FiveThirtyEight.com

FiveThirtyEight.com uses current polling data to make projections for the election — as they claim, “Electoral Projections Done Right.” This kind of analysis is different, of course, than just relying on straight-up polling, which generally asks how people would vote today.

For example, from the post linked above.

McCain has eight “penumbra” states where the model projects he will win by five-to-ten percent. Obama has seven “penumbra” states. McCain wins the electoral vote in these 15 states 81-67.

Twenty-four states and the District of Columbia are projected to go to one candidate or the other by more than 10%. The electoral vote here goes to Obama 175-79.

Summing up, in the states where a candidate is projected to win by more than 5% of the vote, Obama leads McCain 242-160. You need 270 to win.

That leaves the battleground states, the 11 that are projected to be within five percent come November. The eleven are North Carolina, Florida, Missouri, Nevada, Indiana, Montana and Virginia that slightly favor McCain; and Colorado, Ohio, Michigan and New Mexico that slightly favor Obama. These are the battleground states and they have 136 electoral votes. FiveThrityEight figures Obama to win 51 of these, and thus the election 293-245.

NewMexiKen finds FiveThirtyEight’s analysis to be among the more interesting — and potentially more accurate. I recommend the site to you — I extracted as much as I did for this post to get you interested.

FiveThirtyEight.com is run by Nate Silver, whose claim to fame before was as “a writer, analyst and partner at a sports media company called Baseball Prospectus. What we do over there and what I’m doing over here are really quite similar. Both baseball and politics are data-driven industries.” How the data is used is what makes FiveThirtyEight.com intriguing.