State polls – fresher than you think
As you can see, the Meta-Analysis has taken a downtick. This suggests that the race has leveled off – or may drift toward parity a bit. Notably...
Purple polls
I’ve now started making “Purple Poll” and “Red/Blue Poll” maps using poll-data from RealClearPolitics. I hope to update the maps on an almost daily basis between now and the election. You can see the maps at http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb/JAVA/election2008/. -Bob Vanderbei
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Nice work.
1) Perhaps a more neutral shade – like cross-hatched yellow – would have been better than stark black for the no-poll state? You want them to recede into the background and highlight the states with data, not the other way around.
2) That the US map is mostly purple (and very similar in shade) tells us something…but it also obscures which states have trended which way. Perhaps another map that slightly more exaggerates the color differences (eg, a 35%/75% polling result forcing the top-bottom on the red-blue portion of the color scale) would be helpful – in effect, converting your equilateral color triangle to an isosceles one.
can you really trust “Real Cherry-picked Polls” after that article Nate wrote about them?
Hm.
I think RCP isn’t that bad. That’s a tempest in a teapot.