Well, this has been a remarkable and bizarre couple of weeks, with conventions, hurricanes*, VP picks, economic meltdowns, and most elusive of all, even a few interviews with the painfully shy Republican vice presidential candidate. And amid this whirlwind of events, a few gusts may have even reached the oh so crucial undecided swing voters. Here is a video tribute to the last few weeks for the polling junkies among us. (You know who you are.) As the end of the world approaches, sit back and enjoy.
A few notes about what's in the video. The top panel is an analysis of all major national polls, very similar to the methodology employed Pollster.com†. The horizontal axis is time and the vertical is support on publica opinion polls. I give a running composite score for the candidates as time passes in order to show you what the polls looked like on that day. In other words, if a few outlier polls made people freak out initially, but eventually were averaged out by new data, you'll see see the line dancing around before settling down.
The second panel is a current events tracker. The third panel is different than the 2nd in that it tracks the (Obama - McCain) difference for each poll rather than tracking each trend separately.
All of the polls were collected from Pollster.com just minutes ago and processed and posted here. I've added any hot-off-the-press polls that Pollster might not get to until tomorrow to make it absolutely as up-to-date as possible.
Otherwise, here's a quick color key:
- red: Republican event;
- blue: Democratic event;
- purple: event for both parties;
- yellow: non-partisan event.
Thanks to the commenters on the first version of this movie approach. I've incorporated many of their suggestions into this final product.
*
I rode out a typhoon as I watched Ike on the news. In fact, I'm sitting through another typhoon in Taiwan as I write this.
†
loess smoother, degree=1, span=35/(number of polls)