Still more for the poll-obsessed

Published October 20, 2004 8:39PM (EDT)

You just can't get enough. OK, neither can we. But still.

The poll-obsessed among us -- and you know who you are -- have been filling our inbox with links to sites that provide different ways of looking at the presidential horserace. Some of you like Slate's Election Scorecard, which hands Kerry a 276-262 Electoral College win today. Others among you spend your days with the New York Times' 2004 Election Guide, which has Kerry up 225-213 in the Electoral College today.

And some of you favor sites that reside a little farther from the beaten path. Electoral College Meta-Analysis, a site run by a professor of moleculor biology at Princeton, applies something called a MATLAB script to state poll results to come up with potential outcomes for the race. Today's prediction: Kerry wins the Electoral College, 316-222.

And we'd be remiss if we didn't mention Professor Pollkatz's Pool of Polls. The site is run by a visiting economics professor at DePaul whose name is not Pollkatz. It's not what you'd call pretty, and the explanations of the analysis behind it were way too much for us to follow. (We got lost when the "equation alpha + beta*ratio" starting yielding a projection of something or other.) But the good professor's regression analysis -- we think that's what it is -- projects that Kerry will win the Electoral College vote, 291-247.

For what it's worth, that's the same tally that electoral-vote.com has today. We know -- we just checked.


By Tim Grieve

Tim Grieve is a senior writer and the author of Salon's War Room blog.

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