Ray Fair is one of my favorite econometricians. He has an excellent website, fairmodel.econ.yale.edu, where he freely shares his models. He writes clearly and his methods are reported in detail. He is concerned with the proper use of econometric methods. For example, he has long been opposed to...

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...

The state of election forecasting has progressed to the point where it is possible to develop highly accurate forecasts for major elections. However, one area that has received little attention is the use of forecasting as an aid to those involved with political campaigns. In the run-up to the...

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...

We review the performance of the PollyVote, which combined forecasts from polls, prediction markets, experts’ judgment, political economy models, and index models to predict the two-party popular vote in the 2012 US presidential election. Throughout the election year the PollyVote provided...