Do political parties take the importance of issues at a given election into account when outlining promises and actions for the future? While a growing body of research shows that parties fulfil the majority of their campaign pledges, previous studies have rarely addressed the process of pledge making. In this paper, we provide the first comparative study explaining issue emphasis in statements about the future. More specifically, we address three questions: First, do parties talk more about the future in policy areas they “own”? Second, are parties more likely to address policy areas that are most important to voters (and in particular voters of their party) in statements on future actions or outcomes? And third, how do these dynamics vary between government, opposition, and challenger parties? We shed light on these open questions by applying supervised machine learning to a novel text corpus of over 500 machine-translated party manifestos from over 110 elections to identify statements about the future and their policy areas. We match these data on future-oriented issue emphasis with comparative survey data on “most important issue questions” and responses regarding parties’ issue ownership. The results of our study have important implications for our understanding of parties’ campaign strategies, issue salience, and political accountability.