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Show HN: Get notified when new presidential polls are released
- railsjedi 14y agoDeveloper 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!
- lordlarm 14y agoCan I see them without getting mail, but by RSS for example?
- yakshaving 14y agoYou can follow @pingpoll
- rolux 14y agoNot 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/ http://www.gregpalast.com/latinos-too-lazy-to-vote/) seem to get widely ignored. Sites like http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/ http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/ may be great in bringing insightful reflections on statistics to a larger audience, but by focusing exclusively on the maths of elections, they might actually reinforce this ignorance towards actual political issues.
- PhrosTT 14y agoI always wonder what kind of influence polls have on voters. A lot of people probably won't bother voting if their state is a perceived landslide.
- ilconsigliere 14y agoThe New Yorker is talking about this very subject today: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2012/10/david-brooks-v-nate-silver-prediction-polls.html http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2012/10/da... I read that article this morning and still signed up for pingpoll minutes later..
- rolux 14y agoThanks 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.
- jsdalton 14y agoWhat 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.
- Flemlord 14y agoInteresting. I don't want every poll, but I would like to be notified when Real Clear and 538 are updated. Maybe with a tolerance band when they break out of a certain range.
- mr-ron 14y agoWhat is the source of polls this app is using?
- yakshaving 14y agoWe 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.
- mr-ron 14y agoI notice that there was a state poll released by Rasmussen but I haven't gotten an email. Is this only tracking national polls?
- railsjedi 14y agoYep, 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 :)
- kcbanner 14y agoThe site seems down at the moment
- msrpotus 14y agoYikes. 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.
- jlarocco 14y agoI'd be more interested in an app that blocked out polls and political news.
- railsjedi 14y agoOh, come on. It's only 2 more weeks. Just think of it like a really big sporting event, except way less impactful ;)
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- scarmig 14y agoHere'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!")
- 27182818284 14y agoI think you basically described FiveThirtyEight
- scarmig 14y agoFiveThirtyEight definitely doesn't do this, or hasn't in the past, it least. It models via demographics and polling, while this would be a much simpler model basing its predictions on already reported results.
- aamar 14y agoCNN 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.
- joshuahedlund 14y agoI'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.
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- harshpotatoes 14y agoLiving 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.
- camiller 14y agoReally? 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?
- harshpotatoes 14y agoMostly 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.
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- RobertL 14y agoJust got my first update from Gallup... Romney 50%.. Obama 47%... This is kind of cool.