

Show HN: Get notified when new presidential polls are released - railsjedi
https://pingpoll.me

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rolux
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 exclusively on the maths of elections, they might actually reinforce
this ignorance towards actual political issues.

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ilconsigliere
The New Yorker is talking about this very subject today:
[http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2012/10/da...](http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2012/10/david-
brooks-v-nate-silver-prediction-polls.html)

I read that article this morning and still signed up for pingpoll minutes
later..

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rolux
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.

~~~
jsdalton
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.

~~~
rolux
If you're asking me for a thesis, then I guess it would include the idea that
what people should be willing to devote to politics is more than, and
fundamentally different from, _attention_. Once politics become politics of
attention, they become, quite precisely, the spectacle you're referring to: a
real-time feed of gossip, gaffes and stats.

More specifically though, my impression was, quite simply, that obsession with
details, as a mainstream phenomenon, often coincides with the inability or
unwillingness to see the bigger picture. While I can't back this up with
statistical data, I'm pretty sure there's a well-founded psychological term
for it.

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msrpotus
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.

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railsjedi
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!

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

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username3
This should be on <https://pingpoll.me/>.

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jlarocco
I'd be more interested in an app that blocked out polls and political news.

~~~
railsjedi
Oh, 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
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 over the raw results ("OMG with 5%
of the vote in, Obama's leading by 20 points in Ohio!")

~~~
joshuahedlund
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.

~~~
mayneack
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.

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waterlesscloud
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.

~~~
theshadow
I think county by county results would be enough to do a reasonable prediction
but I don't think SOS websites are updated with those results in anything
close to real time on election night.

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harshpotatoes
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.

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camiller
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?

~~~
harshpotatoes
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.

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Flemlord
Interesting. 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.

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mr-ron
What is the source of polls this app is using?

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yakshaving
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.

~~~
mr-ron
I notice that there was a state poll released by Rasmussen but I haven't
gotten an email. Is this only tracking national polls?

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railsjedi
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 :)

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lordlarm
Can I see them without getting mail, but by RSS for example?

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yakshaving
You can follow @pingpoll

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kcbanner
The site seems down at the moment

