Sixteen years ago this week a hurricane hit New Orleans and I launched PoliticalArithmetik, my first blog. This week a hurricane hit New Orleans and I’m (re)launching a website, PollsAndVotes.com.

After a year of PoliticalArithmetik, Mark Blumenthal (@mysterypollster) and I launched Pollster.com (with the support of Doug Rivers) and spent several years explaining polling and providing tracking of races, presidential approval and other topics in public opinion. In 2010 HuffPost bought Pollster and Mark had a good run with that. I departed and started PollsAndVotes.com in 2011, but have not maintained the site for a while. This is the relaunch of PollsAndVotes.com.

For some while now I’ve primarily posted analysis of polling on Twitter at @PollsAndVotes. As much as I like Twitter (most of the time) I think it is time to again have a PollsAndVotes website that allows longer posts, in one place, that can be easily found and searched for older posts, like from last week or last month. Having an editor to fix typos is also welcome.

I’ll be building out this site at a somewhat deliberate pace. I’ve decided not to import the old posts from the previous PollsAndVotes.com let alone from PoliticalArithmetik. I’ll update some of those, such as partisanship trends, but start fresh with the current data.

There will be a mix of topics here, but I’ll not be trying to replicate what Pollster.com did and what FiveThirtyEight.com and RealClearPolitics.com do well already. Most of the analysis here will be deeper dives into the national and state polling data that goes beyond trends. I also hope that my fellow academics will find graphics that may be useful in teaching.

The menu topics at the top of the page will (eventually!) provide a quick guide to analysis of “Polls” and “Votes” but also Wisconsin politics, party id, voter turnout, roll call votes and the US Supreme Court. Those first two will be something of a catch-all category. <;-)

Sixteen years ago I spent Labor Day weekend at home instead of the American Political Science Association annual meeting, keeping up with news of Katrina and launching PoliticalArithmetik. What started that weekend changed my life. I’ve still got a few days until this Labor Day weekend, and am not attending APSA, though I’ve been following the news on Ida. I hope you find the site interesting and useful.