If you're a poll junkie, we have news for you
More polls and averages are now available at FiftyPlusOne.news
This is a quick blog post for the real polling junkies at Strength In Numbers — the true sickos, the type of people who used to spam refresh the FiveThirtyEight polls page (RIP) for horse race and approval polling. If that’s not you, don’t worry, regular SIN programming resumes tomorrow.
I'm excited to share that FiftyPlusOne.news, the polling aggregation project I've been building with some of my friends and former colleagues, just got a major upgrade. (If you’re thinking, what on Earth is FiftyPlusOne, read this footnote:1)
We just launched an expanded website and a new newsletter with some great additions for members. The redesigned site now features full interactive data tables, a home page for better navigation, and the kind of data density that made me really proud of the work we used to do at 538 — all done by a small team of three working in our spare time.
Here’s what’s new:
Texas primary polling averages
With Texas’s March 3 U.S. Senate primaries fast approaching (early voting starts Feb. 17), we’ve rolled out polling averages for both the Republican and Democratic sides of the race. On the Republican side, it’s shaping up to be a messy three-way race between Ken Paxton, John Cornyn, and Wesley Hunt, with Paxton slightly leading in recent polls. Currently, no candidate is anywhere close to the 50% threshold needed to avoid a May runoff.
On the Democratic side, Jasmine Crockett and James Talarico are locked in a very competitive battle, with different polls telling very different stories about who’s actually ahead. The uncertainty interval for the average shows we cannot conclude that either candidate has a real lead:
Having a solid, transparent polling average for these races — rather than cherry-picking whichever individual poll confirms your priors — is exactly the kind of thing FiftyPlusOne is built for. Our averages weight polls by quality and recency, and we show confidence intervals so you can see just how uncertain things really are. (Warning: this is uncertainty about the polling average itself; uncertainty in translating the polls to votes is nearly 3x as large!).
More coverage from smart contributors
We are also expanding the editorial operations at FiftyPlusOne through a new Substack newsletter, now available at blog.fiftyplusone.news. The intention there is to publish more straightforward election updates and wonky blogging, like about how our polling averages work and why we make the decisions we do about which polls to aggregate/which to avoid.
As of this Thursday, we will start publishing a weekly roundup of the latest polling data on the site, plus weekly articles from our staff and contributors. (If you’re a journalist or academic, or otherwise have a piece to share, you can pitch us at editor@fiftyplusone.news if you’ve got a story idea you’d like us to consider.)
Full data tables and sorting polls
If you’re the type of person who relies on our data for your job, you’ll be happy to know that you can now sort the site by the date we added the polls to our database. This is helpful whether you are a journalist writing about a race, a campaign staffer who has to write polling memos for your boss, a political bettor adjusting your wagers based on the latest data, or even a competitor making sure you have the latest data in your own aggregate.
You can also look at multiple pages worth of data, instead of being limited to just the most recent 5 polls in a contest. Like so:
These features are member-only, which is how we pay for the infrastructure and keep improving the product.
If any of this sounds interesting to you, here’s what you can do:
Check out the redesigned site and new polling averages at fiftyplusone.news
Subscribe to the new FPO newsletter and get full access to the site’s new data features at blog.fiftyplusone.news
Contact us for any bespoke polling data collection needs. (And if you have an idea for an average, we can make that happen too!)
A final thanks to everyone who has supported us in the early stages of FPO. I think the site is really something special.
Back to regularly scheduled SIN programming tomorrow!
Elliott
Footnotes
FPO vs Strength In Numbers
Many of you are new here (SIN has doubled in size since September!), so you might be wondering how FiftyPlusOne relates to this newsletter. The big difference is that Strength In Numbers is my personal project — it’s where I write about public opinion, election forecasting, political strategy, share results from my own polling, and generally riff on whatever I’m thinking about. It’s just me, unencumbered by restrictions on subject, tone, ideology, or anything else. Don’t get me wrong, SIN is definitely wonky, but it’s also opinionated and argumentative.
FiftyPlusOne is, on the other hand, both a group project and almost exclusively descriptive. It grew out of the polling average infrastructure that two colleagues and I originally built for Strength In Numbers last spring. But the work required on that side — data pipelines, database maintenance, front- and back-end website development — is substantial enough that I didn’t feel comfortable having it all exist under my name alone. My co-founders and collaborators deserve credit for their work.
The brand separation between these two entities is my way of making sure I’m not taking credit for everything they do. And honestly, I’m hoping that one day — between subscriptions and API customers — FPO generates enough revenue that these folks can get paid a real amount of money for their labor. Right now, we make enough to cover server and infrastructure costs, but none of us are making serious money off it. They deserve better than that.
So I know the brand separation might be a bit confusing, but it’s necessary so that each product can be its best self. SIN and FPO being separate means my colleagues don’t have to carry the baggage of my opinions, and I don’t have to sand down my voice to fit a nonpartisan data brand. The projects are also simply very different, and cater to different audiences (politically interested, mission-driven people here at SIN, poll sickos and election aficionados over at FPO) — cramming them under one umbrella would be suboptimal from a business standpoint. (To complicate matters further, I also run a solo survey research consulting shop! ahhh!!)
Love your work and enthusiasm!
Count me in!