Welcome

About this Site

Welcome to Electoral Vote Predictor, which tracks political polls for U.S. federal elections. The site was immensely popular in 2004, ranking in the top 1000 Websites in the world and the top 10 blogs in the world, with about 700,000 visitors a day. In some surveys, it was the most popular election site in the country. In 2006, it tracked the Senate and House elections. Now it is back tracking the presidential, Senate, and House elections for 2008.

Unlike other sites, which track generic national polls, this site tracks the state-by-state polls. After all, the presidency is decided by 51 separate state elections, the Senate by 34 separate elections (in 2008) and the House by 435 separate elections. As new state polls are released, the maps, spreadsheets, tables, graphs, etc. will be updated. In the maps, the states with white centers are essentially tossups and are subject to rapid fluctuations.

The main page contains a map showing the state of the polls for the presidency. Putting the mouse on a state pops up information about the polls there. Clicking on a state goes to a graph of the polls.

To the right of the map are several links, as follows:

Polling methodology and using polls is not as simple as you might think. The Polling methodology file explains polling and the methodology used here in detail. The site is updated once a day, generally by 7 a.m. EDT. For this reason, polls released during the course of a day will not show up until the next morning. This is the same news cycle as a morning newspaper.

Before sending e-mail, PLEASE, PLEASE read the FAQ first. Your question may be answered there. Please DO NOT send e-mail announcing a new poll until you have checked the site the next morning. Getting 1000 e-mails about a poll I already know about is not so much fun.

I am a libertarian Democrat, but I have a lot of respect for traditional conservative Republicans like Barry Goldwater, who believed that what consenting adults do in private is none of the government's business. Like Barry Goldwater and also Bill Clinton, I believe in balancing the federal budget. This in contrast to the Bush-43 administration which has invaded Americans' privacy in ways previously unthinkable and has spent our grandchildren's money on irresponsible tax cuts for the richest 1% of the population. Despite my political preference, I have bent over backwards to be scrupulously honest about all the numbers, and have carefully designed the main page to be strictly nonpartisan. Only the political humor page is somewhat partisan. If you are a Democrat, an independent, or a moderate Republican who is fed up with the Republican fiscal and other policies or even a conservative Republican who feels betrayed and who has a sense of humor, you will probably enjoy the political cartoons there. If you want an election site that has a pro-Republican bias from beginning to end, including all over the main page, try www.electionprojection.com.

Menu of Icons below the Map

Menu item	Description	Category
Welcome	This page	Nonpartisan
FAQs	Frequently Asked Questions	Nonpartisan
Donations	If you like this site and would like to help out	Nonpartisan
Icons for bloggers	Icons with up-to-date projections for your blog or Website	Nonpartisan
Previous elections	Electoral-vote.com in 2004 and 2006	Nonpartisan
Electoral college graph	Graphs of the projected electoral college over time	Nonpartisan
Poll graphs	Graphs of the state polls over time	Nonpartisan
Cartogram	Map with state sizes proportional to electoral votes	Nonpartisan
Animated maps	Movies of the maps	Nonpartisan
Data galore	Lots and lots of other election data	Nonpartisan
All Senate races	Information on all 2008 Senate races	Nonpartisan
Hot House races	Information on key 2008 House races	Nonpartisan
Political websites	Links to many political websites	Nonpartisan
Articles and books	Articles and books about politics and the election	Mixed
Political humor	Cartoons and jokes about politics	Pro-Democrat

Acknowledgments

The primary host for this site is at HostRocket.com. They have fast servers, redundant fiber-optic connections to the Internet, and a knowledgeable technical staff. I recommend them highly, especially for business applications where reliability and customer service are important.

We are also starting an experiment using CoDoNS and CobWeb software on PlanetLab as well, which should give improved performance under heavy load. Thanks to Emin Gun Sirer for helping with this.

The nice colored maps with the pop-up boxes are produced completely automatically from each new day's spreadsheet by code written by Eric Paulson of Viking Web Development. The code uses a library written by Walter Zorn.

Rick Wexler and Lila Lundquist kindly help me every day collecting the polling data from many sources.

Thanks to Herb Weisberg of Correlation Research for statistical consulting.

Colleen Shannon of CAIDA provides the daily animated map. Thanks.

Eric Butler helped me collect the data on how the various interest groups rate all the senators.

I would like to thank Tim Bray, one of the co-inventors of XML and a popular blogger for introducing me to RSS feeds and helping me get a feed going. With today's information overload, feeds are fast becoming an excellent way to manage the flows.

I would also like to thank 'Grumpy' for producing the software that makes much of the statistical information.

R.J. Parsons provided lots of Excel expertise to make the spreadsheets have pretty colors that change automatically as the polls go up and down and other useful features.

Brad Barrett has helped me get his web analysis program webalizer running.

I would like to thank Calin Plesa for designing the favicon.ico icon.

Cathy Thomas compiled the list of books by the Senate candidates and built that part of the Web page.

Thanks to Kelly Marks for poster 1 and the people at SnapFood.com for poster 2.