Asking voters who they think will win is one of the mostaccurate methods for forecasting elections available

For decades political pollsters have relied on questions about people’s voting intention in order to predict who will win an election. But what about asking voters about their expectation of which party will win? In new research Andreas Graefe analyzes the accuracy of expectation-based forecasts in presidential elections from 1988 to 2012. He finds that such forecasts are, on average, more accurate at forecasting the election’s outcome than four more established methods.