Accuracy of Combined Forecasts for the 2012 Presidential Election: The PollyVote

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 highly accurate forecasts, outperforming each of its component methods, as well as the forecasts from FiveThirtyEight.com. Gains in accuracy were particularly large early in the campaign, when uncertainty about the election outcome is typically high. The results confirm prior research showing that combining is one of the most effective approaches to generating accurate forecasts

Forecasting Elections Using Expert Surveys: An Application to U. S. Presidential Elections

Prior research offers a mixed view of the value of expert surveys for long-term election forecasts. On the positive side, experts have more information about the candidates and issues than voters do. On the negative side, experts all have access to the same information. Based on prior literature and on our experiences with the 2004 presidential election and the 2008 campaign so far, we have reason to believe that a simple expert survey (the Nominal Group Technique) is preferable to Delphi. Our survey of experts in American politics was quite accurate in the 2004 election. Following the same procedure, we have assembled a new panel of experts to forecast the 2008 presidential election. Here we report the results of the first survey, and compare our experts\u27 forecasts with predictions by the Iowa Electronic Market

The PollyVote Forecast for the 2016 American Presidential Election

The PollyVote applies a century-old principle of combining different evidence-based methods for forecasting the outcome of American presidential elections. In this article, we discuss the principles followed in constructing the PollyVote formula, summarize its components, review the accuracy of its previous forecasts, and make a prediction for this year\u27s presidential election

Accuracy of Combined Forecasts for the 2012 Presidential Election: The PollyVote

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 highly accurate forecasts, outperforming each of its component methods, as well as the forecasts from FiveThirtyEight.com. Gains in accuracy were particularly large early in the campaign, when uncertainty about the election outcome is typically high. The results confirm prior research showing that combining is one of the most effective approaches to generating accurate forecasts