Forecasting elections from the single most important issue

Andreas Graefe (http://www.andreas-graefe.org/) and Scott Armstrong (http://jscottarmstrong.com/) developed a model for forecasting U.S. Presidential Elections. It provides fast advice on which issues candidates should focus on in their campaign by using information about how voters perceive the … candidates’ ability to handle the single most important issue facing the country. It predicted the winner of the past ten elections with an accuracy of 97% (based on an examination of the forecasts on each of the last 100 days prior to each of the last ten U.S. Presidential elections). A working paper version of the paper, which was accepted for publication in the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, is available here (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3662406/Articles/BImodel.pdf).