We used the take-the-best heuristic to develop a model to forecast the popular two party vote shares in U.S. presidential elections. The model draws upon information about how voters expect the candidates to deal with the most important issue facing the country. We used cross-validation to...

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...