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...

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...

In the PollyVote, we evaluated the combination principle to forecast the five U.S. presidential elections between 1992 and 2008. We combined forecasts from three or four different component methods: trial heat polls, the Iowa Electronic Markets (IEM), quantitative models and, in the 2004 and...