Four years ago this month, we launched Pollster.com with a simple mission: To present the deluge of pre-election polls graphically and to provide a daily running commentary that explains, demystifies and critiques political survey research. Both efforts work to the same goal of helping you put polling numbers into a larger context: of other polls, of long term trends and of what we know of the strengths and limitations of survey data.
Today Pollster.com takes a big leap, with a new home and a new name: HuffPost Pollster. If you are finding us for the first time via the Huffington Post, welcome. If you are a regular Pollster.com reader, things look a bit different, but if you browse around a bit -- and we certainly hope you do -- you will find that all of the content and graphical tools you have counted on at Pollster.com for so long are still here or otherwise still accessible. Let's take a quick tour.
Our home page - You can always find a link to our page from the menu at the top of any page in HuffPost's Politics section, and you can always return to it by clicking the "Huff Post Pollster" masthead at the top of this page or any in the Pollster section. Or you can use your old bookmarks -- links to www.Pollster.com, or even my old www.mysterypollster.com will now redirect here.
Right Column: Our home page currently has a feature that, within a day or two, should appear on every Pollster chart and blog post: A terrific right column ("right rail" in the terminology of the web) full of widgets and tools to help you navigate to all of Pollster's content.
Charts: To get you started, we have created a Top Races box in the right column with direct links to charts for the dozen most competitive races for U.S. Senate and Governor. If you want a current chart for a race not listed there, just click on the "Senate" or "Governor" buttons in the map graphic just above it. Every current general election chart for every race with at least one poll is accessible from those summary pages.
Pollster's charts are also now integrated into HuffPost's new Election Dashboard. Over the next few weeks we will be rolling out significant new upgrades and a generally tighter integration between the Dashboard and Pollster's charts and data. Think of Election Dashboard as Pollster on steroids -- if you like the Pollster charts you are going to love the coming evolution of Dashboard.
Poll Updates: Our popular "Poll Updates" feature is still very much a part of Pollster. We moved the listing to the right column, and you will see that you can flip through four pages of links to quickly scan through four times more updates than we used to display on our front page or old right column.
Contributors: All of Pollsters regular contributors have made the move with us and are listed in the contributor box near the bottom of our right column, including Pollster co-founder Charles Franklin, Brenden Nyhan, Brian Schaffner, David Moore, Kristen Soltis, Margie Omero, Michael McDonald, Robert Moran and Steve Lombardo. David Wilson has just joined us as a regular as well. Click on each contributor's name to see a listing of their recent posts.
RSS Feeds & Twitter: If you read Pollster's content via RSS or follow us on Twitter, all feeds should still be working and require no update. Also, all feeds will continue to be full text. You can find our RSS and Twitter feeds here.
Comments: Huffington Post has a vibrant community of commenters and an moderation system that is technologically light years ahead of what we were able to do at Pollster.com. Unfortunately, you will not be able to use your Typekey/Typepad log-in, but you can create a Huffington Post account or log in and connect with any Twitter, Facebook, Google, Yahoo or Linked-In Account. More details on comments and Huffington Post's moderation policies here. I discussed some of the ongoing upgrades in HuffPost's comment system and their potential impact on the Pollster.com community in a post last week.
Archives: We have also left all of the old Pollster.com standing, and much of it still accessible. You can access our full archive of historic poll charts here, or you can navigate directly to the archives for specific states from the "Index to All Polls and Charts" menu at the bottom of the "Polls and Charts" box in the right column. You can also access our complete blog archive here.
Of course, as you browse around you will notice that some aspects of the site are still "under construction" and a few may not work exactly the way you expect them to. If so, please do not hesitate to email me directly. I can't promise to respond personally to every message, but I promise that I'll read them all.
Before closing this post, I want say "thank you" three times. First to Emily Swanson, who has gone above and beyond the call of duty over the last few weeks, and especially the last few days helping to get us ready to launch.
Second, a huge thank you to the incredibly talented Tech Team at the Huffington Post. They labored long and very hard to bring you the pages you are using today, and we all owe them a huge thank you for what they have accomplished.
Finally, let me say the biggest thank you of all who took the time to read this far and who ready to come along with us for Pollster's new day on the Huffington Post. We are honored by your continuing confidence and will work very hard to live up to your high expectations.