Keeping Up With Politics

See links to news organizations

One way to keep up is to find a site that delivers the content you want. Play around with these until you settle on the ones you like.

The site RealClearPolitics includes a collection of political columns from many news sources

Check Politics TV for a collection of video clips about politics, updated daily

The blog Daily Kos is generally progressive, a vet who got mad (named Markos, hence Daily Kos…. I like to say it, “Daily Chaos”, as a compliment)

The blog Politico links many news stories.

The blog Wonkette advertises itself as “DC Gossip,” often interesting

Check The Huffington Post’s politics site, generally progressive

One of the best conservative blogs and collections is Townhall; Note that Convervative Voice is now part of Townhall.

Annenberg supports FactCheck, always worth checking on rumors and conspiracy theories.

rightweb = http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/

If you wish to look at polls, some websites summarize polls into election projections. They almost always link the individual polls they use, and so are nice starting points for browsing polls. Try these:

fivethirtyeight

pollster

USA Election Polls

The Pew Center’s ElectionOnline website focuses on election reform, and is kept up daily.

The Pew Center for the People and the Press

And do check the Pew Forum on Religion in Public Life

For reading about polls, and how they have performed in the past, you might try the National Council on Public Polls and the Roper Center.

If you want to understand political campaigns, you need to look at the MONEY. Check the Federal Election Commission (their web sitemap may help you see what all they report) and the Washington Public Disclosure Commission. You can find, for instance, that as of mid-October 2008 Christine Gregoire and Dino Rossi had between them raised about $23,000,000 in the race for the Governor’s office. You can read more about money and politics at OpenSecrets, a program of the Center for Responsive Politics. To get an idea of how much campaigns cost, consider this. The total for BOTH major party campaigns for President (including primaries, conventions, and general election campaigns) in 1980 was $162 million. In 1988 it was $324 million. In 1996 it was $426 million. In 2004, it was $880 million. Look up what it is this year.

Gambling on politics is illegal in the US. BUT, it is OK to buy futures contracts that will pay depending on whether you chose correctly. The originators of this method of guessing election outcomes was the Iowa Electronic Markets, hosted at the University of Iowa—agriculture country, where people understand how markets work. Check their latest prices on the 2008 election. Intrade does this, too, on politics and about anything else you can think of.

If you were a country where such betting were legal, you could go to a betting house like Ladbrokes where one of their sports is politics. (The betting line for the presidency as of 10/3/08 was 1.25:1 for Obama and 3.75:1 for McCain, meaning the betting community believes Obama has a three-times better chance of becoming president.