When deciding for whom to vote, voters should select the candidate they expect to best handle issues, all other things equal. A simple heuristic predicted that the candidate who is rated more favorably on a larger number of issues would win the popular vote. This was correct for nine out of ten...

Prior research found that people’s assessments of relative competence predicted the outcome of Senate and Congressional races. We hypothesized that snap judgments of "facial competence" would provide useful forecasts of the popular vote in presidential primaries before the candidates become...

We used 59 biographical variables to create a “bio-index” for forecasting U.S. presidential elections. The bio-index method counts the number of variables for which a candidate rates favourably, and the forecast is that the candidate with the highest score would win the popular vote. The...

We summarize the literature on the effectiveness of combining forecasts by assessing the conditions under which combining is most valuable. Using data on the six U.S. Presidential elections from 1992 through 2012, we then report the reduction in error obtained by averaging forecasts within and...

At PoliticalForecasting.com, better known as the Pollyvote, the authors combine forecasts from four sources: election polls, a panel of American political experts, the Iowa Electronic Market, and quantitative models. The day before the election, Polly predicted that the Republican ticket’s...

Problem. Do conservative econometric models that comply with the Golden Rule of Forecasting provide more accurate forecasts?Methods. To test the effects of forecast accuracy, we applied three evidence-based guidelines to 19 published regression models used for forecasting 154 elections in...