Yikes. Exactly what we need; more people focused on polls that all say the same thing--the election is close. Knowing that Gallup says it's 51-49 one way or Rasmussen says it's 51-49 the other way contributes exactly nothing to the world.
Show HN: Get notified when new presidential polls are released
11–20 of 41 posts
Re: Show HN: Get notified when new presidential polls are released
#12I'd be more interested in an app that blocked out polls and political news.
Re: Show HN: Get notified when new presidential polls are released
#13What is the source of polls this app is using?
We used all of these: Rasmussen Reports, ABC News/Washington Post, Investors Business Daily/TIPP, Gallup, Monmouth/SurveyUSA/Braun, CBS News, NBC News/Wall St. Journal, Washington Times: JZ Analytics, Politico/GWU/Battleground.
Re: Show HN: Get notified when new presidential polls are released
#14Developer here. I helped build this site after noticing I was checking presidential polls like 12 times a day and really wanted a quick disposable tool for the next 2 weeks to get them as soon as they are released. On Nov 6th, we'll shut the site down and permanently delete the entire list. Hope you find it useful!
Idea: offer an API that's compatible with IFTTT.
Re: Show HN: Get notified when new presidential polls are released
#15Here's a slightly OT question, for politically inclined folks:
How likely would you be to look at a site that on election day scrapes election results as they come in from various swing states, and extrapolates the state result by projecting each county individually from already reported precincts?
Obvious some assumptions about precinct homogeneity and turnout implicit in that, but it'd provide at least some value over the raw results ("OMG with 5% of the vote in, Obama's leading by 20 points in Ohio!")
Re: Show HN: Get notified when new presidential polls are released
#16Here's a slightly OT question, for politically inclined folks: How likely would you be to look at a site that on election day scrapes election results as they come in from various swing states, and extrapolates the state result by projecting each county individually from already reported precincts? Obvious some assumptions about precinct homogeneity and turnout implicit in that, but it'd provide at least some value o…
I think you basically described FiveThirtyEight
Re: Show HN: Get notified when new presidential polls are released
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
The New Yorker is talking about this very subject today: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2012/10/da... I read that article this morning and still signed up for pingpoll minutes later..
Thanks for sharing that link, good article. Still, its main concern seems to be the predictive value of forecast models, given that "stuff happens" -- while I'm more concerned with the fact that the obsession with polling and forecasts coincides (hard to tell if it's a cause or an effect) with widespread ignorance when it comes to massively undemocratic features of the US voting system.
What is your thesis, exactly? People have a finite amount of attention they are willing to devote to politics, and the obsession with polling thus excludes them from paying attention to these supposedly undemocratic features?
Seems far fetched to me but I'd imagine it's testable. One could test people about their knowledge of poll data and then see whether a higher degree of interest in polls correlated with a lower awareness of these undemocratic feature. I would imagine you'd find your thesis refuted in such a test.
Anyhow, it's likely you're trying to convey something that I'm not quite understanding so please feel free to correct me.
Speaking personally, I would posit that the media puts more focus on polls because they are both interesting and timely to viewers, where as discussions about the flaws of first-past-the-post voting are more dry and are not timely -- timeliness being a crucial determiner of what gets reported as news. So unless there are newsmakers actively making a spectacle about the issue, you're not going to here about it in mainstream media.
Re: Show HN: Get notified when new presidential polls are released
#18Here's a slightly OT question, for politically inclined folks: How likely would you be to look at a site that on election day scrapes election results as they come in from various swing states, and extrapolates the state result by projecting each county individually from already reported precincts? Obvious some assumptions about precinct homogeneity and turnout implicit in that, but it'd provide at least some value o…
CNN and a few others have been doing this in recent cycles, though maybe their presentation could be improved upon. They do seem to emphasize the raw numbers on-air though.
On this topic, a mirror of the Sec.-of-State result pages might be pretty useful. A lot of them aren't going to be able to handle the load.
Re: Show HN: Get notified when new presidential polls are released
#19What is the source of polls this app is using?
We used all of these: Rasmussen Reports, ABC News/Washington Post, Investors Business Daily/TIPP, Gallup, Monmouth/SurveyUSA/Braun, CBS News, NBC News/Wall St. Journal, Washington Times: JZ Analytics, Politico/GWU/Battleground.
I notice that there was a state poll released by Rasmussen but I haven't gotten an email. Is this only tracking national polls?
Re: Show HN: Get notified when new presidential polls are released
#20Here's a slightly OT question, for politically inclined folks: How likely would you be to look at a site that on election day scrapes election results as they come in from various swing states, and extrapolates the state result by projecting each county individually from already reported precincts? Obvious some assumptions about precinct homogeneity and turnout implicit in that, but it'd provide at least some value o…
I'm almost enough of a political nerd and devloper nerd to try this, but I think the hardest part would be the scraping... Since the news sites have probably changed their formatting since the last election, it would be hard to test the results until they start displaying. If it take an hour to get all the bugs worked out in the scraper, well by then, the scraping might be usless. Maybe there's some kind of centralized API for accessing raw election results, though.