The 2016 US election has been fought in cyberspace as much as on the stump.
Now that the campaigning has finished, attention turns to the results. CBR offers guides to the key twitter accounts and blogs, the biggest online only news streams, the mainstream media online presence and social accounts and the best analytics and data sites.
1. 538
538 is a one-stop shop for election predictions, figures and analysis.
The site is powered by a methodology devised by economist and writer Nate Silver.
As well as taking into account the results of polls themselves, Silver also weighs polls according to their quality or how historically accurate the poll has been.
He also factors in information such as economic conditions.
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Although widely referenced, the model is somewhat controversial and has been criticised by some pundits. However, Silver has been successful in predicting the last two US elections.
The site also offers a similar service for baseball.
2. United States Election Project
The United States Election Project, run by Dr. Michael P. McDonald, Associate Professor of Political Science at University of Florida, has a broad focus on the election beyond simply the results.
It aims to be an educational resource for the electoral system as well as a news source.
McDonald’s site provides predictions on all aspects of the election including turnout figures. It collects information from numerous sources such as early voting.
3. Real Clear Politics
Real Clear Politics provides news and commentary, as well as an up-to-date list of recent polls. These are presented in a simple grid format with the source and the poll options.
There are then specific figures for the actual results achieved by the candidate and more crucially, the gap between the candidates.
The site also aggregates relevant news and opinion pieces from other sources.
4. Electoral Vote
Electoral Vote is another aggregator site, but presents the information in a more granular way.
The data is shown in a map of the US with individual states broken down, but by hovering over the state the user is presented with more detailed figures: how likely the state is to go one way or the other and how it has voted historically back as far as the 1992 election.
Clicking on the state gives more detail still; users can look at a line graph of aggregated polls over the last few months.
5. 270towin
270 to win is a customisable prediction tool which allows users to create their own model for how they expect the election to go.
Since the US election is to a large degree dependent on which way individual states vote, the tool allows individual states to be flipped from one candidate or party to the other with a click.
An informed political commentator can therefore use their own judgement to predict which way a state will go and then instantly see what impact that will have on the overall result.
