Friday, October 31, 2008

Passing the time until Tuesday night

If you have any spare time between now and Tuesday night, I strongly urge you to get out there and make phone calls or campaign door to door for the candidates you care about. That stuff works. If you can't do this, but you're obsessed anyway, I imagine you'll be trolling the internet for the latest opinion polls and projections. Here's my list of sites I visit roughly every 15 minutes to check for polling and forecast updates:
  • Pollster.com -- Great maps and charts, along with helpful links to each of the latest state and national polls.
  • Realclearpolitics.com -- Constantly updated polling averages, along with a wide ideological array of news analysis articles.
  • Fivethirtyeight.com -- This has been a real gem this year and a welcome addition to the field. Nate Silver brings his wizardry from the world of sports analysis to politics, using a sophisticated series of equations to eliminate the biases among individual polling houses to effectively forecast elections in each state. Nice bits of polling analysis, too.
  • Drew Linzer's Poll Tracker -- Drew tries to keep it simple by doing Bayesian updates on all the tracking polls in the battleground states. He also uses these numbers to estimate the probability that the candidates will win each state.
Any other good ones I'm missing?

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