With the current election cycle heating up the Huffington Post has announced upgrades to two of their major political tracking tools Pollster and HuffPost Fundrace. The newly enhanced options will be added to the company’s breaking news, original reporting and aggregation tools for election coverage.
First up is the company’s Pollster option which is overseen by Pollster founder Mark Blumenthal. The program will develop real-time snapshots of key races throughout the 2012 election cycle. Among the polls features will be multi-functionality which allows users to examine battleground states for Senate and Congressional races while checking electoral maps for the Presidential campaign. The polls are also being setup in such a way as to allow users to view how they see polling data. For example users can view polls around particular issues, check data selected by specific pollsters users or examine projected electoral maps. Pollster users on the site will also continue to see aggregated polls, the very option that made Pollster a respected polling tool.
Also upgraded has been the HuffPost Fundrace tool which is an interactive offering that allows visitors to examine campaign finance information. For example the program makes it easy to track contributions to candidates including a snapshot of contributions made by celebrities, business power players, companies and other key figures. For information closer to home the program can even show who donated on a visitors own street with visualization that can show users which of their Facebook friends (via Facebook Connect) have contributed and to which candidates.
Fundrace users will also be able to receive a daily e-newsletter that focuses on fundraising issues while a Twitter real-time tracking module is also available along with an enhanced election dashboard that is expected to launch just ahead of the Iowa Caucuses.
Both the new Pollster and Fundrace options are part of the Huffington Post Reclaim 2012 initiative.