Another Neat Election Resource

One interesting resource related to the Presidential election is 270toWin.com. This website has a wide variety of maps, polls, and historical data that allows you to look at past elections. The website does a good job of explaining the complicated electoral college system and what it takes to become the President. One of the neatest features offered by the website is a simulation of the upcoming election, which is generated by polling data collected by the website. If you don't like the way the simulation turned out, then you can run it again and get a different result.

You may examine an individual state's page on the site. This will give you a current graphic barometer of polling data in the state. It will also show you how the state has voted in recent Presidential elections, as well as the number of electoral votes the state has had historically.

The site is very current with RSS feeds available, and there is a blog maintained by the website. There is a small section on the 2008 Senate races, and there is an interactive Senate map that allows you to pick the winners of these races. You can tell that the website has done their homework because they are aware that both Wyoming and Mississippi have two Senate seats up for grabs this year. You have the ability to pick one of each party as the winner in each of these states or each for the same party.

Perhaps the most interesting feature of the website, to me at least, is the answers section. You can find this under the 'more' tab. This section allows you, among other things, to find out when the last time the Democrats/Republicans won the election while losing both 'state x' and 'state y.' Doing this, you learn that no Republican has ever won the White House while losing Maryland and Massachusetts and Kansas. You can also learn that Minnesota has not voted Republican since 1972 (making it the only state Ronald Reagan never won an election in.)

This section is also a good tool for teaching Boolean Logic. Connecting two or three states using an 'and' or 'or' is a simple way to demonstrate to students just what Boolean logic is. The fact that the Boolean is represented graphically may also help visual learners.

Highest possible personal recommendation on this website.

JWF