The 2024 US election has, in the last few weeks, become the most interesting one I can recall. I’m pretty old, so that’s a strong statement; I can recall a lot of US elections. The Internet makes it way too easy to obsess over a story that’s this big and has this many people sharing opinions. Here is my opinion, not on who’s winning, but on how, with only a very moderate expenditure of time and money, you can be as well-informed as anybody in the world as to how it’s going.

Disclosures: I’m not American, got no vote on this one. Am left of the US Democratic party, but at this point they represent an infinitely better option for America than does anything connected to Donald Trump. Thus, the following remarks should be assumed to have a strong Harris/Walz bias.

I claim that using the following sites should, in 5-15 minutes a day, give you an understanding of the state of the race that is very close to that of the big-name prognosticators writing in the big-name publications.

Polls generally · They’ve been wrong a lot recently. The industry is still trying to complete the transition off landlines, which few people have any more; those who still do are an entirely unrepresentative sample. I’ve seen a few smart people guessing that pollers may be getting better, this cycle. We’ll see, won’t we?

Prognosticators generally · They suck. The amount of arm-waving, gut-feel bullshit, and undisclosed bias is disgusting. In the pages of the really big properties like the NYT and WaPo, the opinion columnists are mostly partisan hacks looking for reasons to explain why their favored party is doing just fine and the other is failing. I’ve pretty well given up reading them.

OK, now let’s get to our sources, in no particular order.

Talking Points Memo · TPM is the home of Josh Marshall, the ur-blogger on US Politics, and still as good as anyone. He’s hired a bunch of other clear and clear-eyed writers, who obsess about elections all day every day. They have a strong and acknowledged pro-Democratic and anti-Trump bias, but in my opinion don’t let it clutter their analyses. If you’re reading the polling sites that I’m recommending below, TPM will have smart interpretive pieces about what they might mean.

A lot of their stuff is free, but the best isn’t. Unfortunately, they only offer annual subscriptions at US$70; I’ve subscribed for many years. It depends on how fierce the election monkey on your back is, but in my personal experience, there is no other site that offers more depth and clarity on US politics. Maybe worth your money for one year, this year.

Nate Silver · The former 538 guy is now at the Silver Bulletin. Nate is not everyone’s cup of tea, but he retained the IP rights to the 538 election model, which is updated on a daily basis. He admits to being moderately pro-Harris this time around but argues convincingly that he doesn’t let this cloud his analysis, which I generally find pretty cogent. You probably need a little bit of statistical literacy to fully appreciate this stuff.

As of today, August 20, 2024, his probability-of-win numbers are Harris 53.6%, Trump 45.7%.

The Silver Bulletin has some free stuff, but the best parts, including the model updates, are paywalled. The price is currently $14/month, but on September 1st they’re going up to $20, just until the election is over. Because a lot of people like me signed up with every expectation of unsubscribing in three months.

If you happen to care about professional sports there’s lots of brain candy there too.

538 · Their Latest Polls page is now part of ABC news but seems to retain many of the virtues that made 538 the flavor-of-the-month a few years ago.

The crucial thing, if you’re visiting once a day, is to find the “Sort by Date” widget and click on “Added”, which brings the most recent stuff that you probably haven’t seen yet to the top.

As I write this, their national polling average has Harris 46.6%, Trump 43.8%. This is quite different from Silver’s “probability of winning”. 538’s main virtue is that they get the polls up about as fast as anyone else. It’s free.

RCP · I kind of hate to mention RealClearPolitics because it is at least in part a hive of filthy MAGA-friendly screamers. Their front page is all links, MAGA-dominated but including a sprinkling of analysis from more even-handed or openly-progressive sources. Anyhow, the problem with that stuff isn’t the bias, it’s the fact that they’re just a bunch of low-value prognosticators. I wouldn’t waste much time on the front page, I’d start by clicking on “Polls”, near the top left.

Their aggregation of poll results will contain about what you’ll see at 538 (sometimes important polls get to one place first, sometimes the other). But RCP offers other useful resources. There is the RCP Pollster Scorecard, which offers data on the accuracy and bias of most of the pollers whose results they report. Since some of those pollers are super extra biased, this can be a useful sanity check.

What I really like is the Electoral College Map, which as I write is predicting a Trump victory, 287-251 in EC votes. You can click on each state and see the polls they used to compute their prediction for that state.

I think their MAGA bias shows in the these predictions, but that’s OK, because there’s a “Create Your Own Map” link, where you can disagree with them and explore each sides’ path to victory or defeat. Looking at today’s map, my conclusion is that if Harris can flip Pennsylvania from red to blue she probably wins, and if she can bring along either or both of Arizona and North Carolina, Trump is roadkill.

CNN · No, really. It’s cheesy and overhyped but feels to me like it’s speaking to a pretty big constituency that I don’t know anybody from, there’s a bit of zeitgeist in the flow. To my eye it leans a little more Dem than GOP (that’s a surprise) and is not actually terrible.

When? · My advice is to wait until at least mid-afternoon, when the polls of the day have been published and ingested, then put in your pollscrolling time. Won’t take too long and you’ll know what the allegedly-smart people do.