Benchmark Politics has Launched a Kickstarter: www.kickstarter.com/...
Hey everybody! So many of you have heard of me here and many of you use my numbers on a regular basis. I’m a long time kossack who has been a lifelong member of the Democratic Party. In 2016, we have managed to best all of the top experts in political forecasting at the state level by having the most accurate state level predictions out there. We do this by modeling at the county level and aggregating the information up to the state level — this gives us a few orders of magnitude higher degrees of freedom for modeling, and this is one of the reasons that our state model has been so dang accurate. You can see our accuracy rankings here:
Benchmark Politics AccuracyThese scores are derived from the following statistics:
That being said… our web page is sad. I started here on DailyKos and Reddit with a blogger platform and have been releasing all of my state level results there. This has not been very good — try navigating www.benchmarkpolitics.com right now and you’ll see exactly why this is a poor setup — finding the state or individual county you want is a nightmare. I am not a web developer and have very little experience in that department. I’m a statistician and my goal up to this point has been solely to get the numbers out there using a web outlet. This does a great disservice to all of you who follow us.
So what am I doing? I’m creating a Kickstarter — the kickstarter is two fold and will be very exciting for everyone here that follows our info and wants a new source of cleanly presented election data to follow this election cycle. I truly believe what we are fundraising will benefit everyone.
1) We are raising money to completely overhaul the site and make it comparable to Real Clear Politics, Huffington Post Pollster, Fivethirtyeight, etc.
2) We are planning on launching the site with a BOOM! What are we doing? We’re going to release one of the first crowdfunded polls with top contributors even determining the state that we poll and what questions are on it. As a statistician that has conduced exit polls and public opinion polls, I am more than capable of this!
Here is the Kickstarter URL: www.kickstarter.com/…
We have raised $3500 in under 24 hours for this project!
Here is an in depth plan on what we are going to do:
1) Enhanced navigation with tags - easily make your way around our site and find what you are looking for.
2) A State Navigation Guide - Never look on the sidebar struggling to find your state or the most important post about that state - our site will handle this cleanly.
3) A newsletter, podcast, and subscription system - For our supporters, we will release newsletters and podcasts to our subscribers early. This is useful in many circumstances - if you want benchmark information before ANYONE else has it, this will be your way to achieve this. We will be giving these away as part of our kickstarter and then selling them on the site with a login page. We'll also be doing podcasts and are VERY excited to expand on this.
4) State and County Maps - We have a few ways of accomplishing this, but we want a map that you can interact with and look closely at your particular county in map form. This is something we have been lacking but are achieving lately and we think it will be HUGE for our user experience.
5) Poll Trackers - We want to run our own poll tracker that will compete with Pollster and RealClearPolitics. We think it is important to our site and our readers to have a good source of polls. RCP has been lacking lately and we want to fix that.
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Benchmark Politics CROWDFUNDED Poll!
This was an idea Ian and I both had. I am a statistician with some experience running polls and am entirely equipped to handle doing my own. The downside - Polls are costly. There exist polling services that allow us to use callcenters or automatic dialers to conduct our own poll, and we can do it provided we can raise enough money. This will be a huge draw to our site and will be fantastic as it will be one of the first crowdfunded polls on the internet about a political campaign. We will then use the poll in our own benchmarks. You will help us with your contributions - we will have the members who donate $250 all vote on which state ends up getting polled, and for those generous enough to donate top dollar amounts, we will allow them to actually work with us to develop their own poll question that will end up on the poll itself. We are VERY excited about this, to say the least.
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Dailykos is one of our top traffic sources and you guys are the main people who cite us. I am not doing this for myself — I will not profit from this kickstarter at all. Rather, I am making something that I feel will serve this community and Democrats at large with something that is currently missing out there, and giving my model and polling updates a better platform so that all of you can share them with ease and pull the data for your own use.
Thank you so much for your support up to this point — if this kickstarter fails, I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing with full intention of providing a valuable service to all of you. If it succeeds though, I really do believe we could accomplish something great here.
Follow @benchmarkpol on twitter.
