Sites like http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/ may be great in bringing insightful reflections on statistics to a larger audience, but by focusing exclusively on the maths of elections, they might actually reinforce this ignorance towards actual political issues.
I read that article this morning and still signed up for pingpoll minutes later..
Still, its main concern seems to be the predictive value of forecast models, given that "stuff happens" -- while I'm more concerned with the fact that the obsession with polling and forecasts coincides (hard to tell if it's a cause or an effect) with widespread ignorance when it comes to massively undemocratic features of the US voting system.
A lot of people probably won't bother voting if their state is a perceived landslide.
I think other countries don't focus on polls much simply because in a parliamentary system, it's very hard to poll. It would be like trying to poll the US House races, which no one really does.
On Nov 6th, we'll shut the site down and permanently delete the entire list.
Hope you find it useful!
How likely would you be to look at a site that on election day scrapes election results as they come in from various swing states, and extrapolates the state result by projecting each county individually from already reported precincts?
Obvious some assumptions about precinct homogeneity and turnout implicit in that, but it'd provide at least some value over the raw results ("OMG with 5% of the vote in, Obama's leading by 20 points in Ohio!")
On this topic, a mirror of the Sec.-of-State result pages might be pretty useful. A lot of them aren't going to be able to handle the load.
Edit: what about outside of prime time. Say during your local 5 o'clock news?
I have a feeling though, that the presidential campaigns are buying a significant portion of the available air time.
Seems far fetched to me but I'd imagine it's testable. One could test people about their knowledge of poll data and then see whether a higher degree of interest in polls correlated with a lower awareness of these undemocratic feature. I would imagine you'd find your thesis refuted in such a test.
Anyhow, it's likely you're trying to convey something that I'm not quite understanding so please feel free to correct me.
Speaking personally, I would posit that the media puts more focus on polls because they are both interesting and timely to viewers, where as discussions about the flaws of first-past-the-post voting are more dry and are not timely -- timeliness being a crucial determiner of what gets reported as news. So unless there are newsmakers actively making a spectacle about the issue, you're not going to here about it in mainstream media.
More specifically though, my impression was, quite simply, that obsession with details, as a mainstream phenomenon, often coincides with the inability or unwillingness to see the bigger picture. While I can't back this up with statistical data, I'm pretty sure there's a well-founded psychological term for it.
You can spend an hour watching a presidential debate (plus additional hours looking up the various claims made), or you can spend a minute reading the heading, deck and first paragraph of an article that says this or that candidate "won" the debate.
Polls function as a kind of supernormal stimulus [1] that displace real analysis, in a manner analogous to the way that junk food, which distils fat, sugar and salt to their essence, displaces whole foods.