the historical precedents were almost all stacked against Harris. That’s even ignoring that no woman has been elected President yet. It also doesn’t take into account that the shortest candidate for President almost always loses, and compared to the general population, Harris, at 5’4″ is by far the shortest person to run for the office. (James Madison was also that height, but the average man then was only two inches taller.)

However, the fact that Kamala Harris was a weak, unpopular candidate who ran one of the most inept campaigns in American history is more important than anything I’ve mentioned. If Lichtman had been inclined to be honest, he could have said that no amount of other advantages will overcome that.