Tim the Spectator

Go tickle a Possum - on my favorite blog

My favorite political blog is Possum Pollytics.  It’s an independent source of reflection and analysis of politics and polling, run by the alarmingly smart Possum (who is really 34 year old Brisbanite Scott Steel).

This blog is amazing because it offers in-depth and insightful poll analysis for free (FOR FREE!), when the major parties and newspapers pay thousands of dollars to get it.

Possum doesn’t bullshit, doesn’t have an agenda in presenting his take on things, and because he’s a marsupial you know he knows what he’s talking about.  The man is a self-confessed econometrics nerd, and seems to have started the blog to simply revel in his love for the numbers.

Possum describes himself as an accidental poll analyst, and for the last few years he’s been keeping up an interesting discussion on his own wordpress blog in his own time.  The blog caught Crikey’s eye and his stuff starting getting into the Crikey daily email (where I discovered it).

Recently he made the big move from the notable small time to the internets bigtime.  Pollytics now lives within the Crikey Blogs page.  The content is just as interesting as before, the posts just as regular, and thankfully the man is now being supported by advertising (surely every blogger’s dream).

What makes the blog so bloody interesting is graphs like this:

The polls decide who is winning and losing the political game.  And for spectators such as myself, these graphs are the scoreboard.

The blog has been particularly useful lately in my efforts to follow the US presidential election.  Possum keeps track of all the polling data, betting odds and electoral college vote projections to give us spiffy little graphs like this:

Obama is in the lead after the economy has gone down the dunny, while you can look back a little and see a Sarah Palin shaped dip from the last few weeks.  Great stuff.

Possum is independent.  He has delved into the results of  major polsters to show us all that at least one of them is wrong (or even both of them): Analysing the Poll Bias: Morgan vs. Newspoll Part I

Last year during the Kevin07 election, Possum took on The Australian for their interpretation of a particular set of poll results.

In this story – Rudd ‘relaxed’ about Howard’s poll comeback, The Australian’s political editor Dennis Shanahan saw a small rise in John Howard’s preferred prime minister rating in the Newspoll and wrote this headline: Newspoll: Howard checks Rudd’s march (which was later changed to the ‘Rudd relaxed’ story).  In the story and in Shanahan’s personal blog he declared that this result was the first sign of a Howard comeback.

Possum, god love him, tore into this shonky interpretation.  In this post: Poll Wars: Episode 1 - The Phantom Metrics, he started a huge stir by ripping into Shanahan’s hypothesis, that the preferred PM rating was an indicator of the election result.  There was no proof that Shanahan’s conclusion was supported by the facts.  A number of other great blogs, including Crikey and Larvatus Prodeo, jumped to Possum’s defense as the Oz decided to fight back.  Unfortunately it’s hard to fight back against pure mathematical analysis.

Possum’s blog is what the new media should be.  It challenges the established media and keeps it accountable, just as the established media is meant to keep the powerful accountable.

I love this blog because it provides something that I can’t get anywhere else.  While the blogosphere in Australia is nowhere near as important as that in the US, this blog is on the way to building it up.

Now that the blog is an incorporated part of the Crikey network, I’m worried it isn’t as indpendent as it once was.  Will the man feel tempted to defend Crikey from criticism?  Lets hope not.

Design wise, the new layout is an improvement over the old site.  The small font and dull layout made the original site a bit of an eyesore.  The new design is clearer without being radically different, with plenty of colourful maps on the right hand side to stare at.

Possum also runs the occasional competition, and you can win nifty stuff.  So do yourself a favor and bookmark Pollytics.com.