A Presidential election is, of course, an epicenter for data visualization.  It is, after all, the data that gets the last word and it’s the data that, ultimately, we’ve all been watching and discussing for the last 6, 12 or 18 months.  For the Numerati, this is good times (“high five for that chi square extrapolation!”).  It’s also good times for finding cool ways to look at data.  Here are some favorites I’ve jotted down.

My top pick for pure aesthetics has got to be the news tracker at everymomentnow.com.  It’s instantly understandable, clean and useful.  Each bar represents a day and the width of the bar represents the number of article references in that day for the candidate, providing information about media trends between the two candidates.

Another, and perhaps the ambitious, is the New York Times’ Visualization Lab.  The Times teamed up with IBM’s Many Eyes (and Wordle) to allow you to visualize all kinds of sources (including articles in the Times itself).  Construct your own visualization of Sarah Palin’s speech at the RNC or check out a Wordle of Obama’s acceptance speech.

For a general purpose and up-to-the minute perspective on the online coverage of the election, check out Perspctv.  This one also meets a high bar for aesthetics which makes the data feel highly accessible.  Yahoo has also put together a really nice dashboard, which includes a cool bit of interaction where you can play out your own electoral scenarios.

Of course with all this data being thrown at us, we’re becoming more savvy about how we interpret it.  Takeaway.org has picked up on that, I guess, and gives us a poll of the polls.  A visualization of how the different pollsters predictions stack up (literally) against one another. 

This idea (and others) has been incorporated into the “new” approach to polling that we see at fivethirtyeight.com.  I first heard about those guys in an interview on the Colbert Report.  I guess they started off by predicting sports scores and were able to do so with a significantly better track record than others.  We’ll see if their prowess holds out for the election, but right now they’re giving McCain a 3.3% chance of winning.  Sorry Red States.

Last of all, Saturday Night Live has done a very nice job of putting this all in perspective.  The skit it is brilliant.  The technology is pretty great too.