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Best Places to Follow the Polls Online

by Terrence O'Brien on October 23, 2008 at 06:01 PM

  1. Best Places to Follow the Polls Online
Our sister site, Download Squad (plug, plug), is all over this political stuff -- much like us. One of the greatest pastimes of a political junkie is poll watching, and Download Squad has compiled a list of the best outlets to track the endless number of state and national polls in the presidential election.

Our two favorites are FiveThirtyEight.com and RealClearPolitics (RCP). Both aggregate the results of just about every poll under the sun, but that's pretty much where the similarities end. FiveThirtyEight.com (named for the number of votes in the electoral college) is a math geeks's wet dream. The site was started by a professional baseball statistician who has created a complex formula that doesn't just average out polls (like RCP) but compensates for in-built bias and historical accuracy.

RCP, on the other hand, has a much simpler formula that hopes the different polls will simply average themselves out. RCP also serves as a one stop shop for political news and commentary. In addition to their own in-house writers, RCP adds links editorials and articles from major media outlets like Time, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and NPR.

Check out the original article for some other sources of obsessive poll stalking, including an iPhone application for those who literally can't tear themselves away. [From: Download Squad]

Tags: election, elections, elections 2008, Elections2008, five thirty eight, FiveThirtyEight, politics, polls, real clear politics, RealClearPolitics, web

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