This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam.

Democrats were not the only ones to grin after the US presidential vote.

Donald Trump's election has sent shockwaves through the world of pollsters and political

analysts.

Pundits on both the left and right had predicted Hillary Clinton would walk away with a race.

Today, we're talking to one expert who got it right.

There are several surprising things about him.

For one thing, Alan Lickman is a historian, not a data scientist.

For another, this wasn't a fluke.

This is the ninth time in a row he's called the election correctly.

Finally, and this is the craziest part, Alan often calls the winner months and sometimes

years before an election.

He sometimes calls elections before he knows which candidates are running.

Alan says his secret is sitting in plain sight, but most of us are too consumed with the

drama of campaigns and candidates to see it.

Alan Lickman, welcome to Hidden Brain.

Thank you so much.

Alan, you're in the Middle East right now in a hotel room and cutter.

I want to take you back more than a quarter century.

You're at Caltech and you sat down to dinner next to another academic.

You were an art couple, you're a historian with an interest in American politics and he

was a geophysicist.

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