Forecasting Elections from Voters’ Perceptions of Candidates’ Positions on Issues and Policies

Ideally, presidential elections should be decided based on how the candidates would handle issues facing the country. If so, knowledge about the voters’ perception of the candidates should help to forecast election outcomes. We make two forecasts of the winner of the popular vote in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election. One is based on voters’ perceptions of how the candidates would deal with issues (problems facing the country) if elected. We show that this approach would have correctly picked the winner for seven out of nine elections from 1972 to 2004, along with providing an idea of the margin of victory. In addition, in predicting the two-party vote percentages for the last three elections from 1996 to 2004, the methods’ out-of-sample forecasts outperformed those derived from four well-established models. Based on this approach, we predict the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama, as the winner, obtaining 51.2% of the popular two-party vote. The other forecast is based on voters’ preference for policies and their perceptions of which policies the candidates are likely to pursue. It also predicts Obama to win the popular vote