Reading through the polls

This election year, polls have been all over the places and frankly haven't help much in understanding what was going. They are more like reading through tea leaves... Are polls being manipulated? Quite possibly, when they come from partisan sources, but I think more importantly, they're just tools that are less than perfect, especially when the contest is so tight and when events such as the first debate or hurricane Sandy can have enormous impact on the mood of the Nation.

What's been helpful to me during this election thought has been "FiveThirtyEight," a polling aggregation website by Nate Silver. Established on March 7, 2008, the site compiles polling data through a methodology derived from Silver's experience in baseball sabermetrics balancing out the polls with comparative demographic data and weighting each poll based on the pollster's historical track record, sample size, and recentness of the poll.

During the 2008 election, Silver projected a popular vote victory by 6.1 percentage points for Obama and an electoral vote total of 353. Reality was respectively 7.2 and 365. This year, Nate Silver projects 309 electoral votes for Obama when just 270 are required.  Hopefully, this will work once more!