About "experts" who've correctly predicted many presidential races

[Silent3]

10. As far "surely there must thousands of coin flippers with great prediction records"... wow, way to misunderstand...

...an analogy for illustrative purposes.

Of course actual coin flipping isn't going to be used by anyone (well, perhaps a few cranks) for making predictions. But there really will be a lot of people who think they've got mathematical models or a predictive formulas that actually aren't much better than a coin toss for accuracy. These are effectively mere coin tosses with fancy window dressing, or a bit better than coin tosses, but perhaps not by much.

I can't point to long lists of such people because the people who fail a lot naturally fall into obscurity. Only people who succeed quite a bit gain attention... but, unfortunately, it's practically impossible to know how many reach prominence by simply lucking out a lot.

At the time the following article was written, an elementary school had a 48-year-long record for correct election prediction, an even better record than Lichtman's, back in 2016 (I have no idea if they've extended that record since).

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/these-things-have-all-correctly-predicted-the-presidential-election-results-for-decades/