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Show HN: Get notified when new presidential polls are released

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Re: Show HN: Get notified when new presidential polls are released

#31

Post by railsjedi »

mr-ron wrote: post #19
yakshaving wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yep, just the main national tracking polls. We email every one out so at the state level it might get overwhelming. And we can't really put too much into a filtering setup since it's a product that'll autodeadpool in 2 weeks :)

Re: Show HN: Get notified when new presidential polls are released

#33

Post by smackfu »

rolux wrote: post #4

Not being a US citizen, I'm always quite stunned by what I perceive as an obsession with polling results. Especially when fundamental flaws in the US voting system (see, for example, http://www.gregpalast.com/latinos-too-lazy-to-vote/ ) seem to get widely ignored. Sites like http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/ may be great in bringing insightful reflections on statistics to a larger audience, but by focusing ex…

Let me flip this backwards: Why wouldn't polls get a lot of attention? People want to know who will win the election in advance, just like they like spoilers. Polls are a fact-based way to report on it.

I think other countries don't focus on polls much simply because in a parliamentary system, it's very hard to poll. It would be like trying to poll the US House races, which no one really does.

Re: Show HN: Get notified when new presidential polls are released

#34

Post by mayneack »

joshuahedlund wrote: post #20
scarmig wrote: post #15

Here'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 centraliz…

I'll bet you could get each state's official SOS results relatively easily. However, "calling" the election depends on more than just the official SOS reports. CNN will call things when their exit polls show one thing and then the early rounds of official results confirm them.

Re: Show HN: Get notified when new presidential polls are released

#35

Post by waterlesscloud »

mayneack wrote: post #34
joshuahedlund wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 centraliz…

I'll bet you could get each state's official SOS results relatively easily. However, "calling" the election depends on more than just the official SOS reports. CNN will call things when their exit polls show one thing and then the early rounds of official results confirm them.

I think you'd need more granularity than SOS websites provide. They tend to be county by county, and you really need precinct by precinct.

Re: Show HN: Get notified when new presidential polls are released

#36

Post by camiller »

harshpotatoes wrote: post #28

Living in an "important swing state" at the moment, the last thing I need is more factoids about the presidential race. Every form of media is completely saturated with the same talking points, and it is quite exhausting. It would be nice to hear more about the senate, house and state elections. I don't think I've seen any media coverage/ads for any election besides the presidential race.

Really? I might not be in an "important swing state" but when my wife doesn't fast forward through them on the DVR I see plenty of local/state/and congressional commercials. Unless in your state the presidential campaigns are buying up ALL of the available airtime.

Edit: what about outside of prime time. Say during your local 5 o'clock news?

Re: Show HN: Get notified when new presidential polls are released

#37

Post by harshpotatoes »

camiller wrote: post #36
harshpotatoes wrote: post #28

Living in an "important swing state" at the moment, the last thing I need is more factoids about the presidential race. Every form of media is completely saturated with the same talking points, and it is quite exhausting. It would be nice to hear more about the senate, house and state elections. I don't think I've seen any media coverage/ads for any election besides the presidential race.

Really? I might not be in an "important swing state" but when my wife doesn't fast forward through them on the DVR I see plenty of local/state/and congressional commercials. Unless in your state the presidential campaigns are buying up ALL of the available airtime. Edit: what about outside of prime time. Say during your local 5 o'clock news?

Mostly I watch TV at night, after 7pm or so. So I suppose it's possible that the local ads are played during an earlier block like the local news.

I have a feeling though, that the presidential campaigns are buying a significant portion of the available air time.

Re: Show HN: Get notified when new presidential polls are released

#38

Post by [deleted] »

camiller wrote: post #36
harshpotatoes wrote: post #28

Living in an "important swing state" at the moment, the last thing I need is more factoids about the presidential race. Every form of media is completely saturated with the same talking points, and it is quite exhausting. It would be nice to hear more about the senate, house and state elections. I don't think I've seen any media coverage/ads for any election besides the presidential race.

Really? I might not be in an "important swing state" but when my wife doesn't fast forward through them on the DVR I see plenty of local/state/and congressional commercials. Unless in your state the presidential campaigns are buying up ALL of the available airtime. Edit: what about outside of prime time. Say during your local 5 o'clock news?

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Get notified when new presidential polls are released

#39

Post by username3 »

railsjedi wrote: post #25
railsjedi wrote: post #2

Developer 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!

We'll also be tweeting out poll results from http://twitter.com/pingpoll

This should be on https://pingpoll.me/.

Re: Show HN: Get notified when new presidential polls are released

#40

Post by theshadow »

scarmig wrote: post #15

Here'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 considered building such a site about a couple of months ago, the problem is getting the streaming results. From my research there is no public api that allows you access to results in real time at the level of granularity you would need (atleast county level). I suppose you could scrape the data off from the sites of the networks but you don't know how that's going to be formatted until election day at which point it's too late.
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