One year ago in June 2008, The Elliott Wave Theorist published a study called “Fibonacci Regulates the Occurrence of Landmark Political-Equality Events.” It showed the importance of Fibonacci time durations in the establishment of political rights for African-Americans and women.

According to the operative Fibonacci time sequence, our analysis called for the election of an African-American or a woman to national office in November 2008. With Barack Obama, an African-American, running for president on the Democratic ticket, we had a 50% chance of confirming the Fibonacci time duration. As it turns out, the market found a way to assure that a woman would be in the race, too, when Repulican presidential candidate John McCain selected Sarah Palin as his vice presidential candidate. Interestingly, the same pressures that our study uncovered were behind McCain’s choice. So no matter the outcome, EWI’s call for an African-American or a woman in the executive office would be fulfilled. In point of fact, Obama won the election to becme the 44th U.S. president.

The original study from 2008 is republished below.

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Excerpted from The Elliott Wave Theorist, June 9, 2008. Since this study was done, Barack Obama won the U.S. presidential election in November 2008 and is now the 44th U.S. President.

Fibonacci Regulates the Occurrence of Landmark Political-Equality Events
By Dave Allman

Everyone recognizes the historical significance of the current U.S. election: A man partially of African-American heritage is the presumptive Presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, and a woman received (though by a disputed calculation) the largest popular vote for any Presidential nominee in U.S. history. 

These historic events piqued our interest, and some quick research turned up the following data concerning some of the most important measures ever adopted in the United States with respect to the social recognition of equal political status: 

 

As the Fibonacci durations have gotten shorter, the historical significance of each major instance of rights recognition has diminished proportionately.

All of the events cited here relate to social recognition legitimizing the equal political status of some portion of the population. In 1776, representatives of the colonies declared a claim to self-determination, a status equal to that of the British government; in 1865, African-Americans won their right to live freely, equating their status with the rest of the population; in 1920, women won the voting privilege, equating their political status with that of men; in 1954, African-Americans were granted (at least in principle) equal access to tax-funded schools. Electing either a woman or an African-American to the presidency would be a social recognition of their equal status as national leaders. If either Obama or Clinton takes office in 2009, it will fall right into the set of Fibonacci durations depicted below.

 

As you can also see at the bottom of that figure, the durations between each of these events produces a series of three consecutive, declining Fibonacci numbers. This series seems to have ended in 1954, without more events of this kind in 1975, 1988, etc. But perhaps we should point out that continuing this series down to the final “1” in the sequence naturally brings us to 2008, the year of the historic primary as well as the coming election.

It is perhaps of some note that American society gave the vote to African-American men (1870) before giving it to women (1920) and that Congress ratified the 13th and 15th amendments more quickly than it did the 19th amendment. These precedents suggest that the U.S. is more likely to choose an African-American male president before it does a female president.

Along those lines, if the general election is close and Mississippi is the deciding state, the country likely will vote in John McCain. Mississippi was the last to ratify two of these crucial amendments— the 19th in 1984 and the 13th in 1995.

One might argue that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is an equally important event that does not fall along this continuum, thus challenging the pattern. But this legislation is not like the other events. The instances noted above conferred and extended equal political rights or privileges. The Civil Rights Act, in contrast, took away property rights (as well as rights related to assembly) and granted unequal privileges to specified groups. (Whether one thinks this law is good or bad is not at issue here.)

One might also argue that the 15th amendment, which gave African-Americans the right to vote and was ratified in 1870, should be viewed as the proper companion to the 19th amendment. If Obama doesn’t win now, then perhaps he would become president at the next opportunity, in 2013 (1870 +143). But the best overall Fibonacci web clearly targets 2008-2009.

We extrapolated this series backwards from 1776 to see if any other important historical events turned up, but we didn’t see anything notable. Given the lengths of these durations and their common termination in 2008-2009, we suspect that these years may mark the end of a major positive-social-mood-related event spiral from 1776. That idea certainly fits our Elliott-wave case that a Grand Supercycle uptrend in positive social mood beginning in the late 1700s has been topping out since 2000. Given this perspective, we would predict that ensuing events along these lines might be less civil and trend in the other direction. 

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