In absence of generating any of my own content, here are a few links that I’m reading regularly as the federal election campaign unfolds. I thought I’d pass them along…CBC’s The National has a couple of excellent features. The “At Issue” panel is a must for political junkies, with more frequent appearances during the campaign, and podcasts of each show segment.CBC has an added campaign feature, “The Insiders” featuring Jamie Watt and David Herle, which deals more with the mechanics of the election campaign from the perspective of those who’ve run them. In addition to podcasts, the segment’s blog is regularly updated. (A permanent link now appears in my own sidebar)Even if you don’t speak or read French, the interactive riding-by-riding map on La Presse‘s website might be the most user-friendly I’ve seen online to date. At present it shows poll-by-poll 2008 results in all 308 federal ridings. You may want to check back for updated content throughout the election.Speaking of interactive maps, the Toronto Star has a good breakdown of the Metro Toronto ridings – with candidate info, demographics, and traditional voting patterns. (speaking of which, if anyone has a similar such link for Atlantic ridings, I’d be more than happy to post it.)Of course, if you need your daily fix of poll results, the Nanos daily trend line is here. As always, it’s a good idea to read about the methodology involved in accumulating these rolling three-day samples.The ever-popular ThreeHundredEight.com site takes daily polling results, aggregates them and attempts to use that national and regional data to project the likely outcome in all 308 federal ridings. It’s popular, and it’s fun, but I’d caution anyone to take the prognostication with a grain of salt, given the great difficulty in projecting so many ridings with such small national samples. Nevertheless, it’s a fun tool for tracking regional swings in national polls, and helps to illustrate how small shifts in national support might play out in tight local races.Of course, you can get a lot of quicker, shorter, snippier and sillier campaign coverage in quasi-real time via twitter. You can follow me @mark_watton
