Forecasting the 2008 Presidential Election: A Challenge for the Fiscal Model

In 2004, for the first time the fiscal model was employed for the purpose of real-time, ex ante forecasting of a presidential election. The results were encouraging (Cuzán and Bundrick 2005). This year, however, the model encounters a set of challenging conditions, relevant only to it, never seen in the data before. In this paper, we briefly summarize the model, describe the problem, wrestle with ways to address it, and conclude with a forecast for November.