Allan Lichtman, the Keys and Trump's midterms on The Mark Thompson Show
The historian known for calling presidential races came back to the former KGO host's live show, and the comments filled about four times faster than usual.
Why this story? The video opened at a pace of 60,411 views a day, 6.1 times a normal first day on this channel (9,916).
Allan Lichtman Drops BOMBSHELL Update on What to Expect From Trump During the Midterms
What does the man behind the Keys to the White House expect from Donald Trump in the midterms? That question, billed in the title as a "BOMBSHELL Update," carried Allan Lichtman's latest conversation with Mark Thompson to about 60,000 views in its first day. A regular video on the channel usually opens with something closer to 10,000.
Lichtman, a historian at American University, is best known for the Keys, a set of true-or-false questions about the party in power that he has used to call presidential races since the 1980s. In 2024 they pointed to Kamala Harris, and that miss is still very much on viewers' minds. Much of the comment section is an argument over why the system got that race wrong and what it fails to measure, with plenty of commenters offering theories of their own.
It was his second appearance in two days. A day earlier, Lichtman joined Thompson's full live episode, whose notes describe his coming book, Great American Presidents: The Twelve Who Transformed the Nation, and say he considers Trump the worst president in history.
Thompson spent years as the announcer of American Idol and hosted a long-running program on KGO-AM in San Francisco. When the station changed formats, he kept the show going online, live every weekday and funded by its audience. With the midterms close, his guest list has turned to the big questions: political violence scholar Robert Pape was back the following day to talk about what the title calls "The DARK REALITY of the 2026 Midterms."
Published on Trari
Where next?
- Channel
- The Mark Thompson Show
- Subscribers
- 193,000 ▲ 3,000 this week
- Channel views, last 7 days
- 804,668
- Channel views, pace per day
- 168,140 (on a normal day: 77,967)
- Video published
- October 8, 2026
- Video views so far
- 70,228 (less than a day online)
- Video views, pace per day
- 62,147
The numbers
The Lichtman interview lifted the whole channel, which drew roughly twice its usual daily views.
💡 Test your knowledge
According to the show's own description, Mark Thompson was the longtime voice of which TV talent show?
The channel's about text calls Thompson the longtime voice of American Idol, where he worked as the show's announcer.



