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Many of the keys are subject to arbitrary interpretation; Nate Silver criticized his process and arguably has a better probability model with more consistent accuracy across thousands of races somewhere around 90%. Key 2 was given to Biden despite the writing on the wall that 2/3 of Democrats wanted a contest both before and after the primaries. Key 3 Incumbency these days is more of a liability with both candidates distancing themselves. Key 9 Scandals have lost a lot of meaning in the Trump era.
Should be noted that he gave a full-throated endorsement of Hillary Clinton... only to predict she'd lose. The thing is, he had originally referenced in two different publications ahead of that prediction that she would specifically lose the popular vote. She didn't. He then changed his model.
Also I'm not a fan of this guy because he belittled with insults those who called for Biden to step down... Despite not giving a prediction on Biden at the time.
They aren't as arbitrary as they seem, it's just that the media don't go into the full detail.
For example, key 2 is actually "The candidate is nominated on the first ballot and wins at least two-thirds of the delegate votes", which is clearly true
Furthermore, the entire point of this method is that it ignores opinion polls. So it makes no difference whether the public actually wanted a primary contest or not. Likewise, it doesn't matter whether scandals have "lost meaning".
His entire methodology is contingent on history repeating itself. But we know we live in times of historical firsts that defy extrapolation.
With key 2 it's less about the definition and more about the allotted weight of importance. Like, imagine if the DNC simply said that "we are unilaterally awarding all delegate votes to Biden and skipping a Primaries voting process for our Democratic voters." Yes, the key would still be True, but would that mean jack shit? Not really. And again, Incumbency is more a liability when the incumbent President's approval rating matches Jimmy Carter. His Charisma keys are another example of subjective interpretation and which itself is clearly reflective of opinion polls.
For all our sake, I hope he's right. But his prediction is just as if not more useless than the aggregation of A+ polls in moments of time that can actually adapt to changing circumstances, including things like impactful scandals, military success / failures, and social unrest.
At the end of the day Perception is Reality; even if the economy is doing well in short and long-term on paper, we again unfortunately live in unprecedented times where that is not being felt by the actual people who are, you know, going to the ballot box.
Any prediction is based on history. Even pollsters believe the history of polling results before an election can predict how people will actually vote on election day.
What people usually don't realize about the "keys" is that they aren't advocating some political position, like "incumbency is good". It is more like a retrospective clinical study, where you look at a bunch of factors (smoking, exercise, TV watching, eye color) and see which ones best predict some outcome of interest (lifespan). If smoking has an association with lifespan and eye color doesn't, then smoking is a predictor and eye color isn't.
It doesn't matter if people don't understand why smoking would affect lifespan. It doesn't matter if people think eye color should be more predictive than smoking. It doesn't matter if people think cigarettes today are not the same as they used to be, so smoking should no longer be a predictor for lifespan. Predictors are predictors until they actually fail to predict.