The win precentage tracker returns!

I'm pretty new to the world of political polling, so it took me a while to stumble across Nate Silver at the 538.com website. Silver used to be a baseball statistics analyst, but grew so frustrated with political commentators looking at the wrong numbers that he set up his own polling website; if you don't know that the name 538 refers to the number of votes in the electoral college you definitely need Nate. To the untrained eye, his graphs and pic charts are wonderfully clear, but even more telling are his explanatory posts, which offer up a wonderful picture of bleary-eyed, sometimes cranky, devotion:—

I wish pollsters were a little more consistent in when they released their data. Otherwise, there is no particularly good time of day for the polling thread. Among the more prolific pollsters, SurveyUSA and ARG tend to release their polls in the afternoon; Mason-Dixon and Quinnipiac in the early AM; Zogby in the middle of the night, and Rasmussen is all over the board. But since I don't keep a particularly consistent schedule either, I suppose that's neither here nor there....

Yes, an analysis of Rasmussen's Florida numbers. But also a new poll tracking graphic. It risks information overload, but ought to do a much better job of telling you how the sausage is made...

This might be my favorite graph that we've done so far: a comparison of Barack Obama's popular and electoral vote totals across the first 1,000 simulations that we ran last night....

So many polls, so little time!

When my friend Geoff and I went to debate camp together (yes, there is something even dorkier than writing about polls), Geoff had a screensaver with an obnoxious lime green background and that pronounced in some very tacky, Windows 3.0 kind of font: "SLEEP IS THE ENEMY". I don't quite feel that way myself, but lately I've begun understand where Geoff was coming from. We were so busy rolling out methodological changes over the weekend that we didn't bother to document the latest polls. So let's see what we've got on the polling front....

The other major change to our methodology (which I am surprised nobody guessed in the teaser thread) is that we are now making adjustments to the results of all states based on a time trend....

I very much do not want to set an expectation that we're going to be running the numbers more than once a day, but with polling volume especially heavy lately, we're making some accommodations...

This is a Saturday for beer and baseball, and not for polling, but we do have one result out....

My latest ZohoSheet project. This will give you a simple popular vote projection for November based on (i) a candidate's support from each party and (ii) turnout rates...

I recommend that you not play with the party ID numbers, since those numbers move glacially and are at least somewhat exogenous to the political contest in any given year. Instead, you can manipulate the turnout rates.....