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...

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...

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...

The assumptions of multiple regression analysis are not met in many practical forecasting situations and, as a result, regression models are insufficiently conservative. We tested the effect on forecast accuracy of applying three evidence-based forecasting guidelines to 18 political economy...

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...