Favorite election sites

Pollster.com has the Flash going on, and it's pretty flashy.

This is a fascinating, horribly oversimplified mechanism for tracking the Presidential election for 2008, but it's a really Flashy (pun), fun-to-play-with tool.

I do really appreciate, however, that it focuses more on the stupid Gallup national daily tracking poll which determines whether John McCain or Barack Obama would get elected homecoming king, but not much else, since popular votes don't matter.

And while Obama's numbers look good at the moment, let us not discount what happens if Michigan and / or Ohio flip -- Obama doesn't have enough to win. That's not to say McCain would win all the 'toss up' states and put together enough EVs to carry the thing, but right now he IS leading in more 'toss up' states than he's trailing in.

And then there's Indiana. There's nothing more to take out of the numbers there than "Gosh, that's really interesting". The poll numbers are all over the board, and the latest ones look pretty friendly to Obama -- but look at some of the weirdness in the polling methodologies.

The WTHR poll is no doubt Indianapolis heavy, and shows Obama well in the lead.

The Indiana Legislative Insight poll forced people to either choose Obama or McCain, and McCain cleaned up. However, as a counterpoint, check out the Zogby poll. That's the only poll on the chart that evidently allowed people to select a third-party candidate, and SEVEN percent of respondents chose Bob Barr. Ten percent more went 'Undecided', and I don't understand how, in Indiana, you can call many of those potential votes for Obama. They're either McCainers or they're stay-homers.

But Barr, 7%? My gosh. I'd really thought he wouldn't be much of an influence in the election until I saw that number. If Barr and Undecided are powerful enough this year to pull Indiana to basically a tie-with-statistical-noise... What does that portend for the other toss-up states who aren't traditionally *nearly* as partisan as Indiana?