Several folks have written in to ask about tracking the Electoral College, which is (I think) the important way to look at the election. The last week or so, Trump has gained somewhat in the national vote but when you look at the state races, he's still losing as many states as ever and Hillary is still way ahead in enough to give her way more than 270 electoral votes. Here are the main sites where you can track all this…
- Nate Silver's fivethirtyeight is considered the gold standard of aggregating the various polls and weighting them properly. He has three different models through which to view the electoral breakdown and in theory, all of them should converge more and more as we near November.
- The New York Times has a page called Upshot which gives you a clear breakdown of how many of the pollsters or other aggregators see the election.
- None of these sites have a visible bias but 270 to Win does seem to favor Republicans a bit more. That doesn't mean they're wrong…and they do have a lot of past stats you won't find elsewhere.
- Larry J. Sabato's Crystal Ball, which comes to us from the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, seems to favor Democrats a bit more. That doesn't mean they're wrong…and they're good about explaining why they classify a given state as they do.
- The Cook Political Report is pretty non-partisan and pretty solid. Always worth a look.
All of these sites called the last presidential election with reasonable accuracy…and they did that at a time when Dick Morris was on Fox News saying the polls were wrong and that Mitt Romney would win in a landslide. There are individual pollsters out there with no track record saying that Trump's ahead in Pennsylvania or that he's even on a national level and you can believe them if you want. I'm sticking with these five sites.