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Politics III
Mar. 5th, 2008 09:25 amI read a fair bit of daily political news.
I do not regularly read The Daily Kos, The Huffington Post, Talking Points, or their conservative counterparts (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gomijacogeo and shoutingboy, feel free to recommend those as well). But I do watch the electoral math closely. This post details the sites that I do watch, and where I'm getting the data upon which I base my analysis of the actual situations on the ground in US politics.
First and foremost, Andrew Tannenbaum's Electoral College site, which is updated near daily, and closely tracks the various poll organizations to try and determine what's actually happening in the races on the ground. If you only read one political site, read this one.
Second, Rasmussen Reports is the leading non-partisan polling organization. Their polling and analysis skills are exceptional. They sell very, very detailed polls and analysis to political campaigns, but they also make their summary data available to the public. Also, they've partnered with one of the politicals futures markets to track the current projections of coming elections, which is also extremely interesting.
Third, of temporary interest while the democratic primary process is still in flight, CNN is running a Delegate count watch and Forbes is running a predictive calculator that you can use to look at various possible scenarios for how each candidate could win the Democratic nomination. I really hope that Forbes or Andy Tannenbaum put up one of these for the general election as well. (Two side observations: even with yesterday's victories, it's going to be extremely difficult for Clinton to win the nomination - if she wins commanding victories in the remaing states, she will need to get an even more significant majority of the 'superdelegates' to secure the nomination; Also, CNN's commercial fortunes are looking significantly up this quarter, apparently because they're recieving a lot more traffic than usual because people are watching the election process play out... on CNN)
Fourth, I mentioned political futures markets a few paragraphs back. There are three relevant ones: The grandaddy of them all, the Iowa Electronic Market; The European based Intrade market; and Rasmussen's market, which is a partnership between Intrade and one of the best US polling companies. Each one of those is a real-money market, where people are actually putting cash on the line. hey clearly have some predictive value . If the polls are saying one thing, and the futures markets are saying something different, then we know that something strange is going on. If the polls and the futures markets are agreeing, then we can believe that we actually know something about how things would turn out if we were to hold the election today. (Another aside: Right now on both Intrade and IEM, Mrs. Clinton's prospects for being the Democratic nominee have improved dramatically since yesterday morning, but Obama is still favored to win both the Nomination and the General Election)
I do not regularly read The Daily Kos, The Huffington Post, Talking Points, or their conservative counterparts (
gomijacogeo and shoutingboy, feel free to recommend those as well). But I do watch the electoral math closely. This post details the sites that I do watch, and where I'm getting the data upon which I base my analysis of the actual situations on the ground in US politics.First and foremost, Andrew Tannenbaum's Electoral College site, which is updated near daily, and closely tracks the various poll organizations to try and determine what's actually happening in the races on the ground. If you only read one political site, read this one.
Second, Rasmussen Reports is the leading non-partisan polling organization. Their polling and analysis skills are exceptional. They sell very, very detailed polls and analysis to political campaigns, but they also make their summary data available to the public. Also, they've partnered with one of the politicals futures markets to track the current projections of coming elections, which is also extremely interesting.
Third, of temporary interest while the democratic primary process is still in flight, CNN is running a Delegate count watch and Forbes is running a predictive calculator that you can use to look at various possible scenarios for how each candidate could win the Democratic nomination. I really hope that Forbes or Andy Tannenbaum put up one of these for the general election as well. (Two side observations: even with yesterday's victories, it's going to be extremely difficult for Clinton to win the nomination - if she wins commanding victories in the remaing states, she will need to get an even more significant majority of the 'superdelegates' to secure the nomination; Also, CNN's commercial fortunes are looking significantly up this quarter, apparently because they're recieving a lot more traffic than usual because people are watching the election process play out... on CNN)
Fourth, I mentioned political futures markets a few paragraphs back. There are three relevant ones: The grandaddy of them all, the Iowa Electronic Market; The European based Intrade market; and Rasmussen's market, which is a partnership between Intrade and one of the best US polling companies. Each one of those is a real-money market, where people are actually putting cash on the line. hey clearly have some predictive value . If the polls are saying one thing, and the futures markets are saying something different, then we know that something strange is going on. If the polls and the futures markets are agreeing, then we can believe that we actually know something about how things would turn out if we were to hold the election today. (Another aside: Right now on both Intrade and IEM, Mrs. Clinton's prospects for being the Democratic nominee have improved dramatically since yesterday morning, but Obama is still favored to win both the Nomination and the General Election)
