Mapping The Scenarios: Geo Resources For The Election
by Brady Forrest
If you're like me you'll be looking at maps and polls and news sites all day long on November 4th. As the polls close and some states go red vs. blue you'll be updating your mental map of the country. Below are some tools and data sources for simulating scenarios online.
New York Times - The Grey Lady has invested in a lot of great visualization tools. The map above shows the electoral importance of each state and their leanings. Their maps also let you create your own scenarios. So if you believe that Missouri will go Red change it and see how that effects the totals. If you want to reminisce check out their debate visualizations.
GeoCommons - An online geo-database and mapping tool has many pertinent data sets available including Early Voting Data and Active Registered Virginia Voters.
FiveThirtyEight - Nate Silver and his fellow bloggers have been doing a great job of reading the polls. They've called it for Obama, but this is based on their math not their affiliation. As states are tallied I am sure they'll be updating their simulations.
Electoral-Vote - Very similar to FiveThirtyEight, this site also aggregates polls, but applies a different algorithm. They even have a Data Galore section with CSV's of all data used on the site.
Twitter Vote Report - As mentioned yesterday this site will be collecting vote reports from people on the ground.
Google - If you want to see recent voting patterns, Google has made the US election since 1980 available. They've also released a number of other maps and an election portal. And of course don't forget Google Hot Trends.
Video Galore - If you want to watch the election news online Silicon Alley Insider and LifeHacker have collected the available streams.
http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/11/mapping-the-scenarios-geo-reso.html
